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

immediately, without a long succession of setbacks, blundersand relapses? 1The international proletarian revolution has a history ofless than a century counting from 1871 when the proletariatof the Paris Commune made the first heroic attempt at theseizure of political power, or barely half a century countingfrom the October Revolution. The proletarian revolution, thegreatest revolution in human history, replaces capitalism bysocialism and private ownership by public ownership anduproots all the systems of exploitation and all the exploitingclasses. It is all the more natural that so earth-shaking arevolution should have to go through serious and fierce classstruggles, inevitably traverse a long and tortuous course besetwith reverses.History furnishes a number of examples in which proletarianrule suffered defeat as a result of armed suppression by thebourgeoisie, for instance, the Paris Commune and the HungarianSoviet Republic of 1919. In contemporary times, too,there was the counter-revolutionary rebellion in Hungary in1956, when the rule of the proletariat was almost overthrown.People can easily perceive this form of capitalist restorationand are more alert and watchful against it.However, they cannot easily perceive and are often off theirguard or not vigilant against another form of capitalist restoration,which therefore presents a greater danger. The state ofthe dictatorship of the proletariat takes the road of revisionismor the road of “peaceful evolution” as a result of thedegeneration of the leadership of the Party and the state. Alesson of this kind was provided some years ago by the revisionistTito clique who brought about the degeneration of socialistYugoslavia into a capitalist country. But the Yugoslavlesson alone has not sufficed to arouse people’s attention fully.Some may say that perhaps it was an accident.1V. I. Lenin, “A Great Beginning”, Selected Works, Eng. ed., FLPH,Moscow, 1952, Vol. II, Part 2, p. 229.468