The Cultural Revolution and the Fall of Lin Piao
Appendix Parts I and II
August 4 and August 25, 1972
editor's note "The Cultural Revolution and the Fall of Lin Piao" was written by Sam Marcy in August, 1972, after the appearance of the official version of the death and purge of Lin Piao. This event signaled a struggle over policy in the highest levels of the Chinese leadership, particularly over the Nixon visit and the rapprochement with U.S. imperialism.The suppression of the Left in China begins with the fall of Lin Piao and Chen Po-ta. We reprint the articles here because they offer a broad historical overview of the Cultural Revolution -- the blocking of capitalist restoration and the safeguarding of the new social relations established by the Chinese Revolution of 1949 and deepened by the Great Leap Forward and the Commune movement of 1958-59.
Sam Marcy makes extensive use of Engels' analysis of earlier great revolutions to show how, the Cultural Revolution grew from historical necessity but that once that historical task was fulfilled in China, the base of the revolutionary left was eroded and the ideas of "storming the heavens" and creating a new Paris Commune-type of state were jettisoned. Subsequent events, covered in the earlier articles in this pamphlet, have all confirmed this analysis.
Here are links to these two articles: