It is necessary to delineate classes. Although the bad people are a minority, they have occupied key departments and seized power, which is a serious matter. ... A distinction must be made between class composition and one's own performance; the main thing is one's own performance. The main purpose of delineating classes is to clear out the bad elements.

A distinction must also be made between class origin and one's own performance, with the emphasis on performance. The theory of judging solely by class composition is wrong. The question is whether you stand on the side of your original class origin, or on the side of a changed class standpoint, that is, on the side of the workers and poor and lower-middle peasants? Furthermore, one must not practice sectarianism, but must unite with the great majority, even uniting with a portion of the landlords and rich peasants. The children of landlords and rich peasants must be united with. Some counter-revolutionary elements and destructive elements must also be reformed; as long as they are willing to be reformed, they should be wanted, all of them should be wanted. If we were to judge solely by origin, then Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin would all be unacceptable. For example, Marx also had to first study idealism before later studying materialism and creating Marxism. Hegel and Feuerbach were his two teachers in philosophy.

When we delineate classes in factories, it is mainly to find out those Kuomintang secretary-generals, reactionary military officers, and fugitive landlords, those landlord, rich peasant, counter-revolutionary, and bad elements. Like at the Baiyin Factory, it is to find out those bad people, not to investigate all people, not to investigate technical personnel from exploiting class backgrounds. In the past, some of them mainly served the exploiting classes; as long as their performance is good now, they should be trusted. Even if their performance is not very good, they must be reformed. Some are merely from exploiting class backgrounds; in that case, it depends on whether their performance is good or bad.

The emergence of socialist theory can only come through intellectuals, who study and elevate the already existing phenomena of class struggle into theory, propagate it, and transform the working class from being dispersed to being organized, from a spontaneous class to a class-for-itself. Workers live and work under exploitation and oppression every day, so busy just to eat, they cannot produce Marxism themselves. Marx himself was not a worker, but he could see the trend of development. Through analysis and research, he transformed bourgeois philosophy into proletarian philosophy, and bourgeois political economy into proletarian political economy, and in this way educated the workers. In fact, workers cannot read that many books, cannot read such voluminous works; the advanced ones may read a bit more. The phenomenon of class struggle has existed for several thousand years; the bourgeoisie also said there was class struggle. Only Marx and Engels theorized and systematized it. To overthrow the bourgeoisie, socialism inherited from capitalism. I myself also first learned from the landlord class, studying Confucius for six years, and from the bourgeoisie for seven years, a total of thirteen years. At that time, in my twenties, I knew nothing of Marx at all. Only after the October Revolution in Russia did I come to know of Marx and read Marx's books.