To My Comrades
#PUBLICATION NOTE
This edition of To My Comrades has been prepared and revised for digital publication by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism under the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Switzerland on the basis of the edition published on the website wengewang.org.
#INTRODUCTION NOTE
This is a letter from Comrade Mao Zedong to the Third Plenary Session of the Tenth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China dictated in Beijing, China between the 26th of August and 5th of September, 1976. It was first published on the website wengewang.org.
The Third Plenary Session of the Party's Tenth Central Committee was probably supposed to have been held at Shaoshan, Hunan Province after the 15th of September, 1976, when Comrade Mao Zedong was scheduled to relocate there due to his health situation. Comrade Jiang Qing was to preside over the Plenary Session, and Mao Yuanxin to deliver the Report of the Second Political Bureau. However, due to the death of Comrade Mao Zedong, the Plenary Session was never held; the so-called «Third Plenary Session» held in 1977 only served to sanction the October 1976 counter-revolutionary State coup in violation of Communist principles and the Party Constitution, and was thus illegitimate.
The letter was dictated by Comrade Mao Zedong to an unknown official during his last days. He was quite ill and difficult to understand correctly, requiring interpreters to speak. The letter was written down on a number of different, random pieces of paper available to the interpreter who wrote down the letter.
After the October 1976 counter-revolutionary State coup, which restored capitalism in China, the letter was sent to the Party Archives and not taken up for discussion by the Party's Central Committee. It was not until the 2000s that it was made available to researchers for the first time.
The letter appears to have been dictated when Comrade Mao Zedong was in a less lucid state of mind than usual. Major revisions have therefore had to be made to the text of the letter in order to render it legible.
#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!
#TO MY COMRADES
#LETTER TO THE THIRD PLENARY SESSION OF THE TENTH CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHINA
#Mao Zedong
#August-September 1976
#★
#1. CONSIDERATIONS
In light of the facts becoming increasingly clear in the process of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, what we have achieved thus far in our country — in consolidating the revolutionary class dictatorship of the proletariat, in State affairs, in the economic and political spheres, and in the relations between the proletariat and the peasantry — even though our capabilities are limited and our conditions are bad, the Chinese people are building up a society that is fundamentally better than the old society, and they are doing so to serve the cause of the proletarian world revolution. This can only be guaranteed as long as we firmly take the Marxist-Leninist road, make great scientific advancements, engage in the class struggle, and understand revolutionary dialectics. In this way, through their own efforts, the Chinese people, in the course of their Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, serve as a great example for the workers of all humanity in developing the productive forces in full accord with the interests of our people, of socialism, and of the revolutionary road of mass struggle and socialist construction. We, the Communist Party of China, are the great motive force of the proletarian revolution in China, of the Chinese people's national rejuvenation, independence, and sovereignty, and of the struggle against the counter-revolutionaries. We are fighting for the cause of the proletariat and for the creation of a free and productive human race. The good work of the Chinese proletariat and people and of their comrades in our Party is marching forward under the great banner of Marxism-Leninism, the revolutionary doctrine of the international proletariat. Under this banner, our great proletarian political party has thus far blazed a trail for shining communism in China and throughout the world, waged a great struggle in defence of Marx and Lenin to serve the cause of world communism, a struggle in defence of Marxism-Leninism, the revolutionary theory of the international proletariat, in defence of the principles of Scientific Socialism, for energetic and modern Marxism-Leninism. We have dealt a great blow to the counter-revolutionary cliques and bandits of the old world, and are correctly waging a struggle against that revisionist and careerist bureaucrat and renegade [Deng Xiaoping], who used the Party to hide himself from the people, who has never had full confidence in the masses of the people, and whose petty and dangerous standpoints have been taken up by certain people in our provincial Party committees, where these alienating standpoints are being applied in the form of failed policies on the widest possible scale. The Party must assert that this trend constitutes an objectively counter-revolutionary force, whose opportunist and idealist ramblings, covered up with Marxist-Leninist-sounding phrases, have replaced truly intelligent work, which sows discord among the Chinese people by appealing to the stomach instead of to the brain, which intentionally paints proletarian internationalism as an outdated dogma, and so on.
The Communist Party of China is in the process of making great advances, but it is hampered by an irrevocably dogmatic attitude, which has infected the Party's work and gradually turned it from an instrument for building socialism into a rigid instrument for commandist authorities, who have forgotten the power of the Chinese people and instead practise isolated intellectualism, contempt for the masses, and irrational behaviour. The Party must rid itself of these bureaucrats and prevent its own debasement by making fundamental changes in the relations between the Party and the people. I hereby call on the comrades on the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China to take responsibility for preparing a meeting on the subject of the reforms that I propose here. These reforms are entirely appropriate and must be implemented in order to defend and consolidate the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, to revitalize it, and to make its effects permanent — it must make a lasting impact on the Chinese road to socialist development by raising the consciousness of the Chinese people even higher, which is our objective as consistent Marxist-Leninists and defenders of the revolutionary theory and practice of the proletariat. The reactionaries inside our State bodies still exist and make themselves known through their rabid phrase-mongering, which serves their own egotistic cliques. This meeting of the Central Committee is only appropriate in these conditions, following a whole decade of consolidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The efforts of the Party in this struggle must align with the great proletarian-revolutionary standpoint of the Chinese people. The proletarian road is the road of socialist construction, and this road is primarily developed further by organizing the uprising of the proletariat throughout the country, particularly in the countryside. The development of the proletariat is continuing under our Party's leadership. This is good; it is the road that leads to proletarian revolution, to modern socialist development, to the consolidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and so on. This is the proletarian road to revolution and consolidation, the road leading to socialism and communism.
#2. THE DEVELOPMENT OF MARXISM-LENINISM AND THE RURAL AND INDUSTRIAL AREAS OF THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
In examining our countryside, we should learn from the negative example of the Council Union. Uneven development, pollution, and waste are blossoming in the Soviet countryside under the market system of anarchy in production prevalent in the revisionist Council Union, which extracts toil from the peasants through threats of insolvency and of «counter-revolution through sabotage». The Council Union is not leading its countryside in taking the socialist road at all, because it never was a sufficiently socialist country, and the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat in the Council Union was never revolutionary nor firm enough, and so, it became a tool in the hands of the renegades to reverse the gains made by the Communist Party of the Council Union and to totally reverse the victories won by the proletariat until that time. The Chinese Party cannot draw inspiration of any kind from the revisionist Soviet Party, nor allow itself to engage in the dehumanizing practice of debt-slavery, which is so prevalent there. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution serves as a great and revolutionary opportunity for the blossoming of socialist farming, and the development of people's communes and State farms is a great thing for the Chinese people, who enjoy a stable, dialectical balance between the peasants of the people's communes and the farmworkers on the State farms, and, in contrast to the Council Union, the development of the agricultural sector of our economy is a great deal more productive and inspires the peasant and farmworker comrades to strive for bountiful harvests and grain procurement through revolutionary methods of work. It should be a great priority for the Party to promote proletarianization in China. It was Comrade Marx who stressed the great historical necessity of proletarianization as an absolutely essential condition for advancement toward socialism, but this must be done in connection with the consolidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is what guides the peasantry toward proletarianization. Without the proletarianization of the peasantry, there is no basis for socialist construction in the countryside. That's all on this matter for now.
#3. ON PROLETARIAN CULTURE AND THE ARMY
Culture is part of the superstructure, which Marxism regards as being, in the final analysis, a supplement to the economic basis. I need to make a few points about this. As its name suggests, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution implies a development of proletarian culture. The development of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution could not have been based on a misunderstanding of Marxism, as some people claim, because we undertook the Cultural Revolution in order to imbue the masses with proletarian consciousness and to transform the peasants into farmworkers and the handicraftspeople into industrial workers. I said long ago, in 1940, that China's culture reflects its historical level of development as a nation — I already said it that long ago.1 But we are Communists, and our Party is a proletarian-internationalist political party that shuns nationalism, so we are not nationalists who proclaim the glory of China or the Chinese people on a chauvinist basis. The development of our cultural revolution — the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution — was necessitated by the need for laying a foundation for socialist society. The conditions for laying this foundation were proletarian education and mass work. We had to confront many reactionaries, both on the Right wing and on the «Left» wing — and we have confronted many who were on the «Left» wing. We need to improve the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution; it cannot be abandoned, we still have work to do.
As for the People's Liberation Army, it works in defence of the homeland, but it has some defects that limit its capabilities. We should address them at the upcoming Party meeting, which I hope can be held soon.
#4. SOME NOTABLE QUESTIONS
I approve of what has been said about the Fourth National People's Congress and of the adoption of the new Constitution of the People's Republic of China. It represents a new stage in our national development. I support the great results of the recent Central Committee meeting, which was held not long ago to discuss matters of considerable importance.2
#5. ON PARTY HISTORY
The history of our Party must be borne in mind by our comrades, and we must learn from our past mistakes, which have been increasing in the past few years following the gains made in the 1970-72 period, when we successfully fought against the renegades. This cowardly clique showed itself in a devious way, quite unlike the rather openly opportunist lines of Liu Shaoqi and Li Lisan. Complacent in these treacherous activities were Peng Dehuai and He Long, who both knew of and greatly admired the policies of Lin Biao. In sum, they formed a «Left»-Right bloc and hatched a devious plot to subvert and then liquidate the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and to undermine the Party and its leadership through a planned terrorist usurpation of the People's Government and the implementation of revisionist economic policies, which would have resulted in the integration of the Chinese people's economy with that of the Council Union, so as to make the Chinese people dependent on the revisionists and to make them serve them, like some kind of grotesque slave-labour army. I know clearly how well the people have been waging the struggle against the «Far Left» renegades and the Right-wing reactionaries. The «Left»-Right bloc is a very important question, which we formulated very long ago. I cannot tell you right now, but many comrades past and present have told us about the shady dealings of the renegades, and we have in our possession a recording of considerable importance, which shows the treacherous collaboration of this bloc.
Li Kenong and Jiang Fengwei — these two people were involved with Japanese agents and assisted their terrorist undertakings both against the Council Union and against our struggle in defence of the homeland. The Eighth Route Army was infiltrated by Japanese spies, who remained thorns in the side of the heroic Chinese people and the People's Liberation Army, even after Liberation. This fact has been established by the people's courts and by comrades studying the history of our Party. We must work to improve our study of Party history, and should more often mention the revolutionary role of the Communist Party of China as the successor to the internationalist work of the Third International in spreading the Marxist worldview.
#6. CLOSING REMARKS
The Party must consolidate the revolutionary class dictatorship in the cities now, since we have adequately covered the countryside in terms of propagating the revolutionary theory of Marxism-Leninism. Future Party conferences and congresses will clear matters up.
[Comrade Mao Zedong reaffirmed the Party's line. In conclusion, he said that he was optimistic about the prospects of a recovery and return to work, and that he was looking forward to once again seeing Comrade Jiang Qing and other comrades.]