Page 20 - SELECTED WORKS OF MAO TSE-TUNG Volume I.indd

14 MAO TSE-TUNG
revolutionary group. Their political representatives are the Étatistes ²
and the right-wing of the Kuomintang.
The middle bourgeoisie. This class represents the capitalist rela-
tions of production in China in town and country. The middle
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bourgeoisie, by which is meant chiefly the national bourgeoisie, is
inconsistent in its attitude towards the Chinese revolution: they feel
the need for revolution and favour the revolutionary movement
against imperialism and the warlords when they are smarting under
the blows of foreign capital and the oppression of the warlords, but
they become suspicious of the revolution when they sense that, with
the militant participation of the proletariat at home and the active
support of the international proletariat abroad, the revolution is
threatening the hope of their class to attain the status of a big bour-
geoisie. Politically, they stand for the establishment of a state under
the rule of a single class, the national bourgeoisie. A self-styled true
5
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disciple of Tai Chi-tao wrote in the Chen Pao, Peking, “Raise your
left fist to knock down the imperialists and your right to knock down
the Communists.” These words depict the dilemma and anxiety of
this class. It is against interpreting the Kuomintang’s Principle of
the People’s Livelihood according to the theory of class struggle, and
it opposes the Kuomintang’s alliance with Russia and the admission
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of Communists and left-wingers. But its attempt to establish a state
under the rule of the national bourgeoisie is quite impracticable, be-
cause the present world situation is such that the two major forces,
revolution and counter-revolution, are locked in final struggle. Each
has hoisted a huge banner: one is the red banner of revolution held
aloft by the Third International as the rallying point for all the op-
pressed classes of the world, the other is the white banner of counter-
revolution held aloft by the League of Nations as the rallying point
for all the counter-revolutionaries of the world. The intermediate
classes are bound to disintegrate quickly, some sections turning left
to join the revolution, others turning right to join the counter-revolu-
tion; there is no room for them to remain “independent”. Therefore
neither of them knew where to seek reinforcements or where to obtain allies on a
mass scale. Comrade Mao Tse-tung pointed out that the peasantry was the staunchest
and numerically the largest ally of the Chinese proletariat, and thus solved the
problem of who w as the chief ally in the Chinese revolution. Moreover, he saw
that the national bourgeoisie was a vacillating class and predicted that it would
disintegrate during the upsurge of the revolution, with its right-wing going over to
the side of imperialism. This was borne out by the events of 1927.