Thoughts on chapter eight: find it wryly entertaining that he would depict the unsavory members of the party as in-laws rather than direct family members.

Before joining the Party, some young comrades were bitterly dissatisfied with existing society, saw no way out and turned to the Communist Party as to a beacon of light. They thought that everything would be satisfactory and would work out well once they joined. Yet after doing so, or after arriving in our revolutionary base area, they find there are shortcomings and mistakes in the Party, too, and in real life not everything is satisfactory (much that would satisfy them would not be in the interests of the revolution and the Party)

Heavy implications in that last line. I would imagine he’s referring to the utopian idealist types that think communism would be fully automated luxury for them right away and no struggle or work translating the theory to the practical business of running a political economy.

in China today there still exists exploiting classes and the influence of these classes - selfishness, intrigue, bureaucracy and various types of filth. We have many excellent Party members who are not easily affected by such influences. But it is so strange that certain members bring some of the filth of the old society with them into our Party of reflect it there? Is it so strange that a person that has just crawled out of the mud is covered with slime? Of course not. It is only to be expected. It would be strange and indeed incredible, if the ranks of the Communist Party were absolutely free from such filth.

Similar thematic metaphor as the classic “we all eat out of the trash can.”

The pressure of the bourgeoisie and its ideology on the proletariat and its party finds expression in the fact that bourgeois ideas, manners, customs and sentiments not infrequently penetrate the proletariat and its party through definite strata of the proletariat that are in one way or another connected with bourgeois society.

The long term interest of the proletariat is to rid itself of the shackles of the bourgeoisie, but as long as they must survive in a bourgeois political economy, they need to defer and placate that system. Thus we get contradictions in the proletariat movements (more on that in a bit).

The second stratum consists of new comers from non-proletarian classes - from the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie or the intelligencia.

The first two are straightforward enough, but the last category is a bit more nebulous. Is this just those in academia? Professional, as much as there can be, philosophers? Could journalists fall into this category?

The third stratum, lastly, consists of the labour aristocracy, the upper stratum of the working class, the most well-to-do portion of the proletariat, with its propensity for compromise with the bourgeoisie, its predominant inclination to adapt itself to the powers that be, and its anxiety go "get on in life". This stratum constitutes the most favourable soil for outright reformists and opportunists.

Ah yes, labor aristocracy, very contentious within leftist debate and more of that contradiction within the proletariat and proletariat movements. Obviously, all leftists want to see the well-being of laborers improved. Yet it’s also unavoidable that the history of improving their conditions has led to subsets of the working class seeing itself as working class plus, their protections and unions not the result of working class struggle but rather a blessing upon them for being the hard working laborers, as opposed to those lazy, mooching laborers. It is a delicate balance to find improvements that empower the working class without destroying its proper sense of class identity and not falling into producerism mindsets.