Lin Biao -- On the Preparation for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution - Page 4

Our Party waged intense battles in accordance with the resolution of the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee and the Party's general line for the transition period formulated by Chairman Mao. By 1956, the socialist transformation of the ownership of the means for production in agriculture, handicrafts, and capitalist industry and commerce had been in the main completed. That was the crucial moment for deciding whether the socialist revolution could continue to advance. In view of the rampancy of revisionism in the international communist movement and the new trends of class struggle in our country, Chairman Mao, in his great work On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, called the attention of the whole Party to the following fact:

In China although in the main socialist transformation has been completed with respect to the system of ownership . . . there are still remnants of the overthrown landlord and comprador classes, there is still a bourgeoisie, and the remolding of the petty bourgeoisie has only just started.

Countering the fallacy put forward by Liu Shao-chi in 1956 that "in China, the question of which wins out, socialism or capitalism, is already solved." Chairman Mao specifically pointed out: "The question of which will win out, socialism or capitalism, is still not really settled." "The class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the class struggle between the different political forces, and the class struggle between the ideological field between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie will continue to be long and tortuous and at times will even become very acute." Thus for the first time in the theory and practice of the international communist movement, it was pointed out explicitly that class and class struggle still exist after the socialist transformation of the ownership of the means of production has been completed, and that the proletariat must continue the revolution.

The proletariat headquarters headed by Chairman Mao led the broad masses in carrying on the great struggle in the direction he indicated. From the struggle against the bourgeois rightists in 1957 to the struggle to uncover Peng Teh-huai's anti-Party clique at the Lushan Meeting in 1959, from the great debate on the general line of the Party in building socialism to the struggle between the two lines in the socialist education movement -- the focus of the struggle was the question of whether to take the socialist road or to take the capitalist road, whether to uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat or to uphold the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Every single victory of Chairman Mao's proletariat revolutionary line, every victory in every major campaign launched by the Party against the bourgeoisie, was gained only after smashing the revisionist line represented by Liu Shao-chi, which either was Right or was "Left" in form but Right in essence