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China’s Cultural Revolution

What the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China was about

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The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China was a mass revolutionary upsurge from 1966 to 1976, involving hundreds of millions of people. It was a kind of “revolution within the revolution.” The Cultural Revolution was a profound and intense struggle over the direction of society and over who would rule society: the working people or a new bourgeois class.

Mao Zedong and the revolutionary forces in the Communist Party mobilized people to rise up to prevent capitalist takeover and to shake up the higher levels of the Party that had become increasingly cast in a bourgeois–bureaucratic mold. But the Cultural Revolution was much more than that. The masses were carrying forward the revolutionary transformation of the economy, social institutions, culture, and values and were revolutionizing the Communist Party itself. This is what Mao called continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Cultural Revolution was the high point of the first stage of communist revolution. It is the third “milestone” of the first stage of the communist revolution... with the Paris Commune and the Bolshevik revolution as the first two milestones.

It was eventually defeated, in 1976, and China is not a socialist country today. But the Cultural Revolution still inspires and is incredibly rich in lessons. Anyone who aspires to a just and liberating society and world needs to learn about...and learn from the Cultural Revolution.

For a comprehensive analysis of the Cultural Revolution, read Chapter 4 “The Cultural Revolution: The Furthest Advance of Human Emancipation Yet” in the interview with Raymond Lotta, You Don’t Know What You Think You “Know” About... The Communist Revolution and the REAL Path to Emancipation: Its History and Our Future.

Go to the Fact Sheet on the Cultural Revolution, The Truth about the Cultural Revolution.

Read the important interview with Bob Avakian, “The Cultural Revolution in China... Art and Culture... Dissent and Ferment... and Carrying Forward the Revolution Toward Communism,” or listen to the audio from the Michael Slate Show on KPFK.

For more on the economic achievements and breakthroughs in revolutionary political economy during the Cultural Revolution, read the essay by Raymond Lotta, “The Theory and Practice of Maoist Planning: In Defense of a Viable and Visionary Socialism,” which is the afterword of the 1994 book, Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to Communism.

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The website Revcom.us follows the revolutionary leadership of Bob Avakian (BA), the author of the new communism. Bob Avakian has scientifically analyzed that we are in a rare time when an actual revolution has become more possible in the U.S. He’s charted a strategy for making that revolution, and laid out a sweeping vision and concrete blueprint for “what comes next” in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America.

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