p Blatantly ignoring the laws of social
development and hard facts, Mao Tse-tung uses Marxist concepts in a totally distorted and subjective form. In his very first works—On the Classes of Chinese Society and Report on a Study of the Peasant Movement in Hunan Province—one sees the tendency to distinguish between classes 43 not by objective criteria, i.e., by their relationship to the means of production and by their position in social production but by their personal material level, ideology and other subjective criteria. Mao Tse-tung perverted the concept “proletariat”, bringing under this classification the urban lumpen-proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasantry. Today, all who disagree with the "thought of Mao" are labelled "bourgeois elements”. The Marxist theory of the hegemony of the proletariat in the bourgeois-democratic and socialist revolutions has always been alien to Mao Tsetung. Despite the Mao group’s skill at falsification, they cannot obscure the fact that at the Third Congress of the CPC in June 1923 Mao Tse-tung unequivocally supported the views of Chen Tu-shiu, then General Secretary of the Party, and with him refused to recognise the hegemony of the proletariat and pinned his hopes on the big and small national bourgeoisie. In 1923 he wrote: "Proceeding from historical necessity and the tendencies of the present situation, the most essential and important part of the work for the weal of the national revolution must be undertaken by shopkeepers and not by the mass of the people.”  [43•*  "The stronger the unity among shopkeepers and the greater their influence, the more powerful will be the force leading the people and the faster will the revolution achieve success.”  [43•** 

p This negation of the leading role of the working class continued, in subsequent years, to guide the actions of Mao Tse-tung, who comes from a well-to-do peasant family. The peasants played an unquestionably great role in the specific conditions of China. Taking this into account the Comintern issued important instructions in the mid-1920s. But the role of the peasants, who had for a long time been the main force of the Chinese liberation struggle, cannot be absolutised. Yet such absolutisation is typical of Maoism.”  [43•***  Mao Tse-tung ignored Lenin’s proposition, of vital importance to China, that "the proletariat, even when it constitutes a minority of the population (or when the class-conscious and really revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat constitutes a minority of the population), is capable of overthrowing the 44 bourgeoisie and, after that, of winning to its side numerous allies from a mass of semi-proletarians and petty bourgeoisie who never declare in advance in favour of the rule of the proletariat, who do not understand the conditions and aims of that rule, and only by their subsequent experience become convinced that the proletarian dictatorship is inevitable, proper and legitimate.”  [44•*  This teaching was skilfully applied by the Bolsheviks in a backward country with a predominantly peasant population.

p It is not surprising that the defeat of the Chinese revolution in the 1920s strengthened Mao Tse-tung and his supporters in their contention that the proletariat was incapable of leading the revolution. They adhered to this view during the people’s democratic revolution, too, when nonrecognition of the leading role of the working class was particularly disastrous. During the years ,of successful socialist construction in China the Maoists tried to slow down the growth of the working class. They went to all ends to keep it from coming to the fore. But industrialisation strongly enhanced the position of the working class and it proved capable of fulfilling its leading role.

True, time and again Mao Tse-tung and official propaganda nodded approval of the working class. However, against the background of the Mao group’s home policy, all these nods were nothing but cheap demagogy aimed at giving this policy a Marxist colouring. In On the Correct Solution of Contradictions Within the Nation Mao Tsetung names the Party and the Army as the principal factors strengthening the state. He says not a word about the role of the working class. In other writings he goes even further and virtually equates the hegemony of the proletariat with that of the Army. In the period of the "big leap" and the people’s communes the countryside was counterposed to the towns, while the people’s communes were proclaimed the "best form of organising the gradual transition from socialism to communism”, which "in the course of its development becomes the basic unit of the future communist society”. But the most striking expression of Maoism’s hostility for the working class was the "cultural revolution" spearheaded against the CPC and the trade unions, against the foundations of the political and social existence of the working 45 class. The Trotskyite theories about young people being the barometer of the revolution and opportunist views disparaging the working class were used by the Maoists to justify their assault on that class.