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Happines according to Marx and Mao
QUOTABLEQUOTES:
Happiness
According
Happiness-According to Marx and Mao The following is a Letter to the Editor and the key portion of his Answer which appeared in the Aug. 9, 1962 issue of the Canton Nan-fang Jib-pao (Communist South China DaiZy). “Comrade Editor: As a young man of the new China living in the peaceful and happy socialist motherland, I really feel fortunate. But sometimes I also feel that life in the countryside after all is not as happy and meaningful as that in the city. Cultural and recreational life in the city, for instance, is very lively, while holidays can be spent very happily. Life in the countryside, however, is very insipid, for farm work is more arduous and cultural and recreational activities are scarce during holidays. One therefore cannot work in the countryside completely in peace. As I myself cannot solve this ideological trouble, please give me some help.” “Answer: As young people hope their life will be happy and meaningful, they should first of all understand what is meant by happiness and what kind of life is meaningful. Marx’s daughter once asked her father: ‘What is your understanding of happiness?’ Marx replied: ‘Wage a struggle.’ Comrade Mao Tse-tung, our leader, has also said: ‘To struggle with the sky is of boundless joy! To struggle with the earth is of boundless joy! To struggle with man is of boundless joy!’ The teachings and advice as given by these two great revolutionary leaders have made us realize that happiness and joy cannot be separated from struggle. Only through struggle will we be able to obtain happiness. Since struggling involves first of all the question of encountering difficulties and hardships, there is no happiness without privation. The course of struggling arduously is also the course of creating a happy life. This is the correct understanding we should have in respect to happiness and the correct attitude we should take toward life.”
Lenin’s Words Applicable to Soviet Union Today “The policy of the Tsarist govermnent in China is a criminal policy, which brings increasing ruin to the people as it corrupts and oppresses them more than ever before. The Tsarist government not only holds our people in slavery; it sends them out to put down other peoples that rise against their own enslavement (as was the case in 1849, when Russian troops suppressed the revolution in Hungary). It not only helps Russian capitalists to exploit their workers and tie the workers’ hands so that they would not dare to unite and defend themselves; it sends soldiers out to rob other peoples for the interests of a small group of the rich and the elite. There is just one way to get rid of the yoke which war dumps on the working people: convo-
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to Marx
and Mao
cation of people’s representatives, who would put an end to the absolutist rule of the government and force it to take into consideration the interests of others and not only of its own gang of courtiers.” -V. I. Lenin writing in the first issue of Iskra (The Spark), December, igoo, as recorded in his Sochineniia (Works, Russian 4th edition, Vol. IV, pp. 351-352).Zskra was the spark that helped kindle the flame of the Bolshevik Revolution 17 years later.
“Worse Than Colonial Times,” African says of Berlin The President of the Malagasy Republic (Madagascar), M. Philibert Tsiranana, visiting Berlin, said at a press conference August 30: “Whoever built this wall, is really a monster. Even during the colonial times my people were treated better.” (Der Abend, Berlin daily, Aug. 31,lg62).
Indian Calls Berlin Wall “Everybody’s Wall” “ . . . the Wall was built because Mr. Ulbricht
was afraid of the economic and ideological consequences of the continuing exodus of skilled workers and intellectuals to West Germany. These refugees have voted with their feet against the regime that they have fled. And the Wall is monumental symbol of the essential human failure of that regime and the crude power that backs it. . . . The sharpest impression East Berlin leaves on the mind of a visitor is of a ghost city.. . . The silence and emptiness of the great city seemed a protest against the regimentation and conformity of daily living evident in the large red banners hung from factory gates and public buildings proclaiming peace, friendship, socialism and unity and various production targets. Perhaps the people preferred to stay at home because only there could they be themselves. East Berlin was drab and soulless. One felt glad to get away. “West Berlin was different. It was bustling, alive, gay, affluent, elegant. . . . West Berlin is the greatest industrial centre between Moscow and Paris . . . . “Confidence in the future of the city rests on the assurance of continued and unfettered access to it from West Germany. West Berlin can withstand another seige as in 1948-49 but it cannot survive if its communications with the outside world are permanently severed or placed under any form of restraint. That is why the Soviet proposal that West Berlin be accorded the status of an isolated free city within a complete sovereign East Germany is so patently unacceptable. “The Berlin problem cannot be treated in isolation. It is part of the German problem which in turn is part of the larger question of East-West relations. The Berlin Wall is everybody’s wall. A non-aligned nation has no reason to accept it.” -From The Times Verghese) .
of India, July 26, 1962 (by B. G.
British TUC leader Condemns the Wall Sir Tom O’Brien, Senior Member of the British Trade Union Congress General Council and a former TUC President, after visiting Berlin made the following observations recorded in Berlin Report, August 1962: “I make the categorical charge that the State trade union federation (F.D.G.B.) does not represent the workers. It has been officially designated an agent of Its primary function is driving the State as employer. the workers to the highest pitch of productivity. .. “In fact, the whole system of Communist industrial law aims merely to squeeze the maximum performance out of the worker. Somehow it does not seem to have been successful, for, in an incredible refinement, the Ulbricht regime has asked the Federal Republic for a loan of hundreds of millions of marks to bolster its bankrupt economic programme . . . “Altogether, the rights and living conditions of the East Berlin workers fall pitifully short of those enjoyed by their fellows on the other side of the Wall . . . “Some day the Wall, and all that it symbolises for we trade unionists, must be breached and freedom and re-unification brought to those who wait with resignation or despair for liberation. How and when it will come are imponderables. I hope it will come peacefully.”
Former Red Colonel Calls Western Armies Superior Lt. Col. Martin Herbert Loeffler, highest ranking East German officer to escape to the West thus far, made some interesting comments on Communist military preparation as he had seen it. At a news conference Sept. 2 I, he said, among other things: “I do not expect that a military operation will be taken against West Berlin because there have been no preparations for it,” Loeffler said. “However, all units stationed around Berlin are kept ready for battle at all times.” Loeffler, who served in the Nazi army as a private and was a prisoner of war in Russia for three years, said despite the high quality of the Soviet army he felt that the Western armies “are morally and technically superior.” “The technical superiority, especially of the Americans, will in the end be decisive,” he added. “The Russians, in case of war with the West, fast will send the six National Peoples Army divisions to the crematory,” the colonel said sarcastically, indicating they would be first to bear the brunt of atomic war. Loeffler said he remains a Communist, however, despite his defection.
Ben Bella, Castro Embrace at Havana Algerian Premier Ahmed Ben Bella arrived at Havana Oct. 16 soon after having spoken with President Kennedy in Washington and at the U.N., where he pledged his nation to unprejudiced neutralism. After embracing Premier Castro of Cuba, Ben Bella said: “Algeria is and will be with Cuba.”
In reply, Castro declared that “both the Algerian and ‘Cuban revolutions are irreversible,” and added: “To visit Cuba at a time when the United States is redoubling its criminal blockade . . . . when the Yankee imperialists threaten to attack is on your part an act of political fu?nness and valor.” Later, in a joint communique, Ben Bella and Castro said they had “considered the unpostponable necessity of evacuating (foreign) troops and dismantling foreign military bases in other cotmtries, including Guantanamo naval base.” The U.S. naval installation in Eastern Cuba will be “claimed . . . through international law,” the communique said. The reference to foreign troops and bases referred obviously to French military units and bases still in Ben Bella’s newly independent north African nation.
The Soviet Image of America’s Economy In a review of a 8o8-page book by L. B. Alter, “The Bourgeois Political Economy of the USA (on the basic stages in the development of American capitalism),” Soviet economist S. Epstein in the important, relatively “liberal” monthly Novy Mir (New World) No. 7, July, 1962, writes in part: “There is no deed of capitalism so dirty that a theoretical ‘substantiation’ cannot be found for it. Not too long ago American professors wrote treatises on the absolute necessity of child labor! Such a leading light of American political economy as Kerry [tic] praised to the skies the ‘harmony of interests’ shared by slaves and slave owners. . . . Present day bourgeois economists in one way or another argue for the eternity of hired slavery, justify unemployment and militarism, the policy of monopolistic prices, rationalize the idea of world domination by the USA and the submission of nations to American imperialism. The times when bourgeois political economy could afford to be objective have vanished into history. . . “The overall number of unemployed in the USA actually amounts to ten million . . . In 1960, seventy-five million Americans, or more than two-fifths of the country’s population, lived in poverty or on the brink of poverty . . . only seven percent of the population can be classified as well-off. . . “Textbooks used to educate American students either do not mention Marx’s name or do so in passing, at times accompanied by stupid jokes. At best they say that Marx was right about some things ‘in his time’ but is out of date now. But this tactic boomerangs. . . His name, ominous for the bourgeoisie, can be avoided. But as a matter of fact, all of the contemporary political economy of capitalism is nothing but a hidden polemic with Marxism-Leninism. .. “Anti-Communism has become in our day the prinpal function of bourgeois political economy. What cannot be refuted can be distorted, the better to introduce confusion into the consciousness of the masses. Lenin’s words retain their full force: ‘when the professors undertake to refute Socialism, you don’t know at what to wonder most-their stupidity or their @orante or their lack of integrity.’ They have no constructive ideology. Theirs is the political economy of bankrupts.”
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Happiness
According
Happiness-According to Marx and Mao The following is a Letter to the Editor and the key portion of his Answer which appeared in the Aug. 9, 1962 issue of the Canton Nan-fang Jib-pao (Communist South China DaiZy). “Comrade Editor: As a young man of the new China living in the peaceful and happy socialist motherland, I really feel fortunate. But sometimes I also feel that life in the countryside after all is not as happy and meaningful as that in the city. Cultural and recreational life in the city, for instance, is very lively, while holidays can be spent very happily. Life in the countryside, however, is very insipid, for farm work is more arduous and cultural and recreational activities are scarce during holidays. One therefore cannot work in the countryside completely in peace. As I myself cannot solve this ideological trouble, please give me some help.” “Answer: As young people hope their life will be happy and meaningful, they should first of all understand what is meant by happiness and what kind of life is meaningful. Marx’s daughter once asked her father: ‘What is your understanding of happiness?’ Marx replied: ‘Wage a struggle.’ Comrade Mao Tse-tung, our leader, has also said: ‘To struggle with the sky is of boundless joy! To struggle with the earth is of boundless joy! To struggle with man is of boundless joy!’ The teachings and advice as given by these two great revolutionary leaders have made us realize that happiness and joy cannot be separated from struggle. Only through struggle will we be able to obtain happiness. Since struggling involves first of all the question of encountering difficulties and hardships, there is no happiness without privation. The course of struggling arduously is also the course of creating a happy life. This is the correct understanding we should have in respect to happiness and the correct attitude we should take toward life.”
Lenin’s Words Applicable to Soviet Union Today “The policy of the Tsarist govermnent in China is a criminal policy, which brings increasing ruin to the people as it corrupts and oppresses them more than ever before. The Tsarist government not only holds our people in slavery; it sends them out to put down other peoples that rise against their own enslavement (as was the case in 1849, when Russian troops suppressed the revolution in Hungary). It not only helps Russian capitalists to exploit their workers and tie the workers’ hands so that they would not dare to unite and defend themselves; it sends soldiers out to rob other peoples for the interests of a small group of the rich and the elite. There is just one way to get rid of the yoke which war dumps on the working people: convo-
16
to Marx
and Mao
cation of people’s representatives, who would put an end to the absolutist rule of the government and force it to take into consideration the interests of others and not only of its own gang of courtiers.” -V. I. Lenin writing in the first issue of Iskra (The Spark), December, igoo, as recorded in his Sochineniia (Works, Russian 4th edition, Vol. IV, pp. 351-352).Zskra was the spark that helped kindle the flame of the Bolshevik Revolution 17 years later.
“Worse Than Colonial Times,” African says of Berlin The President of the Malagasy Republic (Madagascar), M. Philibert Tsiranana, visiting Berlin, said at a press conference August 30: “Whoever built this wall, is really a monster. Even during the colonial times my people were treated better.” (Der Abend, Berlin daily, Aug. 31,lg62).
Indian Calls Berlin Wall “Everybody’s Wall” “ . . . the Wall was built because Mr. Ulbricht
was afraid of the economic and ideological consequences of the continuing exodus of skilled workers and intellectuals to West Germany. These refugees have voted with their feet against the regime that they have fled. And the Wall is monumental symbol of the essential human failure of that regime and the crude power that backs it. . . . The sharpest impression East Berlin leaves on the mind of a visitor is of a ghost city.. . . The silence and emptiness of the great city seemed a protest against the regimentation and conformity of daily living evident in the large red banners hung from factory gates and public buildings proclaiming peace, friendship, socialism and unity and various production targets. Perhaps the people preferred to stay at home because only there could they be themselves. East Berlin was drab and soulless. One felt glad to get away. “West Berlin was different. It was bustling, alive, gay, affluent, elegant. . . . West Berlin is the greatest industrial centre between Moscow and Paris . . . . “Confidence in the future of the city rests on the assurance of continued and unfettered access to it from West Germany. West Berlin can withstand another seige as in 1948-49 but it cannot survive if its communications with the outside world are permanently severed or placed under any form of restraint. That is why the Soviet proposal that West Berlin be accorded the status of an isolated free city within a complete sovereign East Germany is so patently unacceptable. “The Berlin problem cannot be treated in isolation. It is part of the German problem which in turn is part of the larger question of East-West relations. The Berlin Wall is everybody’s wall. A non-aligned nation has no reason to accept it.” -From The Times Verghese) .
of India, July 26, 1962 (by B. G.
British TUC leader Condemns the Wall Sir Tom O’Brien, Senior Member of the British Trade Union Congress General Council and a former TUC President, after visiting Berlin made the following observations recorded in Berlin Report, August 1962: “I make the categorical charge that the State trade union federation (F.D.G.B.) does not represent the workers. It has been officially designated an agent of Its primary function is driving the State as employer. the workers to the highest pitch of productivity. .. “In fact, the whole system of Communist industrial law aims merely to squeeze the maximum performance out of the worker. Somehow it does not seem to have been successful, for, in an incredible refinement, the Ulbricht regime has asked the Federal Republic for a loan of hundreds of millions of marks to bolster its bankrupt economic programme . . . “Altogether, the rights and living conditions of the East Berlin workers fall pitifully short of those enjoyed by their fellows on the other side of the Wall . . . “Some day the Wall, and all that it symbolises for we trade unionists, must be breached and freedom and re-unification brought to those who wait with resignation or despair for liberation. How and when it will come are imponderables. I hope it will come peacefully.”
Former Red Colonel Calls Western Armies Superior Lt. Col. Martin Herbert Loeffler, highest ranking East German officer to escape to the West thus far, made some interesting comments on Communist military preparation as he had seen it. At a news conference Sept. 2 I, he said, among other things: “I do not expect that a military operation will be taken against West Berlin because there have been no preparations for it,” Loeffler said. “However, all units stationed around Berlin are kept ready for battle at all times.” Loeffler, who served in the Nazi army as a private and was a prisoner of war in Russia for three years, said despite the high quality of the Soviet army he felt that the Western armies “are morally and technically superior.” “The technical superiority, especially of the Americans, will in the end be decisive,” he added. “The Russians, in case of war with the West, fast will send the six National Peoples Army divisions to the crematory,” the colonel said sarcastically, indicating they would be first to bear the brunt of atomic war. Loeffler said he remains a Communist, however, despite his defection.
Ben Bella, Castro Embrace at Havana Algerian Premier Ahmed Ben Bella arrived at Havana Oct. 16 soon after having spoken with President Kennedy in Washington and at the U.N., where he pledged his nation to unprejudiced neutralism. After embracing Premier Castro of Cuba, Ben Bella said: “Algeria is and will be with Cuba.”
In reply, Castro declared that “both the Algerian and ‘Cuban revolutions are irreversible,” and added: “To visit Cuba at a time when the United States is redoubling its criminal blockade . . . . when the Yankee imperialists threaten to attack is on your part an act of political fu?nness and valor.” Later, in a joint communique, Ben Bella and Castro said they had “considered the unpostponable necessity of evacuating (foreign) troops and dismantling foreign military bases in other cotmtries, including Guantanamo naval base.” The U.S. naval installation in Eastern Cuba will be “claimed . . . through international law,” the communique said. The reference to foreign troops and bases referred obviously to French military units and bases still in Ben Bella’s newly independent north African nation.
The Soviet Image of America’s Economy In a review of a 8o8-page book by L. B. Alter, “The Bourgeois Political Economy of the USA (on the basic stages in the development of American capitalism),” Soviet economist S. Epstein in the important, relatively “liberal” monthly Novy Mir (New World) No. 7, July, 1962, writes in part: “There is no deed of capitalism so dirty that a theoretical ‘substantiation’ cannot be found for it. Not too long ago American professors wrote treatises on the absolute necessity of child labor! Such a leading light of American political economy as Kerry [tic] praised to the skies the ‘harmony of interests’ shared by slaves and slave owners. . . . Present day bourgeois economists in one way or another argue for the eternity of hired slavery, justify unemployment and militarism, the policy of monopolistic prices, rationalize the idea of world domination by the USA and the submission of nations to American imperialism. The times when bourgeois political economy could afford to be objective have vanished into history. . . “The overall number of unemployed in the USA actually amounts to ten million . . . In 1960, seventy-five million Americans, or more than two-fifths of the country’s population, lived in poverty or on the brink of poverty . . . only seven percent of the population can be classified as well-off. . . “Textbooks used to educate American students either do not mention Marx’s name or do so in passing, at times accompanied by stupid jokes. At best they say that Marx was right about some things ‘in his time’ but is out of date now. But this tactic boomerangs. . . His name, ominous for the bourgeoisie, can be avoided. But as a matter of fact, all of the contemporary political economy of capitalism is nothing but a hidden polemic with Marxism-Leninism. .. “Anti-Communism has become in our day the prinpal function of bourgeois political economy. What cannot be refuted can be distorted, the better to introduce confusion into the consciousness of the masses. Lenin’s words retain their full force: ‘when the professors undertake to refute Socialism, you don’t know at what to wonder most-their stupidity or their @orante or their lack of integrity.’ They have no constructive ideology. Theirs is the political economy of bankrupts.”
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