A Guide to Ideological Struggle
The Association for the Liberation Struggle of the Proletariat (LSEP)
Written by FlameFlame
2023年5月28 日
The communist revolution is the most radical rupture with the traditional relations of property; no wonder that in the course of its development it must break most radically with traditional ideas as well.
------Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto
Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement…Only a party guided by advanced theory can fulfill the role of an advanced fighter…Engels believed that the great struggle of the social-democratic movement did not have two forms (political and economic), ------as is usually believed in our country,------but three forms: alongside these two struggles there is also the theoretical struggle.
------Lenin: What Is to Be Done?
Many of our comrades still do not clearly understand the difference between the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie. There are many Party members who have joined the Party organizationally but have not fully joined it ideologically, or have not joined it at all. Such people who have not joined the Party ideologically still carry in their heads a great deal of filth from the exploiting classes; they do not understand at all what proletarian ideology is, what communism is, or what the Party is. They think: what is proletarian ideology anyway? Isn’t it just the same old stuff? They do not know that it is not easy to acquire this stuff; some people never acquire the temperament of a Communist in their whole lives, and there is nothing for it but to leave the Party. Therefore our Party, our ranks, though for the most part pure, must nevertheless be seriously rectified ideologically and organizationally if we are to lead the revolutionary movement to develop better and complete its tasks faster. And in order to rectify organization, ideological rectification must come first; we need to launch an ideological struggle of the proletariat against the non-proletarian.
------Mao Zedong: Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art
What is ideological struggle? Why must ideological struggle be carried out?
Class struggle as a whole contains three forms: economic struggle, ideological struggle, and political struggle. Ideological struggle is one basic form of class struggle, also called theoretical struggle. The great teacher Lenin once discussed the extreme importance of ideological struggle in What Is to Be Done? and quoted Engels to explain the principle that class struggle contains three forms. “Engels believed that the great struggle of the Social-Democrats did not have two forms (political and economic), ------as is usually thought in our country,------but three forms: alongside those two struggles there is also the theoretical struggle.”[①] Ideological struggle includes three parts: creating socialist theory, upholding socialist theory in practice, and developing socialist theory according to circumstances.
Cover of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? (1902)
Class practice forms a person’s worldview, and worldview determines social activity; this is a basic principle of historical materialism. The significance of ideological struggle lies in the fact that it enables the revolutionary class to transform its worldview under the guidance of scientific Marxist theory, thereby raising ideological consciousness and practical capacity. In summary, this comes down to two points: first, Marxist ideological struggle revolutionizes people’s worldview and cultivates in them communist ideology that puts public interest above all and personal interest last, thus leading people onto the road of revolution. Second, Marxist ideological struggle makes people’s worldview scientific, teaching them to correctly understand the objective laws of things, so that they can properly use those laws to solve the real problems of revolution. Therefore, every class and stratum that takes part in the revolution must insist on ideological struggle if it is not to make mistakes or take the wrong path; only then can it follow the revolutionary road of resisting revisionism and imperialism and become a Marxist revolutionary fighter.
However, because different classes have different bases for their worldviews, the significance of ideological struggle differs for each class.
Because of its class position and class practice, the working class is free from the burden of private property, is the most revolutionary and most united class, and is the most advanced in ideological consciousness and the easiest to accept Marxism. For the working class, ideological struggle is a weapon of combat; it enables the working class to move from spontaneity to consciousness and makes proletarian revolution possible. **“Philosophy finds in the proletariat its material weapons, just as the proletariat finds in philosophy its spiritual weapons.”[②] At the same time, because bankrupt propertied classes are constantly replenishing the ranks of the working class, bringing bourgeois ideas into workers’ ranks, and because these ideas are also instilled into the consciousness of the working class through the most advanced modern science and technology and the various methods commonly used by the bourgeoisie, Marxist ideological struggle is extremely necessary for the contemporary working class.
Because of its class position and practice, the petty bourgeoisie both hates the oppression caused by the capitalist system and clings to capitalist private ownership of property; it often opposes capitalism from the standpoint of personal interests. This dual nature determines that it is a vacillating class in revolution. Therefore, for the petty bourgeoisie, ideological struggle is a means of helping them move in the direction of revolution. Moreover, the cultural life of contemporary imperialism has become rotten and decadent to a shocking degree; the soil on which such detached, decadent culture grows is precisely the increasingly detached-from-social-practice way of life that prevails among the petty bourgeoisie. In such circumstances, the petty bourgeoisie needs ideological struggle all the more urgently. “The petty bourgeoisie must transform itself if it is to become a class useful to the revolution; if it is to become a revolutionary class, it must liberate itself from moral corruption.”[③]**
It should be especially noted that ideological struggle is also called theoretical struggle, but this does not mean that it is only a form of movement manifested in political activity and political events. The laws of ideological struggle can also be applied to the interpretation of individual lifestyles, just as the laws of the three parts of Marxism—philosophy, political economy, and scientific socialism—also manifest themselves through everyone’s activities. Starting from the logic of reality, it is all the more absolutely necessary to apply ideological struggle to the transformation of lifestyle. A person whose life is saturated with selfish and self-interested ideas, a person who stubbornly maintains a life of pleasure in order to protect personal interests, how could such a person possibly throw himself into the great political activity of revolution? In this unprecedentedly corrupt age, it is especially necessary to pay attention to ideological struggle in lifestyle, and especially necessary to view everyone’s lifestyle through the lens of class struggle.
The film Never Forget made in socialist China vividly showed, through the intersection and conflict between public duties and private affairs in workers’ daily lives, the fierce struggle between proletarian and bourgeois ideology in that era. At the end of the film, the protagonist’s father—the veteran worker Ding Haikuan—warns the younger generation that grew up under socialism to be vigilant against bourgeois corrupt ideas in daily life, saying: “This is a kind of class struggle. This class struggle has no gunfire, no artillery fire; it often takes place amid talking and laughing. It is a class struggle that is not easy to see clearly, a class struggle that is easy to forget—never, ever forget!”**[④] ** **
What is the object of ideological struggle?
Lenin said that in capitalist society there is “either the bourgeois ideological system, or the socialist ideological system.” “There is nothing in between here.”[⑤] Therefore, ideological struggle is the contradictory struggle between bourgeois ideology and socialist ideology; standing on the Marxist standpoint, the object of ideological struggle is naturally bourgeois ideology.
The core of bourgeois ideology is individualism; in plain words, it is the word “private”. By contrast, the core of socialist ideology is collectivism; in plain words, it is the word “public”. Our struggle against bourgeois ideology is a struggle against the selfish and self-serving behaviors and ideas existing in society, a struggle against the selfish and self-serving behaviors and ideas existing within ourselves; it is the struggle between “public” and “private”.
Internationalist and communist fighter Norman Bethune****
As Chairman Mao taught us, “A Communist should be broad-minded, honest, active, and should place revolutionary interests above everything else and subordinate personal interests to the interests of the revolution. At no time and in no place should he set aside principles and wage an unremitting struggle against all incorrect ideas and actions in order to consolidate the collective life of the Party and the ties between the Party and the masses; he should be more concerned about the Party and the masses than about the individual, and more about others than about himself. Only thus can he be called a Communist.”[⑥]
So concretely speaking, how do we judge the progress of ideological struggle? Which behaviors reflect bourgeois ideology and need to be corrected?
Chairman Mao actually gave the answer. In In Memory of Norman Bethune, Mao called on everyone to learn from Comrade Bethune’s “spirit of utter selflessness and devotion to others” and “the spirit of complete absence of any self-seeking motives.” “Starting from this point, one can become a very beneficial person to the people. A person’s ability may be great or small, but so long as he has this spirit, he is a noble person, a person of moral integrity, a person free from vulgar tastes, a person who is of benefit to the people.”[⑦]
From Chairman Mao’s guidance, we can understand that the object of ideological struggle is vulgar taste; if we are to carry out ideological struggle, we must eradicate vulgar taste.
What is vulgar taste? Some may think that “popular and accessible” is vulgar taste, while “elegant and refined” is not. This understanding is precisely a reflection of bourgeois individualist ideology.
Comrade Zhang Chunqiao, through his exposition of the common essence of vulgar taste, gave a definition of it: “Vulgar taste comes in many kinds and many forms. Their common mark is that they do not start from the fundamental point of ‘placing revolutionary interests above everything else’ and ‘being more concerned about the Party and the masses than about the individual, and more about others than about oneself,’ nor from ‘the spirit of complete selflessness and devotion to others,’ but instead start from being more concerned about oneself than about the Party and the masses, more concerned about oneself than about others, or from being exclusively self-serving and wholly unbeneficial to others, in looking at and handling all kinds of problems.”[⑧]
All self-interested behavior that starts from individualism is vulgar taste; all spiritual products that spread various bourgeois ideas from an individualist standpoint are spiritual opium. The kind of people mentioned earlier, who think that watching Douyin or Kuaishou—browsing short videos—is vulgar taste, while “appreciating” bourgeois niche films, books, comics, and animation is not vulgar taste, and who think themselves superior and solitary, not ashamed but proud of it, are suffering from too deep an addiction to bourgeois spiritual opium.
These colorful varieties of bourgeois spiritual opium are contemporary bourgeoisie’s most handy “soft knives” for corrupting the proletariat and petty bourgeoisie, and their power can be said to be boundless. Today Chinese social and cultural life has entered an unprecedented state of decay, and bourgeois spiritual opium is playing a decisive role. We must not underestimate the bourgeoisie and think it absurd that the bourgeoisie consciously uses the “soft knife” of decadent culture to kill people. In fact, using “entertainment” to numb the fighting spirit of the masses has long been a customary tactic of the exploiting classes. In the Roman Empire two thousand years ago, because the development of slave society led to increasingly severe class differentiation, most Roman citizens became urban lumpen-proletarians, who, together with slaves and serfs, rose up against the rule of the great Roman slaveholders. At that time, the Roman dictator Octavian, while suppressing slave uprisings, also held entertainment activities on a large scale in arenas, theaters, and amphitheaters, using cruel performances of slaves slaughtering one another or being driven to fight beasts to the death to amuse the urban lumpen masses, corrupt their minds, and keep them away from political struggle. Today the bourgeoisie is even more cunning than Octavian; their tricks are far more varied than the performances in the arena and amphitheater. If we relax our vigilance even a little, we will suffer erosion by bourgeois reactionary ideas! We must be vigilant and wage a resolute struggle against the spiritual opium that carries bourgeois reactionary ideology!
“Any contempt for the socialist ideological system and any departure from it means a strengthening of the bourgeois ideological system.”[⑨]
Social practice determines each class’s worldview
The epistemology of materialist dialectics is the reflection theory of materialism. Its basic view is that cognition comes from practice, and human cognition is a reflection of objective things. Moreover, materialist dialectics holds that there is no matter detached from motion, and no motion detached from matter. Therefore, as a basic form of class struggle, ideological struggle, though it appears as cognitive movement, depends on a certain material basis and on the practice of the classes struggling against one another. It can be seen that ideological struggle is by no means what certain petty-bourgeois philistines imagine—a so-called “struggle in the head” or a so-called “revolution in the depths of the soul.”
Social practice is the basis of ideological struggle. First, this is shown in the fact that each class’s ideology (worldview) is determined by its own social practice, and that its own social practice in turn is determined by its class position. As a form of class struggle, ideological struggle has different class content and political content in different social formations. In capitalist society, ideological struggle is the struggle between proletarian ideology and bourgeois ideology, and the ideas of other non-basic classes[⑩] also participate as supplements. According to the basic principles of Marxist philosophy, people’s worldviews are formed on the basis of practical activity, and practical activities of different class character produce different worldviews. “In a class society, every person lives in a certain class position, and every kind of ideology bears the stamp of class.”[11] Concretely speaking, the basic characteristics of proletarian ideology are broad vision, public-mindedness, self-sacrifice, unity, strict discipline, adherence to truth, and courage; the basic characteristics of bourgeois ideology are ambition, profit-seeking, harming others to benefit oneself, intrigue, posturing, fickleness, and outward strength with inner weakness; the basis of petty-bourgeois ideology is bourgeois individualism, but with a certain intermediary character, and its basic characteristics are short-sightedness, selfishness, stinginess, coldness, looseness, vacillation, and timidity. The antagonism between bourgeois ideology and proletarian ideology in ideological struggle stems precisely from the antagonism between the respective class practices of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
(1) In terms of overall perspective, the proletariat is broad-minded and far-sighted. This is because the proletariat’s production and life practice, especially the production and life practice of industrial workers, is highly socialized large-scale collective activity. In capitalist large-scale industrial production, the proletariat not only masters the most advanced production technology, but also, in the practice of large-scale production, life, and class struggle brought about by this industry, sees the actions of all classes and strata and sees people acting as groups of different classes. Such practice cultivates in the proletariat the habit of thinking about people’s words and deeds from the standpoint of social groups, and enables it to see the long-term interests of various movements.
The bourgeoisie is ambitious and covetous in terms of overall perspective. The bourgeoisie is a class in the capitalist mode of production that forms a unity of opposites with the proletariat. Although they do not themselves take part in productive labor, they are also part of the capitalist mode of production; they carry out exploitation frantically and direct workers’ labor to create profit for themselves. Therefore, the bourgeoisie has a thorough understanding of the capitalist modern large-scale production and the capitalist society built upon it. But the bourgeoisie’s so-called far-sightedness is centered entirely on profit-grabbing exploitation. In reality, they care only about their own narrow class interests, and they can only see immediate interests, not long-term interests. “Capital is afraid of no profit or too little profit, just as nature is afraid of vacuum. Once there is sufficient profit, capital becomes bold. With 10% profit, capital is assured of everywhere being employed; with 20% profit, it becomes lively; with 50% profit, it becomes reckless; with 100% profit, it tramples on all human laws; with 300% profit, there is not a crime it will not risk, even at the danger of the gallows.”[12] Moreover, the modern bourgeoisie, out of its own class interests, believes in idealist and metaphysical philosophy; it has no scientific worldview and cannot make correct predictions about the development of social history.
The petty bourgeoisie is short-sighted in overall perspective, or rather it has no overall perspective at all. Because the petty bourgeoisie’s production base is scattered, isolated, and small-scale, its production and living sphere is very narrow; it develops the habit of caring only about its own narrow life and property. Therefore the petty bourgeoisie is easily worried and upset over very small gains and losses, yet is utterly ignorant of the fierce class struggles that have a huge impact on the whole society, and is indifferent to various social phenomena and political struggles.
(2) In terms of the public/private outlook, the proletariat is public-minded and selfless. Because the proletariat has no burden of private property, and has long engaged in collective labor and collective life, it has formed a public-minded and selfless ideology in a collective life of equality and mutual assistance. Because the proletariat has no private property, there is no activity of preserving and managing private property, and naturally no private-property consciousness. The proletariat is the only class since humanity entered class society that does not have private-property consciousness. Only this class has no narrow selfish class interests; its class interest is the abolition of all class distinctions themselves. Therefore the proletariat is the most progressive class and the only class capable of leading proletarian revolution. All intellectuals must also proletarianize their own worldview and become a part of the proletariat in order truly to be competent for revolutionary work.
In terms of the public/private outlook, the bourgeoisie is profit-seeking. The bourgeoisie is not only a selfish class, but an extremely selfish and profit-seeking class; so long as it can gain even a little benefit for itself, it does not hesitate to damage all the interests of others. The bourgeoisie is a class that maintains its parasitic luxury consumption by extracting surplus value from the proletariat, and the only activity by which it survives is exploitation. Capital extracts surplus value in its constant cycle of movement[13], and the bourgeoisie obtains profit from the continuous exploitation of the working class in order to “feed itself.” The bourgeoisie not only carries out exploitation that squeezes the proletariat, but also engages in competition with other bourgeois and small producers; it must constantly defeat competitors in order to maintain or obtain more profit, and therefore it is an extremely egoistic class. “There are no eternal friends, only eternal interests.” “A man not for himself, heaven and earth will destroy him”—this is the true portrayal of the bourgeois public/private outlook.
In terms of the public/private outlook, the petty bourgeoisie is selfish and self-serving. The petty bourgeoisie’s ideological basis is bourgeois individualism. The petty bourgeoisie is a non-basic class, not one of the two opposing classes in the mode of production; its ideology is not independent, but is basically determined by bourgeois ideology, while still differing from it. As noted above, the petty bourgeoisie’s sphere of life and production is very narrow; it cares only about its own interests, and therefore it is a selfish class. “They are not revolutionary, but conservative. Not only that, they are even reactionary, because they try to roll back the wheel of history.”[14] But precisely because their sphere of production and life is narrow, the petty bourgeoisie does not possess the bourgeoisie’s ambition; it will not, like the bourgeoisie, go so far as to sacrifice the interests of the vast majority to benefit itself. In this respect, it is different from the bourgeoisie, which carries out exploitation and competition on a large scale. On the other hand, the petty bourgeoisie is sometimes also oppressed and exploited by the bourgeoisie and has the desire to resist the capitalist system, but it does so for itself. The petty bourgeoisie’s desire in capitalist society is either to maintain the status quo or to fantasize about becoming a new exploiting class, rather than to abolish the system of exploitation. Therefore, the petty bourgeoisie must be ideologically transformed. “If they are revolutionary, it is because they are about to pass into the ranks of the proletariat; in that case, they are no longer defending their present interests but their future interests, and they leave their old standpoint and take up the standpoint of the proletariat.”[15]
“I liberate humanity by liberating myself; I pour out my hot blood for the people”------Revolutionary youth intellectual Jin Xunhua, who heroically sacrificed his life in the raging flood while rescuing state property
(3) In terms of the outlook on sacrifice, the proletariat puts others before self and sacrifices itself for others. The proletariat is the class with the strongest spirit of self-sacrifice; its view of sacrifice is based on the ideology of public-mindedness and selflessness, and is the result of long-term mutual cooperation and mutual assistance in production and life. Since ancient times, all revolutionary undertakings have been carried out by the poor helping the poor; proletarian revolution is no exception. The proletariat is the class with the strongest spirit of self-sacrifice. As Marx said: “If one works only for oneself, one may perhaps become a famous scholar, a great philosopher, or an outstanding poet; however, one can never become a truly perfect and truly great man. History calls those who work for a common goal and thereby ennoble themselves the greatest men; experience praises those who bring happiness to the majority as the happiest people… If we choose the profession that most benefits humanity, then burdens cannot crush us, because this is a sacrifice made for all; then the joys we enjoy will not be miserable, limited, and selfish; our happiness will belong to hundreds of millions; our cause will continue silently, yet it will have eternal effect, and before our ashes noble people will shed tears.”[16] The spiritual outlook of the great teachers and leaders of the proletariat reflects the spiritual outlook of that class—utter selflessness, devotion to others, sacrificing oneself, and dedicating oneself to society; every Marxist must learn this spirit.
In terms of sacrifice, the bourgeoisie has always sacrificed others to satisfy itself. “Capital comes into the world dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”[17] The bourgeoisie is the personification of capital, the embodiment in human form of capitalist exploitation relations and exploitative concepts. In earlier exploiting-class societies, production was carried on for use-values; thus the extraction of surplus labor from the exploited classes was always limited by the physiological needs of the exploiters themselves. But capitalist production is the most developed commodity production; unlike all earlier exploiting-class societies, it seeks not use-value but value. The bourgeoisie’s greed for extracting surplus value from the working class is not limited by physiological needs; it is unlimited. From this limitless greed for extracting surplus value there arose the most reactionary and most evil worldview in human history—the bourgeois worldview. So long as the bourgeoisie can earn even a little profit for itself, it does not hesitate to sacrifice the happiness or even the lives of countless people; the more capital it has, the more surplus value it exploits, and the stronger this twisted, pathological psychology becomes.
In terms of sacrifice, the petty bourgeoisie is “not inclined to part with a feather”[18]. Although the petty bourgeoisie does not, like the bourgeoisie, form an extremely reactionary view of sacrifice through constant exploitation, it values its own interests very highly and is absolutely unwilling to sacrifice its own interests for others. Reflected in revolutionary activity, the petty bourgeoisie is extremely unstable in its position and is even often liable to surrender; this must be taken very seriously.
(4) In terms of the outlook on relations with others, the proletariat is united; the bourgeoisie is full of intrigue; the petty bourgeoisie is cold and unfeeling. The differences among the classes in this respect are also determined by their most fundamental ideological difference—the difference in the public/private outlook. Because the proletariat has no private interests and no private-property consciousness, it often adopts a unified course of action and forms a unified ideology in collective activity, and therefore in interpersonal relations the proletariat always values unity and can genuinely maintain unity.
“One may say that the science of the European proletariat was created by two scholars and fighters, whose relationship surpassed all the most moving legends of human friendship known to the ancients.” (Lenin: Friedrich Engels)
The bourgeois worldview is fundamentally egoistic; all their actions and thoughts start and end with their own personal interests. Although the bourgeoisie also speaks of cooperation with other capitalists and petty proprietors, at most this is nothing more than a temporary collusion based on exchange of interests, or an unequal exchange with added conditions. Bourgeois social relations are all constituted by intrigue, deception, and mutual scheming.
In terms of relations with others, the petty bourgeoisie is relatively close to the bourgeoisie, but because of its narrow vision and conservatism, it is not as skilled as the bourgeoisie in deception, and tends more toward maintaining an attitude of “let matters that don’t concern me lie.” However, it should be noted that the right wing within the petty bourgeoisie leans toward the bourgeoisie; they are fixated on climbing upward and making a fortune, and thus they also display bourgeois characteristics in interpersonal relations. Moreover, the ideological basis of the petty bourgeoisie is after all bourgeois individualism; its private interests differ from one person to another. Aside from the right wing, many petty bourgeois, in the interests they care about most, also display bourgeois patterns in their relations with others—deceiving each other and scheming against each other. “The relations between people all need to be managed”—this is the creed on relations with others of all bourgeois and most petty-bourgeois people, turning all human relations into vulgar, mean transactions.
Led by Lenin, Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, and Sverdlov, the Bolshevik Party led the Russian proletariat to victory in the October Socialist Revolution. “The masses are divided into classes;…classes are usually led by political parties; and political parties are usually headed by comparatively stable groups of the most authoritative, most experienced people, chosen to hold the most important posts and called leaders.” (Lenin: Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder)
(5) In terms of the outlook on authority, both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie must establish their own authority, while the petty bourgeoisie, though claiming not to recognize any authority, in practice recognizes bourgeois authority. The proletariat’s outlook on authority is to recognize an authority formed by correct centralism built on a democratic basis—that is, proletarian authority—and, under the leadership of this authority, obey strict discipline and act in a unified way. Proletarian authority is not artificially established; rather, it is established through the sharp class stand, profound theoretical cultivation, and outstanding organizational ability of proletarian leaders, who win the trust and support of the whole class rank and file. The proletariat’s class nature of seeking no private gain enables it to unite consciously under the leadership of the leader, subordinate individual interests to collective interests, and avoid splits, independence, or power struggles. “Lenin’s first several speeches at the Marxist group meetings in Petersburg left the following impression on the audience: he was a master of Marxism, possessed firm confidence in the eventual victory of the proletarian revolutionary cause, and was skilled in using Marxism to guide Russia’s revolutionary practice. A group member recalled how joyfully they welcomed Lenin: ‘This is our leader, our guide, our theorist; follow him and there can be no mistake—everyone thought so.’”[19] The correct proletarian outlook on authority—obedience to principle, obedience to the leader, obedience to correct opinion—is the ideological basis for establishing a consolidated proletarian dictatorship; this is a characteristic of thought that other classes do not possess. “The proletariat’s unconditional centralism and extremely strict discipline are one of the basic conditions for defeating the bourgeoisie.”[20]
The bourgeois outlook on authority holds that authority does not arise from the support of the people but is established by bluster. “Which is better, to be loved or feared?.. If one must choose between the two, being feared is much safer than being loved… For a ruler it is in fact not necessary to possess all the qualities mentioned above, but it is very necessary to appear to possess them.”[21] This passage comes from Machiavelli’s The Prince, which the bourgeoisie treats as a standard, and it is also a true portrayal of the bourgeois outlook on authority. In bourgeois eyes, authority is created by deception and intimidation, by making people afraid and obedient, so they always want to “put on airs in order to frighten people.” “Reactionary classes have always relied on two hands to maintain their rule and carry out external expansion. One hand is priestly deception, and the other is executioner-style repression.”[22] But paper cannot wrap fire; lies cannot cover truth; force cannot suppress the people. Bourgeois authority is nothing but a paper house; a gust of wind will bring it down.
The petty bourgeoisie advocates opposition to all authority (though in practice it recognizes and supports bourgeois authority). It is self-important and undisciplined, likes to boast and think highly of itself, and from its long-standing scattered, small-scale production and living, and from its individualist ideology, it develops a free-and-easy mentality that refuses to submit to any authority. The petty bourgeoisie does not actually want no authority; it only wants its own personal authority. Yet the petty bourgeoisie is a class that does not control the means of production (including spiritual means); it has no ideology of its own, so in fact it can only support bourgeois authority. All the fallacious arguments the petty bourgeoisie uses to boast about itself are borrowed from bourgeois ideology.[23] In terms of authority, the petty bourgeoisie’s nasty habit of refusing to yield to anyone and its constant fantasy that the revolutionary movement should serve its own interests are in fact a denial of proletarian authority and proletarian dictatorship; it can only play the role of destroying revolutionary unity and helping the bourgeoisie obstruct the revolution.
(6) In terms of the outlook on truth, the proletariat upholds truth. The proletariat is the most advanced and most revolutionary class ever known in human history; the scientific character of proletarian ideology and the class character of the proletariat are completely consistent. The proletariat’s “social position determines that it can ultimately liberate itself only by abolishing all oppression and exploitation; in struggle it can lose only a pair of chains while gaining the whole world; its fundamental interests are entirely consistent with the objective trend of social development and fundamentally consistent with the interests of the broad masses of working people; in order to transform the world thoroughly, it must first understand the world correctly: this determines that it not only does not need to conceal any factual truth, but precisely must fully expose objective truth.”[24] The proletariat is the main force of revolution and also the leading class of revolution. Whether starting from the needs of guiding revolution or from the proletariat’s own practical life, it is clear that only the proletariat is the class that consistently upholds truth.
In terms of the outlook on truth, the bourgeoisie is fickle. For the bourgeoisie, the amount and speed of profit are important, while scientific truth is not. In the past, when the bourgeoisie had not yet seized power, it put forward some correct demands and had a certain progressive character in order to abolish feudal privileges and feudal relations of production and win the support of the people. But even then, the bourgeoisie had no intention of applying its slogans of “freedom, equality, fraternity” to the masses; these slogans merely meant that the bourgeoisie also wanted to gain power freely and equally. Once the bourgeoisie came to power, its reactionary nature was gradually exposed, and its increasingly mad activity against truth for the sake of narrow class interests became day by day more frenzied. “In 1830 the crisis that finally decided everything took place. The bourgeoisie of France and England won power. From that moment, class struggle both in practice and in theory assumed ever clearer and more threatening forms. … The question was no longer whether this or that principle was correct, but whether it was useful or harmful to capital, convenient or inconvenient, in conflict with regulations or not. Impartial research gave way to the quarrels of hired scribblers; disinterested scientific inquiry gave way to the bad intentions of defenders.”[25] After capitalism entered its monopoly stage—the imperialist stage—monopoly capital gained a dominant position, the monopoly bourgeoisie became the ruling class of capitalist society, and capitalist society entered the darkest and most reactionary period. The basic philosophy of the contemporary bourgeoisie is the extremely subjective idealist philosophy—pragmatist philosophy—whose basic idea is: whatever conforms to one’s own interests and is useful to oneself is truth. James, the founder of pragmatist philosophy, said: “In pragmatism, such as the hypothesis of God, if it has a satisfying function, then that hypothesis is true.” On the basis of this view, James arrogantly declared that there was no need to prove the scientificity of the doctrine of creation by God, because Sunday gives us the convenience of rest, and thus it is truth. Deng Xiaoping, the leader of the Chinese revisionist clique, also liked to talk about the black-cat-white-cat theory. What he really meant was: no matter whether the capitalist system is an exploiting system, so long as it can make everybody (meaning a tiny handful of bourgeois people) rich, it is a reasonable system. According to this pragmatist saying, no matter what lies, deception, nonsense, or fallacies they are, so long as they are beneficial to “me,” then they are all truth. This is the reactionary outlook on truth of the contemporary bourgeoisie.
In terms of the outlook on truth, the petty bourgeoisie is vacillating. Because the petty bourgeoisie’s position in capitalist society is vacillating, at one moment it has hopes of “getting rich,” edging toward the bourgeois position, and at another moment its living conditions rapidly worsen, even to the point of bankruptcy, falling into the ranks of the proletariat. In such a situation, the petty bourgeoisie’s “revolutionary nature” arises, “this revolutionary nature is unstable and superficial; its characteristic is that it quickly turns into obedience, depression, despondency, indulgence in fantasy, and even into a ‘frantic’ infatuation with this or that bourgeois ‘fashionable’ trend of thought—this is all well known.”[26] In times of revolutionary fever, the petty bourgeoisie will shout many seemingly extreme revolutionary slogans and use all kinds of revolutionary theories and claims to label itself, but it will not persist in systematic theoretical study, much less deepen correct theory through practice. And when its living conditions improve a little, or when the revolution enters a low tide, it will begin to peddle defeatist talk on a large scale and spread all kinds of bourgeois reactionary idealist ideas. This vacillating attitude toward proletarian revolutionary theory (Marxism) and bourgeois reactionary theory reflects the petty bourgeoisie’s vacillating outlook on truth. Only by bringing the petty bourgeoisie into the track of organized revolutionary activity and transforming it with a scientific Marxist worldview and real revolutionary life can it play a role in revolution.
(7) In terms of the outlook on struggle, the proletariat is courageous and fearless. Contradiction is difference, contradiction is connection, and in human society contradictions are universally present. Human beings themselves are the sum of social relations; in human society, connections and contradictions are constantly arising between people, which is to say that struggle is constantly taking place in human society. In class society, this form of struggle appears as class struggle carried out by each class from the standpoint of its own class interests. The proletariat has no private interests at all; only by abolishing all class oppression and exploitation, thereby abolishing itself as a class, can it ultimately liberate itself. Because of the proletariat’s public-minded and broad-minded standpoint, its heroic struggle and spirit of self-sacrifice are extraordinarily outstanding. If a person struggles for his own personal interests, he may have temporary courage and motivation, but when the situation in the struggle exceeds his estimate and the outcome may cause greater losses to his personal interests, he will choose compromise and surrender. If a person struggles only for himself, he may obtain temporary courage and victory, yet he can never obtain complete victory or become a truly great figure. But struggle carried out for others’ sacrifice, for the interests of the collective and the revolution, can transcend the narrow limits of personal self-interest, enabling a person to gain infinite courage and a firm will to struggle, all the way to final victory. In the struggle against oppression and exploitation, the proletariat is the most active, the most courageous, and the most historically initiative-bearing. It has created countless experiences of revolutionary struggle, and in the course of struggle, facing any difficulty, it never retreats, never compromises, upholds truth, upholds revolution, and at any time unconditionally sacrifices personal interests. The heroic sons and daughters of the Paris Commune who rose up under the bayonets of hundreds of thousands of reactionary troops, the Soviet soldiers and civilians who were attacked from both inside and outside during the fourteen-nation intervention war, the revolutionary base-area people during the War of Resistance Against Japan who alone resisted all puppet troops and ninety percent of the Japanese army—deeds of heroic struggle by hundreds of millions of working people shine brilliantly as proof of the proletariat’s revolutionary spirit of daring to struggle and being good at struggle.
**“Those Parisians—what flexibility, what historical initiative, what spirit of self-sacrifice! After enduring six months of starvation and destruction caused more by internal betrayal than by external enemies, they rose under the bayonets of the Prussians, as if no war had taken place between France and Germany, as if the enemy were not at the gates of Paris! There has never before in history been such an example of heroic struggle!” (Marx: Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann)
In terms of struggle, the bourgeoisie is all show and no substance. The bourgeoisie is the ruling class in capitalist society. It has long engaged in exploitation, oppressing and exploiting the people; monetary capital is its rod of power, the state machine is its sword for killing, cultural media is its opium smoke, and the tools of economic, military, and cultural domination in the entire capitalist society are in its hands. In ordinary times, relying on its control of political power, financial power, and military power, it becomes used to acting arrogantly and overbearingly, trampling over the proletariat and the broad masses of working people and wielding power at will, thinking itself invincible, and therefore always appearing fierce and menacing in struggle. But in reality, bourgeois rule is built on money and power and is only barely maintained by lies, deception, and violent repression; in the end it is never supported by the people and has little help from the righteous. Once the strength of the broad masses of the people is mobilized and forms a mighty, irresistible revolutionary tide, all the backstops on which they rely will fail. At that point the bourgeoisie will panic, become weak and powerless, vacillate, and surrender.
The performance of Tonghua Iron & Steel Co., Ltd. general manager Chen Guojun during the struggle of the Tonggang workers is a typical example of the bourgeoisie’s outward strength but inward weakness in class struggle. At the very beginning of the Tonggang workers’ movement, Chen Guojun, full of arrogance, shouted at the workers’ march that had poured into the factory: “Who told you to come in? Get out, all of you! If you don’t get out, tomorrow I’ll make sure you’re all laid off.” Once these words were spoken, they enraged the workers, and Chen Guojun was beaten and chased by the Tonggang workers. But at this time Chen Guojun still thought he had everything under control; he hid in the office and kept calling for help on the phone. After the workers found him, while he trembled uncontrollably, he brazenly threatened the workers as if he did not know death: “In three years I’ll make this factory surname Chen, and send you all home!” The workers quickly made Chen Guojun—who was already at death’s door yet still stubborn—pay the price. A group of workers dragged him like a dead dog to the first-floor corridor and beat him. At first, Chen Guojun was still shouting arrogantly, asking the factory managers present to identify the workers who had participated in the beating. But the furious workers did not buy his act at all and took turns surrounding and beating him. Seeing that the scene was nothing like he had expected and could not be controlled, Chen Guojun showed a frightened expression, but it was already too late. He was beaten several times by the workers starting in the morning, and by 4:30 in the afternoon he was kicked from the second-floor stairs down to the first-floor entrance. Around five o’clock, when the workers saw that he was on the verge of death, they kept passing by him spitting and kicking him. By then Chen Guojun had been beaten beyond recognition, blood and flesh all muddled together; he no longer had the slightest arrogant air and kept begging the workers around him: “I beg you, please save me, I still want to live!” But the workers had no sympathy for this evil dog who had relied on power to bully others in ordinary times, and coldly replied: “If you want to live, then we have to die!”
The facts prove that “all reactionaries are paper tigers. In appearance the reactionaries are frightening, but in reality they are not very powerful. From a long-term point of view, the truly powerful force does not belong to the reactionaries, but to the people.”[27] Once the people awaken and organize themselves, the bourgeoisie can only tremble in the revolutionary storm and collapse completely.
In terms of struggle, the petty bourgeoisie is timid and hesitant. In capitalist society, the petty bourgeoisie is an intermediate class; on the one hand it has left behind the poor life of the proletariat, and on the other hand it still suffers bourgeois oppression. Therefore, on the whole, the petty bourgeoisie is a potential ally of the proletariat and, after education and transformation, can stand on the side of the proletariat in struggle against the bourgeoisie, and can even be proletarianized. But the petty bourgeoisie is after all a propertied class; its upper and middle strata lean toward the bourgeoisie, and its willingness to struggle against the bourgeoisie is not strong. Most of the time its attacks on the bourgeoisie remain at the stage of grumbling and venting grievances. The petty bourgeois worldview is based on bourgeois individualism; most petty bourgeois still cling to dreams of getting rich and rising to high positions, and they can very easily develop in the direction of harming others for their own benefit. Therefore, the petty bourgeoisie’s struggle is aimed not only at the bourgeoisie, but often also at other petty bourgeois and the broad working masses. The frenzy formed by the petty bourgeoisie in its long life of looseness and the selfish mentality formed in its narrow life make it, in spontaneous conditions, more inclined to struggle against the proletariat and other petty bourgeois than against the bourgeoisie. To take a common social phenomenon as an example, most parents of petty-bourgeois origin, or parents influenced by petty-bourgeois opportunist and speculative ideas, treat their children as speculative instruments and desperately want to use “this stock” to defeat other petty-bourgeois competitors, increase the property of their individual family, and raise their economic status. Likewise, most students who have long lived a parasitic life of having clothes handed to them and food served to them, influenced by the bourgeois individualist idea of “raise by one point, knock down ten thousand,” also think only of their own smooth official career in school life, and treat other students and even all social strata with a competitive and hierarchical mentality. The most extreme example is the typical petty-bourgeois far-rightist—the “left-camp person”—Xu Jiajin. He spouted Marxist phrases, shouting slogans about opposing oppression and class struggle, but his deep-rooted selfishness and hierarchical thinking made him not dare to strike at the capitalists, schools, or government that truly oppressed him; instead he murdered eight innocent female classmates. After the failure of the 1848 revolution, Engels summarized the experience of the movement to defend the imperial constitution and evaluated the petty bourgeoisie in this way: **“This class usually boasts and likes to speak beautifully, and sometimes even verbally adheres to the most extreme positions; but once it faces even a small danger, it becomes as timid as a mouse and excessively cautious; once the masses rise up, it is utterly frightened and full of anxieties; once matters develop to the point of armed struggle, it is prepared to betray the entire movement.”[28]
Criticism and self-criticism are the basic forms of ideological struggle
“Whether one has serious self-criticism is also one of the striking signs that distinguish us from other parties. We have said that a house should be swept regularly, otherwise it will collect dust; a face should be washed regularly, otherwise it will be covered with dust. The thoughts of our comrades, and the work of our Party, may also get dusty, and should likewise be swept and washed. ‘Flowing water does not rot, door hinges do not get worm-eaten’ means that they resist the invasion of microorganisms or other organisms through constant motion. For us, regularly reviewing our work, developing a democratic style in the course of review, not fearing criticism and self-criticism, and implementing such beneficial Chinese maxims as ‘Say all you know and say it without reserve,’ ‘The speaker is innocent, the listener should take warning,’ and ‘Correct mistakes if you have them; guard against them if you do not,’ is precisely the only effective method of resisting all kinds of political dust and political microorganisms from corroding our comrades’ thoughts and our Party’s body.”[29]
Maintain a humble attitude and carry forward the spirit of self-criticism****
Communists are not afraid of their own weaknesses, “because we are not afraid to speak of our weaknesses, and can learn to overcome them.”[30] According to the laws of dialectics, the two sides of a contradiction transform into each other under certain conditions. As long as we grasp the various causes of our own weaknesses and eliminate them, we can turn negative factors into positive factors and turn our weaknesses into strengths. Criticism and self-criticism are precisely the best method of exposing and eliminating our weaknesses and the causes of those weaknesses; through criticism and self-criticism we can make continuous progress. In the past, all classes and parties were afraid of their own weaknesses and treated them as factors leading to their own demise; the proletariat and the Communist Party, however, are not afraid to acknowledge their weaknesses and treat them as stepping stones to progress. Therefore Stalin said: “In fact, self-criticism is an indispensable and constantly used weapon in the arsenal of Bolshevism; it is inextricably linked with the nature of Bolshevism and its revolutionary spirit.”[31]
We must always remember Chairman Mao’s teaching that the purpose of criticism and self-criticism is **“to learn from past mistakes so as to avoid future ones” and “to cure the disease in order to save the patient”[32].
What is meant by “learning from past mistakes so as to avoid future ones” is that we must mercilessly expose the problems that exist in ourselves and in other comrades, examine them from a class standpoint, analyze them with a scientific attitude, and enable ourselves to work better for the cause of proletarian revolution in the future. On this point, we must absolutely not make the mistake of liberalism. If one vaguely senses one’s own problems but is unwilling to face or reflect on them, and for selfish and self-serving motives tries every possible way to preserve one’s shortcomings, that is applying liberalism to oneself and putting personal interests ahead of revolutionary interests; it is harmful to oneself and even more harmful to the revolution. A person who takes a liberal attitude toward his own mistakes has no standing to criticize the mistakes of others, and obstructs ideological struggle; even if he criticizes others, he will not hit the vital point, and the result is that he harms both others and himself. If one adopts a “you don’t offend me, I don’t offend you” attitude toward the problems of others, and practices bourgeois social etiquette, that is applying liberalism to others, and allowing comrades to be led astray by mistakes is in fact deeply harmful. Those who take a liberal attitude toward others’ mistakes think that making everyone’s relations harmonious and happy-go-lucky is a good thing, but in fact this suffocates the atmosphere of class struggle and damages revolutionary interests.
Therefore, we must first be strict with ourselves, regularly examine the problems that exist within us, and think deeply about them, turning vague feelings into scientific analysis, and resolutely correct them. At the same time, we must not pursue meaningless “harmony at all costs,” but rather put the political life of comrades and the future of the revolutionary cause first, and seriously criticize comrades who have gone astray so that they can return to the right track.
What is meant by “curing the disease in order to save the patient” is that when dealing with comrades’ problems we should adopt a gentle and patient attitude, and conduct correct criticism with the aim of “saving the person,” so that our comrades can correct their mistakes and the revolutionary cause gains another source of support. On this point, we must not make the mistakes of subjectivism or sectarianism. To criticize problems existing in a comrade without careful investigation and study, and to make judgments without considering his long-term performance, is a subjectivist error; being insufficiently careful in one’s attitude toward criticizing comrades, and only trying to save one’s own effort, is not conducive either to correcting problems or to preserving comradely relations. When criticizing a comrade, if one does not start from revolutionary interests and does not seek to help him correct his problems, but instead practices “cruel struggle” and “merciless blows,” one is in fact making a sectarian mistake; thinking that it does not matter to treat comrades with whom one has poor relations wrongly, thereby undermines other people’s confidence and desire to correct their problems and causes losses to the revolutionary cause.
Therefore, when we criticize other comrades we must conduct careful investigation and also take into account their long-term performance; we must not jump to conclusions. And when striving to help comrades reform themselves, we should not carry out “merciless blows”; we should persuade patiently from the standpoint of revolutionary interests.
The unity of opposites of criticism and self-criticism
The law of the unity of opposites is the essence and core of materialist dialectics and the fundamental law of world development. The development of the objective world and the subjective world follows the same law. Only by using the law of the unity of opposites of dialectics as a weapon of thought can we correctly carry out ideological struggle. Criticism and self-criticism, as the basic forms of ideological struggle, are also a pair of contradictions and a concrete manifestation of the law of the unity of opposites. Opposition is struggle and exclusion; unity is co-existence and transformation.
Criticism and self-criticism are opposites. Criticism exposes and analyzes the errors and shortcomings of others; self-criticism exposes and analyzes one’s own errors and shortcomings. Ideological struggle is also a form of class struggle, divided into three different standpoints—enemy, self, and friend—and in different circumstances different methods must be used to resolve it. “Be harsh toward the enemy and harmonious toward those within the ranks; this is our principle.”[33]
The enemies of Marxists are all bourgeois and some right-wing petty bourgeois elements who support private ownership and private-property consciousness; because they stubbornly defend private interests from a class standpoint and are rooted in selfish ideology, they are bound to be irreconcilably opposed to Marxism, with no room for compromise. In struggle against the enemy, we mainly use criticism to resolve contradictions. Because the contradiction between enemy and ourselves is antagonistic, it must be resolved through the outbreak of external conflict. Marxists make their living on truth; when Marxists debate the enemy, it is not for personal interests or the interests of small groups. Using criticism as the main method against the enemy does not mean being unreasonable; against the enemy’s reactionary views, one must start from the Marxist method of class analysis and present clear materials, logic, and methods in order to thoroughly refute the other side. If we do not occupy the field of public opinion, the enemy will occupy it. Whether it is a major matter or a minor one, Marxists must express their own views; especially when it comes to reactionary speech, we must carry out merciless criticism. At all times and on all matters, we must be serious and conscientious and apply class criteria rigorously.
Criticism is not only aimed at the enemy; the errors and shortcomings of comrades, friends, revolutionary fellow travelers, and the general masses also need to be criticized. From a dialectical point of view, criticism of comrades is in fact self-criticism within the revolutionary organization and, compared with criticism of the enemy, is rather the more important and more common kind of criticism. Inner-Party struggle gives the Party vitality; if there is no mutual criticism and self-criticism within the Party, then the Party’s life stops. Criticism of comrades is the best care and help. Comrade relations are established in sincere criticism and self-criticism, not in indifference to each other’s political principles and ideological questions. The unity of the revolutionary ranks is built on the basis of Marxist principles; without clarifying questions of right and wrong and principle, revolutionary unity cannot be achieved at all. If there is no mutual criticism among comrades based on a Marxist standpoint, then they are no longer comrades to each other but petty-bourgeois vulgar relations. In comradely relations, if one simply pursues so-called “human warmth” and “harmony at all costs,” while ignoring Marxist revolutionary principles, then the basis of comradely relations is lost and truly noble feelings are submerged in the thick smoke of bourgeois social etiquette. These are all serious liberal mistakes, which will only allow backward ideas in the ranks to grow day by day, harming comrades’ ideological health and causing one’s own political standpoint to be lost day by day; the result is that both others and oneself are harmed. Comrade Ke Qingshi once gave a sharp exposition of criticism among comrades, saying: “We must surely understand this: if we are helping a comrade, we must help him thoroughly; do not shield his mistakes for him. When he is not yet conscious, if you shield him, he will thank you; but once he suffers a big loss because of this, or once his consciousness has improved, he will blame you for why you did not help him then. If you now help him uncover the problem, when he is not yet conscious he will blame you, thinking you are making things difficult for him; but once his consciousness is raised by this, he will thank you. We absolutely must not vulgarize comradely relations.”[34] But criticism of comrades is different from criticism of the enemy. The comrade’s ideology is mainly Marxist and seeks progress. Criticism of comrades should both uphold principles and leave room for maneuver; it should mainly clarify the reasoning and aim to promote unity.
Self-criticism is the method by which Marxists expose their own problems in order to overcome their own mistakes, and also the method by which Marxist revolutionary parties overcome their own mistakes. Marxists have always taken truth and principle as the sole standard for judging right and wrong, and do not deny truth or distort facts for the sake of personal interests or the interests of small groups. Marxists must be strict with themselves. Criticism of the enemy must be merciless, criticism of comrades must also uphold principle, and the requirements for oneself should be even higher. Chairman Mao said: “Because we are serving the people, if we have shortcomings, we are not afraid that others will criticize and point them out. Anyone can point them out to us. So long as what you say is right, we will correct it. If the way you say it is good for the people, then we will do it according to your way.”[35]
Criticism and self-criticism are both opposites and unities. Within criticism there is self-criticism, and within self-criticism there is criticism. Under certain conditions, the principal and secondary positions of criticism and self-criticism can also transform into each other.
Chairman Mao’s quotations
When we carry out ideological struggle within an organization and help comrades transform their thinking, we must pay attention to flexibly using the forms of criticism and self-criticism, and adopt different methods according to different situations. According to Chairman Mao’s principle of “learning from past mistakes so as to avoid future ones; curing the disease in order to save the patient,” we should attach importance to and seriously criticize comrades’ ideological and political mistakes, so that those criticized can awaken and be “frightened into a cold sweat,” which is the only way to help comrades deeply understand the problem. On the other hand, we must insist on a gentle and patient attitude in persuasion, and must not resort to crude commandism; still less should we subjectively exaggerate the facts. When dealing with comrades’ problems, we must analyze them from the attitude of seeking truth from facts, help comrades clarify the causes, process, results, and impact of erroneous ideology, and point out a way out. In this process of criticism, in order to help comrades with our own experience and to show an equal attitude that makes comrades easier to accept, self-criticism is needed. The ideological transformation of any person requires a process. When criticizing comrades, think about your own past mistakes, reflect on similar problems that still exist in yourself, sympathize with the erroneous thoughts and feelings of comrades whose consciousness is not yet high, and carry out self-criticism. Chairman Mao warned us to guard against individualism and sectarianism, not to think that because we understand a little Marxism or think we are highly conscious, we can become self-important and boss around comrades within the Party, or even the masses outside the Party. Such people think they are very revolutionary, but in fact they know only a little and are annoying; they can only isolate themselves and cut themselves off from the people. In carrying out self-criticism while criticizing comrades, the ultimate purpose is still to serve collective interests. Reflecting on one’s own shortcomings and their impact on the revolutionary cause and collective interests is, first, conducive to correcting one’s own mistakes, and second, it also makes the criticized person convinced and receptive; it both reduces the impact of erroneous thinking on the collective and promotes unity within the revolutionary ranks.
When engaging in self-criticism, it is also necessary to combine it with criticism of others, the aim being to promote the overall ideological struggle and safeguard collective interests. Whether criticism or self-criticism, the ultimate purpose is to serve the revolutionary cause and collective interests; therefore self-criticism should not be confined to reflecting on one’s own problems. The connection between the particular and the general is universal; the ideological problems of any individual embody class character and embody certain general laws of class struggle. In self-criticism, one should draw inferences from one case to another, think about the class basis, practical basis, and social roots of one’s own problems, summarize general laws, and put forward opinions for others and the collective, helping other comrades to progress. Criticizing comrades is not for “taking care of people,” and self-criticism is not standing at attention to take a beating, so in order to carry out ideological struggle better, pointing out others’ problems while doing self-criticism is a brave and responsible act that helps strengthen unity in the ranks.
Criticism and self-criticism are not only united; under certain conditions they transform into each other. When we carry out criticism of comrades’ ideological problems, we mainly adopt different attitudes and methods according to the criticized person’s attitude. When raising a comrade’s problems, we should “move them with emotion and guide them with reason,” using reasoning as the main method, deeply analyzing the roots and harms of their errors, while also persuading them from the standpoint of revolutionary feeling and collectivism. When the criticized person’s main attitude is to admit mistakes and reflect on the problems, we should appropriately carry out self-criticism, while deepening theoretical analysis and guiding their thinking toward collectivism in order to facilitate resolution of the problem. But when the criticized person’s main attitude is to resist criticism, be unreasonable, or even oppose it in various ways and vent individualist grievances, then we must resolutely criticize and struggle, taking a serious critical attitude, being both rapid and forceful and also principled and well-founded, so as to prevent the further development of individualist ideology. If internal contradictions within the revolutionary ranks are handled improperly—being all harmony when serious criticism is needed, or carrying out cruel blows when gentle persuasion is needed—then internal contradictions may turn into enemy-versus-us contradictions.
“Our comrades must understand that the work of ideological remolding is long-term, patient, and meticulous work; one cannot hope to change the ideas formed over dozens of years of life by teaching a few classes or holding a few meetings. To make people convinced, one can only persuade; one cannot force them to be convinced. The result of forcing is always that they are forced but not convinced. Using force to convince people does not work. It may work against the enemy, but against comrades and friends it must never be used. If one does not know how to persuade, then one must learn. We must learn to overcome all kinds of erroneous ideas through the methods of debate and reasoning.”[36]
Bourgeois human-nature theorists maintain that selfishness is human nature, and they always take comrades’ criticism as attack and take the rectification movement as a campaign to attack people; they have never acknowledged any unity between criticism and self-criticism. Such people, with an individualist outlook, will inevitably absolutely oppose criticism and self-criticism to one another, and absolutely oppose serious criticism to gentle persuasion, thereby completely violating dialectics. The unity of criticism and self-criticism also means, on one hand, the unity of serious criticism and gentle persuasion. In the course of ideological struggle, at different times and in different settings, one may use criticism, or self-criticism, or serious criticism, or gentle persuasion. But in general, criticism and self-criticism, serious criticism and gentle persuasion, are always closely combined.
We must overcome the “peaks and valleys” in ideological struggle
The law of affirmation and negation in materialist dialectics tells us that the development of things always goes through a process from affirmation to negation and again from negation to affirmation, showing a wave-like forward movement.[37] The laws of thought[38] are also one of the objective laws of development in the material world, and ideological struggle naturally is no exception in displaying this fluctuating characteristic. Transforming the worldview is a long process, especially for the petty bourgeoisie who have been steeped in capitalist society for a long time; the erosion of bourgeois ideology has gone deep into the bones, so ideological struggle must inevitably go through twists and turns.
Generally speaking, during a period after ideological struggle has achieved initial results, because of the petty bourgeoisie’s sudden enthusiasm, there is often a strong momentum in both thought and action. This period can be called the “peak” period of ideological struggle. The “peak” state of course can bring progress in the short term, but this brief, shock-style fanaticism cannot resolve the root of ideological problems; on the contrary, it also lays the groundwork for the later “valley” period of thought—because one becomes intoxicated by the apparent formal resolution of ideological problems and relaxes vigilance against the restoration of bourgeois ideology. To prevent entering the state of “false prosperity” in the “peak” period, one must overcome the thought that produces this erroneous tendency—the theory of cataclysm[39]. The theory of cataclysm holds that the development of things does not need to go through a long preparatory stage; the process of development consists of frequent sudden, thorough changes. The error of the theory of cataclysm lies in its failure to recognize that quantitative change leads to qualitative change, and in its ignorance that quantitative change is a necessary preparation for qualitative change. Its ideological root is the free, loose habit lacking organization and discipline that is characteristic of the petty bourgeoisie.
On the other hand, the “valley” period of ideological struggle often follows directly after the “peak” period. During this period, because the contradictions hidden during the “peak” period are exposed again, one becomes aware of the all-round restoration of bourgeois ideology and thus falls into a state of depression and despair, giving up everything. This mentality of giving up on everything is in essence an outbreak of petty-bourgeois bad habits, an old illness relapsing because of the deep connection with decadent bourgeois culture. The excellent Japanese Communist Party member and famous left-wing writer Takiji Kobayashi deeply exposed this psychology of “old illness relapsing” when he wrote in one of his novels: “Because intellectuals are intermediate in class, they often vacillate; facing the healthy steps coming from the countryside and the factories, there is only one road of decline. Or although they have participated in the revolution, there are always some aspects that feel out of taste; and because they have knowledge, they easily harbor hidden infatuation and subtle flirtation toward bourgeois culture. Generally speaking, intellectuals always feel that revolution is too intense, and often deliberately ‘deceive themselves’ by saying, I can’t do it, I can’t do it; as a result they cannot do anything at all, and do nothing at all. … Doing nothing, yet desperately finding reasons to defend oneself, is the most boring behavior. Seriously, wholeheartedly thinking about such reasons is very dangerous; wasting time on this for no reason is in any case wrong.”[40] Using one’s own “incompetence” as an excuse to evade struggle and “give up on everything” and flee back into the world of bourgeois culture to seek spiritual comfort is the error of the “give up on everything” theory. Its ideological root is the petty bourgeoisie’s individualist ideology formed in long-term class practice and its heavy dependence on bourgeois culture.
To overcome such wavering tendencies as the “peaks and valleys” and achieve true ideological progress, we must display extraordinary perseverance and, with the resolve to cut off one’s own wrist, break completely with all old thoughts and old notions of the past, and thoroughly abandon vulgar taste. In concrete methods, we should combine long-term plans and short-term plans to correct the habit of loose, undisciplined conduct, strengthen the study of Marxism through planning, and actively carry out social practice to understand social conditions and the lives of working people. Record one’s own activities over time; after each period (daily or weekly), re-examine past activities, actively discover one’s own problems, and correct them.
Actually, the “peaks and valleys” tendency is nothing to be afraid of. We have Marxism, the most correct, most scientific, and most revolutionary theoretical weapon—what difficulty can’t be overcome? What problem can’t be solved? Many people in the past were steeped in capitalist society for ten or even dozens of years, and after being baptized by Marxism, in just a few months or years they completely turned around their worldview; their thinking transformed toward socialism much faster than toward capitalism, by who knows how many times. The change can only be described as rapid. We must firmly believe that so long as we cherish infinite loyalty to the cause of proletarian revolution and rely on such a powerful ideological weapon as Marxism, any difficulty can be swept away!
The future is bright, the road is tortuous, and the new things are invincible!
Spiritual opium does great harm; we must defeat it
The above has already explained that the object of ideological struggle is vulgar taste and spiritual opium, and has explained their scientific definitions. Next, we need to understand how they affect people, especially how the spiritual products that encompass all kinds of bourgeois reactionary ideas—spiritual opium—harm people. Only in this way can we understand the necessity of resisting spiritual opium and find the way to defeat it.
Because the bourgeoisie is an exploiting class, it must distort facts and objective laws to serve its own interests. “If geometric axioms offend people’s interests, they too will certainly be refuted.”[41] In the past, when the bourgeoisie first rose, it was like this; today, at the point when imperialism faces its death, it is even more so. In order to defend the capitalist system, the bourgeoisie manufactures all kinds of fallacies, and it stuffs its entire idealist and decadent worldview into the spiritual products it creates. Capitalist spiritual products are filled with heroism, idealist views of history, the idea that human nature is selfish, and the law of the jungle; they also contain vulgar content such as sexual romance, drunken songs and dancing, violence and murder, hooligans and bandits, etc. The bourgeoisie goes to all lengths to wrap these filthy things in a glossy shell and use them to deceive the working people and cultivate the petty bourgeoisie’s bad habits in order to maintain its own rule. What is called spiritual opium is precisely this kind of capitalist spiritual product that is golden on the outside and rotten inside.
Consciously resist reactionary literary and artistic works that numb the people’s spirit with bourgeois ideology
The reactionary nature of all spiritual opium stems from its detachment from reality, because all fallacies violate objective laws, and all vulgar content opposes historical progress. Therefore these spiritual opiates must seriously distort facts and reverse right and wrong in order to promote fallacies and beautify the bourgeois way of life. For example, in bourgeois film and television works on gangster themes, hooligans and bandits are transformed into warm-hearted, chivalrous heroes. These beasts who prey on women and bully the weak in the plot often appear as righteous and clever figures: they help friends and family in trouble, sacrificing themselves for brothers; when roaming the “jianghu” they go smoothly, each one an elite rising in status; when in desperate straits they come up with ingenious plans and rely on luck and strength to escape danger; when disaster is imminent they face death calmly and with composure. But let us think about it: are gangster gangs really as noble and powerful as bourgeois film and television works make them out to be? In reality, underworld figures are a bunch of scum who take money to do things, bully the weak with the strong, and are ruthless and cruel. The essence of gangster groups is that they are tools used by the bourgeoisie to employ dark methods to achieve its own ends; wherever the bourgeoisie cannot appear openly, these people are used. It is they who lend money at usurious rates, causing ordinary people to be ruined and families to break apart; they who suppress workers’ strikes and act as thugs for black-hearted bosses; they who form cliques, collect protection money, and squeeze out small producers and small merchants; they who suppress mass movements and, when the police cannot appear directly, go forward to violently disperse the masses. Gangsters are the tumor of this society, a group of lackeys and dogs surviving by being fed a few scraps by the bourgeoisie; where is their cleverness? Where is their righteous spirit?
The bourgeoisie not only invents all kinds of character images in these spiritual opiates to invert black and white, but also designs backgrounds, plots, and materials in ways that are quite absurd. The bourgeoisie is not satisfied with distorting the real world; it even directly introduces all sorts of supernatural and bizarre elements, making the work completely detached from reality and hoping thereby to escape the “shackles” of objective law and freely spread idealist reactionary ideas.[42] In all kinds of fantasy, magical, xuanhuan, and “science” fiction, the bourgeoisie incarnates as various “superheroes” who destroy “evil enemies” in a world without class contradictions or struggle, while the working masses, the true masters of history, instead become the “mob,” on the one hand allowing the superheroes to take whatever they want, and on the other hand showering them with gratitude and respect.
These spiritual opiates not only constantly spread the bourgeoisie’s distorted worldview, causing people to lose the distinction between right and wrong and fall into moral decay; they also play a very bad role—damaging people’s thinking ability. Practice is the only source of cognition, and human cognition has its own objective laws of movement; it continuously moves in the sequence “practice—sensory cognition—rational cognition…re-practice—re-cognition” until it develops into truth. But in capitalist spiritual opium there is no trace of objective law, nor any basis in real logic. Long-term addiction to spiritual opium causes one to detach from social practice, interrupting the movement of cognition and leaving it only at the stage of continuously receiving garbage sensory materials from spiritual opium. Over time, because the brain lacks the basis of rational cognition—reliable sensory materials—thinking ability keeps declining, even to the point of being unable to distinguish the virtual world from the real world! People who long obsessively binge dramas, watch videos, and play games as spiritual opium often develop this bad tendency to a shocking degree, especially those who are detached from productive labor and live parasitic lives, who spend day and night immersed in the false world created by capitalist spiritual opium; once they leave the electronic screen, they are dizzy and disoriented, as if the world is spinning. People whose thinking ability has been seriously damaged by spiritual opium often have the image of spiritual opium in their minds[43]—detached-from-reality images and sound effects replay endlessly in the brain, completely unable to think like ordinary people!
As Marxists, we must resist such spiritual opium from corroding our own thoughts and damaging our thinking; at the same time, we must also persuade other comrades to stay away from these spiritual drugs! To be upright people, we cannot coexist with such harmful spiritual opium! As noted above, long-term dependence on spiritual opium leads to declining thinking ability, making it harder for people to distinguish right from wrong through thought and extricate themselves from it. Therefore, while resisting spiritual opium, we must also establish a correct outlook on right and wrong and prevent ourselves from entering the vicious cycle of “spiritual opium—thinking degradation.” Quitting spiritual opium is not something that can be done overnight, because it contains all kinds of bourgeois culture, which is closely tied to the petty bourgeoisie. But so long as, whenever we are tempted by spiritual opium, we think more about the right and wrong of the ideas within it and analyze more the ways its content departs from reality, we can always quit it. While resisting spiritual opium, we should also read books and newspapers more—study and apply Marxism, take part in social practice—broaden our horizons, link up with the masses, and enrich our spiritual world, and naturally we will be able to escape the harm of spiritual opium. Vulgar taste serves personal aims; spiritual opium caters to personal enjoyment. We must look far ahead, keep the revolution in our hearts, keep the world in view, and be clear-minded proletarian revolutionary fighters!
Persist in struggle, continue the revolution
The facts of the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union and China provide a painful historical lesson: when the proletariat seizes political power, this is not the end of socialist revolution, but the beginning of socialist revolution. “Socialist society is a fairly long historical stage. In this historical stage of socialism, there still exist classes, class contradictions, and class struggle; there still exists the struggle between the socialist road and the capitalist road; and there still exists the danger of capitalist restoration.”[44] If things are not handled well, revisionism will appear. History has once again proved the correctness of materialist dialectics—contradictions are always present and everywhere. In the former Soviet Union and China, during the socialist stage there still existed class contradictions and class struggle, and the bourgeoisie used various conditions to complete capitalist restoration. This lesson applies fully in the field of ideological struggle as well.
Many people think that once they have discovered their own problems and found future goals for struggle, everything seems to be solved at once, as if “all that remains is to do it,” as if the process of solving problems and achieving progress requires no unremitting effort, as if ideological struggle exists only in the process of self-criticism and no longer in the process of correcting problems. We must acknowledge the universality of contradiction and abandon the fantasy of achieving success all at once and forever. We must not think the habitual force of the petty bourgeoisie can be easily overthrown; in reality, the contradictory struggle between socialist and bourgeois ideology will inevitably exist within us for a long time. Lenin once taught us: “It is a thousand times easier to ‘defeat’ a concentrated big bourgeoisie than to ‘defeat’ millions of small proprietors; and these small proprietors, through their daily, petty, invisible, intangible corrupt activities, create the evil consequences that the bourgeoisie needs and that enable the bourgeoisie to restore itself.”[45] In the long process of ideological struggle and remolding, old ideological habits will inevitably surround us from all sides, infecting and corroding our worldview. The spontaneous force of old habits “often causes the petty-bourgeois cowardice, disunity, individualism, and the old illness of enthusiasm turning to despair to relapse within the proletariat.”[46]
“Pull the revolutionary cart without loosening the harness, and keep pulling all the way to communism!”
The theory of continuing revolution is the latest stage of the Marxist theoretical system—the achievement of the Mao Zedong Thought stage—and is truth tested by the practice of the revolutionary people in socialist China. During socialist China, especially during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the Party and the state attached great importance to the question of educating the younger generation and fought on the ideological and cultural front to win over the younger generation from the bourgeoisie. In our ideological realm today, this problem of continuing the revolution still exists, and we still need to wage struggle against bourgeois ideology in the worldview. Matter determines consciousness; human cognition does not fall from the sky. To persist in continuing the revolution in the ideological field, we must do the following three things in practice: First, always maintain boundless confidence and infinite loyalty to the cause of proletarian revolution, and possess collectivist thought and the spirit of self-sacrifice; second, maintain a deep connection with the broad masses of working people and with the whole of social reality; third, persist in studying Marxist theory and persist in using Marxist viewpoint, standpoint, and method to analyze things and handle problems, following the road of integrating theory with practice and raising one’s Marxist level through personal experience.
Practice determines cognition, and cognition reacts upon practice. To transform one’s worldview concretely through practice and persist in continuing the revolution in the ideological field, one must use the method of planning to thoroughly reform one’s material life. A person’s worldview determines what kind of social activity he will engage in—this is a basic principle of Marxism. Transforming the worldview is a long process; establishing a socialist worldview is a strategic goal, and this is not something that can be accomplished overnight. It requires the continual attainment of tactical goals—solving specific ideological problems in all respects—before it can finally be realized. Therefore, in ideological remolding we must also apply Chairman Mao’s military strategy: “In strategy we must despise all enemies, but in tactics we must take all enemies seriously.” For bourgeois ideology, in the overall sense we must despise it; in each specific problem we must take it seriously. “If we do not despise the enemy in the overall sense, we shall commit opportunist errors.” The inevitable trend of development is forward movement; so long as we persist in struggle, we will certainly overcome bourgeois ideology and thoroughly transform our worldview. “But in specific questions, in individual enemy questions, if we do not take them seriously, we shall commit adventurist errors.”[47] Persisting in struggle is the prerequisite for defeating bourgeois ideology. In the process of resolving each specific problem of our own, we must take the enemy seriously, think deeply about each problem, find a method, and finally solve it. We absolutely must not be careless, feel satisfied with ourselves, and get by through deception. Underestimating the great enemy in tactical matters will ultimately only lead to a complete strategic collapse.
To take the enemy seriously in tactics and solve specific problems one by one, the concrete method is: find gaps (find problems), expose contradictions, and promote transformation. The first step, finding gaps (finding problems), means summarizing the phenomenon of the problem, comparing one’s own bourgeois ideology and communist ideology, and finding where one falls short of a qualified Marxist. The second step, exposing contradictions, means analyzing the causes of the problem, because the cause of the development of a thing is precisely its internal contradiction. This requires capturing the causal relationship from the problem phenomenon identified in the first step, finding the cause of the problem, and analyzing what kind of contradiction that cause manifests. The third step, promoting transformation, means that solving a problem is not the annihilation of the contradiction unity itself, but the breaking of its old form and the emergence of a new form caused by the shifting of the principal and secondary aspects. Therefore we need to encourage and support the positive factors in the contradiction, restrict and eliminate the negative factors, and make the positive side become the principal aspect of the contradiction, thereby facilitating the solution of the problem.
To despise the enemy strategically means firmly believing in the justice and necessity of our proletarian revolutionary cause and establishing confidence in victory. On the one hand, it is a characteristic of the petty bourgeoisie to easily fall into “depression” when facing temporary setbacks and difficulties. When we encounter temporary failures, we must still keep a clear head and look at the situation from a long-term and comprehensive perspective. We must not, like a bird startled by the mere twang of a bowstring, sink into blind pessimism. On the other hand, the petty bourgeoisie has countless ties with old culture and is easily tempted by bourgeois ideology. At such times, we must not evade struggle, still less give up on everything and abandon the Marxist standpoint, calmly accepting the corruption of bourgeois ideology.
To abandon the long-term plan for immediate gains is the behavior of revisionists; they “seek only to ‘make do and stay safe’ under capitalism, and for a bowl of thin porridge sell the right of the firstborn—that is, give up the right not to lead the people in revolution against the bourgeoisie.”[48]
“The socialist revolution marks the end of the history of class society of exploiters that has lasted for thousands of years; it marks the beginning of an era in which society is liberated from all forms of oppression, an era of genuine friendship and equality among people, permanent world peace, and the complete normalization of human society. The great all-human content of the proletarian revolution lies here. It is the most important dividing line in human development.”[49]
We must absolutely not, like revisionists, give up lofty ideals for a petty gain. We must absolutely not think that once some of our interests have been achieved, it is time to get off at the station, set up camp, and settle into our own comfortable nest. “The task of truly building communist society must be borne by the youth”[50], and we must persist in struggle and swear to fight for the cause of communism all our lives!
Innovation plan, reform for strength
“When the world changes, affairs change”, “When affairs change, preparations must change”[51]. As early as more than two thousand years ago, the famous ancient Chinese Legalist statesman Han Fei proposed that the objective world is constantly developing and changing, and that people must adapt laws to the times so that action conforms to the development of objective things. Since the objective revolutionary situation is constantly changing, we must also make the class struggle in our ideological realm adapt to such changes. For this reason, we must continuously transform our material life in order to facilitate ideological struggle entering a new stage; this process can also be called “reform.”
Reform needs a clearly defined guide, and that guide is planning, which determines the basis, purpose, and methods of reform. The basis of reform is the current state of our material activities and ideological outlook. So long as we regularly record and examine our activities and keep a clear head while analyzing the objective living environment, it is not difficult to grasp the basis of one’s own reform. In making a plan, the most important thing is to find the purpose on the premise of grasping one’s own basis. As noted earlier, the purposes of our ideological struggle are: first, to cultivate collectivist thought and the spirit of self-sacrifice; second, to establish deep ties with the broad masses of working people; third, to improve the practical level of Marxism. These goals all require us to achieve them through real activities such as participating in organizational work, engaging in principled interpersonal relations, and systematically studying theoretical knowledge, and all such activities inevitably take time to complete. Here, how to use time is especially important. Marx said: “Time is the broad stage on which talents are developed, and so on.”[52] What we mean by planning is planning time. Through planning we must achieve the effects of raising efficiency, speeding things up, and saving time, so as to comprehensively realize firm class stance, practical training, and theoretical improvement.
How does a person’s talent grow? It grows in the course of continual practical training. Why do different people have different talents? In fact, it is because different people have different ways of using time and different efficiencies in using it. Those who are good at improving efficiency and saving time can do more things per unit of time, and thus train their practical ability more, grow more capable, and push practical activity deeper. On the contrary, those who conduct themselves in a loose, undisciplined way and waste time not only stifle the space for their own talent to develop, but may even cause their ability and quality to regress. Especially those who waste time on vulgar taste not only see their brain and physical capacities decline, but may also suffer a decline in thinking ability due to excessive intake of spiritual opium and lose basic self-care ability.
The above has already explained that the purpose of reform is to improve efficiency and save time; therefore the methods of reform are in fact methods of saving time. When making plans, the main methods for improving efficiency and saving time are several: improve skill proficiency; make overall arrangements for personal activities within a given time; carry out reasonable division of labor in collective activities; raise the material and technical level of tools.**
First, human beings are the subject of any social activity. Under fixed objective conditions, a person’s own skill proficiency determines the time required for activity; therefore improving skill proficiency is the prerequisite for improving efficiency and saving time. Practice yields true knowledge; struggle develops talent. To improve skill proficiency, one can only follow the road of integrating theory with practice.
To improve efficiency in practice, one must rely on theoretical guidance. Theory is not a set of restraints that limit action; it is the tool by which we save time, improve efficiency, and grasp laws. Practice detached from theory is nothing but brute force—repeatedly putting in a great deal of time while efficiency never improves. Take cooking as an example: there is a whole set of basic theory involving ingredients, seasonings, methods, and so on. If one does not learn cooking theory and improve technique, and only blindly works hard, it is impossible to make a delicious, filling meal with more, faster, better, and more economical results. Beginners often follow the book—cooking directly from recipes—resulting in too few, too slow, too poor, and too wasteful; skilled people, on the other hand, are not bound by form and can adapt to circumstances. Although the ingredients and seasonings in their hands may be limited, they can always make tasty dishes in a more, faster, better, and more economical way. The key lies in mastering the basic principles of ingredient handling, heating methods, and seasoning balance—that is, the theory of cooking. The process of human cognition follows the laws from phenomenon to essence and from the particular to the general. A recipe is nothing more than the application of general cooking principles to specific dishes. In learning cooking, whether using recipes or not, the key lies in forming rational knowledge of the basic elements of ingredients, seasonings, and methods by summarizing practical experience; the final purpose is to grasp the objective laws of cooking. Once cooking theory is mastered, crude kitchen tools can complete complex processing, simple seasonings can produce rich flavors, and ordinary ingredients can be made into delicious dishes. For example, understanding that oil temperature determines the changes in ingredients allows one to use an oven instead of frying; understanding the common features of seasonings allows one to substitute five-spice powder for cinnamon and star anise. In the final analysis, cooking is a science of studying the processing of ingredients; so long as the laws of the characteristics of ingredients, processing tools, and means are thoroughly grasped, one can do without recipes and invent and create on one’s own. Theory is not obtained from a study divorced from the lives of the people; rather, we must learn to grasp and apply laws in the most general practice. This is so in cooking, and even more so in ideological struggle. Once we master Marxist theory, we can grasp changes in the political situation, promote the development of class struggle, and even in complex environments carry out struggle with direction, planning, and results. This is true integration of theory with practice, true “reform.”
Only talking about theory without drawing correct lessons from practice, and without taking the results verified by practice as the standard for judging right and wrong, will turn into dogmatism, and efficiency cannot improve. Chairman Mao said: “What is rational is trustworthy precisely because it originates in the sensory; otherwise the rational would become water without a source, a tree without roots, merely a subjective self-generated thing that cannot be trusted.”[53] Taking political propaganda and ideological remolding as an example, it not only requires the propagandist to possess a certain level of Marxist-Leninist theoretical cultivation, but also requires a comprehensive understanding of the audience’s living conditions and ideological outlook; without actual investigation and communication, this cannot be done. Some comrades are good at reciting phrases from Marxist works and can casually speak of historical laws, class nature, and so on, but in fact it is all repetitive empty talk, precisely the Party eight-legged essay criticized by Chairman Mao. If such a style is brought into ideological remolding work, it will only ruin the matter and lead other comrades astray. In the final analysis, some comrades’ practice of Party eight-legged essay in practical work such as political propaganda and ideological remolding is for the sake of saving effort, because formalism detached from reality is a form of idealism, and idealism is the easiest way: one can fabricate and quote at will. Once one embarks on this path of dogmatism detached from reality, all the other harms of Party eight-legged essay come out together: “empty talk in long strings, devoid of content” “putting on airs to frighten people” “shooting without a target, not considering the audience” “language tasteless, like a cripple” “A, B, C, D, running a Chinese medicine shop” “irresponsible, harming people everywhere” “spreading poison throughout the Party, obstructing the revolution” “spreading it outside, bringing disaster to the country and the people.” This style is extremely incompatible with Marxist principles and is irresponsible behavior toward other comrades, toward the Party, and toward society as a whole. “The Communist Party does not make its living by frightening people, but by making its living on the truth of Marxism-Leninism, on seeking truth from facts, and on science.” Any work we carry out must be based on down-to-earth investigation and understanding. To do political propaganda, we must first understand the target’s political views; to carry out ideological remolding, we must first understand the target’s long-term life situation and ideological outlook. Whether propaganda work and remolding work are effective must also be judged by the actual changes in the work target. Relying only on empty words to lecture people not only delays others’ ideological development, but also damages the authority of Marxism as a science; the result is that both others and oneself are harmed. “In short, any office making decisions or issuing instructions, and any comrade writing articles or giving speeches, must all rely on the truth of Marxism-Leninism; must rely on usefulness. Only by relying on this can revolutionary victory be won; everything else is useless.”[54]
Second, making overall arrangements for personal activities within a given time is a necessary means of saving time. The objective world is an organically connected whole; the connections within things and between things are universally present. “The movement of each thing is connected with and influences the movement of other things around it”[55]. Nothing and its development can violate the law of the universality of connection. The various personal activities within a given time are no exception; they are connected in various complex ways, and each activity cannot be viewed in isolation. Therefore, how to handle the connections among various personal activities and replace spontaneous connections with consciously established ones is the key to improving overall activity efficiency and saving time. Connection is contradiction; difference is contradiction. In the final analysis, all personal activities are activities that consume a certain amount of time. First, there is opposition and conflict between them: the more time spent on one matter, the less time is available for other matters. But besides the contradictory side, they also have a united side. For example, study, work, and rest all each occupy a certain amount of life time and are mutually conflicting and contradictory. Precisely because of this, some people think that if one studies one cannot work, if one works one cannot rest, and if one rests one cannot study—that is to absolutely oppose these three to one another. In fact, correctly handling the contradictory relations among these three can achieve mutual complementarity and mutual promotion. When studying, if one earnestly grasps theoretical experience and applies what one learns, work efficiency is improved and work time can be saved. Arranging proper rest after study and work enables physical and mental strength to recover fully, which can greatly improve the efficiency of study and work, thereby saving time for both study and work.
To arrange personal activities properly within a given time, we must pay attention to correctly handling the contradictory relation between central work and auxiliary work. The various contradictions existing in the development of things are not balanced in status and role; the principal contradiction plays the leading and decisive role, determining and influencing the existence and development of other contradictions. Therefore Chairman Mao said: “In any given area, there cannot be many center tasks; within a certain period there can only be one center task, supplemented by other secondary and tertiary tasks.”[56] When arranging personal activities, we also need to distinguish correctly between central work and auxiliary work, assigning different priorities to our various activity plans and concentrating our main time and energy on the central task, so that the entire plan can be completed. Treating all plans “equally” may not only cause minor losses to become major losses and prevent the central task from being completed, but may also fail to respond flexibly because the plans cannot be coordinated in time, causing the overall plan to collapse. It can be seen that not distinguishing the relative importance and urgency of various activity plans in order to highlight the central task is in fact a manifestation of a non-planned mentality.
Failing to distinguish primary from secondary is certainly wrong, but ignoring auxiliary work is also wrong. Whether auxiliary work can be completed smoothly is also one of the necessary conditions for doing the central work well. Some comrades, in order to save personal effort, abandon the planning of all auxiliary activities on the pretext of focusing on the central task; they care only about the center and not about anything else, and the result is that even the central task is not done well. Here, in fact, there is a question of whether one truly wants to do the work well or only pretends to want to. If one truly wants to, and wants very strongly, then one must certainly take into account auxiliary work in order to do the central task well and complete the entire activity plan at high quality.
To arrange personal activities properly within a given time, one must also correctly handle the contradictory relation between study/work and entertainment/rest. When instructing the work of the Youth League, Chairman Mao once said: “Young workers, peasants, and soldiers are learning in the course of work, and both work-study and entertainment-rest-sleep must be fully taken into account. Both ends must be grasped firmly; study and work must be grasped firmly, and sleep, rest, and entertainment must also be grasped firmly.”[57] Some comrades are very active and enthusiastic in revolutionary study and work, which is a good thing, but they do not pay attention to rest, resulting in a decline in actual activity efficiency; this problem should be corrected by paying attention to arranging rest. There are also many comrades who are not enthusiastic about revolutionary study and work, but because they maintain the petty-bourgeois state of loose and undisciplined life, not only are they unplanned in their own study and work, but they also have no plan for how to arrange rest, and are often in a state of fatigue. A small number of comrades have such strong petty-bourgeois bad habits that they are not enthusiastic about revolutionary study and work, yet are extremely enthusiastic about vulgar taste full of bourgeois ideology; they browse videos and play games every day, live the life of petty-bourgeois philistines, and have no plan for rest either, leaving themselves in a state of fatigue all day long. This is the worst situation. The human body accumulates fatigue through continuous activity; rest and sleep are necessary, and this is a natural law we cannot but follow. We must, as Chairman Mao instructed, also take “entertainment, rest, and sleep” seriously, put them into the plan, and carry them out carefully. The last type of comrade especially must be vigilant and understand that paying attention to rest is for the sake of better revolutionary activity; one must abandon vulgar taste, and cannot use the banner of rest to indulge in vulgar taste while in fact not resting at all. In that way both the body and the mind are ruined.
The dialectical relation between entertainment and study/work is the same: human beings need entertainment; only by relaxing the tense spirit through entertainment can one better carry out revolutionary study and work. But one must pay attention that people with different worldviews have different forms of entertainment and different effects. We cannot pursue the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois way of entertainment and engage in the old vulgar-taste routine; this will only make the spirit impoverished, foster bourgeois ideology in the brain, detach one from the most fundamental revolutionary road, and make it impossible to continue revolutionary study and work. Moreover, as noted above, such vulgar taste will only destroy normal rest and cause life to fall into a chaotic state of no planning, and cannot at all achieve the proper effect of entertainment in moderately relaxing the spirit. Marxists should have Marxist-style entertainment; Marxist entertainment should be beneficial to physical and mental health, uplifting, and beneficial to the development of both physical and mental strength. When Marx was alive, he often engaged in beneficial exercise and entertainment with his comrades: walking, riding horses, outings, and chess, and thus always maintained a strong body and a clear mind. Engels and Lenin were both good at hunting, and Chairman Mao, at the age of 73, still swam across the Yangtze River; the great leaders of the communist movement all maintained healthy hobbies. Thälmann often accompanied children in river-swimming competitions and ball games, and told his daughter: “Exercise makes people happy, but in order to strengthen us for the struggle of life, exercise is also indispensable.”[58] But what must never be forgotten is that we communists live for the cause of the liberation of all humanity; “for revolutionaries, revolution is life”[59]. For communists, revolutionary activity should always be the first hobby; only grasping the laws of this world’s operation and personally participating in the movement to change the world is what we should be most enthusiastic about. “Communists have always been the most active and most knowledgeable members”[60]; we should become “people who can not only devote their free evening time to the revolution, but can devote their whole life to the revolution”[61].
“Crossing the mighty Yangtze for thousands of miles, the boundless Chu sky is clear and open. No matter how the wind blows and the waves beat, it is better than strolling in a quiet courtyard; today I have leisure and ease.”
(Mao Zedong: Swimming)
Third, human beings are beings who act in society, not Robinson Crusoes drifting on isolated islands; in the course of activity, they are bound to come into contact with others. The activities of Marxist organizations, like socialist production activities, may also and indeed must enable participating members to improve efficiency through the establishment of broad cooperative relations. Therefore, whether one can correctly handle the series of contradictions in the process of personal participation in collective activity and thus achieve a rational division of labor in collective activity is another key to improving efficiency. In the process of participating in collective activity, the first contradiction encountered is between individual activity and collective activity. Since we are Marxists carrying out activities in Marxist organizations, in most cases the interests of individual activity and collective activity are consistent, and there is no serious conflict. But the nature of this non-antagonistic contradiction between individual activity and collective activity in general circumstances can change; the condition for this transformation is ideological consciousness. When a person’s bourgeois individualist worldview gains the upper hand, he will look at problems with a narrow and selfish outlook, and at that time individual activity and collective activity become conflicting. For a person spiritually impoverished and greedy for pleasure, he will think that the study, propaganda, and ideological remolding work carried out by the organization is taking up his personal leisure, and thus he will develop resentment toward the organization, and his participation will be distracted and inattentive. For a person who loves vanity and seeks no progress, he will think that organizational discipline and the organization’s requirement that he train his theoretical cultivation and ideological consciousness are unnecessary. They adopt a mutual-help and reformist mentality, wanting both their own activities and the entire revolutionary organization’s activities to remain at the stage of mere superficiality. They may do some outward show, but in fact they do not seek real understanding in reading and study, and are indifferent to the ideological remolding of themselves and others. The people described above set individual activity against collective activity and put individual interests before collective interests; if they participate in organizational activities with this mentality, they are sure to be empty shells, mere figureheads. The things to do double, yet one gains nothing; efficiency is bound to be extremely low. If we persist in the Marxist worldview and use collective activity to govern individual activity, we can certainly resolve this contradiction and improve efficiency. To give a domestic-life example, cooking, washing clothes, and cleaning: viewed separately, one person carrying everyone’s responsibilities is certainly more tiring than each person doing his own thing. But when we take the overall perspective, everyone contributes according to ability and suitable people are arranged to complete each task. The result is that although individual time spent increases, collective time is saved; for the individual, the person responsible for a specific task is spared the time needed to complete other tasks, and efficiency is also improved. Here, the formerly contradictory relation between individual activity and collective activity becomes one of consistent interests. This logic is true not only in life, but even more so in revolutionary study and work. Everyone must always adhere to the communist principle of collective interest first and individual interest second, viewing problems from the standpoint of the whole and abandoning narrow self-interest; only then can collective and individual activities be consistent, and only then can the goal of improving efficiency and saving time be achieved.
In addition, in the process of collective activity there is also the contradiction between one’s own interests and the interests of others. Some comrades, when participating in collective activity, engage in interest-ism, handling theory study, ideological remolding, and propaganda work according to personal interest, keeping what they like for themselves and pushing what they dislike onto others. When doing ideological work, if someone is close to them they say more; if someone is distant, they leave it to others. When studying theory, if something interests them they read and speak more; if they are not interested, they keep silent. This behavior is in fact also a manifestation of bourgeois individualism, and because of relatively poor ideological consciousness, the originally coordinated relation between one’s own interests and the interests of others in a Marxist organization becomes opposed. Whether in ideological work or theoretical study, if one is not interested in something and neither hears, nor asks, nor does, nor says anything, then one is only creating trouble for others: comrades who need help do not get it, comrades who need enlightenment do not learn knowledge, and several comrades with advanced ideas and advanced theory are exhausted to death; the harm is enormous. In resolving this contradiction, we must also carry forward the spirit of self-sacrifice, use difficulty to temper ourselves, leave convenience to others, and bring into play the communist style of “compete, learn, catch up, help.”
Finally, improving activity efficiency also requires correspondingly raising the material and technical level of tools. As the saying goes: “Even the cleverest housewife cannot cook without rice.” That is exactly the meaning. Cooking requires cookware, seasonings, and ingredients; writing requires paper, pens (now smart phones and laptops), and reference materials; sleep requires a bed, pillow, and quilt—these truths are self-evident. The ability to use tools and the tools themselves are a sign of social progress. We must acknowledge this objective truth and, when improving activity efficiency, pay attention, where possible, to improving tools and becoming familiar with how to use them.
But in the final analysis, Marxism as a theoretical weapon is our Marxists’ most powerful tool. “The doctrine of Marxism is omnipotent precisely because it is correct”[62].
We must remember: Marxism is the universal truth applicable everywhere, and we Communists make our living on truth.
From democrats to revolutionaries
The process of petty-bourgeois ideological remolding, or rather the process of petty-bourgeois revolutionary transformation, can be summarized as the developmental process of “from democrat to revolutionary.” The petty bourgeoisie is the intermediate class in capitalist society; this class itself is a product of the capitalist mode of production and a supplement to capitalist production. “In any capitalist country, there always exists alongside the proletariat a broad petty-bourgeois stratum, namely the stratum of small proprietors. Capitalism in the past arose out of small production, and it is still constantly arising out of small production today. Capitalism is bound to reproduce many ‘intermediate strata.’”[63] The characteristics of many production sectors or production links themselves determine that such production is small-scale and scattered, and in order to ensure profits the bourgeoisie also needs to use a large amount of manual labor and family labor. This determines that petty-bourgeois small production, as a supplement to capitalist large-scale production, must necessarily exist together with capitalism. Get rich, and one cannot get rich without exploiting the poor. The petty bourgeoisie runs its own business just as the bourgeoisie runs enterprises: it is based on recognizing capitalist private ownership, that is, individual appropriation of social labor.[64] In other words, the petty bourgeoisie’s way of “making money,” like the bourgeoisie’s, depends on capital exploitation, but it starts from using its own labor and then moves to using wage labor. This production mode of the petty bourgeoisie, which is close to the bourgeoisie, inevitably leads them to pursue a bourgeois lifestyle. This is the basis of the petty bourgeoisie’s psychology of personal enrichment. Even petty-bourgeois intellectuals are the same: although they appear not to have their own industries to run, their mental labor, as part of capitalist production, serves the bourgeoisie; they belong to the bourgeois camp (unless they join the revolution), they receive from the bourgeoisie a portion of the social labor they control, and they also have the possibility and desire to rise into the bourgeoisie. This economic character of the petty bourgeoisie determines that they basically defend the capitalist system, and they, like the bourgeoisie, strongly pursue personal enjoyment. This is the source of petty-bourgeois reactionary nature. **“Therefore, they are not revolutionary, but conservative. Not only that, they are even reactionary, because they try to turn the wheel of history backward.”[65]
But the petty bourgeoisie is not a “reactionary gang”; it also has a side close to the people. The petty-bourgeois character is contradictory and complex: on the one hand it pursues a bourgeois lifestyle, on the other hand it feels the oppression of capitalism and opposes capitalism; “The petty bourgeois, in an already developed society, by virtue of the position in which he finds himself, is necessarily both a socialist and an economist, that is to say, he is at once enamored of the splendor of the big bourgeoisie and sympathetic to the suffering of the people. He is at once a bourgeois and the people.”[66] From another angle, the petty bourgeoisie is also oppressed. Because petty-bourgeois small production cannot compete with the bourgeoisie, except for a few speculators who succeed, the majority are inevitably destined to go bankrupt and enter the ranks of the proletariat. Precisely because the petty bourgeoisie often feels the oppression of the bourgeoisie, there is also an anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois sentiment, and a desire for personal liberation; this is the source of petty-bourgeois revolutionary nature. Based on feelings against capitalist oppression, the petty bourgeoisie has some democratic ideas. Before the proletariat ascended onto the historical stage, the petty bourgeoisie had been the far-left wing of the democrats, such as the Jacobins during the French Revolution.
The democratic ideas of the petty bourgeoisie are entirely different from the democratic ideas of the bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie is an exploiting class; its democratic ideas only had some progressive color before it became the ruling class, when they served as a weapon for its own offensive against the feudal landlord class that held political power. The bourgeois ideas of democracy and equality meant abolishing the privileges of the feudal nobility and abolishing all restrictions that feudalism imposed on the bourgeoisie’s economic and political life. They advocated “equality before money,” which in other words simply means replacing the feudal hierarchy of privilege with the hierarchy of money. At that time, in the bourgeoisie’s ascending period, they never put the people’s lives in their eyes; the democracy they wanted was only for themselves. After the bourgeoisie came to power, the hypocritical nature of its democratic ideas became even more exposed. The bourgeoisie shouted slogans of “freedom, equality, fraternity” while deceiving the people with formal democratic rights, and itself sat in the position of a money-privileged class and did whatever it pleased. For the people, bourgeois democracy amounts to only changing the rulers every few years. **“Even in the most advanced, most civilized, most democratic republic, despite great progress in bourgeois culture and bourgeois democracy, the overwhelming majority of the working masses still remain a herd of ignorant wage slaves or oppressed peasants, subject to plunder and humiliation by a tiny handful of capitalists.”[67]
The democratic ideas of the petty bourgeoisie are combined with sympathy for the miserable lives of the people. The petty bourgeoisie’s mode of production and way of life are bourgeois in nature, and in general they approve of the capitalist system. But the petty bourgeoisie’s economic position has not yet reached the level of the bourgeoisie; their heads are filled with all kinds of bourgeois ideas, but their bodies still remain among ordinary people, and they still share a certain degree of common life with the people, so they have a certain common feeling with the people. However, because the basis of the petty bourgeois worldview is individualism, their sympathy for the people often starts from sympathy for themselves; they sympathize with those who suffer the same oppression only where and when they themselves are oppressed.
The revolutionary nature of the petty bourgeoisie is unreliable. “This revolutionary nature is unstable and superficial; its characteristic is that it quickly turns into obedience, depression, despondency, indulgence in fantasy, and even into a ‘frantic’ infatuation with this or that bourgeois ‘fashionable’ trend of thought—this is all well known.”[68] The ideas of personal enjoyment and personal liberation form the basic contradiction of petty-bourgeois ideology, and in this contradiction the idea of personal enjoyment always occupies the principal aspect. Because the petty bourgeoisie’s way of life is stubborn; so long as it still occupies the position of a small producer and lives a life free from oppression and relatively isolated from the world (at least isolated from the bourgeoisie’s frequent oppression), its conservatism and reactionary nature will often come into play. The revolutionary nature of the petty bourgeoisie comes into play only occasionally, because compared with their stubborn way of life, their feeling of bourgeois oppression is only occasional. As the petty bourgeoisie jokes about itself, it is a class that is “intermittently striving to improve itself, continuously living off others and waiting to die.”
“What is called a class is such a group that, because of the different positions it occupies in a certain social economic structure, one group can appropriate the labor of another group.”[69] This is Lenin’s definition of class, which clearly shows that class relations are economic relations. There are no classes that betray economic interests, but there can be individuals who betray their class. As Marx said: “It is the environment that is changed by men, and the educator himself must be educated.”[70] Human beings have subjective initiative, and under certain conditions they can change their own class standpoint. The petty bourgeoisie, as the intermediate class in capitalist society, is bound to undergo continual polarization and, under pressure of bankruptcy, take different roads. Some right-wing petty bourgeois, driven by the desire for fame and gain, see their desire for personal enjoyment swell continuously and finally degenerate into the accomplices and running dogs of the bourgeoisie (a tiny minority becoming bourgeois themselves), that is, turn into reactionaries. Another portion of left-wing petty bourgeois, stimulated by social darkness and people’s suffering, turn the desire for personal liberation into the desire for social liberation, and transform from democrats into revolutionaries.
The revolutionary transformation of the petty bourgeoisie cannot be completed overnight. The process of ideological remolding is long and painful; it requires tenacious will to continue. “Great energy is produced only for great purposes.”[71] The revolutionary transformation of the petty bourgeoisie requires using the great purpose of revolution—the liberation of all humanity—as the driving force in order to continue unceasingly; in other words, the driving force behind petty-bourgeois revolutionary transformation is the social responsibility of revolution. And a revolutionary sense of responsibility can only arise from deep feelings for the people. Hong Rengan, the revolutionary hero of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, once frankly expressed his conviction, saying: “For ten years this military adviser has traveled through the dust and wind, deeply understanding demonic deceit and fraud. Having traveled across the five lakes, I thoroughly know the hardships of the common people.”[72]** “Each year the Manchu demons strip China of hundreds of millions in fat and oil,” “each year they spend several billion taels of silver on opium,” “while our Chinese people are moved into poverty,” and “if this military adviser had no knowledge at all, how could he willingly endure repeated hardships? Indeed, as one born in China, there are obligations that cannot be refused.”[73]** This makes it very clear that Hong Rengan made rescuing the Chinese people his unshirkable duty because he deeply recognized the darkness of Qing rule and the suffering of the people. Hong Rengan grew up in a poor rural area, working the fields while attending school, and had an inseparable flesh-and-blood connection with the laboring peasants. Therefore he was able to stand on the standpoint of the oppressed classes and struggle and sacrifice for the revolution.
Marx, Engels, Wolff, and others with the typesetters in the editorial office of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The revolutionary teachers Marx and Engels transformed themselves from revolutionary democrats into communists precisely in the struggle against autocracy and capitalism, in their contact with worker and peasant masses and in speaking out for them.
In summary, the petty bourgeoisie has the possibility of developing in two directions—toward revolutionaries and toward reactionaries—and this stems from the dual nature of petty-bourgeois ideology: the contradiction between the ideology of personal liberation and the ideology of personal enjoyment. The key to transforming the petty bourgeoisie’s ideology of personal liberation into an ideology of social liberation lies in whether its attitude and feelings toward the people can be changed. If one merely regards oppression as something occasional rather than regarding oneself as part of the oppressed class, it is impossible to understand the feelings of the people. For the petty bourgeoisie to change its standpoint, it must achieve the “four combinations”: combine with society, combine with the people, combine with practice, and combine with labor. A person detached from society, detached from the people, detached from practice, and detached from labor has no correct understanding in his head; he neither understands nor hates the reactionaries, and feels neither sympathy nor support for the people. From such a life can only arise feelings of disgust toward labor and toward the people, leading ultimately onto the reactionary road of seeking personal enjoyment. Today, among the broad masses of youth and intellectuals, the petty-bourgeois way of life still remains widespread. On the one hand, they yearn for democracy, pursue freedom, and detest the oppression and injustice of capitalist society; on the other hand, they often wallow in their own little world, understanding所谓"liberation" as individual enjoyment and security of personal prospects. Precisely for this reason, some people can become temporarily indignant when they feel real oppression, but once life becomes a little more comfortable, they easily lose their fighting spirit and even turn to the reactionary side. This is a vivid portrayal of the instability of petty-bourgeois ideology and the unreliability of its revolutionary nature. To solve this problem, only social practice and labor remolding can do it. A true democrat who does not move toward the revolutionary camp will inevitably degenerate into a reactionary. Only by linking oneself with the broad masses of the people, combining one’s own destiny with the destiny of society, and elevating personal liberation to social liberation can one complete revolutionary transformation in class struggle and become a part of the proletariat.
Therefore, if the petty bourgeoisie truly wants to become revolutionary, it must bravely acknowledge its shortcomings and thoroughly transform both its ideological feelings and its way of life. It must participate in social practice, engage in labor remolding, and take part in class struggle; it must not regard itself as a young master or young lady going among the laboring people to “investigate” or “experience life.” In the course of labor, one must correctly distinguish the class character of different people in the work environment, engage in pointed struggle against the bourgeoisie and its running dogs, unite and cooperate with the proletariat, sincerely help them, and融入 the people as a member of the exploited class. One must study Marxist theory diligently, learn in the course of use and use in the course of learning, and while raising theoretical level, also propagate to all social strata. One must remain attentive to domestic and international news and current affairs, cherish the motherland and look to the world, caring both about the lives of the people and the world situation, keeping a broad vision so as not to fall into the petty-bourgeois narrow and selfish little circle. One must also remain enthusiastic about organizational affairs and comrades’ conditions, always taking the revolutionary cause and comrades’ progress as one’s own responsibility. One must dare to struggle and be good at struggle, taking a leading role in struggle, fearing neither labor traitors nor leaders nor capitalists nor police, skillfully using Marxism and combining legal and illegal means to strike at the arrogant arrogance of the bourgeoisie. Only such an upright Marxist, with firm stand, superb theoretical level, and fearless fighting spirit, can win the confidence of the working people and truly play the role of spreading Marxism. Only by tempering itself in the stormy waves of class struggle can the petty bourgeoisie realize its own revolutionary transformation and become a qualified Marxist.
Whether to recognize gender oppression and support women’s liberation is the litmus test of true and false Marxism
Socialists have always been supporters of the women’s liberation movement, and even from the predecessor of scientific socialism—the earliest utopian socialists—this has been the case. “In any society, the degree of women’s liberation is the natural measure of universal liberation.”[74] This is what the French utopian socialist pioneer Fourier said.
However, ever since human society entered the patriarchal era (taking China as an example, counting from the period of patriarchal clan communities, this has already lasted six thousand years), the continuous development and combination of private property and patriarchy have elevated men above women in status while producing a large amount of facts of male oppression of women and ideas of male oppression of women. The enormous difference between men and women has persisted from the distant ancient societies to the present day, and gender oppression has not only caused the suffering of the overwhelming majority of women, but also corrupted the character of the overwhelming majority of men, leaving a deep imprint of patriarchy in the minds of most men and a considerable number of women. In order to raise ideological consciousness, establish communist morality, and thoroughly implement proletarian revolutionary principles, we Marxists must, through ideological struggle, turn our standpoint to the side supporting women’s liberation, and study Marxist theory on women’s liberation with the greatest perseverance. Therefore, this chapter will explain from the height of Marxist theory the process and essence of the emergence of gender oppression, and the relationship between women’s liberation and social liberation.
At the dawn of human society, there was not only no difference in status between the sexes, but also no oppression or exploitation among people, no private property and no private-property consciousness; everyone was equal. Through tens of millions of years of evolution, human beings changed their own physiological structure through labor, and in the course of labor practice created language and formed consciousness. From the beginning of this process, human activity opened up a new form of motion above the four forms of motion already developed in nature—social motion. The higher the animal, the more it depends on group activity to sustain the reproduction of the species, and human activity stands above all animals: human beings consciously know and transform the world, and all this activity takes place in society. Since their birth, human beings have not existed in isolation, but have lived in primitive human groups. Generally, dozens or hundreds of people formed a group, jointly making tools, preserving fire, resisting beasts, and obtaining food. At that time the social productive forces were extremely low; the tools used by primitive people were crude and primitive; plants and animals had not been domesticated; there was no accumulation of production experience or technique; human beings had to struggle continually and tenaciously just to survive. Under such conditions, the need for common labor led people to form a “group,” using collective cooperation to make up for the inadequacy of individual strength. All produced together, consumed together, and lived roughly equal lives, relying on and supporting one another to barely survive. In this society with no surplus product, there was no possibility of anyone privately appropriating social wealth, and thus no private property or private-property consciousness; there could not be any power above the people. What people naturally developed in collective life was collectivist thought. In this period just emerging from the animal world, human marriage and sexual relations inherited the habits of the animal world and existed in a chaotic state of unrestricted group marriage. Moreover, primitive people at that time lived a wandering existence and had no fixed division of labor in production, so stable marriage relations were impossible.
With the continued development of productive forces in primitive society, the scale of primitive groups continually expanded and average lifespan increased day by day, making the differences in physical strength, experience, and ability to deal with danger among people of different ages more and more obvious, and thus labor division by age emerged. Although tools remained crude, daily life saw the earliest “division of labor by age”—the elderly who had rich experience but insufficient physical strength, the youth whose mental and physical strength were both in an active period, and children who lacked experience and were physically weak, each forming groups and performing their respective functions. This labor division was not invented by some “sage” genius, but arose naturally from the needs of production practice. On the basis of this labor division, the first restriction on marriage emerged—marriage between different generations was prohibited. But marriage among blood relatives remained the norm. This was because: first, primitive groups just emerging from the animal world had limited and isolated ranges of activity, and primitive groups internally could only be linked through blood-marriage relations; second, in the eyes of primitive people who knew only blood-marriage and no other marriage relations, there could not possibly be any conception of prohibiting close-kin marriage, because they did not even have the concept of close-kin marriage itself. At this historical stage, the marriage system of primitive society was the group marriage system among people of the same generation, and in Engels’s terms, blood marriage. As Engels said, the historical boundary between primitive promiscuous marriage and blood marriage cannot currently be determined, and even groups practicing blood marriage have completely disappeared from the world. But the facts obtained from Morgan’s research—that in some regions of the Polynesian islands and Australia there still existed kinship systems corresponding to the blood-marriage system—prove that primitive promiscuous marriage and blood marriage really did exist, and that their developmental logic, as noted above, was driven by social historical development.
The further development of primitive society’s productive forces caused the division of labor in production and the scope of cooperation to expand; the simple division by age within primitive groups could no longer meet production needs, and this trend of expansion formed a serious contradiction with the extremely narrow scale of primitive groups. Labor productivity improved, division of labor became more refined, and new labor sectors and new specific forms of labor continued to emerge, but primitive groups with limited scale could not undertake the expanded scale of production. At this point, a fundamental contradiction appeared: on the one hand, the development of social productive forces required division of labor and cooperation to break through the narrow blood-relation groups; on the other hand, the internal structure of blood marriage was too closed, isolating different primitive groups from each other. In order to expand the scale of production and improve labor efficiency, contact and cooperation among primitive groups necessarily had to break through the original blood boundaries. It was precisely the contradiction between productive forces and relations of production (which at that time manifested as marriage relations) that drove a qualitative change in human marriage relations and social organization. The demand to expand the scope of division of labor and cooperation led different blood-related primitive groups to begin interacting and cooperating with each other. As contact between different blood-related groups became more frequent, people gradually realized that if relatively stable connections were formed between primitive groups of different bloodlines, not only could the scope of production cooperation be expanded, but larger social organizations could also be established through such connections, greatly increasing the survival capacity of mutually cooperating primitive groups. In primitive society, such connections could only be marriage relations, because at that time people were producing and living together through the bond of marriage and blood relations. Thus, blood marriage inside primitive groups was prohibited, and group marriage outside the clan emerged between a group of men of one generation and a group of women of another generation from different primitive groups. The emergence of new marriage relations inevitably brought corresponding changes in social organization, and thus primitive clan systems appeared. The prevalence of exogamous group marriage marks humanity’s entry into clan society. As Engels said: **“Once the prohibition of sexual relations between all brothers and sisters, and even between the most distant collateral relatives on the mother’s side, had been established, the above-mentioned group (editor’s note: ‘the above-mentioned group’ refers to primitive groups in which blood-kin marriage was prohibited) was transformed into the gens.”[75]
The earliest and most primitive exogamous group marriage was intermarriage between two primitive groups, thereby forming two clans of different bloodlines, and these two clans formed a tribe. Clans were prohibited from internal marriage, while different clans within the tribe intermarried with one another. After this, the phenomenon that clans prohibiting blood marriage developed much faster than other primitive groups made primitive people realize the fact that blood marriage was not conducive to the development of the population, and so they began to consciously prohibit blood marriage and continuously expand the scope of this prohibition. The kinship system (that is, the system of corresponding terms arising from different positions in blood relations) was the product of the continuous expansion of the prohibition on blood marriage; the meaning of various kinship terms lies in determining people’s mutual blood relations and avoiding blood marriage. As the clan grew larger and the number of people sharing blood increased, this prohibition necessarily became stricter, and the kinship system became increasingly complex. Correspondingly, social organization also underwent more complex changes. Because intermarriage between two clans could only very limitedly avoid blood marriage, as clan scale developed and lineages increased, the number of clans intermarrying with one another also increased to avoid blood marriage. This series of developments adapted to the needs of the development of social productive forces at that time and thus greatly promoted the development of productive forces.
All clan societies originally were based on matriarchy, that is, on kinship centered on the maternal line. In each clan, women were the masters of the clan, while men married out into other clans and after death were buried back in their own clan. Clans that intermarried formed a tribe. The reason the earliest clans were matriarchal is twofold: first, under exogamous group marriage, the children of the next generation could only identify their biological mother and not their biological father, so the lineage of all members could only be inherited according to maternal blood relations. Second, in matrilineal clan society, women played a major role in the clan’s public labor and management of public affairs, and women made outstanding contributions in this era. Concretely speaking, this was determined by the natural division of labor at that time. Men were responsible for hunting, fishing, resisting beasts, and fighting enemies; women, because they bore the responsibilities of production and child-rearing, had to move around near the settlement, and therefore were responsible for gathering plants, processing food, processing hides, sewing clothes, caring for the elderly, and raising children. At that time, the work performed by women was at the core of sustaining the clan household, and long-term activity in and around the settlement made them better informed and more convenient for managing public affairs. Moreover, the hunting and fishing yields for which men were responsible were extremely unstable and often depended on food gathered by women for survival. Under such conditions, no one would doubt the legitimacy of women leading social affairs and occupying the position of clan masters. What is more, in the matrilineal clan society of common production, common consumption, and equality for all, there was no room for oppression or enslavement. Although women presided over clan affairs and formed the core of the matrilineal clan group, they were still ordinary members of this society, with no difference from others and no privileges; they likewise participated in labor. Rather, in that era the duties assigned to women by natural division of labor caused women to undertake more complicated labor and affairs, yet they never sought a higher status than men. In the matrilineal clan society period, regardless of sex or age, all were completely equal members of the clan and generally enjoyed primitive democratic and equal rights. Everyone labored and produced together, consumed together as parts of the large family; they helped, cared for, and protected one another, jointly observed the customs of the clan, maintained the clan’s survival, and took the interests of the clan as their own. All members democratically decided public affairs through the clan assembly, and men also had the right to elect and be elected clan leaders. Clan leaders maintained the clan’s functioning through rich experience, noble morality, and clan custom, without any violent means against clan members. Only the clan’s public interests and customs constrained people; if anyone violated these collective interests and customs, they would face public reproach and punishment. Everyone knew nothing of private property or individual families, had no private-property consciousness, no deception or scheming, and no army, prisons, police, or courts standing above the people.
“There was once a time when the state did not exist, when public relations, society itself, discipline, and labor rules were maintained entirely by the force of habit and tradition, entirely by the authority or respect enjoyed by the patriarch or women (at that time women often not only stood on an equal footing with men, but sometimes occupied an even higher position), without a special rank of people who dealt exclusively with administration.”[76] Ancient Chinese texts also recorded the situation of such a society: “Under Shennong there were no regulations and the people followed him”[77], “Governed without using punishment or administration, and ruled as king without raising armor and troops”[78].
This was the situation during the flourishing period of primitive society. The main creative achievements and contributions to social production and life at this stage should be credited to women. Primitive agriculture developed out of the gathering economy handled by women; in the process of gathering wild plants, through long observation and practice, they finally domesticated wild plants and invented the method of cultivating crops artificially. As the yield of the new crops increased and stabilized day by day, their quantity surpassed the food obtained from hunting and fishing and became the people’s regular food. Women not only invented primitive agriculture, but also were responsible for pottery production and continuously improved pottery techniques. At the Yangshao culture site[79], which reflects communal life in the matrilineal clan period of ancient China, a large number of pottery vessels with complex patterns have been found, and there are even many painted pottery pieces, combining high practicality with artistry. These are all creations of laboring women.
Laboring women created agriculture, bringing human history into a new stage.
The society created by laboring women had always been inclusive and friendly toward men, in sharp contrast to the oppression and enslavement that male-dominated patrilineal society later imposed on women. Since private property and the individual family destroyed the matrilineal clan household and developed patriarchy and slavery, women’s status declined steadily. It was not until violence, fraud, theft, and betrayal completely destroyed the classless clan society that humanity opened a new and “civilized” class society, reducing women completely to the sexual slaves and domestic slaves of husbands in monogamous individual families. “The status of women and workers has many similarities, but women preceded workers by one step; that is to say, women were the first slaves among humankind. Women became slaves long before slaves appeared.”[80] Facing all this, how could any unbiased and upright person fail to oppose the thousands of years of oppression imposed upon women? Faced with these women who once created splendid ancient human civilization and enabled men to enjoy the benefits of that civilization, should we demand that they be oppressed by male privilege? If we acknowledge that communism means abolishing all oppression and exploitation, how could we still preserve oppression and exploitation of women? Those who oppress others cannot achieve liberation themselves; the proletariat can only ultimately liberate itself by abolishing all oppression and exploitation. Therefore every proletarian ought to unconditionally support women and eliminate gender oppression.
“All that exists deserves to perish.”[81] The ancient matrilineal clan society, although free from oppression and enslavement, was by no means the “golden age” of human society. Under low productive forces, people struggled to survive; social activity was limited to narrow clans and tribes, and people were to a large extent still dominated by natural forces. Low productive forces meant that people could only maintain basic production and life through collective cooperation; this was the prerequisite for the clan organization to be maintained. As productive forces further developed, surplus products began to appear, making private appropriation of social wealth possible. On the other hand, the development of productive forces promoted changes in relations of production, gradually turning the possibility of private appropriation of social wealth into reality, and private property emerged. The expression and result of rising labor productivity was further refinement of division of labor and higher levels of production specialization. Labor that in the past could only be done collectively could now be undertaken by a few people or even a single person. Under the new conditions of production, individual labor adapted to the trend of specialized division of labor, helped each person to bring their strengths into play, rapidly accumulate production experience, improve production technology, and represented a higher level of productive forces. Individual labor gradually replaced collective labor and became the universal form of labor in clan communities. Naturally, individual labor opposed the public ownership of means of production, because it was inconvenient for “flexible” individual labor and therefore demanded that the means of production be placed in individual hands; at the same time, the gradual universalization of individual labor made its contribution to production surpass collective labor, and people therefore demanded that the old system of equal distribution and common consumption in clan communities be changed and that private appropriation of social wealth be legally recognized. While improving productive forces, specialization of division of labor also widened the differences in labor capacity among different laborers; under conditions in which private-property factors were constantly growing, this partly led to the emergence of class distinctions.[82]
The Mosuo are a branch of the Naxi ethnic minority in the southwest of China. Among the Mosuo there exists a kind of relatively loose male-female union called “walking marriage” (zǒuhūn). Walking marriage is a form of pairing marriage in matrilineal clan society; women do not leave their original family, and children belong to the mother’s side. Mosuo women enjoy relatively high status, and the maternal uncle rather than the father is the closest male relative to Mosuo children.
So what impact did all this have on women’s status? As we already know from the above, in primitive society people were linked by blood, and the clan household was the basic unit through which people produced and lived together. But as individual labor gradually became widespread, and more detailed division of labor appeared and stabilized, the basic unit of common production and common life also inevitably had to shrink. Thus, the individual marriage system and the individual family appeared. The earliest individual marriage system was not stable; within such a marital relation, one man had one principal wife among a group of wives, and one woman had one principal husband among a group of husbands. Obviously, this was the product of the transition from group marriage in primitive society to individual marriage; this earliest unstable individual marriage system was called pairing. Under pairing marriage, a pairing-family was formed. As the name implies, it is composed of a pair of spouses (whose union is not very stable). Pairing was the product of the development of productive forces and also the product of private-property factors; it created the individual family, a thing opposed to clan organization, and thus had a disintegrating effect on clan organization. The key point is that the individual family existing alongside the clan large family destroyed the respected, equal status women once had with men, gradually turning them into domestic slaves. The natural division of labor between the sexes did not change much; the difference was that because primitive agriculture’s output kept increasing, men also joined this sector. As many mediocre people today have invented and deeply believe, men’s status rose and even surpassed women’s because they were physically stronger and pushed women out of agricultural production. But the facts are by no means so! Women, as before, mainly handled housework, but in the past housework within the clan large family was labor carried out for the whole society, and it naturally received people’s respect and social recognition. But with the emergence of the individual family, women’s housework became labor done for a tiny family. Society absolutely does not recognize the labor of the individual family as social labor; even the husband himself who enjoys the fruits of that labor does not recognize that the wife’s housework qualifies as labor.[83] In addition, with the continuous progress of productive forces and the ever-growing population, the housework women had to shoulder became increasingly heavy, making it less and less possible for them to participate in social labor outside the small family. In this way, the social labor sector was monopolized by men, and social labor became the male monopoly. Worse still, the public ownership of common production and common consumption in primitive society had already gradually collapsed, and what people obtained from social labor was no longer social products equally shared by clan members but property privately appropriated by each. The result of all this was that men who monopolized social labor became the masters of the economic lifeline in the individual family, and “all dependence and oppression in society come from the economic dependence of the oppressed upon the oppressor.”[84] Women therefore inevitably became the sexual slaves, domestic slaves, and reproductive tools of husbands.
Although, because of private property, the individual family from its very beginning became a place where men oppressed women, pairing marriage was not stable, and husbands in pairing families could not do whatever they wanted with their wives. Because the pairing family was only a stage in the transition from group marriage to individual marriage, not a completely individual family. Pairing families existed in the late period of matriarchal society, when the clan large family still existed alongside the individual family, women were still protected by the clan large family, and lineage was still inherited through the maternal line. The individual family had not yet become an independent social economic unit, and it was not yet necessary; people could still directly live a life of collective labor and collective consumption within the clan community, and therefore women did not have absolute economic dependence on the husband in the individual family. If the husband abused the wife, or if he could not increase the collective wealth of the clan, the wife could at any time divorce him, and even make the husband leave the clan and expel him—because women were still the主体 of the clan. Of course, this does not mean any privilege of women. Here, women’s purpose in divorce was only to oppose male privilege or to oppose private-property ideas that encroached on collective interests. The opposition and unity of private property and public ownership, the opposition and unity of the clan large family and the individual small family, and the opposition and unity of male oppression and female resistance to oppression constituted the main content of the historical transition from matriarchy to patriarchy in the pairing period (the late matrilineal clan society). But motion is absolute and rest is relative; the struggle of contradictions is bound to end in victory for one side and defeat for the other. At that time, the inevitable product of the individual labor and individual family brought into being by productive development was patriarchy, and thus patriarchy defeated matriarchy.
According to Engels’s analysis, the direct cause of human society’s transition from pairing to monogamy—that is, patriarchy replacing matriarchy—was men’s demand to change the inheritance of property. On the one hand, in matrilineal clan society, lineage was inherited through the female bloodline, and property had to return to the clan of maternal relatives. On the other hand, in the late matrilineal clan society, because of individual labor, the individual family, and changes in the division of labor between men and women, private property owned by men emerged, and the amount of this property increased day by day with the growth of productive forces. But private property controlled by men, according to the law of inheritance through the maternal line, could not be passed on to their own children (because they did not belong to the man’s clan), but had to be passed on to the man’s own brothers and sisters or to the children of his brothers and sisters (because they belonged to the man’s clan). Of course, according to the customs of matrilineal clan society, this had been done for thousands or even tens of thousands of years, and men in the past had never objected. That was because there simply was no private property at that time; basically all material means were publicly owned by society, and there was no question of inheritance of private property. But now the situation was different. Private property held by men belonged to themselves and not to the clan, and of course they hoped to pass it to their own children to ensure the continuation of the individual family and their own control over their children.[85] Thus patriarchy finally replaced matriarchy. The clan changed to inheriting property through the male bloodline, matrilineal clan communities died out, and patrilineal clan communities emerged. All people reorganized the commune according to the paternal bloodline, and at the same time monogamous marriage and patriarchal family also became established.
“The overthrow of matriarchy was the world-historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the house too; the woman was degraded, enslaved, became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for breeding children… The first result of this one-man-rule that had now been established showed itself in the intermediate form of the patriarchal family that now arose… The essential character of this family is the inclusion of unfree persons and paternal authority; therefore the perfect type of this family form is the family of the Romans. The word Familia did not originally mean the modern philistine ideal of a compound of sentimentality and family quarrels; among the Romans it did not even denote the married couple and their children, but only slaves. Famulus means a household slave, and familia means the whole body of slaves belonging to one man… This family form indicates the transition from pairing marriage to monogamy. In order to ensure the wife’s chastity, and thus ensure that the child was born from a certain father, the wife was placed under the absolute power of the husband; even if he killed her, that was merely the exercise of his right.”[86]
Monogamy is the result of patriarchy replacing matriarchy, and the family corresponding to this marriage system is the patriarchal family. Because men occupy an absolutely dominant economic position in the family, women’s housework is not socially recognized, yet they are forced to bear this labor. In addition, women have completely lost the protection of the clan large family, and thus became the earliest slaves in the world—the slaves of their husbands. Likewise, for the patriarch, not only the wife is a slave, but the children are also slaves; they are merely the patriarch’s property, because the children are likewise completely economically dependent on the patriarch, and the patriarch can just as easily kill the children as he can kill the wife, which is usually regarded as “merely exercising his power.” From here we can already see the shadow of the “civilized” Confucianism that China has inherited for more than two thousand years—“the ruler as the standard for the minister, the father as the standard for the son, the husband as the standard for the wife.” Confucianism truly deserves to be the product of the purest slave civilization, to the point that all exploiting classes throughout history have tried to preserve it; its vitality is even strong enough to be revived in China today. To take the patriarchal slavery of more than two thousand years ago as “civilization” and carry it forward, no wonder today’s China is still regarded by “democratic” countries as the last uncivilized barbarian land of the capitalist world.
Monogamy itself is only a one-sided restriction on women, because the husband must ensure the chastity of the wife, thereby ensuring that the child definitely comes from his own bloodline. “It is built upon the husband’s rule, and its obvious purpose is to produce children with an unquestionably definite father; and determining that the father is definitely so-and-so is necessary because the children are to inherit their father’s property in the capacity of his own legitimate heirs. The difference between a monogamous family and pairing marriage lies in the fact that the marital relation is much more solid, and this relation can no longer be dissolved at will by both sides. In this case, the usual rule is that only the husband can dissolve the marriage and abandon his wife. Violating marital fidelity remains the husband’s right… and with the further development of society, this right is exercised ever more widely…”[87]
Along with private property and private-property consciousness came not only patriarchy but also slavery. Because the emergence of surplus products made the value created by labor power exceed the value consumed by it, the use of slave labor became profitable. Thus, men who already occupied economic superiority in both society and family were able not only to enslave their own wives, but also to enslave women in society. The higher the economic position men occupy in society, the more they can treat women as property, as a resource, and appropriate and enslave more women. “It is precisely the coexistence of slavery and monogamy, and the existence of young, beautiful female slaves completely subject to the male will, that gave monogamy from the start its special character, making it monogamy only for women and not for men. This character it retains to this day.” Therefore, polygamy is nothing more than a variant of monogamy and a privilege of the wealthy and the dignitaries.
“” The earliest class antagonism appearing in history coincided with the development of antagonism between husband and wife under individual marriage, and the first class oppression coincided with the oppression of women by men. Individual marriage was a great historical advance, but at the same time, together with slavery and private property, it opened up an era that continues to this day, an era in which every progress simultaneously represents a relative regression, because in this progress the happiness and development of some are achieved through the pain and suppression of others."
Slave society, feudal society, and capitalist society—the succession of social formations—merely changed the method by which men rule women in relation to monogamy, but never restricted men’s de facto polygamy. Male domination over women was super-economic coercion before capitalism and economic coercion after capitalism. In other words, rape in the past was premised on possession of the person, but now it is carried out with money. With the spread of the capitalist principle of commodity exchange itself, monogamous marriage has increasingly become open, legal prostitution.
“Everything that is considered criminal on the woman’s side and gives rise to serious legal and social consequences is considered by the man to be a matter of honor, or at most only a moral blemish that can be accepted with pleasure. But the ever-present promiscuous system, under the influence of capitalist commodity production, changes more and more, adapts more and more to capitalist commodity production, and becomes more and more blatant prostitution; its moral corrosive effect therefore becomes greater and greater. And its moral corruption of men is far more severe than its corruption of women. Prostitution only causes the unfortunate women among them to fall, and even they do not fall to the extent usually imagined. On the contrary, it corrupts the character of all men.”
“Actually, that is not the woman’s crime, but precisely her misery. This social system crushes her into all sorts of slaves and still adds every kind of accusation to her… A society based on private ownership originally treats women too as private property, as commodities. It regards women as some kind of unlucky animal… while at the same time wanting her to be the toy of the upper classes… Naturally, all sorts of prostitution include women’s share. But buying and selling involves both sides. If there were no men buying prostitution, where would there be women selling prostitution? So the issue lies in the social roots of buying prostitution.” (Lu Xun: About Women)
Anyone who does not look at women through the lens of a brothel should give women the minimum respect, rather than treating them as sexual tools—much less we Marxists. But regrettably, as Engels said, the thousands of years of gender oppression in class society and the accompanying prostitution phenomenon have corrupted the character of all men, to the point that they are prevented from treating women as independent, equal human beings. If we truly want to shoulder the heavy responsibility of revolution, we must help women realize their own liberation, and must first take off the brothel glasses that thousands of years of patriarchal society have placed on us. No matter how flowery one’s words may be, if one does not oppose gender oppression and pornography-minded thinking, then one absolutely cannot be called a Marxist.
Our country’s greatest revolutionary writer—Lu Xun—was also a great Marxist. Lu Xun’s writings have always combined a high degree of political and artistic quality; with prose like spears and arrows, he fiercely attacked China’s reactionary feudal ethics and cut a bloody path. As a revolutionary writer, Lu Xun has always been known for supporting women’s liberation; in this respect he can be said to be a moral model for Marxists. From the following article, The Evolution of Men, one can appreciate Lu Xun’s profound mastery of Marxist-Leninist theory and literary and artistic cultivation, and even more clearly see the attitude a Marxist should have toward gender oppression.
To say that sexual union among beasts is love would be somewhat sacrilegious. But it cannot be denied that beasts also have sexual life. In their breeding season, when the female and male meet, they inevitably have a little “coquettish” affair. Of course, the female sometimes also puts on an act, runs a few steps and then turns back to look, and calls out a few times, until they actually engage in “living together love.” Although there are many kinds of beasts, and their “love” methods are complex, there is one thing beyond doubt: the male does not necessarily have any privilege.*
Human beings are the spirit of all things; first of all, this means men are capable. At first it was rather haphazard, but because of the fact that they “knew the mother but not the father,” women once “ruled” for a period, and at that time the old grandmothers were probably more formidable than later clan chiefs. Later, for some unknown reason, women came to misfortune: on the neck, hands, and feet they were all locked with chains, fastened with rings and hoops—although after thousands of years most of these rings and hoops have turned into gold and silver, inlaid with pearls and jewels, these collars, bracelets, rings, etc. are still symbols of female slaves today. Since women became slaves, then men did not need to seek their consent before going to “love” them. In wars between ancient tribes, captives would become slaves, and female captives would be raped. At that time, the breeding season probably had already been “canceled,” and at any time and place the male master could rape female captives and female slaves. Modern thieves and rogues’ not treating women as human beings is actually a great inheritance of chieftain-style bushido.*
However, although rape is already a step in the “evolution” of man beyond beasts, it is still only semi-civilized. Think about it: how much interest can there be if the woman is crying, twisting her hands and feet? Since the precious thing called money appeared, men’s evolution has really become remarkable. Everything under heaven can be bought and sold, and sexual desire is naturally no exception. A man can spend a few dirty coins to get what he wants from a woman. Moreover, he can say to her: I am not raping you; you are doing this voluntarily. You are willing to take some money, so you must behave like this and obey completely; we are making a fair trade! After trampling her, he even wants her to say “thank you, young master.” Could beasts do this? Therefore prostitution is a fairly high stage in male evolution.*
At the same time, the old-style marriage of parental command and matchmaker’s word is even more clever than prostitution. Under this system, a man gets a permanent, lifelong piece of living property. When the bride is placed on the groom’s bed, she has only obligations; she does not even have the freedom to bargain, let alone love. Whether you love it or not, in the name of the sages ZHOU Gong and Confucius you must be faithful to one and only one spouse, and you must preserve chastity. The man can use her at any time, while she must observe the ethical teachings of the sages; even if “she only harbored evil thoughts in her heart,” she is counted as having committed adultery. If male dogs used such clever and harsh methods on female dogs, the female ones would surely be so anxious as to “jump the wall.” Yet human beings only know how to jump into wells and become chaste wives, virtuous women, and faithful widows. The evolutionary significance of ethical marriage can be imagined from this.*
As for men using the “most scientific” doctrine to make women, even without ethical codes, willingly remain faithful to one partner and firmly believe that sexual desire is merely “animal desire” and should not be the basic condition of love, and therefore invent “scientific chastity”—that of course is the pinnacle of civilized evolution.*
Alas, humans—men—are what distinguish them from beasts!*
Author’s note: This article is one about upholding orthodoxy.*
September 3.*
The basis of monogamy in the historical sense is private ownership of property. As noted above, it was precisely the emergence of private ownership, individual marriage, and the individual family that gave rise to monogamy, which presupposes the male’s economic dominance in the family and aims at possessing and inheriting private property. Conversely, establishing a patriarchal family that enslaves wives and children is conditional; it requires money. In families without private property, there is no condition for husbands to enslave wives and children, and no motive for doing so. Therefore, “only among the oppressed classes, and today that means among the proletariat, can sexual love become and in fact become the usual relation toward women, whether or not such a relation is officially recognized.” The class position of the proletariat determines that proletarian marriage can be based on love, and that proletarian monogamy can become monogamy in the nominal sense, rather than monogamy in the historical sense. “In addition, ever since large-scale industry has forced women out of the home into the labor market and factories, and often made them the providers for the family, in the proletarian family, except for perhaps some remnants of the abuse of wives that has taken root since the appearance of monogamy, the last remnants of male domination have also lost any basis.” Because participation in social labor gives women an independent economic position, equality between husband and wife and love in the proletarian family can thus become reality.
As noted above, the reason women lost their independent status is that since the establishment of the individual family, housework lost its social character, making the wife the domestic servant of the husband and excluding her from social production. Therefore, only when women are liberated from housework and participate in social labor can they obtain a status equal to men. Even the bourgeois historian Lü Simian in the Republican era saw this very clearly; he said: “The communal system is a friend of women; the family system is an enemy of women. Therefore the slogan ‘women return to the family’ would of course only be shouted by those who want to turn history backward. Some also say that today’s female students are bad and not as good as women of the old style, because they are unfamiliar with domestic management. They do not know that this is precisely the sign of modern women’s progress. For they are unfamiliar with domestic management, but skilled in participating in social work. This is precisely the sign that small, selfish, self-interested organizations are gradually being destroyed; large, fair, and fraternal systems are gradually being formed. A virtuous mother and good wife is only a virtuous slave and good servant. We should teach all men and women the ambition of putting the world in common, and an organization vast and boundless.”[88]
However, if our understanding of gender oppression and women’s liberation stops here, then we are not Marxists, but bourgeois democrats. Lü Simian’s opposition to the bondage and oppression imposed on women by the family system was progressive, of course, but his purpose was merely to allow women to be “equal” with men in social exploitation. Capitalist large-scale production, while creating many proletarians, also creates a large number of female workers, thereby creating the conditions for the emergence of the modern women’s liberation movement. But capitalism itself will never abolish gender oppression; on the contrary, because its nature as a society of private ownership still requires strengthening gender oppression. In fact, patriarchy still stubbornly exists in capitalist society, and the same is true in proletarian families. Because private property still exists, the individual family remains the basic economic unit in society. So long as the individual family continues to exist as an economic unit, housework that is not socially recognized will also continue to exist. Women who bear this housework either cannot participate in social labor or can only participate in social labor to a very limited extent, so they still cannot escape the status of domestic slaves. “The first precondition for the liberation of women is that all women must return to public labor; and to achieve this, the individual family must cease to be the economic unit of society.” Only proletarian revolution is the only way to truly realize women’s liberation. Because proletarian revolution will abolish all private property and private domestic labor. In communist society, because private property and class distinctions are abolished, men will no longer have the conditions or necessity to oppress women; love will become the sole basis of all marriage, and the family will no longer be the basic economic unit, but merely a unit of life formed by equals who love one another. At that time, all housework will be socialized, and publicly managed canteens, nurseries, nursing homes, laundries, and other public facilities organized by the whole society will thoroughly eliminate housework as private labor and completely liberate women from the status of domestic slaves. These policies of women’s liberation were already realized to a large extent in the socialist Soviet Union and socialist China in the past. Future proletarian revolution will realize these women’s liberation policies completely and thoroughly.
To put it in one sentence: only by realizing social liberation can women’s liberation be realized. All oppressed women should awaken: love, marriage, and family in the old world are only shackles and prisons for women; only by joining the great cause of proletarian revolution can they obtain complete liberation and freedom.
“Only by liberating all humanity can the proletariat itself finally be liberated.”
Not only that, women’s liberation is absolutely necessary for proletarian revolution as well. Today remains the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution; the three major contradictions of imperialism are becoming increasingly acute, and the people are increasingly dissatisfied with the rule of the monopoly bourgeoisie. Even relying on barbaric violence and decadent spiritual opium, imperialism can no longer maintain its rule without difficulty. The proletariat must accumulate strength and prepare for new battles; we Marxists must mobilize this great force that makes up half of the world’s population—the broad masses of women—to take part in revolutionary struggle. Laboring women are the earliest oppressed who became slaves in the world; they are the most deeply oppressed, the most full of fighting spirit, and the most revolutionary-potentially powerful ranks in patriarchal capitalist society. Patriarchy over thousands of years was never a natural law, but an oppressive system based on private property; today it has likewise become the basis of private property. The suffering of women over thousands of years was never destiny, but the inevitable result of class society maintaining its own existence. Today, the new crisis of capitalism and the increasingly intensified reactionary rule of imperialism are pushing countless women into even more poverty and humiliation. At the same time, precisely this doubled humiliation and torment are pushing women back into the front lines of revolutionary struggle.
Without women’s liberation, there can be no social liberation; without the strength of women, complete social revolution cannot be realized. When women awaken from thousands of years of oppression and break the chains imposed by patriarchy and enter the ranks of revolutionary struggle, then the end of the old world will not be far off. Women are not appendages of revolution, but the true force that determines revolutionary victory or defeat. Since patriarchy is the first shackle imposed by class society on human civilization, then the struggle to eliminate patriarchy will inevitably become the first bugle call for the elimination of all oppression and exploitation. To stand on the side of women is to stand on the side of historical progress. To oppose women’s liberation is to oppose proletarian revolution itself. We must, together with the broad masses of women, thoroughly bury the old world and build a new society without exploitation or oppression.
Proletarians and laboring women of the whole world, unite!
[①]Lenin: What Is to Be Done?, Selected Works of Lenin, Vol. 1, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[②]Marx: Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 1, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[③]Flame: The Road of China’s Future Revolution.
[④]Never Forget, Beijing Film Studio, 1964.
[⑤]Lenin: What Is to Be Done?, Selected Works of Lenin, Vol. 1, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[⑥]Mao Zedong: Oppose Liberalism, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, single-volume edition, People’s Publishing House, 1967.
[⑦]Mao Zedong: In Memory of Norman Bethune, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, single-volume edition, People’s Publishing House, 1967.
[⑧]Zhang Chunqiao: Knock Down Vulgar Taste, Dragon Flower Collection, Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 1960.
[⑨]Lenin: What Is to Be Done?, Selected Works of Lenin, Vol. 1, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[⑩]Basic classes refer to the classes that establish the mode of production that occupies the dominant position in society; without them that mode of production cannot exist. For example, in slave society, the basic classes are the slave class and the slave-owner class; in feudal society, the basic classes are the peasant class and the landlord class; in capitalist society, the basic classes are the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Non-basic classes refer to classes other than the basic classes in a given social formation. For example, small producers and freemen in slave society, the petty bourgeoisie and landowners (landlords) in capitalist society, etc.
[11]Mao Zedong: On Practice, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, single-volume edition, People’s Publishing House, 1967.
[12]Thomas Dunning: Trade Unions and Strikes.
[13]According to Marxist political economy, the economic category of capital has three definitions: 1. capital is value that brings surplus value; 2. capital is a relation of exploitation under capitalism, namely the exploitative relation whereby the bourgeoisie controls the means of production and uses wage labor to exploit the surplus value of the proletariat; 3. capital is a cyclical movement carried out in sequence.
Capital in its circulation and turnover assumes three forms, and there are three forms of the circulation of capital; see Marx’s Capital or Xu He’s Introduction to Political Economy.
[14]Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto, Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 1, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[15]Same as above.
[16]Marx: Reflections of a Young Man on Choosing a Career.
[17]Marx: Capital, Vol. 1, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[18]Yang Zhu: “Not even plucking one hair if it would benefit the world.” (Mencius, “Jinxin I”)
[19] History Department of Peking University, Concise World History: Modern Part, People’s Publishing House, 1974.
[20]Lenin: Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Selected Works of Lenin, Vol. 4, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[21]Machiavelli: The Prince.
[22]Editorial Department of People’s Daily and Editorial Department of Red Flag magazine: Two Lines on War and Peace—Five Reviews of the Open Letter of the Central Committee of the CPSU, October 22, 1963.
[23]Anarchism, Trotskyism, and Western Marxism are all petty-bourgeois opportunist trends and therefore all clearly reflect the characteristics of opposing proletarian authority and opposing proletarian dictatorship. They proclaim themselves the sole representatives of revolution and truth, but in fact they offer people only the most conventional bourgeois idealism and metaphysics.
[24]Li Da: Outline of Marxist Philosophy, Vol. 1, 1965.
[25]Marx: Capital, Vol. 1, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
In the 1830s, the French and British bourgeoisie completely defeated the feudal landlord class and seized power. In 1830, the July Revolution broke out in France; the Bourbon dynasty representing the interests of the feudal landlord class fell, and the Orléans dynasty representing the financial aristocracy and the big bourgeoisie came to power. In 1832, the British parliamentary reform favored the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie while excluding the landed aristocracy.
[26]Lenin: Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Selected Works of Lenin, Vol. 4, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[27]Mao Zedong: Talk with American Journalist Anna Louise Strong, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, single-volume edition, People’s Publishing House, 1967.
[28]Engels: The Movement for the Defense of the Imperial Constitution in Germany, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 7, People’s Publishing House, 1959.
[29]Mao Zedong: On the Coalition Government, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, single-volume edition, People’s Publishing House, 1967.
[30]Lenin: Concluding Remarks on the Political Report of the Central Committee of the RCP(B), Eleventh Congress of the RCP(B), Complete Works of Lenin, Vol. 33, People’s Publishing House, 1957.
[31]Stalin: Against Vulgarizing the Slogan of Self-Criticism, Stalin Collected Works, Vol. 11.
[32]Mao Zedong: Rectify the Party’s Style of Work, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, single-volume edition, People’s Publishing House, 1967.
[33]Zhang Chunqiao: Knock Down Vulgar Taste, Dragon Flower Collection.
[34]Ke Qingshi: Ride the Wind and Break the Waves, Accelerate the Construction of a New Socialist Shanghai!
[35]Mao Zedong: Serve the People, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Vol. 3, People’s Publishing House, 1967.
[36]Mao Zedong: On Correctly Handling Contradictions Among the People, Selected Works of Mao Zedong (single-volume edition).
[37]Things contain two opposing factors within themselves: affirmative factors and negative factors. Affirmative factors are the factors that determine the nature of a thing and maintain its existence; they are the positive side of the thing. Negative factors are factors contrary to the nature of the thing; they are the factors that drive the thing to perish, the negative side of the thing. The development of a thing reaching a stage in contradictory motion is necessarily caused by the negative factors representing the new thing defeating the original affirmative factors, leading to the demise of the old form, and then through a further process of negation developing to the negation of the negation, entering a new affirmative stage. Negation in this process may have positive significance or negative significance, but on the whole the trend is necessarily the realization of a leap through positive negation.
[38]Correspondingly, in the three major domains of nature, society, and human thought there exist natural laws, social laws, and laws of thought respectively; natural laws and social laws are both laws of the material world, and thought itself is a product of the long development of the material world and a reflection of objective existence, so the laws of thought are also consistent with the laws of the material world.
[39]The theory of cataclysm originally referred to a theory of biological evolution by the 19th-century French natural scientist Cuvier. At that time geology and paleontology had developed greatly, and people discovered fossils of different species in different strata, providing strong evidence for Darwin’s theory of evolution. But Cuvier perversely argued that the development of all species had never “gone beyond its own limits” (that is, the limits set by God), and that there was no kinship between species in different eras. He claimed that the fossils of different organisms in different strata were the result of continuous “cataclysms” in the natural environment, and that each cataclysm was a punishment sent down by God. Cuvier’s theory of cataclysm was closely tied to the interests of the feudal church and to the “God created the world” doctrine, a form of idealism that had a very bad influence.
[40]Kobayashi Takiji: March 15, 1928, Selected Works of Kobayashi Takiji, Vol. 1, People’s Literature Publishing House, 1958.
[41]Lenin: Marxism and Revisionism, Selected Works of Lenin, Vol. 2, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[42]The continuous introduction of supernatural and weird elements, such changes in content, require the form of capitalist spiritual opium to change accordingly with its content; the result of this change is two-dimensionality—the high degree of fusion in the imperialist era of supernatural elements with exaggerated comic and animated art forms. Two-dimensionality is not an art form; it does not refer simply to comic or animated art forms, nor is it content without a specific form. It is not ordinary bourgeois ideology; it is the combination of the reactionary ideological system of bourgeois development to the extreme and a specific exaggerated animation/comic art form. Two-dimensional works have their own specific forms; two-dimensional form manifests differently under different content. In pornographic content, it is the deliberate emphasis and exaggeration of sexual characteristics; in violent content, it is extreme distortion of limbs and unimaginable destructive special effects—things that cannot be expressed by realistic artistic methods, and therefore especially match the bourgeois supernatural setup.
[43]Appearance/reflection (xiang), refers to the reproduction of the image of objective objects that once acted upon the senses, that is, the reproduction of perception. The existence of appearance is not conditioned on the objective object directly acting on the senses.
[44] Mao Zedong, cited in The Theoretical Weapon for Carrying Out Revolution Under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Red Flag magazine, 1967, issue 10.
[45]Lenin: Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Selected Works of Lenin, Vol. 4, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[46]Same as above.
[47]Mao Zedong, cited in People’s Daily Editorial Department: Comrade Mao Zedong on Imperialism and All Reactionaries as Paper Tigers, People’s Publishing House, 1958.
[48]Lenin: State and Revolution, Selected Works of Lenin, Vol. 3, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[49]Principles of Marxism-Leninism, Vol. 1, Life · Reading · New Knowledge Tri-Service Bookstore, 1960.
[50]Lenin: The Tasks of the Youth League, Selected Works of Lenin, Vol. 4, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[51]Han Fei: Han Feizi · Wudu.
[52 ]Marx: Theories of Surplus Value, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 26, Part 3, People’s Publishing House.
[53]Mao Zedong: On Practice, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, single-volume edition, People’s Publishing House, 1967.
[54]Mao Zedong: Oppose Party Eight-Legged Essays, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, single-volume edition, People’s Publishing House, 1967.
[55]Mao Zedong: On Contradiction, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, single-volume edition, People’s Publishing House, 1967.
[56]Mao Zedong: Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, single-volume edition, People’s Publishing House, 1967.
[57]Mao Zedong: The Work of the Youth League Must Take Into Account the Characteristics of Youth.
[58]Thälmann, cited in Irma Thälmann: Recollections of My Father Thälmann, Juvenile and Children’s Publishing House, 1955.
[59]Flame: Report of the Third Congress of the Association for the Liberation Struggle of the Proletariat in 2022.
[60]Engels: On the History of the Communist League, Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 4, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[61]Lenin: The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement, Complete Works of Lenin, Vol. 4, People’s Publishing House, 1958.
[62]Lenin: The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism, Selected Works of Lenin, Vol. 2, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[63]Lenin: Marxism and Revisionism, Selected Works of Lenin, Vol. 2, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[64]This is a relatively complex question. Private ownership as a social system does not denote the relation between people and things (property), but the relation between people and people; the essence of private ownership is the recognition of individual appropriation of social labor. According to Marxist political economy, labor is both individual labor and social labor. But in the contradictory relation between individual labor and social labor, social labor occupies the principal aspect. Because human beings are social animals, the essence of human beings is the sum of social relations, and people exist in social motion. Labor is the activity by which human beings consciously transform the objective world, and from the beginning it has been carried out through group cooperation; detached from society, there is simply no such thing as labor. Therefore, no one whatsoever has the right to appropriate social labor as his private property; from this it can be seen that private ownership violates the laws of human social development. But since a society of private ownership recognizes the right of the individual to dominate social labor, it inevitably also recognizes oppression and exploitation, because exploitation itself is the appropriation of one person’s labor by another, while oppression is the use by the oppressor of the labor he controls to suppress the oppressed. The petty bourgeoisie recognizes private ownership and thus recognizes the rationality of exploitation; they then proceed from possessing their own labor to possessing the labor of others, even if they have not yet exploited anyone at present. The proletariat’s so-called “having no property” does not mean that they possess and consume no material wealth, but that they have no right to appropriate social labor and do not recognize such a right; therefore the proletariat is the most advanced and most selfless class.
[65]Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto, Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 1, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[66]Marx: Marx to Pavel Vasilievich Annenkov (December 28, 1846), Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 10, People’s Publishing House, 2009.
[67]Lenin: The Great Initiative, Selected Works of Lenin, Vol. 4, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[68] Lenin: Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Selected Works of Lenin, Vol. 4, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[69]Lenin: The Great Initiative, Selected Works of Lenin, Vol. 4, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[70]Marx: Theses on Feuerbach, Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 1, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[71] Stalin: The Russian Social-Democratic Party and Its Current Tasks, Stalin Collected Works, Vol. 1.
[72] Hong Rengan: Declaration to the Civil and Military Officials and Soldiers Inside and Outside the Capital, Hong Baozhi of the King’s Righteous Army.
[73]Hong Rengan: Imperially Approved Military Campaign Records.
[74]Engels: Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 3, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[75]Engels: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 4, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[76 ]Lenin: On the State, Selected Works of Lenin, Vol. 4, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[77]Huainanzi · Fanlun Xun.
[78]Book of Lord Shang · Huace.
[79 ]During the socialist period, Yangshao culture was generally recognized as a matrilineal clan society. After capitalist restoration, the periodization of Yangshao culture became a matter of controversy and was designated as possibly early patrilineal clan society. The reason given is that in the late Yangshao culture there appeared adult male-female joint burials, adult male-child joint burials, and a large number of small house sites (according to experts, this is proof of monogamy), but the author considers this untrustworthy. The changes in burial customs in the late Yangshao culture precisely reflect the customs of pairing marriage in the late matrilineal clan society. Clearly, Yangshao culture should be regarded as a typical flourishing period of the matrilineal clan.
[80]August Bebel: Woman and Socialism.
[81]Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 4, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[82]The reason it is said that differences in labor capacity partly led to the emergence of class differences is that the emergence of class differences is also related to clan chiefs and military leaders using their authority to seize public property, as well as the continuous development of commodity exchange.
[83]“Just think for a moment: in the past, in the old days, what kind of people were women exactly? When a woman was still a girl, she was regarded as the lowest among laborers. She worked nonstop for her father, but when her father scolded her he would still say: ‘I feed you.’ After she was married, she had to work for her husband, and whatever the husband wanted her to do, she had to do, and when he scolded her he would still say: ‘I feed you.’ Rural women used to be the lowest among laborers. Of course, under such conditions, labor heroines could not possibly emerge among peasant women. At that time, for women, labor was a cursed thing, and they had to avoid it by any means.” (Stalin: Speech at the Reception of Women Shock Workers of Sugar Beet Plantations in Kolkhozes by Leaders of the Party and Government (November 10, 1935), Stalin Collected Works, Vol. 14.)
[84]August Bebel: Woman and Socialism.
[85]The large family of primitive society, under the communal ownership of primitive communism, linked all family members together through the economic relations of collective labor and collective consumption. Correspondingly, the individual family also needed a bond linking family members, and it also needed an economic relation; this is the inheritance relation of private property. In a society of private ownership, there are interests in conflict between everyone, making people hostile to one another; only common interests can temporarily ease this conflict. The contradiction between property inheritance rights and support obligations established the deepest economic connection between the patriarch and the children in the private-property individual family, temporarily making all family members part of a common-interest community and “uniting” them for the sake of maintaining and expanding family property as that common interest. But at the same time, the patriarch’s economically dominant position in the family allowed him to use inheritance rights as a tool to control the children at any time. Moreover, for the patriarch, children without the right to inherit property were outside this common-interest community, that is, they did not count as family members in the strict sense (in patriarchal society, daughters were generally excluded; marriage into the husband’s family was a special case).
[86]Engels: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 4, People’s Publishing House, 1972.
[87]Same as above.
[88]Lü Simian: History of China, Part One, Chapter One, Marriage.
