BAY AREA, UNITED STATES—This year, 2016, is the 50th anniversary of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in China. The 10-year period from 1966 to 1976 is viewed by communists as the most left period in post-revolutionary China, the farthest any society yet progressed toward trying to put ordinary industrial and agricultural workers in charge of running things. It is also the period of China’s history most attacked and slandered by the capitalists who now rule China.
These political traitors who still call themselves the “Communist” Party of China have grown incredibly wealthy at the expense of the working class. Most academics in Europe and North America are eager to amplify and spread the distortions and lies about the GPCR published by the capitalist scholars and politicians who dominate China today.
There is another side to the story. Gatherings in China celebrating the positive accomplishments of the GPCR, mostly low profile, have taken place in a number of cities. There have also been pro-communist gatherings in other countries, including the U.S. One in particular was held in the Bay Area of northern California in October.
The evening centered on reproductions of two giant character posters (dazibao), one written by communists from the U.S. who were living and working in China. One of the poster writers, in her 80s and wheelchair bound, was present at the conference. She was an inspiration to the younger generations present. In 1966, she wrote posters criticizing the Chinese authorities for giving them and other foreign “experts” special treatment, like better living conditions and no expectation for manual labor. They declared that they, too, aspired to be real revolutionaries and the special treatment undermined their political will and created a separation from the Chinese masses. The special treatment undermined internationalism.
At the event, many new publications were discussed about the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins by Yiching Wu (Harvard University Press, 2014) starts from the perspective that the restoration of capitalism began with Mao Zedong’s betrayal of the revolutionary aspirations of the masses of left workers and students mobilized in the first months of the GPCR. He writes, “Quashing the restless rebels as early as late 1967, Maoist politics … exhausted its once explosive energy. … [and] eventually led to the historic changes in the social, economic and political life in post-Mao China.”

To find out more about the Cultural Revolution you can see three articles from PL Magazine, available on PLP.org:
The Gpcr & The Reversal Of Workers’ Power In China (1971)
Whither China? (1972)
Why Were Communist Revolutions Reversed In China And The Ussr?
Additionally:
The titles and brief summaries of the papers from the San Francisco Conference are now posted at www. wholeworldjustice.org

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) was an historic uprising of the working class led by the most advanced communist ideas at the time. It was the first time the working class attempted to take state power back from a former communist party that had returned to capitalism.
The leader of the Communist Party of China (CPC), Mao Tse Tung, initially encouraged the Cultural Revolution to get rid of a few people in the leadership of the Party, the left forces in the Cultural Revolution recognized that the official Communist Party  was already in the hands of a capitalist ruling class at the time the GPCR began, that the vast majority (90 percent) of the leading cadres were part of that oppressor class, that the People’s Liberation Army (or PLA, the military) was its tool to smash the real Left and maintain power, that the new “red” bourgeoisie had emerged during the 17 years from 1949-66 from the ranks of the revolutionaries themselves and, therefore, that the GPCR was not, as Mao said, a struggle to consolidate proletarian rule, but the first revolution in history to attempt to take power back from the fake “communists,” known as revisionists. This analysis led the left workers and students leading the Cultural Revolution to carry out the following political campaigns.
1) They demanded the ouster of the chief representative of China’s “red” capitalists, Chou En-Lai, along with the high-ranking economic and administrative ministers he was sheltering.
2) They demanded that the GPCR be carried into the Army Officer Corps, which they saw a part of the new ruling class. They engaged in arms seizures from the PLA, raiding depots and arms trains, on the principle that a revolution to overthrow the bourgeoisie had to be an armed struggle of the masses.
3) They opposed China’s foreign policies of alliance with capitalist countries. To carry this through they seized foreign ships in the harbors, burned the British consulate in August of 1967, launched a liberation struggle in Hong Kong, seized Soviet arms going to Vietnam over China’s railroad lines and opposed China’s nuclear development program.
4) They began to discuss and implement the formation of a new Communist party, given their assumption that the CPC had become the party of the bourgeois apparatus that was restoring capitalism under the ideological cover of a fake brand of communism.
The left forces presented a view of what was going on in the GPCR which was contradictory to the official views of the CPC under Mao, who claimed “95% of the cadres are good” vs. the left-wing forces in the GPCR who said “90% of the political cadres must step aside.”
Fake “Communists” Spread Capitalist Lies
To amplify how completely the Chinese bosses have now moved to capitalism, they now tell the same lies about the Cultural Revolution as the U.S. bosses. The distorted historical narrative told by the capitalists who currently rule China, and retold and amplified by capitalists around the world, is that the Cultural Revolution was “10 lost years” in which the Chinese economy was on the brink of collapse.
However, when one of the participants in a San Francisco conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution went to China with a group of Western economists in the midst of the Cultural Revolution in 1972, the iconic liberal mainstream economist John Kenneth Galbraith was in the delegation and reviewed economic data made available by the Chinese leadership and calculated that the GDP was growing at about 9% per year, similar to the rate touted as the “Chinese miracle” after the restoration of capitalism after the late 1970s.
The participation of millions of workers and farmers in political meetings did not cause production to stop, or even to slow down. The criticism of factory or farm managers to a previously unheard of degree, and active involvement in “non-productive” activities that amounted to having a say in the running of society, in fact energized the masses of workers and farmers.
The Communists accomplished feats that would be called miracles under capitalism, starting with spreading literacy across a country of a billion people, introducing health care and ending starvation in what had been one of the poorest countries in the world prior to the communist revolution. Their efforts in the GPCR showed the importance of continuing the struggle for workers power even after a revolution. But to ultimately succeed in building a communist society we have to look at the errors of the CPC as well. While the left forces in the GPCR did so many great things they ultimately were defeated and capitalism was firmly established in China. It is important for us to try to understand why the GPCR failed.
One Step Forward,
Two Steps Back
Communist movements will inevitably make many mistakes big and small. The Progressive Labor Party previously believed in fighting for socialism as an intermediary step towards communism. Now, largely from looking at what happened in the former Soviet Union and China, we are fighting for the building of a communist society directly. It is not the only correction we have made or will have to make going forward. For the working class to take and hold power it is essential that the revolutionary communist movement be able to correct ideological errors and bad practice. Criticism and self-criticism of our ideas and activity is the only way we can deal with problems and mistakes that arise. The leadership of the Party especially, has to honestly and soberly evaluate their own ideas and practice and be open to criticism from others.
Perhaps the main weakness that led to the defeat of the GPCR was the belief in the cult of the individual surrounding Mao Tse Tung. A big weakness of the old communist movement was that it built up individual leaders as people who could do no wrong. While the Left forces in China recognized that China had moved back to capitalism, they held on to the wrong idea that Mao, the leader of the country, was not a supporter of the backward changes. He was, and ultimately Mao used his influence and his control of the Army to put down the revolution.
Struggle, Fail, Struggle… WIN
The lessons of the GPCR are one of the driving forces in history that has given PLP the confidence that the working class will fight for a communist future. It has also helped us understand the need to continually struggle against capitalist ideology of individualism in ourselves and in the communist movement. The effort of the working class in the GPCR has been an invaluable contribution to the fight for communism.
Other lessons learned from the GPCR:
Confidence in the working class and the need for a mass communist party: We are building a party that is open to everyone who wants to fight for a communist future for the working class. People can make contributions in many different ways and the more people who participate in building the Party and ultimately running society the better off we will be.
Breakdown of the separation between “experts” and “followers.” In CHALLENGE, we try to explain what is going on in the world as well as have articles on fighting back in the class struggle. We believe that we can only understand the world by trying to change it and knowledge and understanding comes out of putting communist ideas into practice. We call this “better red than expert!”
The struggle for communism will continue for generations. The working class taking state power is only the beginning of the fight to build a communist society.
This 50th anniversary of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is an opportunity to struggle with our coworkers and friends to renew our efforts to smash this racist, sexist, imperialist system of capitalism once and for all. Fighting back also means understanding what previous generations in this fight have done – both right and wrong. As the world lurches toward fascism and inter-imperialist war, we have our work cut out for us. We, heirs to the struggle for a communist world, truly honor the heroic masses who fought in the GPCR by organizing on our jobs and in our mass organizations for armed communist revolution. Dare to struggle, dare to win!

Although U.S. finance capital didn’t back Donald Trump’s surprising path to the presidency, he will nonetheless represent the interests of the finance capitalist section of the ruling class. “Fascism represents the policy of large-scale capital, and not the revolt of petty bourgeois policies against large-scale capital,” says R. Palme Dutt, the early 20th-century British communist leader and author of Fascism and Social Revolution. Based on the people he’s appointed to cabinet-level positions and others under consideration, Trump could represent an opportunity to unify the rulers’ dominant section with the wing represented by more domestically oriented capitalists, like Charles and David Koch.
While still on top of the dunghill of global capitalism, the U.S. is in significant decline. It faces intensifying competition from two rising capitalist powers, China and Russia. The U.S. bosses’ only chance to stave off their rivals—at least for a while longer—is to impose fascism at home. They need to intimidate, divide, and nationalize the working class to fight in the next broad global conflict. From this point forward, every U.S. president will play his or her part in building a mass fascist movement. Progressive Labor Party cannot stop this trend; it is ingrained in the contradictions of the profit system. But communists have a vital role to play in this volatile period. Our job is to organize the international working class to defend itself and fight back. Our historical task is to turn the guns around and transform imperialist war into a mass revolutionary war for a communist future.
The Next War President
The U.S. military is essential to U.S. capitalist dominance around the world. While Trump may have made isolationist-sounding campaign promises to cancel trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or to step back from NATO and give Russia freer rein in Eastern Europe, make no mistake. Trump will be a war president. There is consensus within the ruling class that Russia and China must be militarily confronted, and sooner than later.
The president-elect’s campaign rhetoric aside, his first cabinet appointments appear to be in lockstep with the finance capitalists’ agenda for imperialist war. Trump’s new national security adviser, Michael Flynn, is a retired U.S. Army general who has pushed for more aggressive intervention in the proxy war in Syria. He also co-authored a book titled, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies. A well-vetted servant of U.S. imperialism and a former senior military intelligence officer, Flynn took part in the invasions of Grenada (1983) and Haiti (1994). More recently, he helped engineer the slaughters of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan to defend main-wing oil interests in the Middle East.
While Trump is as ruthless a capitalist as they come, he has a lot to learn about handling state power on behalf of the arch-imperialists. To that end, he wasted no time in getting briefed on international affairs by arch-imperialist and genocide architect Henry Kissinger. After the meeting, Kissinger told CNN:
On should not insist on nailing [Trump] into positions that he had taken in the campaign. “The art now would be to develop a strategy…that can be linked to some of the main themes of American foreign policy.
In other words: No Trump policies are solidified, and the main wing can align Trump to their imperialist needs.
White Supremacy in the White House
Racism is the backbone of capitalism. Trump’s appointment of alt-right (media baron Stephen Bannon as chief White House strategist and senior counselor, along with his nomination of Senator Jeff Sessions as attorney general, reflects an unambiguous commitment to racist terror. We can expect Trump to build on the legacy of State-Terrorists-in-Chief Barack Obama (who deported a record 2.5 million immigrants) and George W. Bush before him.
 “Over the last 16 years, the federal government has used local police and jails as a key tool to orchestrate mass deportations – and that’s precisely what Trump plans to do on a more frightening scale than ever” (the Guardijjjan.com, 11/21).
Sessions is an open racist. In 1986, he was denied a federal judgeship after a Senate committee learned that he’d called the NAACP “un-American” and “communist-inspired” and “had accused a white attorney who supported voting rights of being a race traitor” (New York Times, 11/21). As Alabama’s attorney general in the 1990s, Sessions blocked reforms to provide basic services to underfunded, segregated public schools (NYT, 11/21).
Under Obama, liberal attorney generals Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch have done nothing to stem the rising tide of racist police murders across the country. In Chicago, the U.S. Department of Justice acknowledged that “...police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color” (Washington Post, 4/16). The DOJ then proceeded to give the Chicago Police Department $2 million for “overtime and upgraded equipment” (ABC 7, 9/9). We can expect more of the same from Sessions.
Bannon is an ex-Goldman Sachs banker and, until recently, the executive chairman of the white supremacist website Breitbart News. As Mother Jones (8/22) observed, he is most ominous when it comes to anti-Muslim racism:
He describes Islam as “a political ideology” and Sharia law as “like Nazism, fascism, and communism.” On his Sirius XM radio show, he heaped praise on Pamela Geller, whose American Freedom Defense Initiative has been labeled an anti-Muslim hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Bannon called her “one of the leading experts in the country, if not the world,” on Islam. And he basically endorsed House Speaker Paul Ryan’s primary challenger, businessman Paul Nehlen, who floated the idea of deporting all Muslims from the United States.
Bosses Cracking Down on Bosses
Despite their internal divisions, the ruling class and their politician servants are aligning to shore up their decadent system. One hallmark of rising fascism is stricter discipline within the ruling class, which must sacrifice some short-term profits to finance an imperialist military and critical domestic infrastructure. “Trump wants an active-duty Army with another 60,000 soldiers in the ranks, an unspecified number of additional sailors to man the 78 ships and submarines he intends to see built in coming years. He wants up to 12,000 more Marines to serve in infantry and tank battalions, and at least another 100 combat aircraft for the Air Force” (Military Times, 11/20).
Liberals like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, longtime champions of higher corporate taxes, have already expressed their willingness to cooperate with Trump in this effort.  Politicians may be Democrats or Republicans, “progressives” or conservatives; they may have tactical or even strategic disagreements. But they are all enemies of the working class. As the U.S. moves closer to full-blown fascism, they will fall in line to support the profit system’s long-term needs. If ruling-class history is any guide (see: German in the 1930s), any holdouts will be eliminated.
It’s too early to assess Trump’s impact on the splits that plague the unstable U.S. ruling class. But it should be noted that he has nominated Kansas Congressman Mike Pompeo as the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Since the days of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the U.S. rulers have entrusted this job to reliable main-wing insiders, from Allen Dulles to George H.W. Bush to David Petraeus. As The Nation (11/18) noted, Pompeo marks a clear departure from tradition:
Pompeo came out of the same Wichita, Kansas, business community where the Koch family’s oil-and-gas conglomerate is headquartered. Indeed, Pompeo built his own company with seed money from Koch Venture Capital. More important, from a political standpoint, is the fact that Pompeo made the leap from business to government with a big boost from the Koch brothers and their employees. “I’m sure he would vigorously dispute this, but it’s hard not to characterize him as the congressman from Koch,” says University of Kansas political science professor Burdett Loomis.
Workers Fight Back!
Workers are not taking the rulers’ attacks lying down. Since Trump’s election, hundreds of marches and demonstrations have erupted all over the country. Black workers are mobilizing against police terror in dozens of cities. Movements like Black Lives Matter, #NoDAPL, and Not My President are severely limited by their reformist nature, opportunistic leadership, and/or bankrupt identity politics. At the same time, they show that workers are ready to fight and resist the drive to fascism and imperialist war. Internationally, from Haiti to Pakistan, in countries where fascism is most advanced, workers are locked in open class struggle against the bosses.
These fightbacks are inspiring to the workers of the world. Ultimately, however, they will fall short without leadership from a serious, disciplined, mass communist organization. History has taught us that only communism can defeat fascism. The Soviet Army smashed the Nazis during World War II. The Chinese Communist Party led peasants, students, soldiers, and workers to victory over Japanese fascism, liberating the planet’s most populous country from the capitalist class. With the leadership of Progressive Labor Party, we can do it again! Join us!

Throughout its history, the U.S. Military has used racism and sexism to divide and manipulate the working class in an effort to build a military to fight their wars.

• Not Recognized By Name
  During the American Revolutionary War, the typical Black soldier was a private, often lacking a name or official identity. He was carried on the rolls as A Negro man, or Negro by name, or A Negro name not Known
• Denied Human Rights But Forced to Fight
  During the Civil War, Black slaves substituted for White masters who chose not to fight. Pressured by Congress to increase enlistment, some states compensated slave owners up to 120 pounds for slaves who served.
• Three-Fifths A Human Being: All Parts Soldier
  By the end of the American Revolution, over 300,000 men would fight, including approximately 5,000 who were Black. However, the new U.S. Constitution re-emphasized Black inferiority by deeming that, for political representation, each enslaved Black person would only count as three-fifths of a human.
• Returned to Chains After Combat
  After fighting in the War of 1812, Black soldiers were returned to their owners once the war ended and re-enslaved, through the Treaty of Ghent which provided for the mutual restoration of properties, including slaves.
• Defending Murder: Houston Rebellion 1917
  When the Twenty-fourth Infantry, of which all members were Black, arrived in Houston, the segregated Texas City responded by enforcing Jim Crow laws and enlisting city police to harass the men. On August 23, two cops beat and murdered a member of the infantry in response members of the 24^th organized the Houston Rebellion. In November 1917, the largest court-martial in U.S. military history convened at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio to try sixty-three soldiers from the rebellion.  Thirteen of the convicted men were executed by hanging on December 11 and 47 others received life sentences.
• American Weapons not American Citizens
  Although they were still not considered American citizens, more than 17,000 indigenous workers fought in WWI (1914—1918). They would, however, not receive any veteran benefits until 1924, when they were declared citizens, yet racism and exploitation were still commonplace in the military.
• Jim Crow On The Ground & In Flight
  During WWII (1940 – 1952), the Tuskegee Airmen were the first Black military aviators in the U.S. Armed Forces. The Military was still racially segregated and Black soldiers were subjected to racism both within and outside the Army. In Southern States Black soldiers were also was still subject to Jim Crow laws.
• Scapegoating on U.S. and E.U. Soil
  During WWII almost four times as many Black soldiers as whites were executed in Europe after military courts-martial, despite the fact that Blacks made up less than 10 percent of troops (NYT, 2013).
• Turning a Blind Eye to Racist Extracurricular Activities
  In 1986, Marine and Army troops based at Camp Lejeune and Fort Bragg in North Caroline took part in Neo-Nazi and White supremacist activities led by the White Patriot Party and KKK to which Army spokespeople responded, “We cannot restrict their freedom of expression, in as much as it does not interfere with their military duty, or violate civilian or military lay” (NYT, 1986).
• Breeding Grounds for Racism
  In 2012 Reuters reported that Neo-Nazi and Skinhead groups were encouraging followers to enlist in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps to acquire military skills. A 2005 Department of Defense report states, “Effectively, the military has a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy pertaining to extremism.
• Sexual Assault: Unprecedented and Unreported
  A 2012 Pentagon survey found that approximately 26,000 women and men were sexually assaulted. Of those, only 3,374 cases were reported. In 2013, a new Pentagon report found that 5,061 troops reported cases of assault.
• Mass Rape Goes Unreported and Repressed
  On the Lackland Air Force Base in Texas at least 43 female trainees who went through boot camp from 2009 to 2011 reported being sexually assaulted or raped by 17 male instructors. Service members who report a sexual assault were 12 times more likely to experience some kind of retaliation than they are to see an attacker convicted.
• Racial Thursday: Weekly Dose of Racism
  Still common practice, one day a week, the U.S. Army allows soldiers to use racial slurs and share racist thoughts within their units without consequence. This practice has been dubbed Racial Thursdays.