From Marx to Mao Tse-tung - BANNEDTHOUGHT.NET

'whole' of the peasants against the monarchy, thelandowners, med,ievalism (and to that extent the revolutionremains bourgeois, bourgeois-d emocratic) ; t h en,with the poor peasants, the semi-proletarians, all theexploited, against capitalism, including the rural rich,the kulaks, the profiteers, and to that extent therevolution trecomes a socialist one. To attempt to raisean artificial Chinese Wall between the first and thesecond, to separate them by anything else thanthe degree of preparedness of the proletariat, and thedegree of its unity with the poor peasants, means todistort Marxism dreadfully, to vulgarise it, to replaceit with liberalism. (LCW z8.3oo.)Speaking on the fourth anniversary of the revolution,Lenin said :The direct and immed,iate dbject of the revolutionin Russia was a bourgeois-democratic one, namely, todestroy ,the survivals of medievalism and sweep themaway completely, to purge Russia of this barbarism,this shame, and to remove this obstacle to all cultureand progress in our country. And we can justifiablypride ourselves on having carried out that purge wifhgreater determination and much more rapidly, boldlyand successfully, and, from the standpoint of itseffect on the masses, much more widely and deeply,than the great French Revolution over one hundredand twenty-five years ago. . . . We have consurnmatedthe bourgeois-democratic revolution as nobody haddone before. We are aduancing'towards the socialistrevolution consciously, firmly and unswervingly,knowing that it is not separated from the bourgeoisdemocraticrevolution try a Chinese Wall, and knowingtoo that in the last analySis struggle alone willdetermine how far we shall advance, what part ofthis immense and lofty task we shall accomplish, andto what exten-t we shall succeed in consolidating our3ovictories. Time will show. But we see even now thata tremendous amount-tremendous for this ruined,exhausted, backward country-has already been donefor the socialist transformation of society. (LCW33.5r )g. The Chinese ReuolutionIn l94o Mao Tse-tung wrote :The first imperialist world war and the first victorioussocialist revolution, the October Revolution,have changed the whole course of world history andushered in a new era. It is an era in which the worldcapitalist front has collapsed in one part of the globe(one-sixth of the world) and has fully revealed itsdecadence everl'where else; in which the remainingcapitalist parts cannot survive without relying morethan ever on the colonies and semi-coloniesl in whicha socialist state has been estakrlished and has proclaimedits readiness to give active support to theliberation movements of all colonies and semicolonies.. . . In this era, any revolu,tion in a colony orsemi-colony that is d,irected against imperialism, i.e.against the international bourgeoisie or internationalcapitalism, no longer comes wittrin the old categoryof the bourgeois-democratic world revolution, butwithin the new category. It is no longer part of theold bourgeois, or capitalist, world revolution, but ispart of the new world revolution, the proletariansocialistworld revolution. (MSW 2;.43-4, cf. SCWto.244-55.)At the beginning of the present century China was asemi-feudal, semi-colonial country, in which .the massesof the peasantry were exploited by the feudal landownersand by a number of colonial powers, which hadoccupied the ports, seized control of the anks, and3r