ONE SOCIETY UNDER ________ISM.
COMMUNISM: COMMUNISM is a sociopolitical movement that aims for a classless and stateless society structured upon common ownership of the means of production, free access to articles of consumption, and the end of wage labour and private property in the means of production and real estate. Communist theory generally states that the only way to solve the problems existing within capitalism is for the working class, referred to alternatively as ‘the proletariat’, who collectively constitute the main producer of wealth in society, and who are perpetually exploited and marginalised by the capitalist class, to overthrow the capitalist system in a wide-ranging social revolution.
CLASSLESS STATELESS
This revolution, in the theory of most individuals and groups espousing communist revolution, usually involves an insurrection involving arms
THE ROOTS OF COMMUNISM START WITH KARL MARX IDEOLOGY CALLED MARXISM
Karl Heinrich Marx 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883
MARX Marx’s theories about society, economics and politics, which are collectively known as Marxism, hold that all society progresses through class struggle.
He was heavily critical of the current form of society, capitalism, which he called the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”, believing it to be run by the wealthy middle and upper classes purely for their own benefit, and predicted that, like previous socioeconomic systems, it would inevitably produce internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system, socialism. Under socialism, he argued that society would be governed by the working class in what he called the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, the “workers state” or “workers’ democracy”.He believed that socialism would, in its turn, eventually be replaced by a stateless, classless society called pure communism
While Marx remained a relatively obscure figure in his own lifetime, his ideas and the ideology of Marxism began to exert a major influence on socialist movements shortly after his death. Revolutionary socialist governments following Marxist concepts took power in a variety of countries in the 20th century, leading to the formation of such socialist states as the Soviet Union in 1922 and the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
ISM
Vladimir Lenin
Joseph Stalin
Karl Marx
Mao Zedong
Communism are based upon Marxism, a variant of the ideology formed by the sociologist Karl Marx in the 1840s. Various historical movements and societies that have stressed egalitarianism and common ownership of goods have been described as communist, including hunter-gatherer societies and early Christianity. Marxism subsequently gained support across much of Europe, and under the control of the Bolshevik Party, a communist government seized power during the Russian revolution, leading to the creation of the Soviet Union, the world’s first Marxist state, in the early 20th century. Various historians have studied the history of communism, including Robert Service and Archie Brown, many of whom have taken a negative view of the ideology, which they viewed as having a tendency towards authoritarianism, totalitarianism and for allowing human rights abuses.
During ensuing decades, communist governments took power in many parts of the world through conquest, including most of eastern Europe, eastern Asia and parts of Africa. During the late 1980s and early 1990s most of these communist regimes collapsed and adopted capitalistic economic policies, even if remaining nominally communist, like the People’s Republic of China. Today, communist governments control countries like Cuba and Nepal.
Communism was one of the Major ideology that involved in the 20th century. And Two of the biigest Communist based country are USSR and PRC. USSR are lead by Vladimir Lenin (Leninism) and Joseph Stalin ( Stalinism) While PRC was lead by Mao Zedong (Maoism). These 3 Key people are the dictator for those countries that already changed their society system.
THE BORN OF COMMUNISM
COMMUNISM PLAN & RULE
1
Conscientious labour for the good society
2
Concern on the part of everyone for the preservation and growth of public property
3
Intolerance Towards the enemies
4
Mutual Assistance
5
Human relations and mutual respect
6
Intorelance towards injustice, parasitism and profiteering
Not Work = Not Eat
Enemies: Liberalism/Capitalism
One for All for One Man is to Man, Comrade & Brother
VLADIMIR LENIN Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (22 April 1870 – 21 January 1924
CREATOR OF THE SOVIET COMMUNIST PARTY AND FOUNDER OF THE USSR
REVOLUTION IS ON THE WAY Lenin’s real name was Vladimir Illych Ulyanov. He changed it to Lenin while on the run from the secret police to avoid arrest. Lenin’s importance to Russia’s history cannot be overstated; in November 1917, Lenin established the first communist government when he overthrew the Provisional Government. Russia had the first communist government in the world. Lenin lead the Russian Communists to power in November 1917. Strictly this should read Russian Bolsheviks as the party Lenin had joined as a young man split in two in 1903. Those who left the party were few in number and became known as the Mensheviks. The majority stayed with Lenin and they became known as the Bolsheviks which means majority in Russian.
Lenin was born in 1870. His family was reasonably well off and Lenin wanted for nothing. At school, Lenin was a very gifted pupil but bossy. In 1887, Lenin’s elder brother - Alexander - was arrested for plotting to kill the tsar (king) of Russia. He was hanged. The people where Lenin lived refused to have anything to do with the family as Alexander had brought great shame on the town. At this time nearly all Russians saw the tsar as a god. It is claimed that when Lenin heard about the execution, he said “I’ll make them pay for this. I swear I will.” Many years later, Lenin’s wife said that it was this event that turned Lenin into a revolutionary with a desire to rid Russia of the system that had been responsible for Alexander’s execution.
LENINISM
Leninism is a political theory and practice of the dictatorship of the proletariat, led by a revolutionary vanguard party. Developed by and named after Russian revolutionary and politician Vladimir Lenin, Leninism comprises political and socialist economic theories, developed from Marxism, and Lenin’s interpretations of Marxist theory within the agrarian Russian Empire of the early 20th century. Leninism reversed Marx’s order of economics over politics, allowing for a political revolution led by a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries rather than a spontaneous uprising of the working class as predicted by Karl Marx. After the October Revolution of 1917, Leninism was the ideological basis of Soviet socialism, specifically its Russian realisation in the Soviet Union.
He felt that the rich abused the poor and that they should help them; he believed that anybody making a profit was abusing everybody else; he believed that everybody was equal; he wanted a government that truly represented the people; he wanted the overthrow of the Russian government as it supported a system that kept the huge majority of Russian people in misery Lenin realised that the millions of poor Russians were incapable of organising themselves if only because they had had no education. Therefore, it was his idea to form an elite group of intellectuals to lead them on their behalf. It was these type of people who gathered around Lenin.
RUSSIAN EMPIRE DETHRONED
On March 3, 1917, a strike was organized on a factory in the capital Saint Petersburg; within a week nearly all the workers in the city were idle, and street fighting broke out. When the tsar dismissed the Duma and ordered strikers to return to work, his orders triggered the February Revolution.
The Duma refused to disband, the strikers held mass meetings in defiance of the regime, and the army openly sided with the workers. A few days later a provisional government headed by Georgy Lvov was named by the Duma. Meanwhile, the socialists in Saint Petersburg had formed a Soviet (council) of workers and soldier’s deputies, forming an uneasy alliance with the Provisional Government. With his authority destroyed, Nicholas abdicated on 15 March 1917. He and his family were subsequently murdered by Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War.
REVOLUTION! REVOLUTION! REVOLUTION! The October Revolution in Petrograd overthrew the Russian Provisional Government and gave the power to the local soviets dominated by Bolsheviks. As the revolution was not universally recognized outside of Petrograd there followed the struggles of the Russian Civil War (1917–1922) and the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922. The revolution was led by the Bolsheviks, who used their influence in the Petrograd Soviet to organize the armed forces. Bolshevik Red Guards forces under the Military Revolutionary Committee began the takeover of government buildings on 24 October 1917 (O.S.). The following day, the Winter Palace (the seat of the Provisional government located in Petrograd, then capital of Russia), was captured. This things later lead into a bloody events called The Russian Civil War
The principal fighting occurred between the Bolshevik Red Army, often in temporary alliance with other leftist pro-revolutionary groups, and the forces of the White Army, the loosely-allied anti-Bolshevik forces. Many foreign armies warred against the Red Army, notably the Allied Forces, and many volunteer foreigners fought on both sides of the Russian Civil War. The war is fight beetwen to power Red Army versus White Army
RED
WHITE
RED TERROR The purpose of this campaign was struggle with counter-revolutionaries considered to be enemies of the people. Many Russian communists openly proclaimed that Red Terror was needed for extermination of entire social groups or former “ruling classes�.
WHITE TERROR White Terror is the violence carried out by reactionary (usually monarchist or conservative) groups as part of a counter-revolution. In particular, during the 20th century, in several countries the term White Terror was applied to acts of violence against real or suspected socialists and communists.
RED ARMY WON
With the end of the war, the Communist Party no longer faced an acute military threat to its existence and power. However, the perceived threat of another intervention, combined with the failure of socialist revolutions in other countries, most notably the German Revolution, contributed to the continued militarization of Soviet society. Although Russia experienced extremely rapid economic growth in the 1930s, the combined effect of World War I and the Civil War left a lasting scar in Russian society, and had permanent effects on the development of the Soviet Union. The results of the civil war were momentous. Soviet demographer Boris Urlanis estimated total number of men killed in action in Civil War and Polish-Soviet war as 300,000 (125,000 in the Red Army, 175,500 White armies and Poles) and total number of military personnel died from disease on both sides as 450,000.
THE BORN OF SOVIET UNION After the Bolsheviks won the ensuing Russian Civil War, the Soviet Union was founded in December 1922 with the merger of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Lenin was the first leader of Soviet Union
DIE AND SUCCEED
As a result of Lenin’s illness, the position of general secretary became more important than had originally been envisioned and Stalin’s power grew. Lenin died in January 1924 and in May his Testament was read aloud at the Central Committee but Zinoviev and Kamenev argued that Lenin’s objections had proven groundless and that Stalin should remain General Secretary. The Central Committee decided not to publish the testament. On 1924 Stalin become the new dictator for Soviet Union
JOSEPH STALIN 18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953
was the first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. While formally the office of the General Secretary was elective and was not initially regarded as the top position in the Soviet state, after Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin managed to consolidate more and more power in his hands, gradually putting down all opposition groups within the party. This included Leon Trotsky, the Red Army organizer, proponent of world revolution, and principal critic of Stalin among the early Soviet leaders, who was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929. Instead, Stalin’s idea of socialism in one country became the primary line of the Soviet politics.
Stalin developed what became known as a “personality cult”. Artists painted pictures glorifying Stalin and he dominated many pictures. It was not unusual for Stalin to be in a white suit so that he stood out from the crowd. He gained the nickname “Uncle Joe” which was an attempt to develop an image of a kind, homely man who was the ‘father’ of all Russians. This was all called “Social Realism”. Those who wrote poems and novels had to do the same - write about Stalin in a manner which gloried him. Some artists and authors were so depressed by all this that they committed suicide rather than do what the state ordered them to do. Many others tried to leave the country.
NKVD: POWER AND FEAR
NKVD was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin. The NKVD contained the regular, public police force of the USSR (including traffic police, firefighting, border guards and archives) but is better known for the activities of the Gulag and the Main Directorate for State Security (GUGB), which eventually became the Committee for State Security (KGB). It conducted mass extrajudicial executions, ran the Gulag system of forced labor camps, suppressed underground resistance, conducted mass deportations of entire nationalities and Kulaks to unpopulated regions of the country, guarded state borders, conducted espionage and political assassinations abroad, was responsible for influencing foreign governments, and enforced Stalinist policy within communist movements in other countries NKVD responsible for a few action such as The Great Purge and Gulag
Stalinism is associated with a regime of terror and totalitarian rule
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938. It involved a largescale purge of the Communist Party and government officials, repression of peasants, Red Army leadership, and the persecution of unaffiliated persons, characterized by widespread police surveillance, widespread suspicion of “saboteurs”, imprisonment, and executions.
The term “repression” was officially used to denote the prosecution of people considered as anti-revolutionaries and enemies of the people. The purge was motivated by the desire on the part of the leadership to remove dissenters from the Party and what is often considered to have been a desire to consolidate the authority of Joseph Stalin. Additional campaigns of repression were carried out against social groups which were accused of acting against the Soviet state and the politics of the Communist Party.
Spot the Difference!
GULAG
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the mainSoviet forced labour camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of extrajudicial punishment, and the Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union. GULag is the acronym for Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies of the NKVD. It was officially created on April 25, 1930 and dissolved on January 13, 1960.
COLLECTIVIZATION Collectivisation in the Soviet Union was a policy pursued under Stalin between 1928 and 1940. The goal of this policy was to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms .The Soviet leadership was confident that the replacement of individual peasant farms by kolkhozy would immediately increase the food supply for urban populations, the supply of raw materials for processing industry, and agricultural exports. Collectivization was thus regarded as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution (mainly in grain deliveries) that had developed since 1927. This problem became more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program Already in the early 1940s over 90% of agricultural land was “collectivized� as rural households entered collective farms with their land, livestock, and other assets. The sweeping collectivization often involved tremendous human and social costs.
POPULATION TRANSFER Population transfer in the Soviet Union may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of “anti-Soviet” categories of population, often classified as “enemies of workers”, deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill the ethnically cleansed territories. In most cases their destinations were underpopulated remote areas (see Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union). This includes deportations to the Soviet Union of non-Soviet citizens from countries outside the USSR. It has been estimated that, in their entirety, internal forced migrations affected some 6 million people.Of these, some 1 to 1.5 million perished as a result.
LIFE IN SOVIET UNION UNDER STALIN
Stalin’s control over Russia meant that freedom was the one thing that people lost. The people of Russia had to read what the state allowed, see what the state allowed and listen to what the state allowed. The state’s control of the media was total. Those who attempted to listen, read etc. anything else were severely punished. Everybody knew of the labour camps and that was enough of a deterrent. Following his death, Stalin and his regime have both been questioned on numerous occasions, the most significant of these being the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, when Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced his legacy and drove the process of de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union. Modern views of Stalin in the Russian Federation remain mixed, with some viewing him as a tyrant[9] while others consider him a capable leader. Was Stalin a disaster for Russia?
1. the country did become a major industrial nation by 1939 and her progress was unmatched in the era of the Depression in America and western Europe where millions were unemployed. 2. those workers who did not offend the state were better off than under the reign of the tsar. 3. Russia’s military forces were benefiting from her industrial growth. 4. there was a stable government under Stalin. 5. people had access to much better medical care some 10 years before the National Health Service was introduced in GB.
1. millions had died in famine after the failed experiment of collectivisation. 2. Russia’s agriculture was at the same level in 1939 as in 1928 with a 40 million increased population. 3. Russia had become a ‘telling’ society. The secret police actively encouraged people to inform on neighbours, work mates etc. and many suffered simply as a result of jealous neighbours/workers. 4. Also many of Russia’s most talented people had been murdered during the Purges of the 1930’s. Anyone with talent was seen as a threat by the increasingly paranoid behaviour associated with Stalin and were killed or imprisoned (which usually lead to death anyway). The vast Soviet army was a body without a brain as most of her senior officers had been arrested and murdered during the Purges.
CHAIRMAN THE ARCHITECT AND FATHER MAO FOUNDING OF THE PEOPLE’S MAO ZEDONG
December 26, 1893 – September 9, 1976
REPUBLIC OF CHINA
MAO ZEDONG Mao was born in Chaochan in Hunan province. He came from a peasant family. As with all peasants living in Nineteenth Century China, his upbringing was hard and he experienced no luxuries.
He first encountered Marxism while he worked as a library assistant at Peking University. In 1921, he co-founded the Chinese Communist Party. Mao gave a geographic slant to Marxism as he felt that within an Asiatic society, communists had to concentrate on the countryside rather than the industrial towns. In reality, this was a logical belief as China had very little industry but many millions involved with agriculture. Mao believed that a revolutionary elite would only be found in the peasantry and not among those who worked in town.
With Zhou Enlai, Mao established a revolutionary base on the border of Hunan. In 1931, Mao set up a Chinese Soviet republic in Kiangsi. This lasted until 1934 when Mao and his followers were forced to leave Kiangsi and head for Shensi in the legendary Long March which lasted to 1935. Here they were relatively safe from the Kuomintang lead by Chiang Kai-shek but far removed from the real seat of power in China – Peking (Beijing).
By the spring of 1948, Mao switched from guerrilla attacks to full-scale battles. The KMT had been effectively broken by the skill of Mao’s guerrilla tactics and defeat was not long in coming. In October 1949, Mao was appointed Chairman of the People’s Republic of China. He governed a country that was many years behind the world’s post-war powers. China’s problems were huge and Mao decided to introduce radical solutions for China’s domestic weaknesses rather than rely on conservative ones.
Mao Was Follower of Marxism...... One Ideology Inspired The Born of Other Ideology
MAOISM Maoism, also known as the Mao Zedong Thought (mao zedong sixiang), is an anti-Revisionist form of Marxist communist theory, derived from the teachings of the Chinese political leader Mao Zedong (1893–1976). Developed during the 1950s and 1960s, it is widely applied as the political and military guiding ideology in the Communist Party of China (CPC) from Mao’s ascendancy to its leadership until the party was taken over by Deng Xiaoping, who implemented Deng Xiaoping Theory and Chinese economic reforms in 1978.
5 COMPONENTS OF MAOISM
1. People’s war: The armed branch of the party must not be distinct from the masses. To conduct a successful revolution the needs and demands of the masses must be the most important issues. 2. New Democracy: In backward countries, socialism cannot be introduced before the country has gone through a period in which the material conditions improve. This cannot be done by the bourgeoisie, as its progressive character is long since replaced by a regressive character. 3. Contradictions as the most important feature of society: Society is dominated by a wide range of contradictions. As these are different in nature, they must also be handled in different ways. The most important divide is the divide between contradictions among the masses and contradictions between the masses and their enemies. Also the socialist institutions are plagued with contradictions, and these contradictions must not be suppressed as they were during Stalin’s era.
4. Cultural revolution: The revolution does not wipe out bourgeois ideology; the class-struggle continues, and even intensifies, during socialism. Therefore an instant[clarification needed] struggle against these ideologies and their social roots must be conducted. 5. Three Worlds Theory: During the Cold War, two imperialist states formed the “first world”; the United States and the Soviet Union. The second world consisted of the other imperialist states in their spheres of influence. The third world consisted of the non-imperialist countries. Both the first and the second world exploit the third world, but the first world is the most aggressive part. The workers in the first and second world are “bought up” by imperialism, preventing socialist revolution. The people of the third world, on the other hand, have not even a short-sighted interest in the prevailing circumstances. Hence revolution is most likely to appear in third world countries, which again will weaken imaperialism opening up for revolutions in other countries too.
PENTAGRAM: 5 SOCIAL SYSTEM OF COMMUNISM Intellectual | Soldier | Farmer | Youth | Worker
The five-pointed red star, a pentagram without the inner pentagon, is a symbol of communism as well as broader socialism in general. It is sometimes understood to represent the five fingers of the worker’s hand, which run the five continents; or it is understood to symbolize the five entities “classes” of socialist utopia: workers, farmers, intellectuals, soldiers, and youth.
COMMUNIST SOCIAL CLASS UTOPIA
Intellectual
Soldier
Farmer
Youth
Worker
MAO VISION:
Transform People Republic of China from an agrarian economy into a modern communist society through the process of agriculturalization, industrialization, and collectivization. The Plan : The Great Leap Forward
THE 5 YEAR PLAN Mao had toured China and concluded that the Chinese people were capable of anything and the two primary tasks that he felt they should target was industry and agriculture. Mao announced a second Five Year Plan to last from 1958 to 1963. This plan was called the Great Leap Forward.
The Great Leap Forward planned to develop agriculture and industry. Mao believed that both had to grow to allow the other to grow. Industry could only prosper if the work force was well fed, while the agricultural workers needed industry to produce the modern tools needed for modernisation. To allow for this, China was reformed into a series of communes.
The geographical size of a commune varied but most contained about 5000 families. People in a commune gave up their ownership of tools, animals etc so that everything was owned by the commune. People now worked for the commune and not for themselves. The life of an individual was controlled by the commune. Schools and nurseries were provided by the communes so that all adults could work. Health care was provided and the elderly were moved into “houses of happiness� so that they could be looked after and also so that families could work and not have to worry about leaving their elderly relatives at home. The commune provided all that was needed – including entertainment. Soldiers worked alongside people. The population in a commune was sub-divided. Twelve families formed a work team. Twelve work terms formed a brigade. Each sub-division was given specific work to do. Party members oversaw the work of a commune to ensure that decisions followed the correct party line.
The Clockworked Labour:
Workers are likened to clockwork toys and they work as long as they are being wound by the chairman.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD During the Great Leap Forward, farming was organized into communes and the cultivation of private plots forbidden. Iron and steel production was identified as a key requirement for economic advancement. Millions of peasants were ordered away from agricultural work to join the iron and steel production workforce. With dramatically reduced yields, even urban areas suffered much reduced rations; however, mass starvation was largely confined to the countryside, where, as a result of drastically inflated production statistics, very little grain was left for the peasants to eat. Food shortages were bad throughout the country; however, the provinces which had adopted Mao’s reforms with the most vigor, such as Anhui, Gansu and Henan, tended to suffer disproportionately. Sichuan, one of China’s most populous provinces, known in China as “Heaven’s Granary” because of its fertility, is thought to have suffered the greatest absolute numbers of deaths from starvation due to the vigor with which provincial leader Li Jinquan undertook Mao’s reforms. During the Great Leap Forward, cases of cannibalism also occurred in the parts of China that were severely affected by drought and famine. The agricultural policies of the Great Leap Forward and the associated famine would then continue until January 1961, where, at the Ninth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee, the restoration of agricultural production through a reversal of the Great Leap policies was started. Grain exports were stopped, and imports from Canada and Australia helped to reduce the impact of the food shortages, at least in the coastal cities.
FAILURE
By 1959, it was obvious that the Great Leap Forward had been a failure and even Mao admitted this. He called on the Communist Party to take him to task over his failures but also asked his own party members to look at themselves and their performance. Some party members put the blame of the failure of the Great Leap Forward on Mao. He was popular with the people but he still had to resign from his position as Head of State (though he remained in the powerful Party Chairman position).
The day-to-day running of China was left to three moderates: Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. In late 1960, they abandoned the Great Leap Forward. Private ownership of land was reinstated and communes were cut down to a manageable size. Peasants also had the incentive to produce as much spare food as was possible as they could sell any spare that they had a market. These three moderates had restricted Mao’s power but his standing among the ordinary Chinese people was still high as he was seen as the leader of the revolution. He was to use this popularity with the people to resurrect his authority at the expense of the moderates. This was in the so-called Cultural Revolution.
THE GREAT PROLETARIAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION
The Cultural Revolution had a massive impact on China from 1965 to 1968. The Cultural Revolution is the name given to Mao’s attempt to reassert his beliefs in China. Mao had been less than a dynamic leader from the late 1950’s on, and feared others in the party might be taking on a leading role that weakened his power within the party and the country. This probably explains the Cultural Revolution – it was an attempt by Mao to re-impose his authority on the party and therefore the country.
The Revolution was launched by Mao in May 1966, following the failure of his policies in the Great Leap Forward. Mao alleged that bourgeois elements were permeating the government and society at large and that these elements aimed to restore capitalism. In his theory of “continuing revolution”, Mao insisted that these “revisionists” should be removed through revolutionary violent class struggle. China’s youth then responded to Mao’s appeal by forming Red Guard groups around the country. The movement subsequently spread into the military, urban workers, and the Communist Party leadership itself. It resulted in widespread factional struggles in all walks of life. In the top leadership, it led to a mass purge of senior officials who were accused of deviating from the socialist path, most notably Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. During the same period Mao’s personality cult grew to immense proportions.
However, the enthusiasm of the Red Guards nearly pushed China into social turmoil. Schools and colleges were closed and the economy started to suffer. Groups of Red Guards fought Red Guards as each separate unit believed that it knew best how China should proceed. In some areas the activities of the Red Guard got out of hand. They turned their anger on foreigners and foreign embassies got attacked. The British Embassy was burned down completely. The looming chaos was only checked when Zhou Enlai urged for a return to normality. He had been one of the leading members of the Chinese Communist Party to encourage all party members to submit themselves to criticism but he quickly realised that the experiment that was the Cultural Revolution had got out of hand and was spiralling out of control. In October 1968, Liu Shao-chi was expelled from the party and this is generally seen by historians as the end of the Cultural Revolution. Mao had witnessed the removal of a potential rival in the party and therefore saw no need for the Cultural Revolution to continue.
THE LITTLE RED BOOK
During the 1960s, the book was the single most visible icon in mainland China, even more visible than the image of the Chairman himself. In posters and pictures created by CPC’s propaganda artists, nearly every painted character either smiling or looking determined, was always seen with a copy of the book in his or her hand. After the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 and the rise of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, the importance of the book waned considerably, and the glorification of Mao’s quotations was considered to be left deviationism and a cult of personality.
THE DEATH OF MAO
On September 9, 1976, Mao Zedong died. Mao’s image during the Cultural Revolution portrayed him as a larger-than-life figure who represented China’s revolutionary progress. To Mao’s supporters, his death symbolized the loss of the socialist foundation of China. When his death was announced on the afternoon of September 9, in a press release entitled “A Notice from the Central Committee, the NPC, State Council, and the CMC to the whole Party, the whole Army and to the people of all nationalities throughout the country”,the nation descended into grief and mourning, with people weeping in the streets and public institutions closing for over a week. Mao’s figure is largely symbolic both in China and in the global communist movement as a whole. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s already glorified image manifested into a personality cult that influenced every aspect of Chinese life. Mao was regarded as the undisputed leader of China’s working class in their 100-year struggle against imperialism, feudalism and capitalism
“COMMUNISM IS IT’S A GOOD IDEA
_____ ISM INVOLVED
Communism: a political theory derived from Karl Marx, advocating class war and leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs. Marxism: the political and economic theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, later developed by their followers to form the basis for the theory and practice of communism. Leninism: Marxism as interpreted and applied by Lenin.
LIKE PROHIBITION, BUT IT WON’T WORK� Will Rogers 1879-1935 American cowboy, Social Commentaries.
Stalinism: the ideology and policies adopted by Stalin, based on centralization, totalitarianism, and the pursuit of communism. Maoism: the communist doctrines of Mao Zedong as formerly practiced in China, having as a central idea permanent revolution and stressing the importance of the peasantry, of smallscale industry, and of agricultural collectivization. Socialism Socialism is an economic and political theory advocating public or common ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources.
Absolutism the acceptance of or belief in absolute principles in political, philosophical, ethical, or theological matters. Totalitarianism: of or relating to a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state : a totalitarian regime.
ENO YTEICOS REDNU .MSI________