[This issue of Peking Review is from massline.org. Massline.org has kindly given us permission to to place these documents on the MIA. We made only some formatting changes to make them congruent with our style sheets.]
[This article is reprinted from Peking Review, Vol. 11, #43, Oct. 25, 1968, pp. 23-24.]
THE New Zealand Communist Review, organ of the New Zealand Communist Party, in a recent article called on all members of the Party to earnestly study Chairman Mao’s brilliant works—the “three constantly read articles.” The article points out that these articles “are the most fundamental works written on the question of the proletarian revolutionary spirit.”
With “the development of Marxism-Leninism to a new stage by Comrade Mao Tse-tung,” the article says, one should give “the necessary priority to the study of the thought of Mao Tse-tung.”
It urges all members of the New Zealand Communist Party to “begin by studying what are known as the ‘three constantly-read articles’ of Comrade Mao—that is, Serve the People, In Memory of Norman Bethune and The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains.” It adds: “No study of Marxism-Leninism and its highest stage of Comrade Mao’s theories can be of full value unless it is all related to the vital theoretical lessons of the ‘three constantly-read articles’ and unless one constantly returns to them as an orientation in the study of all the works of Comrade Mao.”
The article says that this was done in all branches of the New Zealand Communist Party. Most of them went on to sections of the Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung and then to some of the longer works of Comrade Mao from which the quotations were taken.
It states: In his foreword to the second edition of the Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Comrade Lin Piao pointed out that in studying the works of Chairman Mao, one should “strive hard to apply what one is studying.” Without thorough and repeated study of the “three constantly read articles,” it is difficult, if not impossible, to follow this advice. Because in grasping the question of application, the most basic question is to “fight self, repudiate revisionism.” It is impossible to defeat revisionism unless we conduct a persistent and continuous struggle against every manifestatign of self-interest.
“We speak of remoulding ourselves. This means getting rid of bourgeois ideology and struggling to adopt a consistently proletarian ideology. What is the criterion? Not what one says in words, but what one does,” the article says.
“The capitalist class will never voluntarily relinquish its position as the ruling class. It has to be overthrown. Similarly, the basic ideology of the ruling class will never give up its dominant position unless it is overthrown,” it stresses.
“The proletarian world outlook of Communists can only be expressed in complete and unswerving devotion to the cause of the working class and its Party. And this cannot be achieved—or maintained, if it is achieved, in the main—unless there is a constant conscious attack on the poison of self-interest which the surrounding ideology of the bourgeoisie is always pressing upon us,” it adds.
“The best weapons for this attack are precisely the ‘three constantly-read articles.’ If one wants to make such a conscious and constant attack on all manifestations of self, then one must be actually ‘constantly reading’ them,” it notes.
The article stresses in conclusion that one’s attitude to the “three constantly-read articles” “shows one’s whole understanding (or lack of it) that the thought of Chairman Mao Tse-tung is ‘Marxism-Leninism of the era in which imperialism is heading for total collapse and socialism is advancing to world-wide victory.’”
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