metres) from Florida, and constituted an escalation in international tension. In
Soviet eyes, however, the placement of such missiles merely redressed an
imbalance caused by the USA having similar weapons on the Soviet periphery,
most notably in Turkey. John F. Kennedy, the president of the USA, risked
international opprobrium and even nuclear conflict by insisting on their
removal, and used the US Navy to enforce a blockade of all Soviet ships
trying to approach Cuba. Some analysts think that this was the nearest the
world has come to a global war since 1945. In the event the Soviet Union gave
in under the threat, and this retreat finally swung the Soviet military against
Khrushchev, enabling his enemies in thepolitburoto oust him from power a
year later. The political significance of the crisis was considerable; among other
things it demonstrated the way in which a US president can ignore the other
elected branches of government and commit US forces in a major conflict
situation. Despite legislation such as the 1973War Powers Act, the US
Congress had not been asked to approve military action against an enemy in
advance of that action for the entire time period between the Second World
War and theGulf Waragainst Iraq in 1991.
Cultural Revolution
Cultural revolution is part of the post-Marx development ofMarxisttheory,
most importantly with Chinese communism under the guidance ofMao
Zedong. The general idea of cultural revolution is as a corrective to the
materialistic assumption that some commentators claim to find in Marx, that
only physical or legal restraints have to be changed to liberate theproletariat.
A cultural revolution is a revolution in thought, in ideology, or, more
comprehensively, in culture. What might now be called ‘mind sets’ have to
be changed. People have to drop the attitudes, expectations, intellectual
orientations of bourgeois society, and these have to be changed separately
from the change in, say, the ownership of property.
With some thinkers in this tradition, notably the Italian Communist Party
underGramsci’sinfluence, the stress is on getting the cultural revolution first,
as the only hope towards persuading electorates to allow the legal and property
revolution. Building a true socialist or communist consciousness, however, is
seen to be a major and very long-term task by leaders in post-revolutionary
societies, because the attitudes of capitalist or feudal society have been shown
to linger on long after the political death of these structures.
It was because of this problem that Mao, in the late 1960s, authorized his
Red Guards, revolutionary youth, to investigate, punish, humiliate and force
into political re-education (see thought reform) large numbers of the
Chinese e ́lite. The victims were accused of wishing to create a new class
system, or of desiring privilege and generally setting themselves apart from the
Cultural Revolution