Was the Cultural Revolution a good thing, Holla Forums?

And if no communist ever did anything nobody would have an excuse to blame us. Hitler used the failed revolution of 1918/19 as propaganda against communists and jews. Should they not have tried? This kind of reasoning is bullshit.

I think it was a power play by Mao from the start, as he guided genuine popular discontent with party officials toward his own ends. The best example being its arguably first and most notorious targets, school directors. At least back then, they were party cadres, and given the very stifling life in Chinese schools, especially boarding schools, students had a lot of steam to blow off.

But what did they try? The Cultural Revolution was an insane mess, terrible theory leading to even worse praxis. It was based on the fundamentally anti-Marxist idea that a revolution within the Chinese culture would lead to a shift in the economies social relations, and the way this was put into action was literal mob violence, on such an enormous scale that it's essentially killed the idea of Communism in China for the past 50 years. Literally nothing positive came of it, but it did directly correlate with Mao's enemies taking power afterwards.

some top tier book burning desu

First and foremost the Cultural Revolution was a fight against a growing party bureaucracy. There is nothing anti-Marxist about searching for the cause at least partially in the thousands of years old Chinese culture of servitude. Engels himself said that the superstructure has "relative autonomy" from the base.

This link is a nice summary of the goals behind the Shanghai Commune, the Cultural Revolution's most fruitful effort of establishing genuine proletarian rule in China.
marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj/1969/no037/shengwulien.htm

Fair enough, but to claim that this didn't lead to egregious levels of revolutionary excess is a lie. And I do stand by the fact that this was bad theory put into bad praxis. Did Capitalist put a lot of time and energy into burning and destroying all cultural evidence of Feudalism? No, because if you effectively alter the social relations of your society these cultural artifacts lose all meaning. I understand wanting to modernize China and sweep away old ideas, but what took place during the Cultural Revolution was beyond the pale. Well intentioned certainly, but a catastrophe of the highest order.

And I'm saying all this as someone who sympathizes with the Cultural Revolution as a genuine revolutionary moment in Leftist history, but it was a failure, and it was based on a lot of wrong ideas, and when Leftists don't learn from these mistakes is when you get things like Shining Path.

I'd argue overall it was negative but to deny the improvements it did bring is ridiculous

No, God no.

Same

It was an attempt to dethrone the liberals who had entrenched themselves in Mao's government. Its failure proved that Mao's conception of national liberation was fucking terrible and that the national bourgeoisie must be removed immediately after the imperialists are forced out.

Nah.

Well, in an attempt to create a space within which the grip on society could be tightened, it did manage quite ironically to produce some of the most revolutionary workers' movements China had ever seen before May 4th and the first few years of the CPC, see: thenorthstar.info/?p=9866. A commune was made in Shanghai, factory councils established, a proletarian class-party that sought to rival the Maoist CPC was in the making, etc., and all as a happy accident of the cultural revolution, so the CPC had to kill them all. Sad!

most of china's ruling class descends from the pre GPCR ruling class. the GPCR was a witch hunt that got out of control, it was mostly normal people and workers who were scapegoated, while the party bosses got out scot free. the witch hunts had a weird pseudo-psychological emphasis on unconscious 'bourgeois thinking' that reminds me of american idpolers. actual attempts to improve conditions for workers and demands for self government were repressed, sometimes brutally. millions of students were sent down to the countryside and condemned to forced labor.