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

76 MAO TSE-TUNG
ing to the landlord class plus the land of rich peasants to be divided
among the hired hands, poor peasants, middle peasants, to give the
rich peasants the poor land, to nullify debts and to burn land titles
and IOUs. Involved in the struggle at this stage is the whole range
of struggle in which the revolution commences battle with the
counter-revolution, leading to the defeat of the counter-revolution
by the revolution and implementing the disposition of their land and
property.
In the region where the struggle has deepened, a firm soviet political
power has been established and local armed forces and revolutionary
mass organizations have developed extensively; the feudal
forces of landlords and rich peasants have been completely de-
FROM MARX
TO MAO
feated and the land has been thoroughly distributed. The struggle
⋆
of the peasant masses over the land question has advanced to the
stage of improving the soil and developing soil productivity. Therefore,
the central question here is one of land construction.
In the region where the struggle has fallen behind, its stage of
development is between the two stages mentioned above. It has
moved into the period of a formal political power from that of a
provisional political power but it has not yet reached the period completely
consolidating the political power. Here the open counterrevolutionary
struggle of the landlords and rich peasants have been
defeated by the revolutionary NOT masses FOR in the first period. From that
time on, many of these elements would turn about, take off their
counter-revolutionary mask and put on the revolutionary mask. They
too approve the revolution COMMERCIAL
and the land redistribution as well, and
call themselves poor peasants and demand that the land be distributed
to them accordingly. They act actively by virtue of their historical
advantage in that “come to think of talking, they can talk;
come to think of DISTRIBUTION
writing, they can write”. Therefore, during the
first period they have taken advantage of the opportunity to snatch
away the fruit of land revolution. Facts in many places proved that
they are dominating the provisional political power by sneaking into
the local armed forces and manipulating the revolutionary organizations
to get more and better land than what the poor peasants have
obtained. Having moved into the second, some of those sham revolutionary
elements have been washed out because of the pressure of
the upper-level government as well as the advancement of mass
struggle, and because the Revolutionary Committee has been reconstructed
into the soviet, and the mass organizations and local armed