Red Guards

Its frequently claimed that the Red Guards attempted to destroy China's culture, proving what Lenin said that, "a lie repeated often enough, becomes the truth". If this is the case, then what exactly did they destroy? The Forbidden Palace remains untouched, the walls of Xi'an remain complete as does the Great Wall. In fact the rare instances of destruction of monasteries was conducted by Tibetan Red Guards who had every reason to hate the Dalai Lama regime that had gone before. Now, obviously the destruction of China's culture is a terrible thing, but given that such monuments are often built by the masses under the yolk of tyranny, some destruction may occur.

However, the mythical claims that the Red Guards tried to wipe out the past is deliberate disinformation. Rather, the cultural revolution was about breaking free from old ideas that continued to shackle the country ideologically. Many party bosses were behaving like bourgeois leaders, and, as Mao had predicted, a new bourgeoisie was emerging from within the communist party. Therefore the Red Guards had to be mobilised as a great mass movement to challenge such backward thinking.

The reason there is so much hysterical propaganda against the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is that a close analysis would publicise the achievments of this campaign. The real targets were not the monuements of past ideologies, rather they were the outdated and reactionary sentiments that afflicted the communist party. One of the most pressing issues facing the communist movement today, is, how to prevent healthy revolutions, forged in blood and sacrifice, going into reverse and ultimately sliding back into the arms of the class enemy.

Thanks for your greatly informative and marvelously written posts Antifa, it's a pitty you're not a most frequent poster.

As I had said previously, I'm convinced there's a huge campaing of misinformation when treating any social movement in which the oppressed classes rebel against their oppressors and the Cultural Revolution isn't the exception. So I would of course doubt of the veracity claims against the Red Guards may have.

Hmmm, generally I think that the 'GPCR' was little more than a campaign to allow Mao and company to regain some of the power they had lost to others in the Party. Admittedly however, I don't know a great deal about it.

In the end though, I fail to see what was especially proletarian about it considering that the cultural revolution would not have ended, or fundamentally changed the nature of the Chinese regime, since it had not achieved socialism and was not in danger of reverting back to capitalism.

Actually subsequent events have proved that China was in danger of slipping back into capitalism. The Dengist regime tha overthrew communist power on thde death of Mao put China on the road to capitalism.

The proletarian aspect of the GPCR was in the ideology and line that was struggling against capitalist revival within the party and the country. It was a political struggle waged by a mass movement.

I'd say that now a days china is a good example of mixed market economy, actually the closest thing you can have to one.

China was back then (70'a) mostly poor, but then evryone was kinda poor, now there's a BIG diffrence between rich and poor.