A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (79 page)

These measures produced considerable economic growth—12 percent a year according to official figures for the years 1954-57. But this did not get anywhere near the official aim of catching the advanced industrial countries, and a section of the Chinese leadership around Mao Zedong began to fear that unless desperate steps were taken China would subside into being one more stagnating Third World country. In 1958, against the opposition of other leaders such as the president Liu Shoqi and Deng Xiaoping, they launched a ‘Great Leap Forward’ aimed at ultra-rapid industrialisation.

Heavy industry was to be made to grow much faster than before by every district setting out to make its own iron and steel. Millions of new industrial workers were to be fed by removing individual plots from the peasants and forcing people into huge ‘People’s Communes’. In 1958 and 1959 it seemed the ‘leap’ was being made successfully. The official industrial growth rate was almost 30 percent a year, and across the world enthusiasts for Chinese Communism hailed the ‘communes’ as the dawn of a new era. In 1960 reality struck home. China did not have the technical equipment to make the communes viable, and merely herding the peasants together could not overcome centuries-old traditions which set one family against another. Grain output dropped catastrophically and many millions died in famines. The new locally-based industries were of a low technical level, extremely inefficient and damaged the overall economy by using up resources. The Great Leap Forward turned into a disaster for which the mass of people paid a terrible price. Willpower alone could not overcome centuries of stagnation and the de-industrialisation caused by imperialism.

The leadership reacted by shunting Mao away from the levers of power and returning to a more measured approach towards industrialisation. But this policy was hardly a great success. Industrial output was lower in 1965 than in 1960. While the labour force grew by 15 million a year, the number of new jobs grew by only half a million, and the 23 million college graduates found it hard to find meaningful employment.
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As the problems accumulated, the group in the leadership around Mao Zedong once more felt that only urgent action could break the impasse. This time they believed they had found an agency to carry it through—the vast numbers of young people whose hopes were frustrated. In 1966 Mao and a coterie of supporters, including his wife Jiang Qing and defence minister Lin Biao, proclaimed the ‘Proletarian Cultural Revolution’.

China, they said, was being held back by the ‘culture’ of those running the structures of the party and the country. These people had become soft and lazy. Such tendencies had already led Russia ‘down the capitalist road’ of de-Stalinisation, and they could drag China back to its old ‘Confucian’ ways. It was the task of youth to stop this by mass criticism of those obstructing Mao’s policies. The Mao group shut down all education institutions for six months and encouraged 11 million college and high school students to carry the criticism from one region to another on free rail transport.

The ‘Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ was in no sense proletarian and in no sense a revolution. The workers were expected to keep working while the students staged mass rallies and travelled the country. Indeed, part of the message of the ‘Cultural Revolution’ was that workers should abandon ‘capitalistic’ worries like bonus rates and health and safety issues, since these were ‘economistic’, and ‘Mao Zedong thought’ was sufficient motivation for anyone. At the same time the students were instructed not to interfere with the functioning of the military and police apparatus. This was a ‘revolution’ intended to avoid turning the state upside down!

The student ‘Red Guards’ were encouraged to unleash their frustrations not at institutions, but against individuals who were deemed to have shown insufficient revolutionary zeal. At the top this meant targeting those who had disagreed with Mao at the time of the Great Leap Forward. Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and others were forced from office. At the local level it meant scapegoating low level figures of minimal authority who were thought somehow to embody ‘old ways’—schoolteachers, writers, journalists, clerks or actors. The atmosphere of irrational persecution is conveyed vividly in the memoirs of former ‘Red Guard’ Jung Chang, in
Wild Swans
, in scenes in the film
Farewell, My Concubine
about an Beijing opera performer and victim of the Cultural Revolution, and in the novel about a group of intellectuals,
Stones of the Wall,
by Dai Houying.

But the Cultural Revolution was not just an irrational outburst. The frustrations which Mao exploited were real enough. And, because of this, Mao could not keep control of the movement he had initiated. Rival ‘Red Guard’ and ‘Red Rebel’ groups emerged in many towns and many institutions. Some were manipulated by local state and party apparatuses. But others began to attract young workers, to raise questions affecting the lives of the mass of people and, in Shanghai, to get involved in major strikes.

Mao now tried to stop the movement he had initiated only months before, and called upon Lin Biao’s army to restore order in each locality. It was a move which prompted some of the students to turn against the whole social system. A group in Hunan denounced ‘the rule of the new bureaucratic bourgeoisie’. Others made criticisms which laid the ground for the ‘democracy wall’ movement of the 1970s.
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Decisive action by the army brought the ‘Red Guard’ movement to an end, aided by the faith the mass of students still had in Mao himself. Those who had begun to express their feelings through the movement, in however distorted a way, now paid a hard price. Millions were forcibly removed from the cities to undertake backbreaking work in remote rural areas—one estimate suggests one in ten of Shanghai’s population were sent out of the city.
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However, the end of mass participation in the Cultural Revolution was not the end of the turmoil in China. In 1970 Lin Biao, Mao’s designated successor, suddenly fled the country for Russia amid talk of a failed coup, only for his aircraft to crash close to the Soviet border. The early part of the 1970s saw central power concentrated in the hands of Zhou Enlai, who brought back the previously disgraced Deng Xiaoping as his designated heir. Mao’s wife and three collaborators (the ‘Gang of Four’) briefly regained control in 1974, purging Deng again and reverting to the language of the Cultural Revolution. Huge demonstrations to commemorate the death of Zhou Enlai showed how little support they had, and they were overthrown and imprisoned after Mao died in 1976.

Much of the left around the world had enthused at the Cultural Revolution. In many countries opponents of the US war in Vietnam carried portraits of Mao Zedong as well as the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. The trite sayings in the
Little Red Book
of ‘Mao’s thoughts’ were presented as a guide to socialist activity. Yet in 1972, as more US bombers hit targets in Vietnam than ever before, Mao greeted US president Nixon in Beijing, and by 1977, under Deng, China was beginning to embrace the market more furiously than Russia under Stalin’s successors.

The Western media saw such twists and turns as a result of wild irrationality. By the late 1970s many of those on the left who had identified with Maoism in the 1960s agreed, and turned their backs on socialism. A whole school of ex-Maoist ‘New Philosophers’ emerged in France, who taught that revolution automatically leads to tyranny and that the revolutionary left are as bad as the fascist right. Yet there is a simple, rational explanation for the apparently irrational course of Chinese history over a quarter of a century. China simply did not have the internal resources to pursue the Stalinist path of forced industrialisation successfully, however much its rulers starved the peasants and squeezed the workers. But there were no other easy options after a century of imperialist plundering. Unable to find rational solutions, the country’s rulers were tempted by irrational ones.

Most who looked at the advanced capitalist countries in the mid-1960s believed that the system had shaken off the problems of the inter-war years. It was no longer plagued by ever deeper slumps, endless economic uncertainty and political polarisation between revolutionary left and fascist right. US sociologist Daniel Bell proclaimed ‘an end of ideology’. Since the means were now available for the ‘organisation of production, control of inflation and maintenance of full employment’, he claimed, ‘politics today is not a reflection of any internal class division’.
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Bell wrote for
Encounter
magazine, which was financed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). But even those who hated the CIA could come to very similar conclusions. So the German-American Marxist Herbert Marcuse wrote that ‘an overriding interest in the preservation and improvement in the institutional status quo united the former antagonists (bourgeoisie and proletariat) in the most advanced areas of contemporary society’.
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It seemed that history, or at least the history of class struggle, had come to and end—except perhaps in the Third World. It was a notion reformulated, without any acknowledgement to Bell or Marcuse, three decades later by the US State Department official Francis Fukuyama.

Yet the period between the mid-1960s and early 1990s was marked by a series of social upheavals, sudden economic crises, bitter strikes, and the collapse of one of the world’s great military blocs. Far from coming to an end, history speeded up.

There were three great turning points in the second half of the 20th century—in 1968, in 1973-75 and in 1989. Together they demolished the political, ideological and economic edifice of the Cold War era.

1968: the sound of freedom flashing

The year 1968 is usually referred to as ‘the year of student revolt’. It was indeed a year which saw student protests, demonstrations and occupations across the world—in West Berlin, New York and Harvard, Warsaw and Prague, London and Paris, Mexico City and Rome. But there was much more to the year than this. It witnessed the high point of revolt by black Americans, the biggest ever blow to US military prestige (in Vietnam), resistance to Russian troops (in Czechoslovakia), the biggest general strike in world history (in France), the beginning of a wave of workers’ struggles that were to shake Italian society for seven years, and the start of what became known as the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. The student struggles were a symptom of the collision of wider social forces, although they were to feed back into and influence some of these.

The eruptions of 1968 were a shock because the societies in which they occurred had seemed so stable. McCarthyism had destroyed the left which had existed in the US in the 1930s, and the country’s trade union leaders were notoriously bureaucratic and conservative. Czechoslovakia was the most prosperous of the Eastern European countries and had been among the least affected by the upheavals of 1956. France had been firmly under the dictatorial rule of de Gaulle for ten years, the left was doing badly in elections, and the unions were weak. Governments came and went in Italy, but they were always led by Christian Democrats, who relied on the Catholic church to herd people to the polls on their behalf.

Much of the stability was due to the sustained economic growth these countries had experienced. Yet this very growth created forces that undermined the stability, and these forces split the political and ideological structures wide open in 1968.

In the US at the beginning of the long boom the majority of the black population were where they had been at the end of slavery—they were sharecroppers in the rural South, where the local state and white racists used the gun, the bullwhip and the noose to compel them to accept their inferior position. The boom speeded up the movement to the cities to seek work in industry. By 1960 three quarters of blacks were city dwellers. Sheer concentration of numbers began to create the confidence to stand up to the racists and the state. In 1955 the refusal of one woman, Rosa Parks, to sit in the segregated area at the back of a bus ignited a massive bus boycott that shook the old power structures of Montgomery, Alabama. In 1965, 1966 and 1967 there were black uprisings in the Northern cities like Los Angeles, Newark and Detroit. In 1968 virtually every ghetto in the country went up in smoke after the assassination of black leader Martin Luther King, and a large proportion of young blacks began to identify with the Black Panther Party, which called for armed self defence and preached revolution.

The ability of the existing order to stabilise itself in France and Italy in the late 1940s—and to sustain itself in fascist Spain and Portugal—had depended on the fact that a large proportion of the people of these countries were still small farmers, who could be bribed or intimidated into supporting the status quo. The ideological expression of this was the hold the highly conservative Catholic church exercised in many regions. The long boom changed this. By 1968 very large numbers of men and women from peasant backgrounds were concentrated in factories and other large workplaces across the countries of southern Europe. At first they tended to bring their rural prejudices with them, opposing unions or supporting conservative Catholic unions. But they faced the same conditions as older groups of workers who remembered the struggles of the 1930s and the great strikes at the end of the war—the relentless pressure to work harder, the bullying of foremen and managers, and the pressure on wages from rising prices. In 1968 and 1969 they were to fuse into a new and powerful force to challenge the system.

The stability of Czechoslovakia in the mid-1950s was also the result of a booming economy. Growth of around 7 percent a year had given a feeling of self assurance to the ruling bureaucracy, while allowing substantial increases in real wages. The rate of growth slumped in the early 1960s, leading to a build-up of frustrations at every level of society and to splits in the ruling bureaucracy. Leading figures in the party forced the president and party secretary Novotny to resign. Intellectuals and students seized the opportunity to express themselves freely for the first time in 20 years. The whole apparatus of censorship collapsed and the police suddenly appeared powerless to crush dissent. The students formed a free students’ union, workers began to vote out state-appointed union leaders, ministers were grilled on television about their policies, and there was public discussion about the horrors of the Stalin era. This was too much for Russia’s rulers. In August 1968 they sent massive numbers of troops into the country and dragged key government figures off to Moscow under arrest.

They expected to be able to crush the dissent overnight, but the immediate effect was to deepen and widen it. There was limited physical resistance to the Russian tanks, but enormous passive opposition. Russia was forced to allow the Czechoslovakian government to return home with a promise to bring the dissent under control. It was nine months, interspersed with demonstrations and strikes, before this promise was fulfilled. Eventually Russia succeeded in imposing a puppet government which silenced overt opposition by driving people from their jobs and in some cases imprisoning them. Stalinist state capitalism was to run Czechoslovakia for another 20 years.

Yet the ideological damage to the Stalinist system was enormous. Internationally the events revived the doubts people on the left had felt in 1956. Most of the Communist parties of Western Europe condemned the Russian occupation, if only because doing so made it easier to collaborate with social democratic and middle class political forces at home. Among young people moving to the left it became common to denounce ‘imperialism, East and West’. In Eastern Europe, including Czechoslovakia, the membership of the ruling parties became less and less bound by any real ideological commitment—joining the party was a career move, no more and no less.

Even the problems which the US faced in Vietnam were to some extent a product of the long boom. It was the Tet Offensive which pushed the war to the centre of the world stage in 1968. But Tet was not an outright defeat for US forces. The US boasted at the time that it had retaken control of the cities—even if, as a general admitted in one case, ‘We had to destroy the city in order to save it.’ Tet represented the turning point in the war because it persuaded key sections of big business that the US simply could not afford the cost of maintaining control of the country. The US was spending no more on the war than it had in Korea. But the intervening boom had seen the rise of Japanese and West German capitalism, and the US could not afford to meet the challenge of their economic competition as well as pay the cost of a land war in Vietnam. As it was, the war gutted President Johnson’s scheme for a ‘Great Society’ programme of welfare expenditure which he hoped would make his reputation and provide long term stability for US society.

Finally, in all the advanced capitalist countries the long boom had led to a massive increase in the number of students. Everywhere the state sponsored a huge expansion of higher education as it sought to increase the competitiveness of its national capitalism. In Britain, where there had been only 69,000 students at the outbreak of the Second World War, there were almost 300,000 by 1964. The growth also produced a qualitative change in the make-up of the student population. Whereas in the past it had been drawn overwhelmingly from the ruling class and its hangers-on, it came to be composed mainly of children of the middle class and, to a lesser extent, of workers. The colleges in which the mass of students studied were increasingly large, patterned on uniform designs and concentrated the students in much the same way as workers were concentrated in workplaces. Student protesters in Berkeley, California, complained of ‘knowledge factories’.

Students came together in these places for only three or four years, before moving on to very different class destinations in wider society. But the conditions in which they found themselves could create a community of feeling and interest, capable of driving them to collective action. Something else could have the same effect—the ideological tensions in wider society. These existed in a concentrated form in a milieu in which thousands of young people—as students of sociology, literature, history or economics—were expected to absorb and articulate ideological themes.

It meant that issues raised in wider society could be explosive in the colleges. So, for example, the student struggles in Berlin grew out of the police killing a protester during a visit by the despotic Shah of Iran; in the US grew out of horror at the war against Vietnam and in solidarity with black struggles; in Poland grew out of protests against the imprisonment of dissidents; in Czechoslovakia as part of the opposition to the Russian occupation.

Struggles which began over student issues rapidly generalised to tackle the whole character of society. This was shown most dramatically in France. The authorities reacted to small-scale student protests over conditions by shutting the whole of Paris University and sending in the police. Growing numbers of students, horrified by the police violence, joined in the protests until the police were temporarily driven from the whole Left Bank of the city on the ‘night of the barricades’ (10 May). The student movement came to symbolise successful opposition to the whole order over which de Gaulle reigned, with its authoritarianism and willingness to use armed police to break strikes and protests. Responding to pressure from below, the leaders of the rival union federations called for a one day general strike on 13 May—and were astonished by the response. The next day, emboldened by the success of the general strike, young workers initiated an occupation of the Sud Aviation plant in Nantes. Other workers copied their example, and within two days the entire country was undergoing a repetition of the occupations of 1936—but on a much bigger scale. For a fortnight the government was paralysed, and much of the discussion in those parts of the media which continued to appear was of the ‘revolution’ that was occurring. In desperation de Gaulle fled secretly to the generals commanding the French armed forces in Germany, only to be told his job was to bring the agitation to an end. That he was able eventually to do so was only because promises of wage increases and a general election were enough to persuade the unions and, above all, the Communist Party to push for a return to work.

Even before the May events the spread of student struggles internationally was leading to a new popularity for the language of revolution. But until May such talk still tended to be framed by the ideas of people like Herbert Marcuse, with their dismissal of workers. The characteristic slogans spoke of ‘student power’. May changed that. From then on there was a growing tendency to make a connection between what was happening and the events of 1848, 1871, 1917 and 1936—and in some cases with what had happened in 1956. Marxist ideas, marginalised in mainstream intellectual life in the West for two decades or more, suddenly became fashionable. And 30 years later ageing intellectuals right across the Western world were still enthusing over or bemoaning the impact of ‘the sixties’.

It was not only culture in the narrow intellectual sense which felt the influence of 1968. So did many elements of wider ‘mass’ and ‘youth’ culture. There was a challenging of the stereotypes with which young people had been brought up. There were radical changes to dress and hairstyles, with the wide-scale adoption of fashions previously associated only with ‘underground’ minorities. The use of recreational drugs (mainly marijuana, amphetamines and LSD) became widespread. More importantly, a growing number of Hollywood films challenged rather than propagated the American Dream, and some pop music began to take up themes other than sexual desire and romantic love.

In the US the initial ‘movements’—the civil rights and black liberation movement, the anti-war movement, and the student movement—gave birth to others. They inspired Native Americans to take up the struggle against their oppression, and gays in New York to fight back against raids on their clubs—founding the Gay Liberation Front. The experience of the movements also led thousands of women to challenge the inferior role allotted to them in US society—and, all too frequently, in the movements as well. They founded the Women’s Liberation Movement, with demands questioning the oppression women had suffered since the birth of class society, and found an echo among women who had no direct connection with the movement. The fact that the majority of women were beginning to be part of the employed workforce for life and relished the independence it gave them was finding an expression.