Page 129 - SELECTED WORKS OF LIU SHAOQI Volume I

HOW TO BE A GOOD COMMUNIST 125
have been isolated, to the detriment of the struggle to resist Japan and
save China. After the July 7th Incident, when our Party had formed
the Anti-Japanese National United Front with the Kuomintang, certain
comrades went to the other extreme, maintaining that since the Kuo-
mintang had joined in resistance to Japan, there was hardly any dis-
tinction between it and the Communist Party. They adopted a policy
of capitulationism by appeasing the big landlord and big bourgeois
classes and the Kuomintang, and opposed the Party’s policy of uphold-
ing its independence within the united front. While they overestimated
the strength of and placed undue trust in the Kuomintang, on which
they pinned all their hopes for resisting Japan and saving China, they
had no confidence in the strength of the Communist Party and the
people, did not place their hopes on the Communist Party and there-
fore did not dare freely to expand the Party and the anti-Japanese
people’s revolutionary forces and resolutely to fight against the Kuo-
mintang’s policy of opposing and restricting the Communist Party. The
comrades with this approach styled themselves the true representatives
of the proletariat, but in essence their policy would have made the
proletariat a vassal or an appendage of the bourgeoisie, and would
have caused the proletariat to lose the leadership of the Anti-Japanese
National United Front. These “Left” and Right mistakes are both
striking examples of failure to take a firm proletarian stand and to
identify the correct path for advancing the revolutionary cause when
major changes are occurring in the political situation.
The proletariat cannot just emancipate itself alone; it must fight
for the emancipation of all the working people, the emancipation of
the nation and of all mankind, for only thus can it fully emancipate
itself. The proletariat must rid the whole of human society of exploita-
tion, oppression and class struggle once and for all, for only thus can
it genuinely and finally emancipate itself. Hence a firm proletarian
stand must be sharply differentiated from “closed-doorism” and secta-
rianism. In waging struggles the proletariat and its political party
must establish close ties with the masses of working people, form rev-
olutionary alliances with other revolutionary classes and parties and
lead the working masses and all their allies forward together; they
must represent the interests of all working people and all revolutionary
classes and the interests of the nation, that is, they must represent the
interests of more than ninety per cent of the population of the country.
To have a firm proletarian stand is to represent at all times and in all
circumstances the highest interests of the overwhelming majority of