If the Right stage an anti-communist coup d’etat in China, I am sure they will know no peace either and their rule will most probably be short lived, because it will not be tolerated by the revolutionaries, who represent the interests of the people making up more than 90% of the population. (Chairman Mao, as quoted by Premier Chou En-lai in his speech to the 10th Party Congress, 1973. PR #35, 1973)
In order to victoriously wage class struggle the proletariat must have its own party based on Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung thought and the leadership of this party must be in the hands of the proletariat and follow the revolutionary proletarian line. Without this the proletariat will become divided and debilitated and will be unable to lead the masses of people towards communism and a classless society.
The nature of a party is determined not by the fact that revisionists exist within it, but by which element is dominant – the proletariat or the bourgeoisie. The proletarian party must be resolutely defended while the revisionist bourgeois elements in it must be firmly combatted. However, the nature of the party changes completely if the bourgeoisie usurp power in it and become the dominant force, and the tasks of the proletarian revolutionaries also completely change.
In the Soviet Union, when the proletariat’s party was criminally usurped by the Khrushchev revisionist clique, it became the task of the Soviet proletariat to overthrow the Party and the new bourgeois State and once again institute the dictatorship of the proletariat.
During the history of the CCP, opportunist elements have gained leading positions in the Party and have misdirected the Party’s policies and caused tremendous setbacks. Between 1927 and 1935, the “three Left lines” prevailed and caused tremendous setbacks. These inner-party struggles represented the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie but at that time the principal front of struggle was the armed struggle between the comprador bourgeoisie, the rich landlords and the imperialists on the one hand and the masses of Chinese peasants and workers, led by the Communist Party, on the other. Since liberation, the principal front of the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie has shifted to within the Party and this makes the revisionist forces within the Party particularly dangerous. Since liberation, the struggles against the bourgeois headquarters of Kao Kang and Jao Shu-shih, of Peng Teh-huai, of Liu Shao-chi, of Lin Piao and of Teng Hsiao-ping have been particularly intense struggles. All of these leaders had achieved control of a large portion of Party and State power. However, neither they nor the various opportunists before liberation were able to carry out a wholesale purge of the Party or consolidate their control, and when the struggles intensified, all of them, one after another, were defeated.
However, today the revisionists have carried out and are carrying out a Right-wing purge of the Party the magnitude of which has never been seen before. They have consolidated control of the most important bodies in China. There obviously is and there is bound to continue to be struggle within the central leading bodies, in the local leading bodies and between the central and local bodies. However, we believe that it has already been determined that the revisionists have seized and consolidated control of the Communist Party of China and its proletarian character has been changed.
The Chinese Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries may choose, to the extent possible, to stay within the CCP and wage struggle there, but it is likely that this will become harder and harder. Open debate will be difficult, too. Clandestine organizations and then a new CCP will have to be formed and the struggle will eventually have to be armed and violent. There is no alternative but to form a new Communist Party of China to lead the proletariat.
When the anti-Party revisionist renegade P’eng Teh-huai, who was Minister of Defense, treasonously tried to lead the PLA away from the line of Chairman Mao in 1959 in an attempt to usurp Party and state power, Chairman Mao declared: “In that case, I will go to the countryside to lead the peasants to overthrow the government. If those of you in the Liberation Army won’t follow me, then I will go and find a Red Army, and organize another Liberation Army. But I think the Liberation Army would follow me.” (from Chairman Mao Talks to the People, ed. Schram, Pantheon, 1974) The Party and the PLA kicked out P’eng Teh-huai and followed the correct line in 1959, but now the opposite has happened. The revisionists have consolidated control of the Party, the state, and the Army.
The revisionists, in their attempt to restore capitalism, inevitably will have to reverse the many advances of the Cultural Revolution, attack and root up the socialist new things, increase the divisions between the workers and managers, isolate themselves from the masses and rely more and more on top down authority in order to run the economy. As they develop more and more capitalist forms, the economy will become more anarchic and will stagnate and become crisis-ridden, as has already happened in the Soviet Union. They can increase wages to try to buy off a section of the Chinese workers and peasants through material incentives. But their policies are bound to create more and more contradictions between themselves and the people, and these contradictions will inevitably lead to their downfall.
The Chinese have the advantage that they have been through the greatest and most massive revolution the world has ever seen and have been through the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and over two decades of socialism. They have millions of communist cadres experienced in Marxist-Leninist theory and making revolution. We will undoubtedly see another great Chinese revolution that will forge more than ever the Chinese peoples’ iron determination to carry through the revolution to communism.
On the eve of the October purge, the Party Committee and the poor and lower middle peasants of the Tachai Production Brigade declared:
We must always remember the Party’s basic line, get a thorough understanding of Chairman Mao’s teachings that the bourgeoisie is right in the Communist Party, and set our minds for a long struggle against the capitalist-roaders. Whoever engages in restoration and retrogression will have a rebellion on his hands! . . Today’s Tachai grew out of struggle. Given the course set by Chairman Mao for combatting and opposing revisionism, we shall struggle no matter how many and how great the storms and stresses that lie before us. (PR #41, Oct. 8, 1976, p. 22)
A few days before Chairman Mao’s death, Peking Review carried an article, “Proletarians are Revolutionary Optimists.” The article serves as an inspiration to Chinese revolutionaries in their struggle to regain power in China:
If the capitalist-roaders’ plot to usurp Party leadership and seize state power is not exposed and smashed in good time, there will be a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat; and if their revisionist line is not criticized, the gains of the revolution achieved by the proletariat both in the superstructure and in the economic base will be lost. . The declining classes are like a giant tree which has lost its life and is rotten to its foundation. However, they will not retreat from the stage of history of their own accord but will carry on a death-bed struggle to protect their lives with every possible means. An old system will be buried only after many reverses for a fairly long historical period. In the past, the replacement of an old system by a new and the triumph of a rising class over a decadent and declining class invariably took place after a long and tortuous struggle. . This is the case with the revolutions in the past in which one exploiting system replaced another. The proletarian revolution which aims at completely eliminating the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and all exploiting systems will of course take much longer time and will go through many more twists and turns and reverses.
Chairman Mao has pointed out: ’Great disorder across the land leads to great order. And so once again every seven or eight years. Monsters and demons will jump out themselves. Determined by their own class nature, they are bound to jump out.’ So long as there are still classes and class struggle and bourgeois right at home and imperialism and social-imperialism abroad, it is inevitable that ’the capitalist-roaders are still on the capitalist road.’
Some good-hearted comrades among us always have the illusion that the revolutionary ranks should be absolutely pure and the revolutionary road should be absolutely straight. So when they meet with twists and turns, they become depressed and fail to see the bright future. When analysing the situation of the revolutionary struggle, more often than not they overestimate the strength of the enemy and underestimate the strength of the people and arrive at an unrealistic estimate of class forces. The reason for this is that in looking at a question their way of thinking is to a great extent subjective, superficial and one-sided; they cannot distinguish the essence from the appearance and the main aspect from the secondary aspect of things. So when they analyse class struggle and the future of social development, they are easily influenced by pessimistic ideas spread by the bourgeoisie.
In spite of the fact that our struggle against the bourgeoisie in the Party will be protracted and tortuous and that there is the danger of capitalist restoration in the entire historical period of socialism, the bourgeoisie is doomed to fail and the proletariat is bound to win. There is no doubt whatsoever about this general trend of historical development . . . ’The suppression of the old by the new is a general, eternal and inviolable law of the universe.’ (Mao Tse-tung, On Contradiction) (PR #36, 1976)