The 1960s Cultural Revolution

A gripping and engagingly written guide to the New Left, antiwar movement, and counterculture that personify the 1960s cultural revolution.

Others may think of the 1960s as the Last Good Time, but Roger Kimball has no patience with false nostalgia. In his view, the Sixties were the seedbed of excess and moral breakdown. He argues that the revolutionary assaults on "The System" that took place then still define the way we live now -- with intellectually debased schools and colleges, morally chaotic sexual relations and family life, and a degraded media and popular culture.

The second volume in a trilogy which examines the politics, economics, culture and international relations of Chines from the mid-1950s to he mid-1960s, this volume tells the story of the Great Leap Forward--Mao's utopian attempt to propel China economically and socially into the twenty-fist century by mobilizing his nation's greatest asset: its disciplined, manpower. The effort produced economic disaster and political dissension, and helped to precipitate the Sino-Soviet split. Today's leaders point to it as the beginning of two decades of national trauma, which ended only after the death of Mao and the purge of the Gang of Four. Those leaders have recently authorized the release of a mass of new documentation in the form of political reminiscences, economic statistics, and leaders' speeches. This volume is the first scholarly work to use the new material comprehensively, weaving it into the narrative along with the contemporary record and the revelations published in Red Guard newspapers during the cultural revolution. The result is the most detailed account and analysis to date of what went wrong and why.

If the World Wars defined the first half of the twentieth century, the sixties defined the second half, acting as the pivot on which modern times have turned. From popular music to individual liberties, the tastes and convictions of the Western world are indelibly stamped with the impact of this tumultuous decade. Framing the sixties as a period stretching from 1958 to 1974, Arthur Marwick argues that this long decade ushered in nothing less than a cultural revolution – one that raged most clearly in the United States, Britain, France, and Italy. Marwick recaptures the events and movements that shaped life as we know it: the rise of a youth subculture across the West; the sit-ins and marches of the civil rights movement; Britain's surprising rise to leadership in fashion and music; the emerging storm over Vietnam; the Paris student uprising of 1968; the growing force of feminism, and much more. For some, it was a golden age of liberation and political progress; for others, an era in which depravity was celebrated, and the secure moral and social framework subverted. The sixties was no short-term era of ecstasy and excess. On the contrary, the decade set the cultural and social agenda for the rest of the century, and left deep divisions still felt today.

Explains why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, and shows his Machiavellian role in masterminding it. This book documents the Hobbesian state that ensued. Power struggles raged among Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Qing - Mao's wife and leader of the Gang of Four - while Mao often played one against the other.

The concluding volume--following Mao's Great Famine and The Tragedy of Liberation--in Frank Dikötter's award-winning trilogy chronicling the Communist revolution in China. After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives from 1958–1962, an aging Mao Zedong launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The Cultural Revolution's goal was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalistic elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. Young students formed the Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semiautomatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people. The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976 draws for the first time on hundreds of previously classified party documents, from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches. After the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the market and hollow out the party's ideology. By showing how economic reform from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, The Cultural Revolution casts China's most tumultuous era in a wholly new light.

Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Phillipe Sollers, and Jean-Luc Godard. During the 1960s, a who’s who of French thinkers, writers, and artists, spurred by China’s Cultural Revolution, were seized with a fascination for Maoism. Combining a merciless exposé of left-wing political folly and cross-cultural misunderstanding with a spirited defense of the 1960s, The Wind from the East tells the colorful story of this legendary period in France. Richard Wolin shows how French students and intellectuals, inspired by their perceptions of the Cultural Revolution, and motivated by utopian hopes, incited grassroots social movements and reinvigorated French civic and cultural life. Wolin’s riveting narrative reveals that Maoism’s allure among France’s best and brightest actually had little to do with a real understanding of Chinese politics. Instead, it paradoxically served as a vehicle for an emancipatory transformation of French society. Recounting the cultural and political odyssey of French students and intellectuals in the 1960s, The Wind from the East illustrates how the Maoist phenomenon unexpectedly sparked a democratic political sea change in France.

From her perspective as both participant and observer, Barbara Epstein examines the nonviolent direct action movement which, inspired by the civil rights movement, flourished in the United States from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties. Disenchanted with the politics of both the mainstream and the organized left, and deeply committed to forging communities based on shared values, activists in this movement developed a fresh, philosophy and style of politics that shaped the thinking of a new generation of activists. Driven by a vision of an ecologically balanced, nonviolent, egalitarian society, they engaged in political action through affinity groups, made decisions by consensus, and practiced mass civil disobedience. The nonviolent direct action movement galvanized originally in opposition to nuclear power, with the Clamshell Alliance in New England and then the Abalone Alliance in California leading the way. Its influence soon spread to other activist movements—for peace, non-intervention, ecological preservation, feminism, and gay and lesbian rights. Epstein joined the San Francisco Bay Area's Livermore Action Group to protest the arms race and found herself in jail along with a thousand other activists for blocking the road in front of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. She argues that to gain a real understanding of the direct action movement it is necessary to view it from the inside. For with its aim to base society as a whole on principles of egalitarianism and nonviolence, the movement sought to turn political protest into cultural revolution.

Global 1968 is a unique study of the similarities and differences in the 1968 cultural revolutions in Europe and Latin America. The late 1960s was a time of revolutionary ferment throughout the world. Yet so much was in flux during these years that it is often difficult to make sense of the period. In this volume, distinguished historians, filmmakers, musicologists, literary scholars, and novelists address this challenge by exploring a specific issue—the extent to which the period that we associate with the year 1968 constituted a cultural revolution. They approach this topic by comparing the different manifestations of this transformational era in Europe and Latin America. The contributors show in vivid detail how new social mores, innovative forms of artistic expression, and cultural, religious, and political resistance were debated and tested on both sides of the Atlantic. In some cases, the desire to confront traditional beliefs and conventions had been percolating under the surface for years. Yet they also find that the impulse to overturn the status quo was fueled by the interplay of a host of factors that converged at the end of the 1960s and accelerated the transition from one generation to the next. These factors included new thinking about education and work, dramatic changes in the self-presentation of the Roman Catholic Church, government repression in both the Soviet Bloc and Latin America, and universal disillusionment with the United States. The contributors demonstrate that the short- and long-term effects of the cultural revolution of 1968 varied from country to country, but the period’s defining legacy was a lasting shift in values, beliefs, lifestyles, and artistic sensibilities. Contributors: A. James McAdams, Volker Schlöndorff, Massimo De Giuseppe, Eric Drott, Eric Zolov, William Collins Donahue, Valeria Manzano, Timothy W. Ryback, Vania Markarian, Belinda Davis, J. Patrice McSherry, Michael Seidman, Willem Melching, Jaime M. Pensado, Patrick Barr-Melej, Carmen-Helena Téllez, Alonso Cueto, and Ignacio Walker.