OPPOSE BOOK WOR****P
by Mao Tse Tung
May 1930
I. NO INVESTIGATION, NO RIGHT TO SPEAK
Unless you have investigated a problem, you will be deprived of the
right to speak on it. Isn't that too harsh? Not in the least. When you
have not probed into a problem, into the present facts and its past
history, and know nothing of its essentials, whatever you say about it
will undoubtedly be nonsense. Talking nonsense solves no problems, as
everyone knows, so why is it unjust to deprive you of the right to
speak? Quite a few comrades always keep their eyes shut and talk
nonsense, and for a Communist that is disgraceful. How can a Communist
keep his eyes shut and talk nonsense?
It won' t do!
It won't do!
You must investigate!
You must not talk nonsense!
II. TO INVESTIGATE A PROBLEM IS TO SOLVE IT
You can' t solve a problem? Well, get down and investigate the present
facts and its past history! When you have investigated the problem
thoroughly, you will know how to solve it. Conclusions invariably come
after investigation, and not before. Only a blockhead cudgels his
brains on his own, or together with a group, to "find solution" or
"evolve an idea" without making any investigation. It must be stressed
that this cannot possibly lead to any effective solution or any good
idea. In other words, he is bound to arrive at a wrong solution and a
wrong idea.
There are not a few comrades doing inspection work, as well as
guerrilla leaders and cadres newly in office, who like to make
political pronouncements the moment they arrive at a place and who
strut about, criticizing this and condemning that when they have only
seen the surface of things or minor details. Such purely subjective
nonsensical talk is indeed detestable. These people are bound to make
a mess of things, lose the confidence of the m***** and prove
incapable of solving any problem at all.
When they come across difficult problems, quite a number of people in
leading positions simply heave a sigh without being able to solve
them. They lose patience and ask to be transferred on the ground that
they "have not the ability and cannot do the job"; These are cowards'
words. Just get moving on your two legs, go the rounds of every
section placed under your charge and "inquire into everything''[1] as
Con****ius did, and then you will be able to solve the problems,
however little is your ability; for although your head may be empty
before you go out of doors, it will be empty no longer when you return
but will contain all sorts of material necessary for the solution of
the problems, and that is how problems are solved. Must you go out of
doors? Not necessarily. You can call a fact-finding meeting of people
familiar with the situation in order to get at the source of what you
call a difficult problem and come to know how it stands now, and then
it will be easy to solve your difficult problem.
Investigation may be likened to the long months of pregnancy, and
solving a problem to the day of birth. To investigate a problem is,
indeed, to solve it.
III. OPPOSE BOOK WOR****P
Whatever is written in a book is right =97 such is still the mentality
of culturally backward Chinese peasants. Strangely enough, within the
Communist Party there are also people who always say in a discussion,
"Show me where it's written in the book." When we say that a directive
of a higher organ of leader****p is correct, that is not just because
it comes from "a higher organ of leader****p" but because its contents
conform with both the objective and subjective cir***stances of the
struggle and meet its requirements. It is quite wrong to take a
formalistic attitude and blindly carry out directives without
discussing and examining them in the light of actual conditions simply
because they come from a higher organ. It is the mischief done by this
formalism which explains why the line and tactics of the Party do not
take deeper root among the m*****. To carry out a directive of a
higher organ blindly, and seemingly without any disagreement, is not
really to carry it out but is the most artful way of opposing or
sabotaging it.
The method of studying the social sciences exclusively from the book
is likewise extremely dangerous and may even lead one onto the road of
counter-revolution. Clear proof of this is provided by the fact that
whole batches of Chinese Communists who confined themselves to books
in their study of the social sciences have turned into counter-
revolutionaries. When we say Marxism is correct, it is certainly not
because Marx was a "prophet" but because his theory has been proved
correct in our practice and in our struggle. We need Marxism in our
struggle. In our acceptance of his theory no such formalisation of
mystical notion as that of "prophecy" ever enters our minds. Many who
have read Marxist books have become renegades from the revolution,
whereas illiterate workers often grasp Marxism very well. Of course we
should study Marxist books, but this study must be integrated with our
country's actual conditions. We need books, but we must overcome book
wor****p, which is divorced from the actual situation.
How can we overcome book wor****p? The only way is to investigate the
actual situation.
IV. WITHOUT INVESTIGATING THE ACTUAL SITUATION, THERE IS BOUND TO BE
AN IDEALIST APPRAISAL OF CLASS FORCES AND AN IDEALIST GUIDANCE IN
WORK, RESULTING EITHER IN OP****TUNISM OR IN PUTSCHISM
Do you doubt this conclusion? Facts will force you to accept it. Just
try and appraise the political situation or guide the struggle without
making any investigation, and you will see whether or not such
appraisal or guidance is groundless and idealist and whether or not it
will lead to op****tunist or putschist errors. Certainly it will. This
is not because of failure to make careful plans before taking action
but because of failure to study the specific social situation
carefully before making the plans, as often happens in our Red Army
guerrilla units. Officers of the Li Kuei[2] type do not discriminate
when they punish the men for offenses. As a result, the offenders feel
they have been unfairly treated, many disputes ensue, and the leaders
lose all prestige. Does this not happen frequently in the Red Army?
We must wipe out idealism and guard against all op****tunist and
putschist errors before we can succeed in winning over the m***** and
defeating the enemy. The only way to wipe out idealism is to make the
effort and investigate the actual situation.
V. THE AIM OF SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC INVESTIGATION IS TO ARRIVE AT A
CORRECT APPRAISAL OF CLASS FORCES AND THEN TO FORMULATE CORRECT
TACTICS FOR THE STRUGGLE
This is our answer to the question: Why do we have to investigate
social and economic conditions? Accordingly, the object of our
investigation is all the social cl***** and not fragmentary social
phenomena. Of late, the comrades in the Fourth Army of the Red Army
have generally given attention to the work of investigation, [3] but
the method many of them employ is wrong. The results of their
investigation are therefore as trivial as a grocer's accounts, or
resemble the many strange tales a country bumpkin hears when he comes
to town, or are like a distant view of a populous city from a mountain
top. This kind of investigation is of little use and cannot achieve
our main purpose. Our main purpose is to learn the political and
economic situation of the various social cl*****. The outcome of our
investigation should be a picture of the present situation of each
class and the ups and downs of its development. For example, when we
investigate the composition of the peasantry, not only must we know
the number of owner-peasants, semi-owner peasants and tenant-peasants,
who are differentiated according to tenancy relation****ps, but more
especially we must know the number of rich peasants, middle peasants
and poor peasants, who are differentiated according to class or
stratum. When we investigate the composition of the merchants, not
only must we know the number in each trade, such as grain, clothing,
medicinal herbs, etc., but more especially we must know the number of
small merchants, middle merchants and big merchants. We should
investigate not only the state of each trade, but more especially the
class relations within it. We should investigate the relation****ps not
only between the different trades but more especially between the
different cl*****. Our chief method of investigation must be to
dissect the different social cl*****, the ultimate purpose being to
understand their interrelations, to arrive at a correct appraisal of
class forces and then to formulate the correct tactics for the
struggle, defining which cl***** constitute the main force in the
revolutionary struggle, which cl***** are to be won over as allies and
which cl***** are to be overthrown. This is our sole purpose.
What are the social cl***** requiring investigation?
They are:
The industrial proletariat
The handicraft workers
The farm labourers
The poor peasants
The urban poor
The lumpen-Proletariat
The master handicraftsmen
The small merchants
The middle peasants
The rich peasants
The landlords
The commercial bourgeoisie
The industrial bourgeoisie
In our investigation we should give attention to the state of all
these cl***** or strata. Only the industrial proletariat and
industrial bourgeoisie are absent in the areas where we are now
working, and we constantly come across all the others. Our tactics of
struggle are tactics in relation to all these cl***** and strata.
Another serious shortcoming in our past investigations has been the
undue stress on the countryside to the neglect of the towns, so that
many comrades have always been vague about our tactics towards the
urban poor and the commercial bourgeoisie. The development of the
struggle has enabled us to leave the mountains for the plains.[4] We
have descended physically, but we are still up in the mountains
mentally. We must understand the towns as well as the countryside, or
we shall be unable to meet the needs of the revolutionary struggle.
VI. VICTORY IN CHINA'S REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE WILL DEPEND ON THE
CHENESE COMRADES' UNDERSTANDING OF CHINESE CONDITIONS
The aim of our struggle is to attain socialism via the stage of
democracy. In this task, the first step is to complete the democratic
revolution by winning the majority of the working class and arousing
the peasant m***** and the urban poor for the overthrow of the
landlord class, imperialism and the Kuomintang regime. The next step
is to carry out the socialist revolution, which will follow on the
development of this struggle. The fulfilment of this great
revolutionary task is no simple or easy job and will depend entirely
on correct and firm tactics on the part of the proletarian party. If
its tactics of struggle are wrong, or irresolute and wavering, the
revolution will certainly suffer tem****ary defeat. It must be borne in
mind that the bourgeois parties, too, constantly discuss their tactics
of struggle. They are considering how to spread reformist influences
among the working class so as to mislead it and turn it. away from
Communist Party leader****p, how to get the rich peasants to put down
the uprisings of the poor peasants and how to organize gangsters to
suppress the revolutionary struggles. In a situation when the class
struggle grows increasingly acute and is waged at close quarters, the
proletariat has to depend for its victory entirely on the correct and
firm tactics of struggle of its own party, the Communist Party. A
Communist Party's correct and unswerving tactics of struggle can in no
cir***stance be created by a few people sitting in an office; they
emerge in the course of mass struggle, that is, through actual
experience. Therefore, we must at all times study social conditions
and make practical investigations. Those comrades who are inflexible,
conservative, formalistic and groundlessly optimistic think that the
present tactics of struggle are perfect, that the "book of
do***ents"[5] of the Party's Sixth National Congress guarantees
lasting victory, and that one can always be victorious merely by
adhering to the established methods. These ideas are absolutely wrong
and have nothing in common with the idea that Communists should create
favourable new situations through struggle; they represent a purely
conservative line. Unless it is completely discarded, this line will
cause great losses to the revolution and do harm to these comrades
themselves. There are obviously some comrades in our Red Army who are
content to leave things as they are, who do not seek to understand
anything thoroughly and are groundlessly optimistic, and they spread
the fallacy that "this is proletarian". They eat their fill and sit
dozing in their offices all day long without ever moving a step and
going out among the m***** to investigate. Whenever they open their
mouths, their platitudes make people sick. To awaken these comrades we
must raise our voices and cry out to them:
Change your conservative ideas without delay!
Replace them by progressive and militant Communist ideas!
Get into the struggle!
Go among the m***** and investigate the facts!
VII. THE TECHNIQUE OF INVESTlGATION
1. Hold fact-finding meetings and undertake investigation through
discussions.
This is the only way to get near the truth, the only way to draw
conclusions. It is easy to commit mistakes if you do not hold fact-
finding meetings for investigation through discussions but simply rely
on one individual relating his own experience. You cannot possibly
draw more or less correct conclusions at such meetings if you put
questions casually instead of raising key-questions for discussion.
2. What kind of people should attend the fact-finding meetings?
They should be people well acquainted with social and economic
conditions. As far as age is concerned, older people are best, because
they are rich in experience and not only know what is going an but
understand the causes and effects. Young people with experience of
struggle should also be included, because they have progressive ideas
and sharp eyes. As far as occupation is concerned, there should be
workers, peasants, merchants, intellectuals, and occasionally
soldiers, and sometimes even vagrants. Naturally, when a particular
subject is being looked into, those who have nothing to do with it
need not be present. For example, workers, peasants and students need
not attend when commerce is the subject of investigation.
3. Which is better, a large fact-finding meeting or a small one?
That depends on the investigator's ability to conduct a meeting. If he
is good at it, a meeting of as many as a dozen or even twenty or more
people can be called. A large meeting has its advantages; from the
answers you get fairly accurate statistics (e. g., in finding out the
percentage of poor peasants in the total peasant population) and
fairly correct conclusions (e.g., in finding out whether equal or
differentiated land redistribution is better ). Of course, it has its
disadvantages too; unless you are skillful in conducting meetings, you
will find it difficult to keep order. So the number of. people
attending a meeting depends on the competence of the investigator.
However, the minimum is three, or otherwise the information obtained
will be too limited to correspond to the real situation.
4. Prepare a detailed outline for the investigation.
A detailed outline' should be prepared beforehand, and the
investigator should ask questions according to the outline, with those
present at the meeting giving their answers. Any points which are
unclear or doubtful should be put up for discussion. The detailed
outline should include main subjects and sub-headings and also
detailed items. For instance, taking commerce as a main subject, it
can have such sub-headings as cloth, grain, other necessities and
medicinal herbs; again, under cloth, there can be such detailed items
as calico, homespun and silk and satin.
5. Personal participation.
Everyone with responsibility for giving leader****p =97 from the chairman
of the town****p government to the chairman of the central government,
from the detachment leader to the commander-in-chief, from the
secretary of a Party branch to the general secretary =97 must personally
undertake investigation into the specific social and economic
conditions and not merely rely on reading re****ts. For investigation
and reading re****ts are two entirely different things.
6. Probe deeply.
Anyone new to investigation work should make one or two thorough
investigations in order to gain full knowledge of a particular place
(say, a village or a town) of a particular problem (say, the problem
of grain or currency). Deep probing into a particular place or problem
will make future investigation of other places or problems easier.
7. Make your own notes.
The investigator should not only preside at fact-finding meetings and
give proper guidance to those present but should also make his own
notes and record the results himself. To have others do it for him is
no good.
NOTES
1. See Con****ian Analects, Book III, "Pa Yi": "When Con****ius entered
the Ancestral Temple he inquired into everything."
2. Li Kuei was a hero in the well-known Chinese novel shui Hu
Chuan' (Heroes of the Marshes) which describes the peasant war that
occurred towards the end of the Northern Sung Dynasty (960-1127). He
was simple, outspoken and very loyal to the revolutionary cause of the
peasants, but crude and tactless.
3. Comrade Mao Tse-tung has always laid great stress on investigation,
regarding social investigation as the most im****tant task and the
basis for defining policy in the work of leader****p. The work of
investigation was gradually developed in the Fourth Army of the Red
Army on Comrade Mao Tsetung's initiative. He stipulated that social
investigation should be a regular part of the work, and the Political
Department of the Red Army prepared detailed forms covering such items
as the state of the mass struggle, the condition of the reactionaries,
the economic life of the people and the amount of land owned by each
class in the rural areas. Wherever the Red Army went, it first made
itself familiar with the class situation in the locality and then
formulated slogans suited to the needs of the m*****.
4. Here 'the mountains' are the Chingkang mountain area along the
borders of Kiangsi and Hunan Provinces; the 'plains=92 are those in
southern Kiangsi and western Fukien. In January 1929, comrade Mao Tse-
tung led the main force of the Fourth Army of the Red Army down from
the Chingkang Mountains to southern Kiangsi and western Fukien in
order to set up two large revolutionary base areas.
5. The "Book of do***ents" consisted of the resolutions adopted at the
Sixth National Congress of the Communist Party of China in July 1928,
including the political resolution and the resolutions on the peasant
question, the land question, the organization of political power, etc.
Early in 1929 the Front Committee of the Fourth Army of the Red Army
published these resolutions in book form for distribution to the Party
organizations in the Red Army and to the local Party organizations.
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