mARxISM Mao Talk On Questions Of Philosophy
August 18, 1964
[SOURCE: Mao chu-hsi tui P’eng, Hua-ng, Chang, Chou fan-tang chi-t’uan ti p’i-p’an]
It is only when there is class struggle that there can be philosophy. It is a waste of time to discuss epistemology apart from practice. The comrades who study philosophy should go down to the countryside. They should go down this winter or next spring to participate in the class struggle. Those whose health is not good should go too. Going down won’t kill people. All they’ll do is catch a cold, and if they just put on a few extra suits of clothes it’ll be all right.
The way they go about it in the universities at present is no good, going from book to book, from concept to concept. How can philosophy come from books? The three basic constituents of Marxism are scientific socialism, philosophy, and political economy.
[1] The foundation is social science, class struggle. There is a struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Marx and the others saw this. Utopian socialists are always trying to persuade the bourgeoisie to be charitable. This won’t work, it is necessary to rely on the class struggle of the proletariat. At that time, there had already been many strikes. The English parliamentary inquiry recognized that the twelve-hour day was less favourable than the eight-hour day to the interests of the capitalists. It is only starting from this viewpoint that Marxism appeared. The foundation is class struggle. The study of philosophy can only come afterwards. Whose philosophy? Bourgeois philosophy, or proletarian philosophy? Proletarian philosophy is Marxist philosophy. There is also proletarian economics, which has transformed classical economics. Those who engage in philosophy believe that philosophy comes first. The oppressors oppress the oppressed, while the oppressed need to fight back and seek a way out before they start looking for philosophy. It is only when people took this as their starting-point that there was Marxism-Leninism, and that they discovered philosophy. We have all been through this. Others wanted to kill me; Chiang Kai-shek wanted to kill me. Thus we came to engage in class struggle, to engage in philosophizing.
University students should start going down this winter — I am referring to the humanities. Students of natural science should not be moved now, though we can move them for a spell or two. All those studying the humanities — history, political economy, literature, law — must every one of them go. Professors, assistant professors, administrative workers, and student should all of them go down, for a limited period of five months. If they go to the countryside for five months, or to the factories for five months, they will acquire some perceptual knowledge. Horses, cows, sheep, chickens, dogs, pigs, rice, sorghum, beans, wheat, varieties of millet they can have a look at all these things. If they go in the winter, they will not see the harvest, but at least they can still see the land and the people. To get some experience of class struggle — that’s what I call a university. They argue about which university is better, Peking University or People’s University.
[2] For my part I am a graduate of the university of the greenwoods, I learned a bit there. In the past I studied Confucius, and spent six years on the Four Books and the Five Classics.
[3] I learned to recite them from memory, but I did not understand them. At that time, I believed deeply in Confucius, and even wrote essays [expounding his ideas]. Later I went to a bourgeois school for seven years. Seven plus six makes thirteen years. I studied all the usual bourgeois stuff — natural science and social science. They also taught some pedagogy. This includes five years of normal school, two years of middle school, and also the time I spent in the library.
[4] At that time I believed in Kant’s dualism, especially in his idealism. Originally I was a feudalist and an advocate of bour! geois democracy. Society impelled me to participate in the revolution. I spent a few years as a primary-school teacher and principal of a four-year school. I also taught history and Chinese language in a six-year school. I also taught for a short period in a middle school, but I did not understand a thing. When I joined the Communist Party I knew that we must make revolution, but against what? And how would we go about it? Of course we had to make revolution against imperialism and the old society. I did not quite understand what sort of a thing imperialism was, still less did I understand how we could make revolution against it. None of the stuff I had learned in thirteen years was any good for making revolution. I used only the instrument — language. Writing essays is an instrument. As for the content of my studies, I didn’t use it at all. Confucius said: ‘Benevolence is the characteristic element of humanity.’ ‘The benevolent man loves others.’
[5]Whom did he love? All men? Nothing of the kind. Did he love the exploiters? It wasn’t exactly that, either. He loved only a part of the exploiters. Otherwise, why wasn’t Confucius able to be a high official? People didn’t want him. He loved them, and wanted them to unite. But when it came to starving, and to [the precept] ‘The superior man can endure poverty,’ he almost lost his life, the people of K’uang wanted to kill him.
[6] There were those who criticized him for not visiting Ch’in in his journey to the West. In reality, the poem ‘In the Seventh Month the Fire Star Passes the Meridian’ in the
Book of Odes refers to events in Shensi. There is also ‘The Yellow Bird’, which talks about the affair in which three high officials of Duke Mu of Ch’in were killed and buried with him on his death.
[7] Ssu-ma Ch’ien
[8] had a very high opinion of the
Book of Odes. He said the 300 poems it contains were all written by sages and worthies of ancient times when they were aroused. A large part of the poems in the
Book of Odes are in the manner of the various states, they are the folk songs of the common people, the sages and worthies are none other than the common people. ‘Written when they were aroused’ means that when a man’s heart was filled with anger, he wrote a poem!
You sow not nor reap;
How do you get the paddy for your three hundred round binns?
You do not follow the chase;
How do we see the quails hanging in your courtyards?
O that superior man!
He would not eat the bread of idleness!
[9]
The expression ‘to neglect the duties of an office while taking the pay’ comes from here. This is a poem which accuses heaven and opposes the rulers. Confucius, too, was rather democratic, he included [in the
Book of Odes] poems about the love between man and woman. In his commentaries, Chu Hsi characterized them as poems about clandestine love affairs.
[10] In reality, some of them are and some of them aren’t; the latter borrow the imagery of man and woman to write about the relations between prince and subject. In Shu [present-day Szechwan] at the time of the Five Dynasties and Ten Countries, there was a poem entitled ‘The Wife of Ch’in Laments the Winter’, by Wei Chuang.
[11] He wrote it in his youth, and it is about his longing for his prince.
To return to this matter of going down, people should go beginning this winter and spring, in groups and in rotation, to participate in the class struggle. Only in this way can they learn something, learn about revolution. You intellectuals sit every day in your government offices, eating well, dressing well, and not even doing any walking. That’s why you fall ill. Clothing, food, housing and exercise are the four great factors causing disease. If, from enjoying good living conditions, you change to somewhat worse conditions, if you go down to participate in the class struggle, if you go into the midst of the ‘four clean-ups’ and the ‘five antis’,
[12] and undergo a spell of toughening, then you intellectuals will have a new look about you.
If you don’t engage in class struggle, then what is this philosophy you’re engaged in?
Why not go down and try it? If your illness gets too severe you should come back — you have to draw the line at dying. When you are so ill that you are on the verge of dying, then you should come back. As soon as you go down, you will have some spirit. (K’ang Sheng interjects: ‘The research institutes in the Departments of Philosophy and Social Science of the Academy of Science should all go down too. At present, they are on the verge of turning into institutes for the study of antiquities, of turning into a fairyland nourishing itself by inhaling offerings of incense. None of the people in the Institute of Philosophy read the Kuang-ming jih-pao.’) I read only the
Kuang-ming jihpao and the
Wen-hui pao,[13], I don’t read
People’s Daily, because the
People’s Daily doesn’t publish theoretical articles; after we adopt a resolution, then they publish it. The
Liberation Army Daily is lively, it’s readable. (Comrade K’ang Sheng: ‘The Institute of Literature pays no attention to Chou Kuch’eng,
[14] and the Economics Institute pays no attention to Sun Yeh-fang
[15] and to his going in for Libermanism, going in for capitalism.’)
Let them go in for capitalism. Society is very complex. If one only goes in for socialism and not for capitalism, isn’t that too simple? Wouldn’t we then lack the unity of opposites, and be merely one-sided? Let them do it. Let them attack us madly, demonstrate in the streets, take up arms to rebel — I approve all of these things. Society is very complex, there is not a single commune, a single
hsien, a single department of the Central Committee, in which one cannot divide into two. Just look, hasn’t the Department of Rural Work been disbanded?
[16] It devoted itself exclusively to accounting on the basis of the individual household, and to propagating the ‘four great freedoms’ — freedom to lend money, to engage in commerce, to hire labour, and to buy and sell land. In the past, they put out a proclamation [to this effect]. Teng Tzu-hui had a dispute with me. At a meeting of the Central Committee, he put forward the idea of implementing the four great freedoms.
[17]
To consolidate New Democracy, and to go on consolidating it for ever, is to engage in capitalism.
[18] New Democracy is a bourgeois-democratic revolution under the leadership of the proletariat. It touches only the landlords and the comprador bourgeoisie, it does not touch the national bourgeoisie at all. To divide up the land and give it to the peasants is to transform the property of the feudal landlords into the individual property of the peasants, and this still remains within the limits of the bourgeois revolution. To divide up the land is nothing remarkable — MacArthur did it in Japan. Napoleon divided up the land too. Land reform cannot abolish capitalism, nor can it lead to socialism.
In our state at present approximately one third of the power is in the hands of the enemy or of the enemy’s sympathizers. We have been going for fifteen years and we now control two thirds of the realm. At present, you can buy a [Party] branch secretary for a few packs of cigarettes, not to mention marrying a daughter to him. There are some localities where land reform was carried out peacefully, and the land reform teams were very weak; now you can see that there are a lot of problems there.
I have received the materials on philosophy. [
This refers to the materials on the problem of contradictions — note by stenographer.] I have had a look at the outline, [
This refers to the outline of an article criticizing ‘two combine into one’[19] —
note by stenographer.] I have not been able to read the rest. I have also looked at the materials on analysis and synthesis.
It is a good thing to collect materials like this on the law of the unity of opposites, what the bourgeoisie says about it, what Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin say about it, what the revisionists say about it. As for the bourgeoisie, Yang Hsien-chen talks about it, and Hegel of old talked about it. Such people existed in the olden days. Now they are even worse. There were also Bogdanov and Lunacharsky, who used to talk about deism. I have read Bogdanov’s economics. Lenin read it, and it seems he approved of the part on primitive accumulation. (K’ang Sheng: ‘Bogdanov’s economic doctrines were perhaps somewhat more enlightened than those of modern revisionism. Kautsky’s economic doctrines were somewhat more enlightened than those of Khrushchev, and Yugoslavia is also somewhat more enlightened than the Soviet Union. After all, Djilas said a few good things about Stalin, he said that on Chinese problems Stalin made a self-criticism.’)
Stalin felt that he had made mistakes in dealing with Chinese problems, and they were no small mistakes. We are a great country of several hundred millions, and he opposed our revolution, and our seizure of power. We prepared for many years in order to seize power in the whole country, the whole of the Anti-Japanese War constituted a preparation. This is quite clear if you look at the documents of the Central Committee for that period, including On New Democracy. That is to say that you cannot set up a bourgeois dictatorship, you can only establish New Democracy under the leadership of the proletariat, you can only set up a people’s democratic dictatorship led by the proletariat. In our country, for eighty years, all the democratic revolutions led by the bourgeoisie failed. The democratic revolution led by us will certainly be victorious. There is only this way out, there is no other way out. This is the first step. The second step will be to build socialism. Thus, On New Democracy was a complete programme. It discussed politics, economics, and culture as well; it failed to discuss only military affairs. (K’ang Sheng: ‘On New Democracy is of great significance for the world communist movement. I asked Spanish comrades, and they said the problem for them was to establish bourgeois democracy, not to establish New Democracy. In their country, they did not concern themselves with the three points: army, countryside, political power. They wholly subordinated themselves to the exigencies of Soviet foreign policy, and achieved nothing at all.’) These are the policies of Ch’en Tu-hsiu! (Comrade K’ang Sheng: ‘They say the Communist Party organized an army, and then turned it over to others.’) This is useless.
(Comrade K’ang Sheng: ‘They also did not want political power, nor did they mobilize the peasantry. At that time, the Soviet Union said to them that if they imposed proletarian leadership, England and France might oppose it, and this would not be in the interests of the Soviet Union.’)
How about Cuba? In Cuba they concerned themselves precisely to set up political power and an army, and also mobilized the peasants, as [we did] in the past; therefore they succeeded.
(Comrade K’ang Sheng: ‘Also, when they [the Spanish] fought, they waged regular war, in the manner of the bourgeoisie, they defended Madrid to the last.[20] In all things, they subordinated themselves to Soviet foreign policy.’)
Even before the dissolution of the Third International, we did not obey the orders of the Third International. At the Tsunyi Conference we didn’t obey, and afterwards, for a period of ten years, including the Rectification Campaign and down to the Seventh Congress, when we finally adopted a resolution (‘Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of our Party’),
[21] and corrected [the errors of] ‘leftism’, we didn’t obey them at all. Those dogmatists utterly failed to study China’s peculiarities; ten-odd years after they had betaken themselves to the countryside, they utterly failed to study the land, property, and class relationships in the countryside. You can’t understand the countryside just by going there, you must study the relations between all the classes and strata in the countryside. I devoted more than ten years to these problems before I finally clarified them for myself. You must make contact with all kinds of people, in tea houses and gambling dens, and investigate them. In 1925 I was active at the Peasant Movement Training Institute,
[22] and carried out rural surveys. In my native village, I sought out poor peasants to investigate them. Their life was pitiable, they had nothing to eat. There was one peasant whom I sought out to play dominoes (the kind with heaven, earth, man, harmony, Mei Ch’ien, Ch’ang Sang, and the bench), afterwards inviting him to have a meal. Before, after, and during the meal, I talked to him, and came to understand why the class struggle in the countryside was so acute. The reasons he was willing to talk to me were: first, that I looked on him as a human being; second, that I invited him to have a meal; and third, that he could make a bit of money. I kept losing; I lost one or two silver dollars, and as a result he was very well satisfied. There is a friend who still came to see me twice! , after Liberation. Once, in those days, he was really in a bad way, and he came looking for me to borrow a dollar. I gave him three, as non-refundable assistance. In those days, such nonrefundable assistance was hard to come by. My father took the view that if a man did not look after himself, heaven and earth would punish him. My mother opposed him. When my father died, very few people followed the funeral procession. When my mother died, a great many followed the procession. One time the Ko Lao Hui robbed our family. I said they were right to do so, for people had nothing. Even my mother could not accept this at all.
Once there broke out in Changsha rice riots in which the provincial governor was beaten up. There were some hawkers from Hsiang Hsiang who had sold their broad beans and were straggling back home. I stopped them and asked them about the situation. The Red and Green Gangs in the countryside also held meetings, and ate up big families. This was reported in the Shanghai newspapers, and the troubles were only stamped out when troops were sent from Changsha. They did not maintain good discipline, they took the rice of the middle peasants, and so isolated themselves. One of their leaders fled hither and thither, finally taking refuge in the mountains, but he was caught there and executed. Afterwards, the village gentry held a meeting, and killed a few more poor peasants. At that time, there was as yet no Communist Party; these were spontaneous class struggles.
Society pushed us on to the political stage. Who ever thought of indulging in Marxism previously? I hadn’t even heard of it. What I had heard of, and also read of, was Confucius, Napoleon, Washington, Peter the Great, the Meiji Restoration, the three distinguished Italian [patriots] — in other words, all those [heroes] of capitalism. I had also read a biography of Franklin. He came from a poor family; afterwards, he became a writer, and also conducted experiments on electricity. (Ch’en Po-ta: ‘Franklin was the first to put forward the proposition that man is a tool-making animal.’)
He talked about man being a tool-making animal. Formerly, they used to say that man was a thinking animal, ‘the organ of the heart can think’
[23]; they said that man was the soul of all creation. Who called a meeting and elected him [to that position]? He conferred this dignity on himself. This proposition existed in the feudal era. Afterwards, Marx put forward the view that man is a tool-maker, and that man is a social animal. In reality it is only after undergoing a million years [of evolution] that man developed a large brain and a pair of hands. In the future, animals will continue to develop. I don’t believe that men alone are capable of having two hands. Can’t horses, cows, sheep evolve? Can only monkeys evolve? And can it be, moreover, that of all the monkeys only one species can evolve, and all the others are incapable of evolving? In a million years, ten million years, will horses, cows and sheep still be the same as those today? I think they will continue to change. Horses, cows, sheep, and insects will all change. Animals have evolved from plants, they have evolved from seaweed. Chang T’ai-yen knew all this. In the book in which he argued about revolution with K’ang Yu-wei, he expounded these principles.
[24] The earth was originally dead, there were no plants, no water, no air. Only after I don’t know how many tens of millions of years was water formed; hydrogen and oxygen aren’t just transformed immediately in any old way into water. Water has its history too. Earlier still, even hydrogen and oxygen did not exist. Only after hydrogen and oxygen were produced was there the possibility that these two elements could combine to give water.
We must study the history of the natural sciences, it won’t do to neglect this subject. We must read a few books. There is a great difference between reading because of the necessities of our present struggles, and reading aimlessly. Fu Ying
[25] says that hydrogen and oxygen form water only after coming together hundreds and thousands of times; it is not at all a simple case of two combining into one. He was right about this, too; I want to look him up and have a talk. (Speaking to Lu P’ing:
[26]) You people should not oppose absolutely everything by Fu Ying.
Hitherto, analysis and synthesis have not been clearly defined. Analysis is clearer, but there hasn’t been much said about synthesis. I had a talk with Ai Ssu-ch’i.
[27] He said that nowadays they only talk about conceptual synthesis and analysis, and do not talk about objective practical synthesis and analysis. How do we analyse and synthesize the Communist Party and the Kuomintang, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the landlords and the peasants, the Chinese and the imperialists? How do we do this, for example, in the case of the Communist Party and the Kuomintang? The analysis is simply a question of how strong we are, how much territory we have, how many members we have, how many troops, how many bases such as Yenan, what are our weaknesses? We do not hold any big cities, our army numbers only 1,200,000, we have no foreign aid, whereas the Kuomintang has a great amount of foreign aid. If you compare Yenan to Shanghai, Yenan has a population of only 7,000; adding to this the persons from the [Party and government] organs and from the troops [stationed in Yenan], the total comes to 20,000. There is only handicrafts and agriculture. How can this be compared with a big city? Our strong points are that we have the support of the people whereas the Kuomintang is divorced from the people. You have more territory, more troops, and more arms, but your soldiers have been obtained by impressment, and there is opposition between officers and soldiers. Naturally there is also a fairly large portion of their armies which has considerable fighting capacity, it is not at all the case that they will all just collapse at one blow. Their weak point lies here, the key is their divorce from the people. We unite with the popular masses; they are divorced from the popular masses.
They say in their propaganda that the Communist Party establishes community of property and community of wives, and they propagate these ideas right down to the primary schools. They composed a song: ‘When Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung appear, killing and burning and doing all kinds of things, what will you do?’ They taught the primary-school pupils to sing it, and as soon as they had sung it, the pupils went and asked their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, thus producing the opposite effect of propaganda for us. There was a little child who heard [the song] and asked his daddy. His daddy replied: ‘You mustn’t ask; after you have grown up, you will see for yourself and then you’ll understand.’ He was a middle-of-the-roader. Then the child also asked his uncle. The uncle scolded him, and replied: ‘What is this about killing and burning? If you ask me again, I’ll beat you.’ Formerly, his uncle was a member of the Communist Youth League. All the newspapers and radio stations attacked us. There were a lot of newspapers, several dozen in each city, every faction ran one, and all of them without exception were anti-communist. Did the common people all listen to them? Nothing of the kind! We have some experience of Chinese affairs, China is a ‘sparrow’.
[28] In foreign countries, too, it’s nothing else but the rich and the poor, counter revolution and revolution, Marxism-Leninism and revisionism. You mustn’t believe at all that everybody will take in anticommunist propaganda, and join in opposing communism. Didn’t we read newspapers at the time? Yet we were not influenced by them.
I have read the Dream of the Red Chamber five times, and have not been influenced by it. I read it as history. First I read it as a story, and then as history. When people read the Dream of the Red Chamber, they don’t read the fourth chapter carefully, but in fact this chapter contains the gist of the book. There is also Leng Tzu-hsing who describes the Jung-kuo mansion, and composes songs and notes. The fourth chapter ‘The Bottle-Gourd Monk decides the affair of the bottle gourd, talks about the ‘Talisman for Officials’, it introduces the four big families:
