Cultural Revolution leads to ultra-left China

[Thon Taddeo]

A few years ago, there was a thread on this subject, but it had no replies. It seems like a fascinating idea, so I'm creating a new thread.

During the Cultural Revolution in China there arose a number of factions who argued that the CR wasn't going far enough, and that the primary contradiction in Chinese society was between the party-state and the masses. Rather than just criticising "reactionary ideas" and "bad cadres", as the Maoists argues, the ultra-leftists argued that the Cultural Revolution needed to give way to a political revolution against the party-state. Examples of ultra-leftists include the Shanghai People's Commune, which Mao initially supported until they started questioning the political authority of his allies, whereupon it was replaced with a Revolutionary Committee subordinate to Mao and his allies, and the Shengwulian Manifesto written by Xiaokai Yang in 1968, who Mao personally denounced as counter-revolutionary in 1969.

Ultimately these ultra-leftist tendencies were denounced by Mao and the CPC as counter-revolutionary and anarchistic in nature. Later, after Mao's death, the CPC would go on to denounce Mao as an ultra-leftist in 1978.

The challenge is this: Get the ultra-leftists to successfully escalate the Cultural Revolution into a political revolution, resulting in a China based on radical democratic and libertarian socialism.

I would guess that this would require Mao's death pretty early on, in 1966 or 1967. Also the most radical Red Guards would never be able to defeat the PLA. Large numbers of soldiers and officers would need to defect. What changes would be necessary, and how could they be brought about?

 

[Arcavia]

A few years ago, there was a thread on this subject, but it had no replies. It seems like a fascinating idea, so I'm creating a new thread.



I would guess that this would require Mao's death pretty early on, in 1966 or 1967. Also the most radical Red Guards would never be able to defeat the PLA. Large numbers of soldiers and officers would need to defect. What changes would be necessary, and how could they be brought about?

Perhaps an earlier Sino Soviet Split results in libertarian communism veing seen as the true revolution against both soviet style state socialism and western capitalism? From there the PLA is divided in its loyalty and the RG radicalized...

 

[SpookyBoy]

I wonder what this could mean for the New Left movements in the West and elsewhere, as it seems to me an ultra-left China would be a natural ally for them. The New Left tended to come into conflict with the established Old Left (trade unions, political parties) quite often, most famously in France in 1968 where the uprising came into conflict with the interests of the PCF once they were unable to comandeer the movement for the sake of their own advancement.

 

[Green Painting]

People aren’t stupid. When they see how leftism brought about impoverishment , violent death and injust persecution, they would turn around.
1970s communism was already much more nuanced than in the 60s.

 

[phrynolatry]

There's no way that the party-state would be subverted, even during the climax of the Cultural Revolution.
Moreover, I think that libetarian socialism or any kind of liberal political system is hardly possible to gain traction in China, even to this day.

 

[EquatorJewel]

I'm of the opinion for China to go ultra left, even if the PoD is at the Cultural Revolution, would still take quite some time after it. Mayhaps pre-communist revolution divergences is needed, all the way back to Qing's last gasps?

 

[AeroTheZealousOne]

I'm of the opinion for China to go ultra left, even if the PoD is at the Cultural Revolution, would still take quite some time after it. Mayhaps pre-communist revolution divergences is needed, all the way back to Qing's last gasps?

Anarchism definitely had some traction within China before the Bolsheviks succeeded in Russia, so a PoD around this time either altering the outcome of the Russian Revolution or perhaps finding a way to keep the more libertarian left-leaning elements going and popular, but this would ultimately end up butterflying the Cultural Revolution in it's current form at the very least.

I would agree, an earlier Sino-Soviet Split might help form more differences in Chinese socialist ideology. I'm not entirely sure where Mao would fall into this picture, but an earlier death, and the prevention of both Hardline Maoists (such as the Gang of Four) and reformers (such as Deng Xiaoping) from reaching power MIGHT help the couch try move in this direction.

With all of the above points, I feel that an earlier PoD to achieve an ultra-left China would be needed, and it would take a miracle during the Cultural Revolution as it went IOTL for anyone falling on the libertarian-left sphere of socialist ideology to come to power. No names unfortunately come to mind, since such individuals were already probably purged at this point.

 

[gladiator8085]

People aren’t stupid. When they see how leftism brought about impoverishment , violent death and injust persecution, they would turn around.
1970s communism was already much more nuanced than in the 60s.

You'd be surprised. My brother in law has a master's degree and works for the federal government and he actually said to me one time that he wishes some nation would try Communism. I pointed out the USSR, China, and NK as examples and his response was that they implemented it wrong. When I pointed out that the basic tenet of Marxism is that the government control all industry I asked him where they got it wrong. He still insisted that they implemented it incorrectly.

 

[SpookyBoy]

When I pointed out that the basic tenet of Marxism is that the government control all industry I asked him where they got it wrong.

that is literally not what it is but ok

 

[RousseauX]

A few years ago, there was a thread on this subject, but it had no replies. It seems like a fascinating idea, so I'm creating a new thread.



I would guess that this would require Mao's death pretty early on, in 1966 or 1967. Also the most radical Red Guards would never be able to defeat the PLA. Large numbers of soldiers and officers would need to defect. What changes would be necessary, and how could they be brought about?

The Ultra left taking power was what happened otl in Shanghai during the cultural revolution when the , the problem is that as it turned out all it really did was replace the party leadership at the municipal level combined with more chaos in the streets and not particularly good administration

 

[RousseauX]

I wonder what this could mean for the New Left movements in the West and elsewhere, as it seems to me an ultra-left China would be a natural ally for them. The New Left tended to come into conflict with the established Old Left (trade unions, political parties) quite often, most famously in France in 1968 where the uprising came into conflict with the interests of the PCF once they were unable to comandeer the movement for the sake of their own advancement.

This isn't really any different than Maoism w.r.t the new Left of the 1960s

 

[gladiator8085]

that is literally not what it is but ok

Unless I've misread Marx the first stage of Marxism is that the government/party control all means of production.

 

[BBadolato]

You'd be surprised. My brother in law has a master's degree and works for the federal government and he actually said to me one time that he wishes some nation would try Communism. I pointed out the USSR, China, and NK as examples and his response was that they implemented it wrong. When I pointed out that the basic tenet of Marxism is that the government control all industry I asked him where they got it wrong. He still insisted that they implemented it incorrectly.

Marx and Engles never believed that the revolution would take place in backwaters like Russia or China, but in industrialized counties with a conscious working class. The Soviet Union and China effectively had to lead their societies kicking and screaming in a way that gave their Communist parties all of the power.

I fail to see how you can have Maoist China be any far left, the iconoclastic tendencies of the Red Guard were rooted in the early Chinese Anarchists, which Mao was at one point, basically traditional Chinese Culture and everything that came with it was horrible and should be discarded.

 

[RousseauX]

Unless I've misread Marx the first stage of Marxism is that the government/party control all means of production.

actually it's workers, you could have a socialist co-ops not owned by the government but owned by people who work in it

kinda like credit unions

 

[fasquardon]

You'd be surprised. My brother in law has a master's degree and works for the federal government and he actually said to me one time that he wishes some nation would try Communism. I pointed out the USSR, China, and NK as examples and his response was that they implemented it wrong. When I pointed out that the basic tenet of Marxism is that the government control all industry I asked him where they got it wrong. He still insisted that they implemented it incorrectly.

Unless I've misread Marx the first stage of Marxism is that the government/party control all means of production.

You've misread Marx. The aim of Marxism is that the workers control all means of production and ensure that eventually government itself will wither away and die.

However, worker control doesn't work very well when the workers don't have the training to run their workplaces. As such, when the Bolsheviks first tried forcing worker control of enterprises in the Russian civil war they found that production of guns and bullets was falling so in desperation they turned to the brutal system of State Capitalism that you and so many others think is Marxist, but was actually just an act of desperation that then got entrenched because it was always easier to keep doing more of the same thing than it was to change direction and attempt to govern Russia in a genuinely Marxist fashion (because in a genuine worker's democracy, the workers would have the freedom to lynch the Bolsheviks who had so brutalized them during the Russian civil war).

The importance of the Party is a post-Marx thing as well. The Bolsheviks were a persecuted political group for most of their pre-1917 history. And often at odds with other Marxists. So no surprise, they formed a small tight-knit group. During the Russian civil war, most of the institutions from the Tsarist period were either dead or inoperative, so the Bolsheviks built their new revolutionary state on the only thing they had to hand - their own party.

Both party organization and capitalism was woven into the DNA of the Soviet Union by the civil war, not due to any ideas Marx had, and then Bolshevik success made Mao and others in China think that they were a model to be emulated.

So your brother is correct, Marxism hasn't been correctly implemented. Of course, arguably Marx made many mistakes that have pre-disposed those who came after him to go down the path of the State Capitalist dictatorship - Marx's conception of class for example has set up his successors to take divisive positions, which then led to radicalising conflict, his ideas about how money works is arguably the reason why no Marxist has done very well at imagining how a non-Capitalist economy could actually work (fiat currencies, the gold standard and silver currency, to take a few historical examples, all work in different ways, and advantage different systems of economic organization), and his materialistic outlook is arguably a major reason for the fragility of the systems his disciples set up. So one could legitimately question why anyone would WANT to correctly implement the theories of Marx. But the "common wisdom" especially in the US about what Marx's ideas were and how the systems of the USSR and China worked are really quite far from the reality.

fasquardon

 

[SpookyBoy]

Unless I've misread Marx the first stage of Marxism is that the government/party control all means of production.

Marx advocated for worker control of the means of production, the idea of a transitional state was a Leninist idea (and Lenin of course ended up implementing things like the NEP)

Marx did use the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat", but this is sort of misleading as he used it in the sense of society being literally dictated by the working class as opposed to an individual. This is made more confusing by the fact that he never actually wrote much about it as a concept, but he did apply it to the Paris Commune, which was a very different place to the USSR.