As a result of the failure of the Popular Fronts and the inability of Britain and France to conclude a defensive alliance against Hitler, Stalin again changed his policy in August 1939 and signed a non-aggression pact, the
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, with
Nazi Germany. Shortly afterwards World War II broke out, and within two years Hitler had occupied most of Europe, and by 1942 both democracy and social democracy in
Central and Eastern Europe fell under the threat of fascism. The only socialist parties of any significance able to operate freely were those in Britain, Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But the entry of the Soviet Union into the war in 1941 marked the turning of the tide against fascism, and as the German armies retreated another great upsurge in left-wing sentiment swelled up in their wake. The
resistance movements against German occupation were mostly led by socialists and Communists, and by the end of the war the parties of the left were greatly strengthened. The Second International, which had been based in
Amsterdam, ceased to operate during the war. It was refounded as the
Socialist International at a congress in
Frankfurt in 1951. Since Stalin had dissolved the Comintern in 1943, as part of a deal with the imperialist powers, this was now the only effective international socialist organisation. The
Frankfurt Declaration took a stand against both capitalism and the Communism of Stalin and stated that "Socialism aims to liberate the peoples from dependence on a minority which owns or controls the means of production. It aims to put economic power in the hands of the people as a whole, and to create a community in which free men work together as equals.... Socialism has become a major force in world affairs. It has passed from propaganda into practice. In some countries the foundations of a Socialist society have already been laid. Here the evils of capitalism are disappearing.... Since the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Communism has split the International Labour Movement and has set back the realisation of socialism in many countries for decades. Communism falsely claims a share in the Socialist tradition. In fact, it has distorted that tradition beyond recognition. It has built up a rigid theology which is incompatible with the critical spirit of Marxism.... Wherever it has gained power it has destroyed freedom or the chance of gaining freedom...." In 1945, the three great powers of the
Allies of World War II met at the
Yalta Conference to negotiate an amicable and stable peace. UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill joined USA President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin,
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee. With the relative decline of Britain compared to the two
superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, however, many viewed the world as "bi-polar"a world with two irreconcilable and antagonistic political and economic systems. One of the great postwar victories of democratic socialism was the election victory of the British
Labour Party led by
Clement Attlee in June 1945. Socialist (and in some places
Stalinist) parties also dominated postwar governments in France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Norway and other European countries. The
Social Democratic Party had been in power in Sweden since the
1932 general election, and Labour parties also held power in Australia and New Zealand. In Germany, on the other hand, the Social Democrats emerged from the war much weakened, and were defeated in
Germany's first democratic elections in 1949. The united front between democrats and the Stalinist parties which had been established in the wartime resistance movements continued in the immediate postwar years. The
democratic socialist parties of Eastern Europe, however, were destroyed when Stalin imposed so-called "Communist" regimes in these countries. In the Cold War's bi-polar world, socialists were forced to choose between supporting the liberal democratic camp (as with America's "
Non-Communist Left" or the
Atlanticists in the British Labour Party), support the opposing camp led by Moscow (as with the Communist movement), or seek an independent path (as with the
Non-Aligned Movement).
Anarcho-pacifism became influential in the
Anti-nuclear movement and
anti-war movements of the time as can be seen in the activism and writings of the English anarchist member of
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Alex Comfort or the similar activism of the American catholic anarcho-pacifists
Ammon Hennacy and
Dorothy Day. Anarcho-pacifism became a "basis for a critique of militarism on both sides of the
Cold War." The resurgence of anarchist ideas during this period is well documented in Robert Graham's
Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas,
Volume Two: The Emergence of the New Anarchism (1939–1977).
First socialist government in a North American country The first socialist government of Canada and one of the most influential came to power in the province of
Saskatchewan in 1944. The
Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) of
Tommy Douglas won an overwhelming victory toppling the age old Liberal regime which had dominated Saskatchewan politics since the founding of the province in 1905. Douglas and the CCF won five consecutive electoral victories. During his time in office he created the
Saskatchewan Power Corporation which extended electricity services to the many rural villages and farms who before did without, created Canada's first public automobile insurance agency, created a substantial number of
Crown Corporations (government and public owned businesses) many of which still exist today in Saskatchewan, allowed the unionisation of the public service, created the first system of
Universal Health Care in Canada (which would later be adopted nationally in 1965), and created the
Saskatchewan Bill of Rights, the first such charter in Canada. This preceded the Canadian
Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as the previous
Canadian Bill of Rights. The
New Democratic Party (NDP) (as the CCF became known in 1962) went on to dominate the
politics of Saskatchewan and form governments in
British Columbia,
Manitoba,
Ontario, and the
Yukon Territory. Nationally the NDP would become very influential during four
minority governments, and is today by far Canada's most successful left-wing political party. In 2004 Canadians voted Tommy Douglas in as
The Greatest Canadian as part of a nationwide contest organised by the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).
Social democracy in government The social democratic governments in the post war period introduced measures of social reform and wealth redistribution through state welfare and taxation policy. For instance the newly elected UK Labour government carried out
nationalisations of major utilities such as mines, gas, coal, electricity, rail, iron and steel, and the
Bank of England. France claimed to be the most state controlled capitalist country in the world, carrying through many nationalisations. In the UK the
National Health Service was established bringing free health care to all for the first time. Social housing for working-class families was provided in
council housing estates and
university education was made available for working-class people through a grant system. However, the parliamentary leadership of the social democracies in general had no intention of ending capitalism, and their national outlook and their dedication to the maintenance of the post-war 'order' prevented the social democracies from making any significant changes to the economy. They were termed 'socialist' by all in 1945, but in the UK, for instance, where Social Democracy had a large majority in the
Parliament of the United Kingdom, "The government had not the smallest intention of bringing in the 'common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange'" as written in Clause 4 of the Labour Party constitution. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party of Germany adopted the
Godesberg Program in 1959, which rejected
class struggle and Marxism. West German Chancellor
Willy Brandt has been identified as a liberal socialist. In the UK, cabinet minister
Herbert Morrison famously argued that, "Socialism is what the Labour government does", However many socialists within the social democracy, at rank and file level as well as in a minority in the leadership such as Aneurin Bevan, feared the 'return of the 1930s' unless capitalism was ended, either directly or over a definite period of time. They criticised the government for not going further to take over the commanding heights of the economy. Bevan demanded that the "main streams of economic activity are brought under public direction" with economic planning, and criticised the Labour Party's implementation of nationalisation for not empowering the workers in the nationalised industries with democratic control over their operation. In the post war period, many Trotskyists expected at first the pattern of financial instability and recession to return. Instead the capitalist world, now led by the United States, embarked on a prolonged boom which lasted until 1973. Rising living standards across Europe and North America alongside low unemployment, was achieved, in the view of the socialists, by the efforts of trade union struggle, social reform by social democracy, and the ushering in of what was termed a "
mixed economy". At the same time, the wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the west broke down from 1946 onward, and relations between the Communist parties and the democratic socialist parties broke down in parallel. Once the Stalinists helped stabilise the capitalist governments in the immediate upheavals of 1945, as per the agreements between Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, the capitalist politicians had no more use for them. The
French,
Italian and
Belgian Communists withdrew or were expelled from post-war coalition governments, and
civil war broke out in Greece. The imposition of Stalinist regimes in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia not only destroyed the socialist parties in those countries, it also produced a reaction against socialism in general. The Australian and New Zealand Labour governments were defeated in 1949, and the British Labour government in 1951. As the
Cold War deepened, conservative rule in Britain, Germany and Italy became more strongly entrenched. Only in the Scandinavian countries and to some extent in France did the socialist parties retain their positions. But in 1958
Charles de Gaulle seized power in France and the French socialists (SFIO) found themselves cast into opposition. In the 1960s and 1970s the new social forces, introduced, the social democrats argued, by their 'mixed economy' and their many reforms of capitalism, began to change the political landscape in the western world. The long postwar boom and the rapid expansion of higher education produced, as well as rising living standards for the industrial working class, a mass university-educated white collar workforce, nevertheless began to break down the old socialist-versus-conservative polarity of
European politics. This new white-collar workforce, some claimed, was less interested in traditional socialist policies such as state ownership and more interested in expanded personal freedom and liberal social policies. The proportion of women in the paid workforce increased and many supported the struggle for equal pay, which, some argued, changed both the composition and the political outlook of the working class. Some socialist parties reacted more flexibly and successfully to these changes than others, but eventually the leaderships of all social democracies in Europe moved to an explicitly pro-capitalist stance. Symbolically in the UK, the socialist clause,
Clause four, was removed from the
Labour Party Constitution, in 1995. A similar change took place in the German SPD. Particularly after the coming to power of British Premier
Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and US President
Ronald Reagan in 1981, and the
fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many social democratic party leaders were won to the ideological offensive which argued that capitalism had "won" and that, in the words of
Francis Fukuyama's essay, capitalism had reached "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western
liberal democracy as the final form of human government.". Some parties reacted to these changes by engaging in a new round of
revisionist re-assessment of socialist ideology, and adopting a
neo-liberal outlook. Some critics argue that in practice the Social Democratic parties, and the Labour Party in particular, can no longer be described as socialist. On Prime Minister
Tony Blair's departure in June 2007, left wing trade union leader
Bob Crow, general secretary of the
Rail, Maritime and Transport workers union (RMT), argued that Blair will be remembered for "seamlessly continuing the neo-liberal economic and social policies of Margaret Thatcher".
Africa , the first
president of Ghana and theorist of
African socialism, on a
Soviet Union commemorative postage stamp African socialism has been and continues to be a major ideology around the continent, playing a major role in the post-war period of
decolonisation.
Julius Nyerere was inspired by
Fabian socialist ideals. He was a firm believer in rural Africans and their traditions and
ujamaa, a system of collectivisation that according to Nyerere was present before European imperialism. He believed Africans were already socialists. Other African socialists include
Jomo Kenyatta,
Kenneth Kaunda,
Nelson Mandela and
Kwame Nkrumah.
Fela Kuti was inspired by socialism and called for a democratic African republic.
Mass discontent and radicalisation Another manifestation of this changing social landscape was the rise of mass discontent, including the radical
student movement, both in the United States – where it was driven mainly by
opposition to the Vietnam War, and in Europe. Aside from the
Civil Rights Movement, in which socialists participated, the
anti-war movement was the first left-wing upsurge in the United States since the 1930s, but neither there nor in Europe did the traditional parties of the left lead the movement. In the mid-20th century some libertarian socialist groups emerged from disagreements with
Trotskyism which presented itself as Leninist anti-stalinism. As such the French group
Socialisme ou Barbarie emerged from the
Trotskyist Fourth International, where Castoriadis and
Claude Lefort constituted a
Chaulieu–Montal Tendency in the French
Parti Communiste Internationaliste in 1946. In 1948, they experienced their "final disenchantment with Trotskyism", leading them to break away to form Socialisme ou Barbarie, whose journal began appearing in March 1949. Castoriadis later said of this period that "the main audience of the group and of the journal was formed by groups of the old, radical left: Bordigists, council communists, some anarchists and some offspring of the German "left" of the 1920s". Instead Trotskyist,
Maoist and anarchist groups arose. They became particularly influential in 1968, when riots amounting almost to an insurrection broke out in
Paris in
May 1968. Between eight and ten million workers struck, challenging the view becoming popular amongst socialists at the time that the working class were no longer a force for change. There were also major disturbances such as the
1968 Democratic National Convention protest activity in
Chicago, the
Columbia University protests of 1968 in
New York, the embryonic
Red Army Faction in
West Berlin, and in other cities. In the short-term these movements provoked a conservative backlash, seen in De Gaulle's 1968 election victory and the election of
Richard Nixon in the
1968 United States presidential election. In the 1970s, as particularly the far left Trotskyist groups continued to grow, the socialist and Communist parties again sought to channel people's anger back into safe confines, as they did in 1945. The British Labour Party had already returned to office under
Harold Wilson in 1964, and in 1969 the German Social Democrats came to power for the first time since the 1920s under
Willy Brandt. In France
François Mitterrand buried the corpse of the old socialist party, the SFIO, and founded a new
Socialist Party in 1971, although it would take him a decade to lead it to power. Labour governments were elected in both Australia and New Zealand in 1972, and the Austrian Socialists under
Bruno Kreisky formed their first post-war government in 1970. The emergence of the New Left in the 1950s and 1960s led to a revival of interest in
libertarian socialism. The New Left's critique of the
Old Left's authoritarianism was associated with a strong interest in personal liberty,
autonomy (see the thinking of
Cornelius Castoriadis) and led to a rediscovery of older socialist traditions, such as
left communism,
council communism, and the
Industrial Workers of the World. The New Left also led to a revival of anarchism. Journals like
Radical America and
Black Mask in America,
Solidarity,
Big Flame and
Democracy & Nature, succeeded by
The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, in the UK, introduced a range of left libertarian ideas to a new generation.
Social ecology,
autonomism and, more recently,
participatory economics (parecon), and
Inclusive Democracy emerged from this. A surge of popular interest in anarchism occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1968 in
Carrara, Italy the
International of Anarchist Federations was founded during an international Anarchist conference in Carrara in 1968 by the three existing European federations of
France, the
Italian and the
Iberian Anarchist Federation as well as the
Bulgarian federation in French exile. In the United Kingdom this was associated with the
punk rock movement, as exemplified by bands such as
Crass and the
Sex Pistols. The housing and employment crisis in most of Western Europe led to the formation of
communes and
squatter movements like that of Barcelona, Spain. In Denmark,
squatters occupied a disused military base and declared the
Freetown Christiania, an autonomous haven in central Copenhagen. Since the revival of anarchism in the mid 20th century, a number of new movements and schools of thought emerged. ,
Jean-Paul Sartre and
Che Guevara in Cuba, three radical icons of the 1960s The New Left in the United States also included anarchist,
counter-cultural and
hippie-related radical groups such as the
Yippies who were led by
Abbie Hoffman,
The Diggers and
Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers. By late 1966,
the Diggers opened
free stores which simply gave away their stock, provided free food, distributed free drugs, gave away money, organised free music concerts, and performed works of political art. The Diggers took their name from the original
English Diggers led by
Gerrard Winstanley and sought to create a mini-society free of money and
capitalism. On the other hand, the Yippies employed theatrical gestures, such as advancing a pig ("
Pigasus the Immortal") as a candidate for president in 1968, to mock the social status quo. They have been described as a highly theatrical,
anti-authoritarian and anarchist youth movement of "symbolic politics". Since they were well known for street theatre and politically themed pranks, many of the "old school"
political left either ignored or denounced them. According to
ABC News, "The group was known for street theatre pranks and was once referred to as the '
Groucho Marxists'."
Autonomist Marxism,
Neo-Marxism and
Situationist theory are also regarded as being
anti-authoritarian variants of Marxism that are firmly within the libertarian socialist tradition. For
libcom.org "In the 1980s and 90s, a series of other groups developed, influenced also by much of the above work. The most notable are Kolinko, Kurasje and Wildcat in Germany,
Aufheben in England, Theorie Communiste in France, TPTG in Greece and Kamunist Kranti in India. They are also connected to other groups in other countries, merging autonomia, operaismo, Hegelian Marxism, the work of the JFT,
Open Marxism, the ICO, the Situationist International, anarchism and post-68 German Marxism." Related to this were intellectuals who were influenced by Italian left communist
Amadeo Bordiga but who disagreed with his leninist positions; these included the French publication
Invariance edited by
Jacques Camatte, published since 1968, and
Gilles Dauvé who published
Troploin with Karl Nesic. After the
Stonewall Rebellion, the New York
Gay Liberation Front based their organisation in part on a reading of
Murray Bookchin's anarchist writings.". In 1968 in
Carrara, Italy the
International of Anarchist Federations was founded during an international anarchist conference held there in 1968 by the three existing European federations of
France, the
Italian and the
Iberian Anarchist Federation as well as the
Bulgarian federation in French exile. In Indonesia in the mid-1960s, a
coup attempt blamed on the
Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) was countered by an
anti-communist purge led by
Suharto, which mainly targeted the growing influence of the PKI and other leftist groups, with significant
support from the United States, which culminated in the
overthrow of Sukarno. These events resulted not only in the total destruction of the PKI but also the political left in Indonesia, and paved the way for a major shift in the balance of power in Southeast Asia towards the West, a significant turning point in the global
Cold War.
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe In 1946, speaking at
Westminster College in
Fulton, Missouri, former British
prime minister Winston Churchill warned that, "From
Stettin in the
Baltic to
Trieste in the
Adriatic, an
iron curtain has descended across the Continent." In the months that followed, Josef Stalin continued to solidify a Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe. For example, Bulgaria received its new Communist premier,
Georgi Dimitrov, in November 1946, a Communist government under
Bolesław Bierut had been established in Poland already in 1945, and by 1947, Hungary and Romania had also come under full Communist rule. The last democratic government in the
eastern bloc,
Czechoslovakia, fell to a Communist coup in 1948, and in 1949 the Soviets raised their
occupation zone in Germany to become the
German Democratic Republic under
Walter Ulbricht. To coordinate their new empire, the Soviets established a number of international organisations, first the
Cominform to coordinate the policies of the various Communist parties, then the
Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), in 1948, to control economic planning, and finally (in response to the entry of the
Federal Republic of Germany into the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization) the
Warsaw Pact in 1955, which served as a military alliance against the West. One crack within that sphere of influence emerged after 1948, when Marshal
Josip Broz Tito became the president of
Yugoslavia. Initial disagreement was over the level of independence claimed by Tito as the only East European Communist ruler commanding a strong domestic majority. Later the gap widened when Tito's government initiated a system of decentralised profit-sharing workers' councils, in effect a self-governing, somewhat
market-oriented socialism, which Stalin considered dangerously revisionist. Stalin died in 1953. In the power struggle that followed
Stalin's death,
Nikita Khrushchev emerged triumphant. In 1956, at the
20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he denounced the "
personality cult" that had surrounded Stalin in a speech entitled
On the Personality Cult and its Consequences. In the
de-Stalinization campaign that followed, all buildings and towns that had been named for him were renamed, pictures and statues were destroyed. Although in some respects Khrushchev was a reformer and allowed the emergence of a certain amount of intra-party dissent, his commitment to reform was thrown into doubt with the brutal use of military force on the civilian population of Hungary in 1956 during the
Hungarian Revolution and the
March 9 massacre in Tbilisi, 1956. By the late 1960s, the people of several Eastern bloc countries had become discontented with the human and economic costs of the Soviet system, the
Czechoslovak Socialist Republic especially so. As a result of the growing discontent, the
Communist Party of Czechoslovakia began to fear a popular uprising. They initiated reforms to attempt to save the regime, but eventually relied on help from the Stalinists in Russia. In 1968,
Alexander Dubček initiated what is known as the
Prague Spring, ending
censorship of the press and decentralizing production decisions, so that they were to be made not by central planners but by the workers and managers of the factories. People were to be allowed to travel abroad. Brezhnev reacted by announcing and enforcing what became known as the
Brezhnev doctrine, which stated: "When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism the suppression of these counter-revolutionary forces becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries." In August 1968, pursuant to this announcement,
Soviet Armed Forces troops
occupied Czechoslovakia. The following year, the Ukrainians responded to a campaign of passive disobedience on the part of the Czech populace by arranging the replacement of Dubček as
First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The new first secretary,
Gustáv Husák, would prove more compliant. He presided over a
'cleansing' of the Czech Communist Party and the introduction of a new constitution. The early 1970s saw a period of
détente. The
arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union slackened. Brezhnev worked with US President Richard Nixon to negotiate and implement the
Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty of 1972. Brezhnev also scored some diplomatic advances with the
non-aligned world, such as a 1971 friendship pact with India, and the close relations the Soviet Union enjoyed with several
Arab countries after Soviet material support in the
Yom Kippur War of 1973. After his death in 1982, Brezhnev was succeeded by
Yuri Andropov, who died in 1984, and then
Konstantin Chernenko, who died in 1985. Andropov's brief tenure as General Secretary indicated that he might have had reformist plans, and though Chernenko put them aside, Andropov had had time to groom a group of potential reformist successors, one of whom was
Mikhail Gorbachev. It was also during Andropov's tenure and this period of generational turmoil that the rule of Communists next door, in Poland, came under challenge from Solidarność, or
Solidarity, a labour union under the leadership of
Lech Wałęsa. The union was sufficiently threatening to the government that on 13 December 1981, the head of state,
Wojciech Jaruzelski declared
martial law, suspended the union, and imprisoned most of its leaders.
China Through the Second World War, the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under the leadership of
Mao Zedong and the
Nationalist government of
Chiang Kai-shek lived in an uneasy truce in order to combat the common foe, the
Japanese occupation. Upon the
Surrender of Japan, the
Chinese Civil War immediately resumed. Another truce, negotiated by American general
George C. Marshall early in 1946, collapsed after only three months. While war raged in the
Republic of China, two post-occupation governments established themselves next door, in
Korea. In 1948,
Syngman Rhee was proclaimed president of the
Republic of Korea (South Korea), at
Seoul, while the Communist
Workers Party of North Korea in the north proclaimed the establishment of the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea). In January 1949, the
Republic of China Armed Forces suffered a devastating defeat by the Communist
People's Liberation Army at
Tientsin. By spring, Chiang Kai-shek, now losing whole divisions by desertion to the Communists, began the removal of remaining forces to Formosa (
Taiwan). In August, U.S. aid to the Nationalists ended due to Chiang's regime, which was corruption. In October, Mao Zedong took office as the Chairman of the Central People's Administrative Council of the
People's Republic of China in
Beijing.
Zhou Enlai was named premier and foreign minister of the new state. The nascent People's Republic did not yet control all of the territory of the Republic of China. Mao declared it his goal in 1950 to "liberate"
Hainan,
Tibet, and
Formosa, and while he accomplished that of the first two, the third was interrupted: On 25 June 1950, the
Korean People's Army invaded
South Korea unleashing the
Korean War. The
United States Seventh Fleet was summarily dispatched to protect Formosa from a mainland Red Chinese invasion. Although Mao was apparently unenthusiastic about that war, a
Chinese volunteer force entered the Korean War in November. Claiming a victory against
colonialism in the Korean War stalemate, the Communist government in China settled down to the consolidation of domestic power. During the 1950s, they
redistributed land, established the
Anti-Rightist Movement, and attempted
mass industrialisation, with technical assistance from the Soviet Union. By the mid-1950s, after an
armistice in Korea and the surrender of
French Union forces in the
First Indochina War, China's borders were secure. Mao's internal power base was likewise secured by the imprisonment of those he called "left-wing oppositionists". As the 1950s ended, Mao became discontented with the status quo. On the one hand, he saw the Soviet Union attempting "
peaceful co-existence" with the imperialist Western powers of
NATO, and he believed China could be the centre of worldwide revolution only by breaking with Moscow. (Mao viewed then-Soviet leader
Nikita Khrushchev as a
revisionist and a traitor to socialism.) On the other hand, he was dissatisfied with the economic consequences of the revolution thus far, and believed the country had to enter into a program of planned rapid industrialisation known as the
Great Leap Forward. The economic planning of the Great Leap period focused on
steelbecause steel was considered emblematic of industry. The government arranged to have small backyard steel furnaces built in communes, in the hope that the mobilisation of the entire populace would compensate for the absence of the usual economies of scale. During this period, Mao stepped down as head of state in favour of
Liu Shaoqi, but Mao remained
Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. The rushed program of industrialisation was a disaster. It diverted
labour and resources from
agriculture to marginally productive cottage industry and so contributed to years of the
Great Chinese Famine. It also caused a loss of Mao's influence upon the Communist Party and government apparatus. Modernisers such as Liu and
Deng Xiaoping sought to relegate him to the status of figurehead. Mao was not ready to be a figurehead. In the early 1960s he gathered around himself the so-called "Shanghai Mafia" consisting of his fourth wife,
Jiang Qing (a.k.a. "Madame Mao"), as well as
Lin Biao,
Chen Boda, and
Yao Wenyuan, unleashing the
Cultural Revolution. In the
People's Republic of China (PRC) since 1967, the terms
Ultra-Left and
left communist refers to political theory and practice self-defined as further "
left" than that of the central
Maoist leaders at the height of the
Cultural Revolution. The terms are also used retroactively to describe some early 20th century
Chinese anarchist orientations. As a slur, the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has used the term "ultra-left" more broadly to denounce any orientation it considers further "left" than the
party line. According to the latter usage, in 1978 the
Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party denounced as "ultra-left" the line of
Mao Zedong from 1956 until his
death in 1976. "Ultra-Left" refers to those Cultural Revolution rebel positions that diverged from the central
Maoist line by identifying an
antagonistic contradiction between the CCP-PRC
party-state itself and the
masses of workers and "peasants" conceived as a single proletarian class divorced from any meaningful control over production or distribution. Whereas the central Maoist line maintained that the masses controlled the means of production through the Party's mediation, the Ultra-Left argued that the objective interests of bureaucrats were structurally determined by the centralist state-form in direct opposition to the objective interests of the masses, regardless of however "red" a given bureaucrat's "thought" might be. Whereas the central Maoist leaders encouraged the masses to criticise reactionary "ideas" and "habits" among the alleged 5% of bad cadres, giving them a chance to "turn over a new leaf" after they had undergone "
thought reform," the Ultra-Left argued that "cultural revolution" had to give way to "political revolution" – "in which one class overthrows another class". == Late 20th century and early 21st century (1980s–2000s) ==