K. This is the 1st working draft of vol. VI. It still ... - From Marx to Mao

MAO’S INTERVIEW WITH GUNTHER STEIN
Party and non-Party people is growing in the process of all the practical
work they have to do together.”
I asked Mao Tse-tung whether he thought that the Communist
Party had made any mayor mistakes in its policies.
“On all basic points our policies have proved correct from the
very beginning. This is true first of all of our fundamental policies
under New Democracy — of letting the masses of the people organize
themselves for a revolution aiming at national independence,
democracy, and the improvement of the people’s livelihood on the
basis of private property.
“It is only with regard to the application of these basic policies
to concrete conditions that certain deviations are liable to appear
FROM MARX
TO MAO
from time to time, deviations partly to the left and partly to the right.
⋆
They are, however, not deviations of the Party as a whole or of groups
in the Party, but of certain people in our ranks. From all those mistakes
the Party as a whole has learned.
“Yes, in certain periods there have been a few individuals in our
Party who believed that Communism is feasible in China at this time.
But the Party as such has never held that view. Even the existence
within our Party of a group advocating the immediate practice of a
Communist social system is impossible on account of the concrete
conditions in China which make Communism unfeasible for a very
long time to come. NOT FOR
“The Kuomintang allegation that there are groups with diverging
views within our Party is completely unfounded. The Kuomintang,
which is itself COMMERCIAL
so badly split by cliques, cannot conceive of
a really united political party, and that is probably why such rumors
are believed by some in Chungking.”
“Did you ever find yourself in a minority so that your own ideas
on a subject were DISTRIBUTION
not carried out”?
“Yes. I have been in the minority myself. The only thing for me
to do at such times was to wait. But there have been very few examples
of that in recent years.”
I had bean asked by Chinese friends in Chungking to find out
whether the Communists were “Chinese first” or “Communist first”,
and I put the question to Mao Tse-tung.
He smiled. “Without a Chinese nation there could be no Chinese
Communist Party. You might just as well ask, ‘What is first,
children or parents?’ This is not a question of theory but of practice,
like the other question people put to you in the Kuomintang
491