Mao's Cultural Revolution

Did it do anything wrong?
Imagine yourself as a Chinese student, when your glorious leader (not currently head of the party, but still the official arbiter of theory and hero of the revolution) tells you to rise up and kill your teachers.
Then, he continues to support the revolution as it becomes decentralized.

On the other hand, Mao was clearly making a power play against Deng and Liu. He also disbanded the movement and forced the revolutionaries out to peasant lands for a decade or more.

So what does /leftypol think of the Cultural Revolution?

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youtube.com/watch?v=KBjblKtj1ag
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_communism_in_China#The_GPCR_Ultra-Left
youtube.com/watch?v=I5cl0GjPjy4
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The only thing Mao did wrong in the Cultural Revolution was bring it to a halt about 5-10 years too early

It's hard to see any argument that says it was not a true proletariat movement. It was even encouraged to be grassroots and against Party leaders. (except Mao, of course?)
What do you think would have been accomplished in a few more years?

totally anti-marxist.

mao was just an ignorant, paedophile farmer gook

t.Hoxa after Mao death

land reform, lead by workers and students, and hostile to the established power, which was clearly revisionist and pushing towards capitalism

How is this not marxist?

A country the size of China but operated like the Paris Commune, except with a larger, more centralized army actually capable of fending off invading military forces. I see it as being sort of like a Marxist version of what anarkiddies want to believe Mahkno's Ukraine was like.

I don't think it would have been "le full communism" but it would have definitely been more advanced than the USSR ever was able to achieve and probably would have more consistently aided it's comrades in Vietnam, DPRK, and so on

60 million dead from a backyard industrialisation project
and the destruction of 3000 years of history/artifacts that has modern chinese willing to pay 10 million pounds for a vase from the UK just because its Ming dynasty and wasnt smashed into gravel in the cultural revolution

That was the Great Leap Forward.
I'll give you that one

Liberals get out

You say this as if they could have destroyed literally every single last piece of history in China. I'm sure plenty of people who participated in the CR enjoyed the architecture or craftsmanship of certain artifacts and even if every single Red Guard and org in China that participated in the CR decided unanimously to destroy it all they literally couldn't have done it unless they made just that the focus of the revolution.

This is why it's splitting hairs to get butthurt about it, they went after the worst offenders and spent 90 percent of the revolution doing other things so why give a flying fuck unless you're a liberal who fetishizes history.

lad they destroyed EVERYTHING
not a pot nor pan, nor tapestry nor tomb escaped being dynamited or smashed to bits with sledgehammers
to be replaced with BRAND NEW AWESOME TOTALLY COOL GUYS CHAIRMAN MAO BRAND artifacts
cultural revolution was a decade of pure autism no different than what the first Emperor of China did when he ordered the death of every scholar and the burning of every book in China

read this and the situationist international's contemporary criticisms of the bureaucratic collapse that was the GPCR. Tankies may sing the praises of the masses as abstracted fetish, that is, until those masses have the gall to deviate from the superior rationality of the vanguard party and take their liberation into their own hands.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_communism_in_China#The_GPCR_Ultra-Left

Even if this is were true exactly why do the Chinese people have to preserve their own country's artifacts if they don't feel they represent them anymore? Exactly why is it up to non-Chinese, specifically non-Chinese proletarains, to shame the Chinese for doing what they want with their country?

No amount or revolutionary fervor will abolish the laws of capital. You can abolish capital, but its laws are immutable.
China's problem in the 60's was not one of a lack of revolutionary zeal, but one of underdevelopment. A lack of means of production and accumulated technology to provide the kind of standard of living that were being realized in the developed world. To establish communism there is to establish a communism of peasants stuck at near subsistence level production. All well and good - ideally to is up to the people themselves to (collectively) decide what kind of accumulated labor to set aside to develop sanitation, fridges, and whatnot. But we are talking about a communism of that kind surrounded by capitalist or transitional (Soviet Union) states, all of whom commanded a large enough population and technological base to build armies that could destroy the communist project - the comparison to the Paris commune was apt. Communism does not stop bullets. To establish communism without rapid development was to invite the suicide of the revolution. China faced the problem of being behind other world powers by 100 years and having to make it up in 10 even more than the Soviet Union did in the 30's.
If you want to do that, well, the surplus will have to come from somewhere. If you're not extracting a large surplus from the population in that environment, you are likely to be destroyed. It's a perverse effect of capitalism in a geopolitically divided world. To have a sufficiently revolutionary vanguard trying to lead and guide this development and even pragmatically allow hierarchies is not outside of the realm of the imaginable. It's been shown to work - at the risk of relapsing into capitalism (where China is at or near now). The Cultural revolution just threw a wrench into all this, and it diodn't it even accomplished it's goal. I mean, at some level even the CR was a vanguard movement in itself, mostly students - trying to overthrow an ossified vanguard with another vanguard. Not exactly a recipe for any kind of success, and in practice all it ended up accomplishing was slowing development while still leaving us with a China that would develop into today's China.
also this

Most of Chinese history is based on forgeries or outright lies, so there is nothing lost there.

The same reason I give a fuck when Islamic extremists blew up Petra. I don't hold any place as more holy than another, but something about desecration SHOULD turn your stomach.
The same reason I don't want Yosemite to burn down.

already said something virtually identical in my very first post in this thread

It's been recorded in media, so it's not lost forever.
Besides, it's not like you could have afforded to travel there and see it in person.

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Mao never wanted an actual revolution, though

they dont feel anything the chinks as a society operate like a fucking ant colony
whatever the queen wants the millions of soulless drones do
they didnt destroy them because they felt anything, most of them did as peasants do and just started using them for other purposes
does the peasant care hes using a 12th century Bronze vase as his shitting pot? nope couldnt give a toss
as for the 'communists' that took joy out of it they're the same fuckers buying it back from Europe and America to virtue signal it to their friends in China
they didnt smash it or burn it for anything more than brownie points with the CCP

Millenials truly are the greatest generation

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Again, even if it had remained in place, you would have never seen it in person.

the number of times Mao compared himself to Qi Shi Huang you better believe he didnt think himself leader of the revolution of China
he thought of himself as the lucky prick who conned half a billion morons into crowning him the new Emperor

[Citation needed]

Yeah I know. That's why I said it was a mistake

That story repeats itself in china all the time.

no you got that wrong its

Ah so, I bow to immortal dragon of the superior Han master race! Me solly!

True, but socialism could be achieved without destroying the past. This would allow the peasant the economic freedom to enjoy these artifacts.
They are not just commodities.

Anti-intellectualism, manipulation of children for Mao's own selfish political aims, assault and murder of people who usually weren't even capitalists, destruction of beautiful artistic and cultural artifacts, a delibrate fostering of an atmosphere of fear, chaos, and instability, and idealistic glorification of peasants and students.

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you think the chinese ever admit their true nature?
you'll only find a society held together with more lies in saudi arabia and israel and modern North America/Europe tbh
watch 20 episodes of If you are the One and actually listen to them, observe them
they're entire society is a badly scripted soap opera and the audience is themselves

Destroying the entire history of a country and worshipping mangoes is pretty retarded tbh.

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This is a valid point. But you have to agree they went a little overboard.
Of course now, the legacy of the cultural revolution itself lives strong with the revolutionary spirit.
Pic related: the cultural revolution restaurant

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Who cares? Their entire history was just based on lies to fit a Confucian, Han master race narrative.

you'll decry that but support the canonisation of all the communist dictators of the 20th century in China?
they worship them like gods, little vials of boiled mango juice made from mangos gifted to factories by mao are considered curative elixirs and panacea

I don't understand nuance and certainly haven't done any reading about the topic: The Post

Most of the Bourgeois managed to pass down their wealth which is why the bourgeious of today are the descendants of the bourgeois of yesterday

yeah they never depict the Gokturk and Tocharian characters of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in any medium

Athens 370 BC tbh

To what degree was the destruction the actions of actual proles, and not zealous students? Feels like a lot of this was a new elite just trying to prove their street cred.

Again, they didn't

Yeah let's single out and make fun of proles for finding enjoyment in something that was exotic and foreign to them! It's not like any other proles have ever done that in the entire world

It's almost like neoliberalism makes a joke out of everything by commodifying it? Imagine my shock

This

If the Maoist wing of the New Left in China established a new vanguard and decided that blowing up that big portrait of Mao was necessary symbolically to signal the end of the current government I'd probably be okay with it tbh. I'm pretty tank but I don't really consider anything past Mao to be a genuinely Communist project in China

exactly this tbh
>If i get everyone to see me burn this tapestry then Mei might let me fuck her tonight and Li Shen might make me Speaker at next weeks meeting

mangos arent foreign to China
they worshipped them because Mao touched those mangos

see

For real dough, it was a working class movement. Landlords, capitalists, reactionary theorists, and some innocents who were just unpopular were re-educated, had their land redistributed, and many were killed.
But the thrust was worker-based, and dependent on women, as they were a huge part of this movement

Unless you're also going to give up the land acquired because of Jackson's actions, there's no point in taking down a statue of him unless you're virtue signaling.

Wow it's almost like that's the whole reason I'm defending the artifacts being destroyed or something

who created all the artifacts the workers destroyed?

Mei is a slut, you could fuck her for half a jug of rice wine

Let's for the sake of argument grant that. Then why did the GPCR fail? I've seen tankie claim it was because Mao ordered it be halted 10 years to early. Yet also that it was a genuine prole movement.
How could one man end a genuine proletarian movement?

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The Chinese would lie about everything, from the size of their armies to rice harvests.

Consider this, they claim to have invented gunpowder and yet the Europeans took over the world with gunpowder and rifles.

They're infamous to faking facts to save face.

"The state is a special organization of force: it is an organization of violence for the suppression of some class."

Mao fucked up and pussied out, that's why I said it was a mistake. The Red Guards should have just taken matters into their own hands and done Mao the same way they did all the other officials who betrayed the movement. Rather they just did what Mao told them for the most part. The other main flaw of the CR was that it turned into a worship of Mao himself rather than of Maoist thought. To some degree this centralized it and stopped it from caving in on itself too early but it also created the potential for impotence once Mao pussied out and eventually he did

It's honestly incredible to me that you have no ability at all to be nuanced whatsoever in your analysis of history

it wasn't meant to be a genuine proletarian movement. Mao didn't want structural change, he wanted to get rid of his bureaucratic rivals. When proles started making actual revolutionary demands and threatening the bureaucratic class as a whole and not just the bad apples of the week, the state moved in to repress them.

It started as astroturfing. There were tight restrictions on who could join the Red Guard. As the movement developed, students formed their own cadres, made their own red armbands, and became decentralized cells.
Mao ENCOURAGED this, but suspiciously withdrew his support, and disbanded the rebels, once the majority of his opponents had been struggled against.
Thus is was both a proletarian movement and a push controlled mostly by Mao and his cult of personality. These were the internal contradictions which caused the movement to "fail".
Learn 2 dialectic.

well of course
people started to notice Mao drank luxury imported champagne and had his own personal harem of peasant girls at his disposal
such questioning types were counter revolutionaries and needed to be shot

I've been found out, it seems

This is a better articulation of what I was trying to say in

It was about 50/50

I prefer to ask a blunt question and hear what others have to say. And for the better, this is probably the closest you've come itt to not just pointlessly arguing with others about how many statues got smashed.

Apparently didnt kill the bougie revisionists in the party.

Ain't no revisionists here boss, just smokin and jokin

I don't think succdems have literally any room at all to talk about bourgeoise revisionism.

What the fuck?

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Long March, motherfucker
Tell me Mao wasn't a badass.

The Long March is the art of turning a defeat into a victory
Tactically it was a disaster, less than half of the troops survived. Mao himself had to be carried around because he got sick.

Sorry for bringing up dialectical facts

What have you done?

none of that had anything to do with Mao
that had a fuckton more to do with the natural obedience and subservient nature of the chinese peasant instilled through 3000 years of oppressive bureacracy

During the march itself a ton of tactical errors were made.
Cult of personality is one hell of a drug. Mao was incompetent, plain and simple. Enlai or anyone else would have done the job better.

You mean mindless fanaticism removed from actual class struggle as part of a powerplay by Mao? Than yes it's fucking bad you goddamn revisionist.

Honestly? Smashing a bunch of rich people's shit? A bunch of land lord's shit?

Imagine for a moment you had the chance to get a hammer, smash all you wanted from a porky McMansion, and bring them out of their homes, and in a crowd of hundreds, perhaps thousands, chastise them for all they've done wrong?

It might have been sort of fucked up, but wouldn't you?

Wouldn't you?

points conceded, but no other general was able to unify the troops. Without the admittedly strange version of Marxism known as Mao thought, there would have been nothing to unify the movement.
Not trying to Great Man him or anything, but he can teach us a lot about theory and revolution, and his insistence on guerilla tactics is what eventually made the difference. (Along with the timely help of the Japanese Army giving him some breathing room.)

well they probably made the mistake of trying to convey orders through messages when noone could read

(blogpost)
There is one very, very rich bourg living right next to me.
He doesn't like us and the feeling is mutual, mostly because our cats sometimes wander into his property and his dogs want to tear them down, but if they did it, we could sue him, so it bother him.
He also technically own the street we're parking our cars in and chastises us because we're trespassing.
The whole village thinks of him as a crook : he has worked his way to become the mayor, owns half of the houses, and use legal loopholes to subside more construction and seize more land.

I still wouldn't want to do that to him, because he is, for all his shittiness, a human after all and has always acted polite and affable everytime we talked, even though it's clear he hold a grudge against us.

You're a saint. But there are much worse people than that living among us. I'm talking investment bankers mostly. Though, I would smash his shit too, no offense.

A fun way to spell revisionist and not Marxist at all.
Like how we should tell the peasants working their backyard furnaces that it's useless because it would break their revolutionary spirit ?

it would have been impossible to use Marx's analyses of European capitalism to form revolution in peasant China.
Calm down, sweetie

Didn't meant to be aggressive if you felt it that way, sorry.
I would argue that there is basically nothing good out of Mao, but that's just my humble opinion. At best, he did fought and expelled the fascist wing of the KMT, and was a very good crowd manipulator, but almost everything he did in his life was a mistake.

Had the governing of China been more democratic, had he listened to qualified people around him, he would have been a hero.

his writing on guerilla warfare is very interesting, and his ability to mobilize a peasant class is admirable.
He still is a dark hero to many Chinese people, and did strive to eliminate bourgeoisie interests in China.
Despite some massively fucktarded ideas, to suggest that there is nothing we can learn from Mao is to ignore a large part of the history of leftism.
Here's a looong series on the history.

youtube.com/watch?v=I5cl0GjPjy4