Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and related campaigns explicitly mobilized class hatred, resentment, and violence. Red Guards and others were encouraged to denounce, humiliate, beat, and sometimes kill teachers, family members, “bourgeois” elements, and anyone labeled an enemy of the people.
Historians such as Frank Dikötter and survivor-authors such as Jung Chang (who lived through the period as a teenager and later wrote Wild Swans and co-authored Mao: The Unknown Story) document the scale of betrayal, sadism, destruction of culture, and mass suffering. Chang has described the violence and atrocities as going against her own nature and detailed Mao’s indifference to the deaths of tens of millions (Great Leap Forward famine estimates commonly range from ~30–45 million; overall democide under Mao is estimated in the tens of millions by various scholars).
Communist ideology’s emphasis on class struggle has long been analyzed by critics as appealing to envy, resentment, and the desire for revenge against the better-off or designated “class enemies,” rather than primarily to reason or higher cooperative instincts. This is distinct from the common counter-argument that “human nature” is socially shaped and that capitalism encourages greed.
In practice, fully implemented 20th-century communist regimes repeatedly required terror, purges, and the suppression of ordinary incentives and loyalties to maintain power, producing some of the highest death tolls of the modern era.
On the “worst of human nature” claim specifically, economic and psychological evidence supports key parts of it. Systems that sever the link between individual effort and reward (and that actively punish the more productive while redistributing to others) create strong incentives for free-riding, shirking, corruption, and cheating.
