http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2016/images/cr_pc.jpgThis year marks 50 years since Mao and his close comrades launched the Cultural Revolution in China. Next year, 2017, will be 100 years since the February and October revolutions in Russia. And, 2018 will mark the 200th birth anniversary of Karl Marx (1818-1883), whose works were a compelling source of inspiration for the Russian and Chinese revolutionaries. The three anniversaries will doubtless be occasions when, illuminated by their vision of a decent human society, the works of Marx and his close comrade and friend Friedrich Engels will be re-interrogated. Surely questions will be asked as to why subsequent socialist revolutionaries inspired by that vision -- most of all, Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades in Russia, and Mao Zedong and his close comrades in China -- despite their best efforts, could not lay the basis for a socialist society -- a society of equality, cooperation, community and solidarity. . . . The anniversaries of 1966, 1917, and 1818 call for hard questioning. For instance, why did Lenin and his close Bolshevik comrades, when the harsh conditions of civil war and imperialist intervention had abated, not bring back the Soviets to fulfil the role Lenin had assigned to the commune in his State and Revolution? Why did Mao desert the "communards" in the course of the Cultural Revolution, after, at first, applauding them? Was the view of Marx and Engels of the Paris Commune really an embryonic form of a coherent workers' state? Perhaps it is time we discard the halo around these three "prophetic" intellectuals once and for all. Marx, Lenin and Mao would never have claimed that they had said the last word on anything. Did Marx not write, in part, unadulterated twaddle about the Chinese Taipings (in Die Presse, Vienna, 7 July 1862) influenced as he seemed to be by official British propaganda? But, on a more serious note, though he was light-heartedly responding to his daughters Laura and Jenny Marx's questions, Marx once "confessed" that it was his "favourite motto" to "doubt everything." Clearly, in approaching all the serious questions that the anniversaries throw up, we should ask how Marx himself would have reacted if he were alive, for here was a brilliant intellectual, passionate about making a contribution to a worldwide struggle to liberate humanity from the miseries of capitalist exploitation, domination, and oppression. In the spirit of mutual learning, the best approach to the three commemorations would be to "let a hundred flowers bloom" and "a hundred schools of thought contend."

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