Polemic on General Line of International ... - From Marx to Mao

power is concentrated”. 1 The state is a weapon of class struggle,a machine by means of which one class represses another.Every state is the dictatorship of a definite class. So longas the state exists, it cannot possibly stand above class or belongto the whole people.The proletariat and its political party have never concealedtheir views; they say explicitly that the very aim of the proletariansocialist revolution is to overthrow bourgeois rule andestablish the dictatorship of the proletariat. After the victoryof the socialist revolution, the proletariat and its party muststrive unremittingly to fulfil the historical tasks of the dictatorshipof the proletariat and eliminate classes and classdifferences, so that the state will wither away. It is only thebourgeoisie and its parties which in their attempt to hoodwinkthe masses try by every means to cover up the classnature of state power and describe the state machinery undertheir control as being “of the whole people” and “aboveclass”.The fact that Khrushchov has announced the abolition ofthe dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union andadvanced the thesis of the “state of the whole people” demonstratesthat he has replaced the Marxist-Leninist teachingson the state by bourgeois falsehoods.When Marxist-Leninists criticized their fallacies, the revisionistKhrushchov clique hastily defended themselves andtried hard to invent a so-called theoretical basis for the “stateof the whole people”. They now assert that the historicalperiod of the dictatorship of the proletariat mentioned byMarx and Lenin refers only to the transition from capitalismto the first stage of communism and not to its higher stage.They further assert that “the dictatorship of the proletariat1V. I. Lenin, “The Economic Content of Narodism and the Criticismof It in Mr. Struve’s Book”, Collected Works, Eng. ed., FLPH, Moscow,1960, Vol. I, p. 419.445