On May 27, 1871, what Marx called the “final mass murder” of the supporters of the Paris Commune was carried out at a wall of the Pere Lachaise cemetery there. A plaque still marks the place of their martyrdom, now almost a century and a half old. With their deaths, the first revolutionary proletarian exercise of governmental power in the world came to an end. It had lasted only 72 days. Though the socialist side of the Commune was limited by both the composition of the working classes at the time and the nature of its leadership, it had nevertheless proven the capability of the proletariat for self-government, free from bourgeois control. It thus became enshrined as the initial example of “living” socialism, the realization in practice of the new form of social organization that Marx, Engels, and others had been predicting, advocating and mobilizing for over the preceding several decades.
The end of the Commune of 1871 was accompanied by the deaths of thousands, many of them murdered prisoners, and the reimposition of the rule of the bourgeoisie, stronger than ever. Viewed in this way, it would be easy to see this brief attempt at socialist organization of society as nothing but a failure. Indeed, in the days following its defeat, the triumphant bourgeoisie were quick to declare that it would be the last such revolutionary uprising of the new urban proletariat. Certainly, it set back the forces of revolution in France for several decades. But there were those who refused to accept this dire outcome as the final one. As Friedrich Engels was to write a quarter of a century later, in the last year of his life: “It was believed that the militant proletariat had been finally buried with the Paris Commune.” Yet, as he goes on to analyze its aftermath, “completely to the contrary, it dates its most powerful resurgence from the Commune and the Franco-Prussian War.” (“Introduction” by Friedrich Engels to “The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850,” by Karl Marx, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 1, Moscow: Foreign Languages Press, 1962, p. 127) The growth of the Socialist Party in Germany and, almost half a century after the defeat of the Communards, the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, showed the accuracy of the revolutionary optimism that both Engels and Marx continued to hold, despite the bitter defeat of 1871. For the example of the Commune, aided by the Marxist analysis of the lessons to be learned from that struggle, inspired later generations of socialist revolutionaries. Despite its apparent defeat, over the past century and a half, those who fight for revolutionary socialism have continued to look back to the Communards as a “model” for what is yet to come–including in the Shanghai Commune during the Cultural Revolution. The Communards in Paris had “stormed heaven,” as Marx put it, daring to do what had never been tried before, and even though they had been brutally crushed in the end, and their accomplishments quickly destroyed, they had scaled new heights that would never again be forgotten by the world working classes.
We have been here before. The aftermath to the Paris Commune should remind us that there is little new in the current triumphal proclamations of the “final” defeat of the socialist revolution, whether in China or worldwide. Bourgeois political economists and ideologists had already proclaimed capitalism to be both the last and permanent historical stage long before Marx began to counter their ideas–and almost two centuries before Francis Fukuyama in the United States a few years ago declared a similar “end to history” in the final and irreversible triumph of the capitalist system, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The present period, therefore, is only the latest in which spokespersons for capitalism have declared the “death of socialism”–whether in one city, one country or worldwide.
So it is necessary to ask again: is the world today farther away from or further along on the socialist road than it was in 1848, the year of the Communist Manifesto, or 1871, when the Commune arose, or 1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution, or 1976 with the death of Mao and the final end to the Cultural Revolution, or even 1989-1991 when both the Berlin Wall and Soviet Union fell? If “socialism is dead,” why are we even here, unless it is to help to write its memorial? Is it because we know, despite the defeats of the last decades, that socialist revolution not only has not been buried, but that it is, in certain respects, even closer to realization than ever before? How do the Paris Commune and, for us here, the Cultural Revolution in China fit into the long historical pattern of apparent defeat, followed by further victories and socialist revival, not only in newer forms, but with greater strength than before?
What gave Marx and Engels the ability to take such an optimistic approach despite the defeat of the Commune were three things, which they carefully analyzed in later years, and which can offer us guidance still today as to how we too should examine the history of the Cultural Revolution, and the situation in China now in its aftermath. One is the legacy of new consciousness that the struggle leaves behind, even if it seems to have been defeated, as the lessons — both positive and negative — of each attempt to build socialism are absorbed and passed on to the next generation. Marx recorded the policies of the Commune, which helped to turn it into a “model” for all future socialistic projects — such as plans for the cooperative operation of factories, a requirement that all elected representatives earn no more than a skilled worker, the formation of a militia made up of the people in arms, its internationalist spirit and practice, and the destruction of symbols of the feudal and bourgeois regimes. Through these and other similar policies and acts, as Marx analyzed them, the proletariat showed itself capable not only of operating the economy, but of governing society as a whole by abolishing the oppressive state of the bourgeoisie, and the taking over of its political and even military power by the working classes themselves, to be exercised directly and in their own interests, in unity with the workers and peasants of the entire world. The realization of such goals, however briefly, constituted an enormous advance in the consciousness of the working class of its potential for a revolutionary reordering of society, a lesson which was never again to be lost, despite defeat of the Commune and the death of so many of its members.
The second basis for optimism were the newer forms of organization which were given impetus as revolutionaries strove to overcome the limits of previous phases of the socialist movement. Thus no sooner had the last of the Communards died, than the German working class moved to the fore, carrying organizing for socialism to hitherto unknown heights, with a mass based party on a scale never before seen. When the Bolsheviks, in turn, raised the socialist revolution to an even higher level in Russia in 1917, they drew on the lessons of both the Commune and the mass German party — creating a new model of socialism that lasted for 72 years, to the fall of the Berlin Wall, instead of 72 days.
But third, and above all, what gave Marx and Engels their optimistic outlook was the knowledge that capitalism itself creates ever higher levels of socialization of the means and relations of production, laying the foundation for the emergence of “another world” within the shell of the existing one. Even when this growth is not apparent, it continues despite inevitable defeats like that suffered by the Communards. Thus the socialist upsurge in Germany was largely the result of its rapid industrial expansion, fed by its defeat of France and the financial indemnity that it imposed on that country, which raised the social concentration of labor to its highest stage yet, laying the basis for an entirely new level of proletarian organizing.
Thus the basis for socialist society develops, not only in periods of revolutionary upsurge and consolidation, but even in times of setback and defeat–and this form of development continues even if it is largely “hidden,” until it breaks into the open again. This relentless expansion of the foundations for socialism is only sped up by the seeming triumphs of the capitalist system, so that the more rapidly it conquers the entire world, the more quickly it brings into being the very conditions for a new form of global society. This is a dialectical process which the capitalists cannot control and have no ability to prevent.
It is in this light, that we must examine again the historic experience and legacy of the Cultural Revolution as well in the struggle for a socialist world. For like the Commune, it not only collapsed in the end, but was quickly dismissed as a defeat and a failure, not only by its opponents both inside and outside China, and by the triumphant spokespersons for the capitalists, but by all too many on the left as well. As in the case of the Commune too, the objective record can seem to support such an interpretation. For the Cultural Revolution–whatever precise dates we may assign to it–dissolved in chaos, factionalism and senseless violence, and was replaced by the capitalistic “reforms” of Deng Xiaoping, which still continue to drive the development of China today. From 1976 until now, the dominant interpretation both within China and outside is that this was a “lost decade,” an unmitigated disaster. Its history and analysis have been dominated almost without exception by those who were its main targets–party and state authorities, and intellectual elites–who did suffer in many cases from the events of that time, but who for that very reason cannot be trusted to give a full and fair account of its record or to allow objective debate on its meaning. Like the Commune too, therefore, the Cultural Revolution seems to have vanished without a trace, leaving nothing but ruins, buried beneath a resurgent capitalism that is stronger than ever. Today, both inside and outside China, this view of it remains the dominant one, as expressed by many officials, academics, intellectuals and the media. Those who try to give another interpretation of that time face isolation or even worse.
But such a historical viewpoint is both simplistic and undialectical. It is in part to help correct the record that we have met here to reexamine this critical period. For the era of Mao Zedong, which reached its most advanced stage in the Cultural Revolution, played a key role in the development of socialism that parallels in many ways that of the Paris Commune a century earlier. The Communards had shown the world that the proletariat could take power from the capitalists and exercise it in their own name. But the Cultural Revolution showed that the same struggle continues even in the period of the transition to socialism, when the threat is a return to the “capitalist road,” with a new bourgeois class arising, not only from among the remnants of the old society, but from within the party and the state established by the revolutionary forces themselves. Thus among the many new elements that Mao contributed to the development of socialism, this one will stand out as in fundamental respects the most important historically. For the Cultural Revolution was the opening of a further stage, in which the struggle is over class relationships within socialist society itself, its degree of revolutionary thoroughness, and whether the global movement of the working classes to take control over the conditions of their lives moves forward to ever higher levels or not.
The hundreds of millions of workers, peasants and students who struggled in China in the decade of 1966-76, showed what it will take to move from the first stage of socialism to the next, one in which the working classes themselves exercise a more direct control over all social institutions, and not only the factories and farms, but what Marx called “the means of mental production” too are socialized for all to use. Mao called this struggle a Cultural Revolution, because what was needed was a change in the consciousness of the working classes themselves, and their claiming of ownership over the very ideas of the new society. Thus the battle was fought in every social sector and relation. In health care, the elitism and inequality of an urban medical system with its emphasis on Western style practices was replaced by the “barefoot doctors” drawn from the peasants themselves, the opening of clinics in even the poorest rural villages, and the use of Chinese traditional medicine in an equal role. In education, the monopoly of faculty and administrators was broken, and schools–many of them newly built–opened their doors to workers and peasants, who reshaped what was taught so that it served the needs of the working classes. In culture and art, the inheritance of the feudal era, with its emphasis on emperors and elites, was replaced by works about the “ordinary” workers and peasants in their struggles for daily survival, production and the socialist revolution.
As the work of Han Dongping and Gao Mobo — and of many others who have presented at this conference — has shown, these new levels of both consciousness and democratization extended into all the personal relationships of women to men, children to parents, students to teachers, workers to managers, and of the people to party and state authorities. Nationwide, the study of the thought of Chairman Mao meant that even the poorest and most isolated peasant learned the basic concepts of Marxist class analysis, the revolutionary struggle for socialism, “the right to rebel,” and the ideas needed to take part in governing of the society as a whole. Despite all the limitations of the exercise of such power in practice, this had a lasting effect on the consciousness of the working classes that can still be seen even today. Above all, the workers and peasants themselves, as well as many students and others, took part in a great struggle to prevent the move of China back to the “capitalist road.”
Organizationally, the Cultural Revolution was a great and unique experiment with new forms of participation by hundreds of millions of workers and peasants in running society. These included the revolutionary three-in-one committees–whose representatives varied depending on which institution was involved–mass organizations and rallies at every level, big character posters as a means of public criticism and debate, the “sending down” of many students and professionals from the cities to learn from and assist villagers, and the participation of many state and party officials in production. Each of these served to raise the working classes to new levels of equality and democratic control, and to put an end to the domination of society by the “educated classes.” As one worker activist we spoke with in Kaifeng in 2004 summarized it, it was during the Cultural Revolution that workers in the factories gained the most power.
It was on this basis, in turn, that the socialization of all areas of life reached new heights, above all in the deepening of the role of the communes, which brought not only higher levels of production, but all forms of social securities–such as health care and education–for the first time to the rural areas where the vast majority of the population lived. On the farms, as in the urban factories, peasants and workers took the lead in moving China to a higher form of socialism. It was during the Cultural Revolution that they exercised their greatest degree of democratic control and collective social power.
In the end, of course, it all collapsed, and virtually every one of the advances that had been made was quickly turned into its opposite, as China took the “capitalist road.” It is not necessary to examine at length here the reversals that have been suffered, but it is worth briefly reviewing them: the dismantling of the communes and their replacement with the “individual family responsibility” system, with the loss of all collective forms of health care, education, support in old age, and infrastructure development; the dismissal of tens of millions of workers in the state owned enterprises, with a similar collapse of their social securities; the creation of a massive reserve army of labor in the form of tens of millions of migrants, and the reduction of all workers to exploited proletarians; the end of any working class role in governing their own places of work or society as a whole; the corruption of economic managers and public authorities; the creation of a new capitalist class; and the rise to power once again of an “educated elite” dominating all aspects of the society. On the surface, little is left of the revolutionary era.
Yet a full review of the experience of the Cultural Revolution, shows that it too must be looked back upon in a similar manner to that of the Paris Commune, as a “failed” attempt that nevertheless left behind a critical legacy on which not only the Chinese working classes, but socialists both inside and outside of China, will build in the future. This is the historic pattern of the struggle for socialism, which does not move in a straight line, but only through a continuous process of victory and defeat, over and over. The very language by which we talk about this is critical. At a recent conference in Seattle, Wang Hui said that he thought what happened with the Cultural Revolution should be seen not as a defeat, but as a setback. This was a very helpful insight, with its implication that the struggle for socialism continues, despite inevitable historic reverses.
But I think that even this does not adequately capture the role of the Cultural Revolution and all such stages in the long and global struggle for a new socialist society. To understand this, it may be helpful to think about what our history would be like, without the events of 1966-76. Lenin wrote of the need to nurture the “new shoots,” the first experiments in building a communist society, even if most of these efforts would not be able to survive for very long. Because only in this way, would the working classes learn what was possible and the basis be laid for even more advanced forms of social organization in the future. The Cultural Revolution, like the Paris Commune before it, was just such a “shoot.” Ahead of its time, surrounded by the resistance not only of the remnants of the elites of the old society, but of new class elements which arose within the party and state after the revolution, while facing the open threats of imperialism under U.S. hegemony, the chance that it would be able to consolidate its gains in the face of so many contradictions was severely limited from the start. Of course, many mistakes were made and unnecessary losses were experienced, and we must continue to examine and analyze them. But even if everything had been done “right,” whatever that might mean, it is highly doubtful that the goals of the Cultural Revolution could have been institutionalized in a way that would still be viable even today, given the global context in which they occurred, of a world dominated by the forces of capitalist imperialism. The wonder is that so much was accomplished, and so many people not only in China, but worldwide, learned from the experience of that time what a new society could look like.
So how should we interpret these events here today? Mao himself explained the dialectical process by which history moves forward, not in a line, but back and forth.
This means take the ideas of the masses and concentrate them . . . then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such action. Then once again concentrate ideas from the masses and once again take them to the masses . . . And so on, over and over again in an endless spiral, with the ideas becoming more correct, more vital and richer each time. (Sydney Schram, “The Political Thought of Mao Tsetung,” 1969, p. 316, in Alvin Y. So and Stephen W. K. Chiu, East Asia and the World Economy)
Such a dialectical approach applies not only to specific policies, but to the largest historic events, including the Cultural Revolution. If we think of the spiral that Mao refers to–an image that Lenin among others had also used–not as lying on a flat surface, but as a constantly rising and expanding circular motion, then we can understand that even the supposed defeats of the revolution historically are on a higher plane than the victories preceding them. All great revolutionaries grasp this on some level–as we already saw in the aftermath of the Paris Commune, or the Bolshevik triumph after the defeated revolution of 1905.
But Mao, I believe, was the greatest practitioner historically of this dialectical ability to turn defeat into new advances on a higher plane, over and over again. From his move to the literal higher ground of Jinggangshan following the slaughter of the Communists in the cities by Chiang Kai-shek in 1927, and the beginnings of the new stage of revolution there based on the uprising of the peasants; to the Long March after the crushing of the first Red bases in the South; to Shaanxi, at its end, where the revolutionary forces built a new stronghold, and to which people from all over China came; through the war against the Japanese; and the final triumph after being driven out of Yanan itself — each of these showed that even what at first seemed to be bitter defeats and setbacks, led to new victories and more advanced levels of organization than those preceding them. I call this “retreating on a higher plane,” a process that leads to historical advances even in periods of apparent loss, one that is often largely hidden from view at first, but in which the forces of socialist revolution break out with renewed strength after a time.
How then should we view the present era in China, when the Cultural Revolution has largely faded into memory, and the new capitalist forces seem almost beyond any control. Where should we look for a basis for the kind of optimism that Marx and Engels held onto after the Commune was lost? First, we must grasp, as they did, that the very triumph of capitalism not only lays the foundation for a new socialist society, but does so in proportion to its own development. The very rapidity with which China has turned its back on its revolutionary past, and taken the “capitalist road,” rising as a new global power with unprecedented speed, also means that it has reached higher levels of socialization of the means and relations of production that are laying the basis for more advanced struggles by the working classes. As workers, peasants, migrants, and even parts of the “new middle class” of students and intellectuals increasingly face similar capitalistic forms of proletarianization and exploitation, the foundation is being laid for a resurgence of the advance toward socialism, based on heightened forms of unity between the various class strata. In particular, the massive migrant flow to the cities, and the growing subordination of all labor in the countryside to the rule of the capitalist market, is creating a bridge between the rural peasantry and the urban working class, in ways not seen before in China. This is producing the same profound kinds of leveling as are occurring among people worldwide in the current era of “globalization,” and it is leading to higher forms of domestic and international integration, and a reemergence of the power of the global working classes in new forms that are beyond the control of the U.S. dominated capitalist empire to block.
In this struggle, Chinese workers, peasants and those intellectuals who choose to join them, have the historic advantage that they have already experienced the socialist revolutionary era under Mao, and especially the Cultural Revolution, whose legacy they can continue to draw upon. The higher working class consciousness that developed in the period from 1966-1976 in particular has not been lost, but continues to be a source of inspiration and guidance for those who are struggling in the new conditions of the present. The “right to rebel,” the refusal to passively accept the authority of those who oppress and exploit them, a primary legacy of the Cultural Revolution, is still very deeply embedded in the thinking of the workers and peasants of China thirty years after it ended. In 2004 alone, there were some 74,000 major protests–about 200 on average every day–and up from just 58,000 in 2003, and 10,000 a decade earlier. Some of these have involved tens of thousands of demonstrators, among the largest such protests occurring anywhere in the world today, and have led to major, even violent clashes with the authorities. Workers, peasants and migrants are all rebelling against the ravages of the capitalist “market.” As they face the consequences of the rise of the new Chinese capitalists, the working classes, and even many intellectuals, are now rapidly learning the limits of such slogans as “to get rich is glorious,” and many now look back to the socialist era under Mao, as a time when the country was free of the corruption and vast polarization of wealth that is so dominant today.
What is needed to bring together the socialization of society in the course of capitalist development, and the consciousness that reaches higher levels together with it, is the new forms of organization of the working classes themselves. Today this remains at a low point not only in China, but worldwide, despite certain recent advances, especially in some parts of Latin America and South and Southeast Asia in particular. But even here we can find a basis for a revolutionary optimism. Not only are the Chinese working classes beginning to link up in higher forms of unity–such as efforts to bring the workers in all the factories of a city together for common struggles, the self organization that is occurring among the migrant population, and small but significant moves back toward collective production among some of the peasants–but for the first time since the Cultural Revolution, students and intellectuals from the cities are going out to both the factories and farms, to study the conditions there, offer material and organizational support to the working classes, and report back to their campuses and associate networks.
The forces of the left in China, still quite small, marginalized, and divided into many factions, are also reemerging and reviving, in ways not witnessed for thirty years. There is a new openness and demand among leftists to be part of the national debate over the direction that Chinese society should take, and a call once again for a return to the goals and values of the era of revolutionary socialism. Some too, even among those who suffered at the time, are reevaluating the Cultural Revolution, as they come to fully understand the warning that Mao gave of what would happen if China returned to the “capitalist road.” The very holding of our conference here is an example of the new level of open discussion and reevaluation from a left perspective that is found on many levels today, both within the party and state, and in the society as large. Very few such public meetings–which are taking place both inside and outside China this year–took place on earlier such decade anniversaries. Thus far from being dead and forgotten, the Cultural Revolution is once again alive in the consciousness of not only the Chinese people, but of others all around the world. For its lessons are, in many respects, even more relevant today than in the recent past. I do not mean to be blindly optimistic, or to suggest that socialism is somehow inevitable. The forces of both imperialism and capitalism, led by the United States, are still extremely strong and dangerous, and there is no easy path to overcoming them. The global progressive movements remain weak and divided, and revolutionary socialists-including the “Maoists” in Nepal, India and elsewhere — even though showing more signs of life than in many decades, are nevertheless still a small sector among those who struggle for “another world.” In China too, the onward march of capitalism continues despite the recent rise in working class struggles and the revival of the left. Still, the level of both capitalist development and of consciousness is laying the basis for another advance toward a socialist society. What is lacking, in China as elsewhere, are the organized forces of the left that are needed to help bring this into being. This conference is one small step in that direction, by looking again at the Cultural Revolution from a leftist perspective that has been for too long silenced.
I want to close by giving an example of the way in which this historical dialectic continues to work itself out, despite defeats and setbacks along the way. In 2004, when we spoke with worker activists in Zhengzhou, one of them described the long and bitter struggle there to try to prevent the privatization of a state owned paper factory. The workers had seized this plant, part of which remained in their hands, despite the opposition not only of the new private owners, but of local state and party authorities. Describing the events of the takeover, this worker told of how one of the leaders of the movement, upon his release from prison, said that the struggle would continue, because “the principles of the Paris Commune will live forever.” In seizing the plant, as this activist explained to us, “Cultural Revolution” methods were used, forcing out the managers, preventing the removal of equipment, instituting worker control, and fighting against those sent to prevent them from holding on to their own socialist enterprise.
A few weeks after we left, some of these Zhengzhou workers distributed a leaflet on the anniversary of the death of Mao, calling on the party to turn back from the “capitalist road,” and return to the path to socialism. Despite arrests, and the continued imprisonment of one of them, these activists, known as the Zhengzhou 4, show the spirit that lives on in the working classes from Cultural Revolution days, and they received significant support from leftists and progressives from both inside and outside China. That is how revolutionary socialism continues to revive and to resume its historical march. Workers and peasants in China and all over the globe, look back to the Commune, the Cultural Revolution, and all the great “lost” struggles of the past, for inspiration and guidance, even as they move forward into the future. It is in this way, I believe, that we can and will continue to advance to ever higher forms of a socialist society–in spite of the many defeats and setbacks along the path–one in which the working classes themselves take the lead, in ways we have not yet seen before and can hardly even imagine here today.