Comment on «The Correct Attitude Marxists Should Take Toward the Revolutionary Mass Movement»

#PUBLICATION NOTE

This edition of Comment on «The Correct Attitude Marxists Should Take Toward the Revolutionary Mass Movement» has been prepared and revised for digital publication by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism under the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Switzerland on the basis of the following editions:

• Quotation in Long Live the Victory of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!, First English Edition, Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1971.
• Comments on «How a Marxist Should Correctly Deal With Revolutionary Mass Movement», in Chinese Law and Government, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Winter 1968-69).

#INTRODUCTION NOTE

This is a comment written by Comrade Mao Zedong on the collection The Correct Attitude Marxists Should Take Toward the Revolutionary Mass Movement at Mount Lu, Jiujiang, Jiangxi, China on the 15th of August, 1959 in refutation of the anti-Party Peng Dehuai clique during the First Mount Lu Meeting.

The First Mount Lu Meeting refers to the Enlarged Meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, held at Mount Lu, Jiujiang, Jiangxi, China between the 2nd of July and 1st of August, 1959, and to the subsequent Eighth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, held in the same place between the 2nd and 16th of August, 1959.

#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!

#COMMENT ON THE CORRECT ATTITUDE MARXISTS SHOULD TAKE TOWARD THE REVOLUTIONARY MASS MOVEMENT

#Mao Zedong

#15th of August, 1959

#★

I have a document lying on my table, and when I pick it up to have a look, it contains several quotations from me as well as from Lenin. The title is The Correct Attitude Marxists Should Take Toward the Revolutionary Mass Movement. I don't know which academic comrade compiled it. It would seem that this comrade has found some machine-guns and mortars to shoot a stream of bullets at our Right-wing friends at the Mount Lu Meeting. Have you, who are trying to split the Communist Party and are as Right-wing as can be, heard the gunfire? Have the bullets hit your vital organs? You are unwilling to listen to me. I am «like Stalin in his later years», «despotic and dictatorial», and I refuse to give you «freedom» and «democracy». I am also «vain and fond of praise», «biased in view and faith». «Whenever someone at the top likes something, the lower levels are supposed to like it even more.» I let «the errors fall down to the bottom before changing track, and once [I] change track, [I] change it 180°». I have «deceived» you and treated you like «a big fish being baited». Moreover, I have come to «resemble Tito», in that nobody can talk to me and only your leader is qualified to speak. This is really the darkest hour, and it would seem that only you can clear up the situation. These were your automatic bullets, which almost razed half of Mount Lu to the ground. How can you possibly listen to my muddled talk? Yet it has been said that you are all first-rate Marxist-Leninists, adept in summing up experience by expatiating on shortcomings and underestimating achievements. The general line must be revised; the Great Leap Forward has caused more losses than gains; the people's communes are ruined; both the Great Leap Forward and the people's communes are nothing but manifestations of small-bourgeois fanaticism. If that is the case, then please look and see how Marx and Lenin commented on the Paris Commune, and Lenin on the Russian revolution! Which is better, the Chinese revolution or the Paris Commune? Compare the Chinese revolution and the Russian Revolution of 1905-07; which is better? Also, when we compare the conditions of socialist construction in the China of 1958-59 with those of Russia when Lenin wrote these two articles in 1919 and '21, which set of conditions is better? Do you see how Lenin criticized the renegade Plehanov and those «bourgeois ‹excellencies› and their hangers-on»,¹ «the curs and swine of the moribund bourgeoisie and of the small-bourgeois democrats who trail behind them»?² If not, will you please have a look?

Gloating over the difficulties and setbacks of the revolution, sowing panic, preaching a return to the past — these are all weapons and methods of class struggle of the bourgeois intellectuals. The proletariat will not allow itself to be deceived by them.¹

Read and learn, my Right-wing friends!

Since the splitters and our Right-wing friends all like Marxism-Leninism so much, I would propose that these collected documents be presented to the Party for discussion. I think they most probably won't oppose it.