Proletarian Power Misplaced: The Worker Propaganda Teams in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution

In 1968, at the height of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (CR hereafter), Mao Zedong mobilized industrial workers to form Workers’ Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams (WPT hereafter) and to “occupy” the superstructure. This move empowered the working class in an unprecedented way. Did Mao’s move bring about a new model of worker power under communism that was distinct from Lenin’s vanguardist model and Rosa Luxemburg’s model based on her perception of workers’ spontaneity and creativity? In contrast to the workers’ spontaneous rebel groups during the first two years of the CR, the WPTs were a quasi-institutionalized form of worker power created by the political elite to serve the CR agenda. It was also the Mao leadership’s attempt to realize the leading role of the working class by absorbing workers into the structure of political authority, an attempt which reflected the Party’s declared ideological principle. While the WPTs provided workers with opportunities to participate in politics, they were a misplacement of worker power in both social and organizational senses. The article examines the roots of this power misplacement and explores the dilemmas it brought for the Party as well as the working class itself, and why.