"There are a number of ways in which it is necessary to look at the Cultural Revolution. At one level it is necessary to see the real complications behind the official rhetoric. None the less it seems to me that the principle which was behind the rhetoric and some of the practice, and which no doubt got tangled up with much else, was a vital one: namely that even in the early stages of a post-revolutionary society it is an indispensable condition of socialist democracy that the division of labour should be challenged by regular participation of everyone in ordinary labour. The fact that the Chinese did not fully put it into practice or that certain people were exempted from it doesn't change the fundamental principle at all. That principle has never been so clearly and powerfully enunciated as in the Cultural Revolution. I do not think that anyone should manage or administer any form of labour without the knowledge that they themselves will perform it, as well as, preferably, having come from it. When I heard pathetic stories about professors being taken from their libraries and laboratories and sent to help bring in the harvest I felt totally on the side of the revolutionaries." Raymond Williams