Page 111 - SELECTED WORKS OF LIU SHAOQI Volume I

HOW TO BE A GOOD COMMUNIST

July 1939

Comrades,
The question I shall discuss is how members of the Communist
Party should cultivate and temper themselves. It may not be unprof-
itable to the building and consolidation of the Party to take up this
question at the present time.

I. WHY COMMUNISTS MUST UNDERTAKE
SELF-CULTIVATION

Why must Communists undertake to cultivate themselves?
In order to live, man must wage a struggle against nature and
make use of nature to produce material values. At all times and under
all conditions, his production of material things is social in character.
It follows that when men engage in production at any stage of social
development, they have to enter into certain relations of production
with one another. In their ceaseless struggle against nature, men
ceaselessly change nature and simultaneously change themselves and
their mutual relations. Men themselves, their social relations, their
forms of social organization and their consciousness change and pro-
gress continuously in the age-long struggle which as social beings they
wage against nature. In ancient times, man’s mode of life, social
organization and consciousness were all different from what they are
today, and in the future they will again be different.

A lecture delivered at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Yan’an. It was
included in the Documents for the Rectification Movement published by the Lib-
eration Press in 1943 and was reprinted by the People’s Publishing House in 1962
after revision by the author.
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