|
|
. |
|
|||
Through the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, the working class and the masses of people, led by Mao and other communist revolutionaries, carried out changes which were unprecedented. Divisions and inequalities were reduced between different strata and sectors of society, including between the country and the city. The people rose up in their hundreds of millions, developing and strengthening not only new economic and social relations and the revolutionization of culture, of people's thinking, etc., but also the different forms of struggle so characteristic of the Cultural Revolution--big character posters, public mass criticism of persons in power, the organization of brigades of youth, which came to be called the Red Guards, and so forth. Mao warmly supported the struggles and initiatives of the masses and constantly urged them on to persevere in their revolutionary upsurge.
The Cultural Revolution was unprecedented, not only in general or in China, but in the history of socialism. It went against all the "norms" of what socialism was supposed to be, what a communist party is supposed to do, and so on. It was unprecedented for the chairman of a communist party to call upon the masses to rise up and strike down powerful persons in the party. Within the party there were two headquarters. The capitalist-roaders had their own machine and their own headquarters, and this was what was necessary to dislodge them in order to prevent China from being taken down the road to capitalism. Thus Mao summed up that it was not enough to talk about upholding the leading role of the party, etc. Unless the masses were mobilized to recognize, to drag into the light of day, and strike down top leaders of the party who were trying to turn it into a bourgeois party, and to subject to mass criticism and supervision the leading cadres in general, then through the force of habit and the conscious action of revisionist high officials the party would become an instrument of the bourgeoisie and society would be taken "peacefully" down the capitalist road under its leadership.
When Mao died the masses of Chinese people were in the midst of yet another soul-stirring and decisive battle. With the support and guidance of Mao they were fighting to beat back the counter-revolutionary offensive of Deng Xiaoping and others in the top leadership of the Communist Party itself who were whipping up a large-scale wind to reverse the great victories and achievements, especially in the Cultural Revolution. This latest battle raging in 1976 was not an academic debate over how to evaluate the unprecedented events and results of the Cultural Revolution but a life and death struggle over which class would rule China, the proletariat or the bourgeoisie, and which road it would follow, the revolutionary road of socialism or the counterrevolutionary road of restoring the old society with all its misery for the masses. On October 6, 1976, less than a month after Mao's death and less than three weeks after the official mourning period for Mao had ended, the revisionists, using portions of power they had seized from the working class over a period of time, especially in the military, pulled off their coup, before the mass struggle could be developed further and strike harder at their positions of power. And with this act the revisionists rose to power, seizing control of the Communist Party and the state. This coup marked the decisive turning point and fundamental change, the beginning of the process of suppressing genuine revolutionaries and the masses, reversing the entire revolution and restoring capitalism.
This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary
Worker Online |
|||||
