"The great failure of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was not that it did not bring fundamental social changes. In conditions of economic scarcity, any attempt to radically transform the existing division of labor and abolish class distinctions surely would have resulted in economic chaos and social regression. The real failure of the Cultural Revolution was that it did not produce democratic political institutions that might have permitted the working population to acquire control over the means of production and eventually, as they developed modem productive forces, bring about their own socioeconomic emancipation and the emancipation of society as a whole."
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Maurice Meisner, Mao's China and after: a history of the People's Republic (3rd ed., 1999), Chap. 19 : Social Results of the Cultural Revolution
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
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Cultural Revolution
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