Taken from:
Mao Zedong, “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship,” in Mao Tse-tung: An Anthology of His Writings, ed. Anne Fremantle (New York: New American Library, 1962), 184-93.
The work is also available through the Marxists Internet Archive.
A weapon—not a machine gun, but Marxism-Leninism
We thank Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin for giving us a weapon. This weapon is not a machine gun but Marxism-Leninism.
On so-called “campism”
“You are leaning to one side.” Exactly. The forty years’ experience of Sun Yat-sen and the twenty-eight years’ experience of the Communist Party have taught us to lean to one side, and we are firmly convinced that in order to win victory and consolidate it we must lean to one side. In the light of the experiences accumulated in these forty years and these twenty-eight years, all Chinese without exception must lean either to the side of imperialism or to the side of socialism. Sitting on the fence will not do, nor is there a third road.
Throughout his life, Sun Yat-sen appealed countless times to the capitalist countries for help and got nothing but heartless rebuffs. Only once in his life did he receive foreign help, and that was Soviet help.
Let readers refer to Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s testament; his earnest advice was not to look for help from the imperialist countries but to “unite with those nations of the world which treat us as equals.”
Internationally, we belong to the side of the anti-imperialist front headed by the Soviet Union, and so we can turn only to this side for genuine and friendly help, not to the side of the imperialist front.
The people’s democratic dictatorship
The combination of these two aspects, democracy for the people and dictatorship over the reactionaries, is the people’s democratic dictatorship.