Page 19 - SELECTED WORKS OF MAO TSE-TUNG Volume III.indd

REFORM OUR STUDY

May 1941

I propose that we should reform the method and the system
of study throughout the Party. The reasons are as follows:

Ⅰ

The twenty years of the Communist Party of China have been
twenty years in which the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism has
become more and more integrated with the concrete practice of the
Chinese revolution. If we recall how superficial and meagre our under-
standing of Marxism-Leninism and of the Chinese revolution was
during our Party’s infancy, we can see how much deeper and richer
it is now. For a hundred years, the finest sons and daughters of the
disaster-ridden Chinese nation fought and sacrificed their lives, one
stepping into the breach as another fell, in quest of the truth that
would save the country and the people. This moves us to song and
tears. But it was only after World War I and the October Revolution
in Russia that we found Marxism-Leninism, the best of truths, the
best of weapons for liberating our nation. And the Communist Party
of China has been the initiator, propagandist and organizer in the
wielding of this weapon. As soon as it was linked with the concrete
practice of the Chinese revolution, the universal truth of Marxism-

Comrade Mao Tse-tung made this report to a cadres’ meeting in Yenan. The
report and the two articles, “Rectify the Party’s Style of Work” and “Oppose
Stereotyped Party Writing”, are Comrade Mao Tse-tung’s basic works on the recti-
fication movement. In these he summed up, on the ideological plane, past differences
in the Party over the Party line and analysed the petty-bourgeois ideology and style
which, masquerading as Marxism-Leninism, were prevalent in the Party, and which
chiefly manifested themselves in subjectivist and sectarian tendencies, their form

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