Our task is to carry out agrarian revolution and to establish bases of armed struggle in the countryside. Therefore, every Party member must share the thoughts and aspirations of the peasant masses and integrate with them; be ready at all times to make all kinds of sacrifices and come forward tirelessly to serve the people.
The Communist Party members must set themselves up as exemplary models before the masses. Only in this way can they inspire the masses. Therefore, every Party member must fight against self-interest and individualism. Only thus can we introduce revolutionary discipline into the Party without which no revolutionary war can be sustained.
Only a Party composed of such members, however small in the beginning, is able to organize peasants’ revolutionary struggle, to strengthen the Party’s class basis by making the workers and the poor and landless peasants politically conscious, and to turn itself into a big Party capable of leading the revolution to victory.
Our Party’s growth and development depend on how firmly we fight revisionism both inside and outside the Party. And not only that. The growth and development of the peasants’ armed struggle also depend on this fight against revisionism. Precisely for this reason it is said that creating a high tide of struggle depends on how widely we can spread and propagate Mao Tsetung Thought as well as on adopting the new style of work. It is only because we have been unable to master the correct application of Mao Tsetung Thought that we cannot extend the struggle to still wider areas. It has, therefore, become the urgent task today to fight against the clear and concrete manifestations of revisionism.
Some of the revisionist ideas that still persist inside our Party and against which we are struggling at present are mentioned here.
First, economism. At present, economism expresses itself in the line of thinking, according to which the workers and the poor and landless peasants will be unable to accept revolutionary politics unless they are led into open struggles on economic demands. This line of thinking weakens all our work like propagating revolutionary politics — the politics of seizure of power — and building revolutionary base areas in the countryside. Such a line of thinking makes the Party members concentrate their attention and work on organizing struggles for economic demands, and politics loses its place of prominence. Lastly, such a line of thinking makes one contemptuous of the workers and the peasant masses and rely on the intelligentsia. But Chairman Mao has taught us that the struggle for production and the class struggle along with scientific experiment constitute the sources of knowledge. The intelligentsia have no access to these sources, namely the struggle for production and the class struggle, while the workers and the peasant masses have both these sources of knowledge. Secondly, only the peasant masses led by the working class can win victory in the revolution, and Mao Tsetung Thought is the revolutionary ideology of the working class. That is why it is precisely the workers and the poor and landless peasants who grasp the politics of the seizure of power and of building revolutionary bases in the countryside most thoroughly once these are explained to them. This is because it is they who suffer most from the exploitation and oppression of the existing social system, and the revolution serves them more than anybody else.
We do not say that we shall never wage struggles for economic demands. What we say is that political propaganda and building Party organizations are the foremost and main tasks before us.
Economism in the peasant movement expresses itself in the form of rejecting the necessity for waging guerrilla warfare, thus concentrating the attention of the peasants on the question of seizing land and crops. Such economist ideas place open struggle above everything else, discourage any thought of building secret organizations or maintaining secrecy, strengthen the tendency toward spontaneity and belittle the role and importance of conscious leadership.
Such economist ideas belittle the importance of setting up secret Party organizations among the revolutionary classes, thus preventing the members of these classes from entering into the Party. Such economist tendency increases our dependence on the petty bourgeois intelligentsia. The idea that peasant struggles cannot possibly be organized unless members of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia are sent to the villages for this purpose still persists and is still firmly rooted in our Party. We don’t feel ease whenever some assignments are given to a Party unit consisting of poor and landless peasants. As a result we fail to develop their initiative. There is nothing against the members of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia going to the villages. But they must go there for becoming good communists and good revolutionaries, and to learn from the poor and landless peasants. They must not go there to lead the poor and landless peasants, because only the poor and landless peasants themselves, and none else, can be the leaders of their struggle. The task before the comrades who belong to the petty bourgeois intelligentsia and are inspired by the Thought of Mao Tsetung which they have learned, is to educate the poor and landless peasants in the Thought of Mao Tsetung. Dependence on the petty bourgeois intelligentsia is the result of influence of bourgeois ideology, and we must rid the Party of this.
The influence of bourgeois ideology is also evident from the fact that we rely more on weapons than on people. We must never forget the teachings of Chairman Mao and Comrade Lin Piao in this respect. Chairman Mao has pointed out : “Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor; it is people, not things, that are decisive.” The oppressed and persecuted peasants launch their struggle against the ruling classes with bare hands or with whatever they have, but as needs arise with the development of the struggle and dictated by the compulsions of advancing the revolution, they begin snatching and seizing arms from the ruling classes. This is how people’s armed forces develop. It is impossible to wage a revolutionary war by bringing arms from the outside. This is so because, as Chairman Mao has taught us, in waging a revolutionary war we must rely on the masses. “The revolutionary war is a war of the masses; it can be waged only by mobilizing the masses and relying on them.” Our experience also shows that we cannot wage guerrilla warfare simply by acquiring sophisticated weapons; we must be able to bring up men armed with Mao Tsetung Thought to wield those weapons. Unless we are able to bring up such men the weapons will be of no use. And such men are brought up only through revolutionary class struggle, only through annihilating class enemies. The guerrilla unit that has not done this can achieve little even with guns.
Another manifestation of bourgeois ideology is to magnify the importance of actions while giving no importance at all to political propaganda. This is what Chairman Mao has called ‘militarism’. The work of political propaganda must be raised to a newer and higher level at every stage of guerrilla warfare. Only when the masses begin to grasp Mao Tsetung Thought their level of political consciousness will rise and only then will they be able to conquer death. Precisely for this reason it is said that once Mao Tsetung Thought is combined with the force of arms, an invincible power is brought into being which can match and defeat any other power, however strong. The Party members must, therefore, constantly try to develop political propaganda. But we can feel the urge for doing this only when we begin to understand what the poor and landless peasants are thinking, and integrate with them through the pursuit of the mass line.
Party leadership at all levels must shoulder the responsibility of, and take good care in, developing the mass line and educating the Party members in the propagation of the mass line.
Comrades, US imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism are today hatching plots for launching a war of aggression against the great socialist China, and Soviet social-imperialism has been repeatedly carrying on armed provocations against China along the stretches of the Sino-Soviet border. We must remember Chairman Mao’s teaching : “With regard to the question of world war, there are but two possibilities: One is that the war will give rise to revolution and the other is that revolution will prevent the war.” The possibility of a war is very real at present. The responsibility of the communist revolutionaries in India has today increased manifold. We must be able to prevent this war with revolution. If, however, the imperialists succeed in launching a war of aggression in spite of us, then a large share of the responsibility of burning these warmongers into ashes will have to be shouldered by us, that is, the revolutionaries of India — a vast country of 500 million people. Hence, we must fera neither hardship nor death; we must shatter all the trammels of revisionist ideas that bind us today, and march onward along a new path, and master the new style of work and mobilize all our forces to spread the flames of the revolutionary war to every state of India. This revolutionary war will deal a crushing blow at the unity of the imperialists, revisionists and reactionaries and smash it, and the weakness of the enemy in its turn will bring about a new revolutionary high tide. The revolutionary struggle in India will bring a new inspiration, a new impetus, to the revolutionary struggle in every other country of the world.
The great Ninth Congress of the great, glorious and correct Communist Party of China has sent out the clarion call : a new era of world revolution has begun; the revolutionary struggle the world over will destroy world imperialism and Soviet revisionism. A world without exploitation — the dream that the world’s people have dreamed for ages — will be born. We are the architects of that brilliant new future. Today, we are fortunate in having been entrusted with the most, sacred, the noblest of tasks in the world. Let every comrade plunge into this work with all his strength and make the best use of it. Long live Chairman Mao! A long, long life to him!
