Lin Piao -- On the Consolidation and Building of the Party - Page 3

In the new historical period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the proletariat enforces its dictatorship and exercises its leadership in every field of work through its vanguard the Communist Party. Departing from the dictatorship of the proletariat and from continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, it is impossible to solve correctly the question of Party building, the question of building what kind of Party and how to build it.

Liu Shao-chi's revisionist line on Party building betrayed the very essence of the Marxist-Leninist teaching on the dictatorship of the proletariat and of the Marxist-Leninist theory of Party building. At the crucial moment when China's socialist revolution was deepening and the class struggle was extraordinarily acute, Liu Shao-chi had his sinister book Self-Cultivation republished and it was precisely his aim to overthrow the dictatorship of the proletariat in our country and restore the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

When he copied the passage from Lenin on the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which we quoted earlier in this report, Liu Shao-chi once again deliberately omitted the most important conclusion that "the dictatorship of the Proletariat is essential," thereby clearly revealing his own counter-revolutionary features as a renegade to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Moreover, Liu Shao-chi went on spreading such reactionary fallacies as the theory of "the dying out of class struggle," the theory of "docile tools," the theory that "the masses are backwards", the theory of "joining the Party in order to climb up", the theory of "inner-Party peace" and the theory of "merging private and public interests" (i.e., "losing a little to gain much"), in a vain attempt to corrupt and disintegrate our Party, so that the more the Party members "cultivated" themselves, the more revisionist they would become and so that the Marxist-Leninist Party would "evolve peacefully" into a revisionist party and the dictatorship of the proletariat into the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. We should carry on revolutionary mass criticism and repudiation and thoroughly eliminate the pernicious influence of Liu Shao-chi's reactionary fallacies.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is the broadest and most deep-going movement for Party consolidation in the history of our Party. The Party organization at various levels and the broad masses of Communists have experienced the acute struggle between the two lines, gone through the test in the large-scale class struggle and undergone examination by the revolutionary masses both inside and outside the Party. In this way, the Party members and cadres have faced the world and braved the storm and and have raised their class consciousness and the consciousness of the struggle between the two lines. This great revolution teaches us: Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, we must educate the masses of the Party members on classes, on class struggle, on the struggle between the two lines and on continuing the revolution. We must fight revisionism both inside and outside the Party, clear the Party of renegades, enemy agents and other elements representing the interests of the exploiting classes, and admit into the Party the genuine advanced elements of the proletariat who have been tested in the great storm.