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Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung

Opinion On The Free Supply System

1960

[SOURCE: Long Live Mao Zedong Thought, a Red Guard Publication.]


In handling the free supply system, the Marxist style of work and the bourgeois style of work stand opposed in communist life. In my view the rural area work style and the guerrilla attitude are still good; in 22 years of war these were victorious.

Why is building communism unacceptable? Why must we grasp a wages system? This is offering concessions to the bourgeoisie and borrowing the rural area work style and guerrilla attitude to debase us. The result is development of individualism. We have forgotten that we must persuade through words and not by oppression; is it the PLA unit leaders who have restored the free supply system?

We must eradicate bourgeois jurisdiction and ideology. For example, contesting for position, contesting for rank, wanting to increase wages and giving higher wages to the intellectual worker and lower wages to the physical laborer are all remnants of bourgeois ideology. To each according to his worth is prescribed by law and it is also a bourgeois thing. In the future do we want to have a division into classes when riding vehicles? We don’t necessarily want to have a special car. We want to show some consideration toward the elderly and the weak, but we don’t want different classes for the others.

Our party is a party which continuously fought a war for more than 20 years. For a long time it has implemented the free supply system. From several tens of thousands of persons it grew to several million, right up to liberation. In the very beginning the collective lived an egalitarian life. In work everyone was industrious and in warfare all were courageous. There was absolutely no reliance on material incentives, but rather a reliance on the drumbeat of revolutionary spirit.


Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung