LET US IMPROVE GUIDANCE GIVEN BY THE MINISTRY AS REQUIRED BY THE TAEAN SYSTEM
Speech at a Consultative Meeting of the Officials of the Machine Industry
September 19, 1962
We have discussed for two days the orientation to be given to the development of the machine industry next year.
Before I go into this question, I would like to mention the shortcomings in the work of the machine industry and the measures to be taken to rectify them.
The major shortcoming in the work of the machine industry is that it lacks discipline and order.
The production of modern machinery and equipment is a very precise and complicated undertaking, so the work of the machine industry calls for strictest order and discipline and for the highest degree of precision.
At the moment, however, these requirements are not met in the work of this industry. In particular, no strict order is followed in implementing its plan, and discipline is very lax in cooperative production.
This is not the fault of the factories and enterprises, but is due entirely to the ministry.
So far the Heavy Industry Commission has drawn up plans, based on subjective wishes, without a correct understanding of the demands of the national economy and of the actual situation at factories and enterprises. Then, after sending such plans to lower echelons for implementation, the commission goes and alters or supplements them haphazardly. Hundreds of items have thus often been added to the plans for the factories and enterprises even before a month has passed since the assignment of the plans. One day, the chairman of the Heavy Industry Commission gives an order that they should manufacture this, and the next day the vice-chairman tells them to produce that. As a result, the state plans are simply all ignored.
If the items covered by such alterations and additions were indispensable for the Heavy Industry Commission, they should have been included in the plan in the first instance. But when drawing up the plan they were careless, and did not even make a detailed estimate of what they would need. And later on, they go and order one thing after another.
Of course, it would be impossible to plan everything correctly: one or two items might well be overlooked. Moreover, when an unexpected task is given by the state, they may be obliged to alter the plan a little, or to assign additional production tasks. In that case they should visit the factory to which they are giving a supplementary task, discuss the matter with the factory staff in detail, and identify any difficulties which may arise in carrying out the new task. If they find it necessary to reinforce the factory’s equipment, they should take the appropriate measures. They should also take steps to ensure the supply of materials, and form an idea of how to organize cooperation in production before the new task is assigned. If the factory finds it too difficult to implement the state plan because of the additional production task, the commission should adjust the plan and clearly define the order of priority to be followed in carrying it out. But the commission has not taken any of these measures, and has simply imposed supplementary tasks upon lower units, over and above the tasks which have already been assigned as part of the state plan; and has then, in a bureaucratic manner, urged these lower units to hurry up.
A particularly serious problem is that some officials change plans impulsively and carelessly, and send down supplementary assignments, even without the approval of the Cabinet or the Political Committee of the Party Central Committee.
Take an example.
This year you comrades sent down an additional task of producing equipment for a metallurgical works. If you wanted to get such a large amount of equipment produced, you should have included it in the plan, and if you intended issuing an additional assignment to produce so much equipment, you should have gone to the lower unit and had extensive discussions with the masses of producers concerning the possibility of fulfilling the proposed new task before you issued the assignment. You should have figured out precisely what machines would be needed for the additional task, and how to organize cooperation between all concerned in carrying it out, and then you should have taken all the necessary measures. But you forced the factory to carry out the task without your having taken any such measures. And worse still, you gave them such a heavy task even without referring the matter to the Cabinet or the Political Committee.
The leading officials in this sector frequently send down such supplementary assignments haphazardly, so that in practice many factories have to do their work virtually without a plan. Thus, neither the Tokchon Automobile Plant nor the Huichon Machine-Tool Factory has a definite plan. Shipyards, too, are working without definite plans. This runs fundamentally counter to the method of managing a socialist economy, which can develop only in a planned manner.
Because unexpected production tasks are imposed on them in this way, factories and enterprises amply cannot carry out the state plan, though they do their best to do so. You say you have a plan, but in reality you have no plan. This has given rise to a very dangerous tendency in the machine industry to think that all they have to do is to carry out their additional tasks, without bothering about whether they
fulfil the state plan or not.
If there is such an undisciplined unit in the army, it should be disbanded, and if there is such a disorderly and undisciplined Party organization, it should be dissolved.
Cooperative production, too, lacks discipline. Cooperative production should function as smoothly as a pair of gears. At present, however, the machine industry fails to produce goods properly by cooperative efforts.
These practices of ministerial officials–of making plans by rule of thumb rather than on the basis of the actual situation of the lower echelons, of changing their plans frequently, and of sending down many additional tasks–as well as the lack of discipline in organizing cooperative production, have resulted in the piling up of unfinished or half-processed goods at machine factories. Large numbers of machines and equipment remain unassembled merely because of the shortage of a few machine parts such as bearings and electric equipment; and large quantities of other goods are left unfinished after only casting or a little cutting has been done. As I said at the Taean Electrical Machinery Plant, we must turn out finished goods. Heaps of half-finished or unfinished goods are useless: they are only a waste of valuable materials and manpower. Probably a very large sum of state funds is thus being wasted or frozen at the machine factories. What a great loss the officials of the machine industry have inflicted on the state, and what a serious crime they have committed against the state!
These shortcomings of the machine industry are explained by the fact that the leading officials in this sector are deficient in their Party spirit.
Our Party has been deeply interested in the development of the machine industry, and this policy remains completely unchanged. As all of you know, even in the difficult war years our Party already took steps to build machine factories and, in the postwar period, made great efforts to create a powerful base for an independent machine industry. Since the struggle for socialist industrialization started on a full scale, our Party has been giving close attention to the development of the machine industry. We have had talks with the workers of this industry several times each year, and whenever we visited a local district, we never failed to inspect any machine factories there.
The Party Central Committee has adopted many decisions for the development of the machine industry. When we were improving the guidance and management of the national economy to suit the new circumstances, we chose the Taean Electrical Machinery Plant–part of the machine industry–to give the lead in working the new system of industrial management.
But the leading officials in this sector are not living up to the Party’s concern and expectations. In particular, they are not operating the Taean work system successfully, although they are in duty bound to do it better than any other sector. They are not striving to emulate the spirit of guidance which was given to the Taean Electrical Machinery Plant. None of the machine factories are worth mentioning as an example of the proper implementation of the Taean system.
At present, quite a few officials in this sector are asserting that “technique is omnipotent” and that “administrative authority is omnipotent”–though their own technical level is not so high. But technique alone is not enough to solve all problems. We cannot be successful in our work unless we study Party policy and work by Party method. But officials in this sector do not make a deep study of Party policy and documents nor do they work hard to carry out Party policy. They do not zealously oppose any of the tendencies which are contrary to Party policy, and some of them even connive at these tendencies.
The leading officials of the machine industry should do more to stimulate their Party spirit, so that they will acquire the revolutionary habit of informing themselves in detail of the Party’s policy on the machine industry, and carrying it out.
The machine industry must do away with such disorderly and undisciplined practices as soon as possible, radically improve the ministry’s guidance of the factories and enterprises, and make further innovations in the development of the machine industry.
The thorough application of the Taean work system is the fundamental guarantee for improving the guidance and management of production. The Taean work system is itself an application of the Chongsanri spirit and the Chongsanri method in the industrial sector; and its basic requirement is that the revolutionary mass line should be thoroughly implemented in the guidance of production.
The leading officials of the Ministry of Machine Industry should put an end to the old bureaucratic work method which is characterized by pressing and ordering people about instead of guiding production, and should zealously struggle to establish a revolutionary work system by which superiors go to the workplaces to help their subordinates and find solutions to problems, as required by the Taean system.
Contrary to the intention of the Party, which requires officials to go down to the lower echelons, many officials still travel about factories by car, as if on a pleasure trip, just checking the amount of output and, before they leave, urging the men to hurry up. This can never be regarded as guidance, nor will it be of the slightest help to factories or enterprises. If we, in giving guidance to Chongsan-ri, had just urged people to do things, asking about figures, before we left–just as is your practice now when purporting to guide factories and enterprises–we would not have helped in any way to improve the management of cooperatives. But at that time we talked with workteam leaders, sincerely discussed matters with Party members and exchanged views even with old people. We thus got to know what they wanted, what the shortcomings were in the management of the cooperative, and how to run the cooperative better and increase agricultural production more rapidly. On this basis, we cut various knots one by one and took the necessary measures.
The leading personnel of the ministry must go down to the shop floor and give guidance in this manner.
The purpose of the minister, vice-ministers and chiefs of management bureaus inspecting factories and enterprises is so that they can thoroughly acquaint themselves with the realities, help their subordinates to solve their problems, and thus encourage them to meet their targets more successfully. So when inspecting lower echelons, leading officials must, first of all, consult and listen to the workers and technicians who are directly engaged in production.
The workers and technicians who are directly engaged in production know about production better than anyone else. Rails are produced by workers and technicians, and machines are also manufactured by workers and technicians. So, only when they hear the opinions of such producers, can leading officials get a clear picture of the state of production, find out what problems there are, and get to know how to produce with greater efficiency. In a nutshell, you can give correct guidance for production only when you listen to the masses of producers.
Of course, one cannot say that all suggestions of shop-floor workers are correct. Some of these suggestions may be constructive and others may not. The leading officials therefore should assess each suggestion made, be glad to accept good ones and see that they are put into practice. To those workers whose suggestions are not constructive, a good explanation should be given why not. But many of the shop-floor workers’ suggestions are constructive, so the leading officials should listen to their voices.
When you are down at the workplace, you should also help producers actively, to say nothing of listening to their voices.
Nevertheless, some leading officials of the ministry, on their tours of inspection of lower echelons, were in the habit of blaming their subordinates for having failed to do something, and of just shouting at them to do it, instead of helping them in the matter. Worse still, such brutish people were actually admired as dynamic men. Such an attitude will be of no help to their subordinates, and will only make them refrain from offering suggestions after that. Why should they make suggestions when they know not only that they would get no help in solving their problems, but also that they would be abused for having made suggestions? Leading officials should not try to find fault with suggestions offered by their subordinates, nor should they abuse them for making them. On the contrary, they should consider each suggestion prudently from various angles and if they see any problems, they should help their subordinates to solve them.
If leading officials listen to the opinions of the masses at the lower echelons and find out the matters at issue in this way, they will avoid falling into subjectivism and rid themselves of the bureaucratic approach to work.
Not only leading officials but also technicians of the ministry should go frequently to workplaces and help the men there. Particularly in view of the fact that technical staffs of our machine factories are not yet competent enough, it is imperative that able technicians help the men on the shop floor in making technical preparations before anything else and in solving the technical problems which crop up in production.
Doing this means precisely implementing the Chongsanri spirit and the Chongsanri method, and following the mass line in giving guidance for production.
Not only in directing production, we must also follow the mass line punctiliously in planning.
Plans must be drawn up to suit the actual conditions of factories and enterprises. But this should never be taken to mean that production quotas should be set low, in a passive way: low production quotas cannot play an active role, nor do they conform to the requirements of the reality of socialist construction in our country. On the other hand, planning too high a target is no good either: such a plan would simply lack feasibility. Targets should therefore be neither too low nor too high. They should accord with both the objective requirements of the national economy and the actual conditions at the lower units concerned.
In order to map out a feasible and dynamic plan, the leading officials of the ministry must go directly to factories and enterprises, consult the producer masses extensively and then draw up the plan in collaboration with them. If planning were to be left entirely to the discretion of the people at lower echelons, the result might be a passive plan, contrary to the Party’s intention. Among the lower echelons are those whose level of consciousness is not yet high enough, and those who are not firmly equipped with the Party’s ideology. Not all people have a high collectivist and patriotic spirit, nor are they firm in their Party stand. Therefore, the minister, vice-ministers, chiefs of management bureaus and other leading ministerial officials should go down to lower units with the control figures given by the Party, acquaint themselves with the realities in detail, listen to the voices of the broad masses of producers, and help them work out a correct plan. In other words, the leading officials of the ministry should go to the factories, take their production capacity and their preparedness for production into account and, on this basis, figure out in detail what machines and how many of them a factory can produce, to which task the factory should give priority and which task should be put off a little. In this way the leading officials should specify in the plan how much, and in which month the factory should produce which items of machinery; and they should then do the necessary organizing work. Only then can technical documents, equipment and materials be arranged in advance, as required by the Taean system.
In order to prepare a plan in this manner, the officials of the ministry should be given a short course and good briefing before going down to lower echelons, instead of being sent down without any preparations. The leading officials of the factories, including the managers as well as all the shop-floor workers, should be well informed of the Party’s intentions so that they can take an active part in discussion of the plan.
Correct planning must be followed by a tightening of discipline under which the plan is implemented to the letter.
When the plans drafted by the ministries have been coordinated by the State Planning Commission and approved by the Cabinet and the Political Committee of the Party Central Committee, nobody should be allowed to change them or issue additional assignments arbitrarily. Even if a plan has to be changed or additional assignments have to be given in unavoidable circumstances, such measures must not be taken by the arbitrary decision of a minister or a few other ministerial officials. In such a case a consultative meeting must be held with the participation of the managers, Party committee chairmen and hard-core workers of the enterprises of the sectors concerned, to discuss the matters sincerely, making concrete estimates of the possible supply of materials, manpower and many other factors. The proposed amendment to the plan should then be submitted to the Political Committee of the Party Central Committee and to the Cabinet for their approval.
You must establish strict discipline in carrying out your plan. If the plan is changed one way or the other as the result of suggestions by a few-impulsive persons, the authority of the state plan will be lost, discipline and order will be damaged, and production will be unsuccessful.
I think you know this well because many of you have experience of military service, and some of you have battle experience. If a plan of operation has been mapped out and an order has been given to capture an enemy height, the commander should lead all his men, without the slightest vacillation, to carry out the order. Instead, if, when confronted with a difficult situation, he gives up his attack on the height and tries to sidetrack his forces to a ravine, his battle formation will break apart and the battle will end in failure.
The same is true of the struggle for production. Once a plan has been worked out and approved, it must be carried out to the end. If the plan is frequently changed during its implementation, the factories and enterprises concerned will find themselves in confusion, and will not succeed with their production. Henceforth you must draw up a scientific plan which conforms to reality. When the plan has been approved, you must carry it out, without modification and under strict discipline. This is the first and foremost task of the machine industry in establishing order and discipline, and an important guarantee for successful production.
Along with this, the machine industry should tighten discipline in cooperative production.
The main reason why this sector is failing to increase production at the moment is that the factories do not receive punctually the goods necessary for cooperative production. This is because of the inefficient coordination of joint efforts and the lack of discipline in cooperative production. In consequence, the automobile plant, for instance, often finds it impossible to finish the assembly of automobiles because they have not received a few components which are due from other factories, although everything else is ready.
Such inefficiency in cooperative production is explained mainly by the fact that a proper system for managing the joint efforts has not been established. Hence the need to set up a separate department within the Ministry of Machine Industry to ensure the coordinated management of cooperative production. It could be named the supervisory bureau of cooperative production or the department of cooperative production.
The State Planning Commission could have a cooperative production headquarters to organize cooperative production in a rational manner, and directly manage and undertake the manufacture of lorries, tractors, excavators and similar machines. But it seems difficult for the State Planning Commission alone to cope with the problems of managing cooperative production.
The State Planning Commission should therefore have a cooperative production headquarters which, however, should confine itself to indicating the main orientation to be followed in producing on a cooperative basis and which should direct the joint efforts of the ministries concerned. The organization and direction of specific cooperative operations should be the responsibility of the cooperative production department of the Ministry of Machine Industry. The cooperative production department should work out its plan correctly and give the right leadership to ensure its thorough implementation.
The department should assign tasks for cooperative production in concrete terms, specifying the items and quantities to be produced, the factories concerned and the deadline. It should take in hand the implementation of the plan at the factories, and direct them to respect the order of priority in production to ensure the success of the joint efforts.
Meanwhile, all factories which participate in cooperative production should make it a rule to give priority to the production of goods for the joint operations. Steel and other metal castings and components, which are manufactured within the framework of the plan of cooperation, must be forwarded to the factories concerned 15 days to one month in advance of the scheduled deadline for delivery. Whether these items are produced a fortnight earlier or later is not of much consequence to the factories which make them, but can decisively affect the implementation of plans at the factories which are to receive them.
In order to organize cooperative production properly, specialized production should be activated.
It would naturally be impossible for a single factory to produce all the parts of a complicated machine such as an automobile, tractor or excavator, and indeed to attempt to do so would be irrational.
But the leading officials in the machine industry have not properly mastered the development of specialized production: they merely think of expanding existing machine factories and giving each of them the task of producing scores of kinds of goods. What is worse, they often change the kinds of goods to be produced at a given factory. With several “general purpose” factories, and no factories which specialize in the production of individual items, it will be impossible to increase the variety of machinery and equipment or to improve quality, so as to meet the demands of our continuously developing national economy.
In order to promote specialization, the tasks assigned to a given machine factory should, as far as possible, always relate to the production of the same item or items.
If a machine factory is told to make one thing this year and another next year, or if it is given another task before it can produce one thing on a normal basis and so finish its previous task, it will be impossible to achieve specialized production, make the optimum use of equipment, or improve the quality of the items produced.
If a calligrapher is on and off his job, he will be unable to develop his penmanship; if he takes up his pen after a year’s suspension, he will feel his hand tremble and will be unable to write properly. Likewise, if a worker is told to cut one thing today, to repair a machine tomorrow, and cut something else the next day, he will be unable to do anything properly.
Nevertheless, the officials of the Ministry of Machine Industry have been imprudent enough to make frequent changes in the production tasks which have been assigned to machine factories.
They should end this practice and develop specialization by giving fixed assignments to machine factories as far as possible. It would be advisable for the Pukjung Machine Factory, for instance, to specialize in the production of diesel engines. This would make it possible to build many large vessels and thus catch plenty of fish and increase the sea transport capacity. The Ragwon Machine Factory should concentrate on the production of excavators rather than be asked to carry out miscellaneous assignments. Demand for excavators is very high now and will increase in the future: agriculture, and the building and mining industries have a great demand for excavators. To satisfy this demand there should be a factory specializing in the production of excavators.
Specialized production may, of course, be a little difficult in machine plants like the Ryongsong Machine Factory which mostly produce large one-off items. But they, too, can specialize in the production of machines such as compressors. In this way, each machine factory should specialize in the manufacture of one or two main items.
Giving fixed production assignments to the existing machine factories is an important step towards ensuring specialized production, but this alone is not enough.
The development of the national economy, coupled with the technological revolution, demands that we produce a variety of new-type machinery in larger quantities. So the existing machine factories are obliged to receive additional tasks of producing new types of machines to meet the demand. New machine factories should therefore be built to develop specialized production and to widen the variety of machinery.
Of course, it would be a good idea to build many new big machine factories, but it would take a large sum of money and a long time. So this problem should be solved by building small and medium machine factories throughout the country.
Next, you should improve the supply of materials to factories, as is required under the Taean system.
The basic principle of material supply is that higher echelons get supplies to lower echelons. In other words, the ministries and management bureaus should ensure that the necessary materials are duly delivered to the enterprises, and the enterprises should ensure that they are delivered directly to the workplaces. This would enable producers to concentrate all their efforts on their own work without having to run around trying to obtain raw materials and other necessities.
The current army supply system is the one by which the higher echelons are responsible for ensuring the delivery of supplies to the lower echelons. Weapons, equipment, food rations and all other army supplies are delivered from higher to lower echelons and combat troops.
We set up a new material supply system at the Taean Electrical Machinery Plant in order to get the mass line implemented thoroughly in economic management by abolishing the outdated bureaucratic method by which the ministries and management bureaus merely issued supply vouchers, got the staff of enterprises to run about endeavouring to obtain materials, and simply urged them to carry out their plans–without even providing them with materials. Material supply agencies have been organized to ensure that the ministries and management bureaus deliver materials in kind to the factories and enterprises, and in a responsible manner. But these agencies are not yet playing their roles properly, so that the factories and enterprises are not receiving adequate supplies of materials, and a large number of their managerial staff have to be diverted to efforts to procure materials.
However hard they may try, factories will be unable to deliver supplies to the workplaces, as required by the Taean system, unless the ministries and management bureaus first deliver them to the factories. The ministries and management bureaus should take in hand the work of material supply agencies and enhance their roles, so as to ensure that they will supply factories and enterprises with materials in time, and thus contribute to the attainment of trouble-free production.
Another thing: the collective leadership of the Party committees should be strengthened in the management of factories.
Today, when the sizes of factories have increased incomparably and technical equipment has become strengthened, one man’s intelligence is no longer good enough to manage a factory properly, as was the case in the past. Only the collective leadership of the factory Party committee can ensure the successful management of a factory.
In order to strengthen its collective leadership, the Party committee must first be organized well. The Party committee must be composed of hard-core workers from the main production units of the enterprise. The Party Committee of the Hwanghae Iron Works, for instance, should have many smelters from the blast furnace shop and steel shop. Only when those Party members who carry out their revolutionary tasks in good faith in the important production sectors, are on the Party committee, can the Party committee come to understand clearly the various problems which arise in production and management, and solve them correctly.
Along with this, everyone should faithfully accept collective leadership by the Party committee and obey its decisions. The manager, too, should act on the decisions adopted through collective discussion by the factory Party committee: he must never deal with problems arbitrarily. The factory managerial staff must never regard guidance from the Party committee as meddling in their work, or as something of a nuisance.
As the saying goes that you must ask your way even when you know it, you should pool everyone’s brains and discuss problems widely, if you are to succeed in carrying out such a difficult and complicated revolutionary task as socialist economic construction. So the factory Party committee must collectively discuss and decide the action to be taken on each problem which arises in factory management and in the implementation of its plan, and all the staff of the factory must do their work in accordance with the decisions of the Party committee.
If its collective leadership is strengthened in this way, the Party committee will be able to find out and correct promptly even wrong instructions that might be given by the ministry and management bureau. If an instruction is given by the ministry or a management bureau, the Party committees should examine whether it conforms to the Party’s policy or not. If the instruction is deemed to be correct, they should work out, by collective discussion, the measures to carry it out. In any other case, they should bring the matter before higher authority, up to and including the Party Central Committee, and get it rectified.
To proceed. I would like to mention some measures which ought to be taken for the further development of the machine industry.
Thanks to the correct policy and wise leadership of our Party, a strong base for a modern machine industry was built in our country in a very short time after the war. But we can never rest content with this. Our machine industry still has many shortcomings and many machine factories are not perfectly equipped. We must continue to direct great efforts to this industry, equip our machine factories completely as soon as possible, make up for their deficiencies and accelerate the development of the machine industry, in keeping with the progress of our national economy and the requirements of all-out technological revolution.
Even though we have to put much stress on the development of the machine industry, it would be impossible to confine large-scale investment to this sector nor can we afford to equip all machine factories completely at one go. Therefore, we should rather make a modest investment in the machine industry each year, so as to reinforce casting capacity where it is inadequate, or increase processing capacity where it is insufficient, and thus progressively complete the equipment of machine plants, and reinforce the weak links of this industry one by one.
At present one of the weakest links in our machine industry lies in electrical machinery production. We should create a new base for the production of electrical machinery, while expanding the existing ones, thereby producing more motors and other electrical machines and equipment. In particular, we should give close attention to the increased production of explosion-proof electric motors.
Our capacity for the production of large-sized machines and special machines is another of the weak links in our national economy. To meet this problem we should build a new heavy machinery plant in the near future.
We could import the complete equipment for a heavy machinery plant from abroad, but it would cost us a large sum of foreign currency and, moreover, it would take us a long time. It would therefore be advisable for us to endeavour to build a heavy machinery plant on our own, drawing on the strength of our existing machine industry, in the revolutionary spirit of self-reliance.
When the Kusong Mining Machinery Factory had built a 6-metre hobbing lathe, I asked the factory officials to produce another and send it to the Ryongsong Machine Factory, and they did so. If each year, each machine factory produces one or two machines for a heavy machinery plant, in the spirit of the days when the “let-each-machine-tool-make-more” movement was being launched, we could build an excellent heavy machinery plant in two to three years. If the leading officials of the ministry organize this work properly and rouse the workers to action, I think they will manage to accomplish this task in addition to fulfilling their production plan.
Training more technicians and skilled workers and improving their quality is another very urgent task for the development of the machine industry.
We should not only improve the training of technicians in universities, but also see to it that the night and factory colleges produce many more technicians.
We should also properly organize the activities to improve the qualifications of technicians on the job. We should arrange frequent short courses and provide technicians with good conditions for study.
We should see to it that the technicians acquire a revolutionary habit of study, making it a rule to study two hours every day. Some people say that two hours’ study every day would interfere with production. This is an unreasonable view. The purpose of technicians’ study is to enable them to become more efficient in production, so their study can never be an obstacle to production. Because our machine industry is young, our technicians are not yet very experienced and their skills are still modest. Unless they improve their qualifications by hard study, our technicians will not be able to develop the machine industry rapidly.
Technicians should not only make strenuous efforts to master their own specialities, but also study diligently the Party’s idea and policy. If they think they knew everything and neglect to study, simply because they have been to a university, they may become lazy and depraved and lose the Party spirit. In the long run they will disregard the Party, behave arrogantly towards it and even come out against it. All our workers should therefore study and understand Party policy deeply, while not neglecting study even a moment. Those who are not yet engineers or assistant engineers should study hard to acquire these technical qualifications, and those who are engineers and assistant engineers should make strenuous efforts to deepen and broaden their technical knowledge.
In addition, mechanics should be kept on the same job a long time. Only then will they be able to raise their technical and skill levels, and only then will the ranks of skilled workers grow. You should see that workers who have been in the machine industry for ten to twenty years account for at least 30 to 50 per cent of the labour force in each machine factory. Now that we have made a little history with our machine industry, we can do so if we organize well and tackle this task properly.