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

For decades or even longer periods after socialist industrializationand agricultural collectivization, it will be impossibleto say that any socialist country will be free from thoseelements which Lenin repeatedly denounced, such as bourgeoishangers-on, parasites, speculators, swindlers, idlers,hooligans and embezzlers of state funds; or to say that asocialist country will no longer need to perform or be ableto relinquish the task laid down by Lenin of conquering “thiscontagion, this plague, this ulcer that socialism has inheritedfrom capitalism”.In a socialist country, it takes a very long historical periodgradually to settle the question of who will win — socialismor capitalism. The struggle between the road of socialismand the road of capitalism runs through this whole historicalperiod. This struggle rises and falls in a wave-like manner,at times becoming very fierce, and the forms of the struggleare many and varied.The 1957 Declaration rightly states that “the conquest ofpower by the working class is only the beginning of therevolution, not its conclusion”.To deny the existence of class struggle in the period of thedictatorship of the proletariat and the necessity of thoroughlycompleting the socialist revolution on the economic, politicaland ideological fronts is wrong, does not correspond to objectivereality and violates Marxism-Leninism.18. Both Marx and Lenin maintained that the entire periodbefore the advent of the higher stage of communist societyis the period of transition from capitalism to communism, theperiod of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In this transitionperiod, the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is to say, theproletarian state, goes through the dialectical process ofestablishment, consolidation, strengthening and witheringaway.In the “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, Marx posedthe question as follows:34