Lin Piao -- On the Course the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution - Page 1

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is a great political revolution personally initiated and led by our great leader Chairman Mao under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a great revolution in the realm of the superstructure. Our aim is to smash revisionism, seize back that portion of power usurped by the bourgeoisie, exercise all-round dictatorship of the proletariat in the superstructure, including all spheres of culture, and strengthen and consolidate the economic base of socialism so as to ensure that our country continues to advance in great strides along the road of socialism.

Back in 1962, at the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the Party, Chairman Mao pointed out: To overthrow a political power, it is always necessary first of all to create public opinion, to do work in the ideological sphere. This is true for the revolutionary class as well as for the counter-revolutionary class.

This statement of Chairman Mao's dealt the Liu Shao-chi counter-revolutionary clique a blow at the heart. It was for the sole purpose of creating public opinion to prepare for the overthrow of the dictator of the proletariat that they spared no effort in seizing upon the field of ideology and the superstructure, violently exercising counter-revolutionary dictatorship over the proletariat in the various departments they controlled and widely spreading poisonous weeds. To overthrow them politically, we must likewise first vanquish their counter-revolutionary public opinion by revolutionary public opinion.

Chairman Mao has always attached major importance to the struggle in ideology. After the liberation of our country, he initiated many criticisms including those of the film The Life of Wu Hsun," the Hu Feng counter-revolutionary clique and Studies of "The Dream of the Red Chamber." And this time it was Chairman Mao again who led the whole Party in launching the offensive on the positions occupied by Liu Shao-chi and his gang for the bourgeoisie. Chairman Mao wrote the celebrated essay Where Do Correct Ideas Come from? and other documents, in which he criticized Liu Shao-chi's bourgeois idealism and metaphysics, criticized the departments of literature and art under Liu Shao-chi's control as being "still dominated by 'the dead'", criticized the Ministry of Culture by saying that "if it refuses to change, it should be renamed the Ministry of Emperors, Kings, Generals and Ministers, the Ministry of Talents and Beauties or the Ministry of Foreign Mummies" and said that the Ministry of Health should likewise be renamed the "Ministry of Health for Urban Overlords."