Cultural revolution is part of the post-Marx development of Marxist theory, most importantly with Chinese communism under the guidance of Mao Zedong. The general idea of cultural revolution is as a corrective to the materialistic assumption that some commentators claim to find in Marx, that only physical or legal restraints have to be changed to liberate the proletariat. A cultural revolution is a revolution in thought, in ideology, or, more comprehensively, in culture. What might now be called ‘mind sets’ have to be changed. People have to drop the attitudes, expectations, intellectual orientations of bourgeois society, and these have to be changed separately from the change in, say, the ownership of property.
With some thinkers in this tradition, notably the Italian Communist Party under Gramsci’s influence, the stress is on getting the cultural revolution first, as the only hope towards persuading electorates to allow the legal and property revolution. Building a true socialist or communist consciousness, however, is seen to be a major and very long-term task by leaders in post-revolutionary societies, because the attitudes of capitalist or feudal society have been shown to linger on long after the political death of these structures.
It was because of this problem that Mao, in the late 1960s, authorized his Red Guards, revolutionary youth, to investigate, punish, humiliate and force into political re-education (see thought reform) large numbers of the Chinese élite. The victims were accused of wishing to create a new class system, or of desiring privilege and generally setting themselves apart from the masses in a counter-revolutionary manner. The theoretical problem inside Marxism of the idea of a cultural revolution is that it implies an autonomy of thought from socio-economic structure, which does not fit well with the general thesis that thought and attitude are superstructural, dependent on the economic substructure. Ultimately the cultural revolution in China did great harm, and after Mao’s death thousands of desperately needed experts and professionals had to be rehabilitated to help drag China back on to a more orthodox path towards social and economic development.
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