London Marxism Reading Group

China Study Group: Mao Zedong, "No Investigation, No Right to Speak"

Mon, Mar 30 · 7:30 PM BST

London Action Resource Centre, 62 Fieldgate Street, Whitechapel, E1 1ES, London, GB

"The Centre is of the opinion that the achievements in construction these recent years are great ... However, in the concrete work in the agricultural and industrial and other sectors, there were some flaws and mistakes that led to some losses. The reason for these flaws and mistakes was fundamentally because many leading personnel had slackened in the kind of investigation and research work which had been carried out during the War of Resistance against Japan and the War of Liberation with excellent results, and had become content with reading the reports that appear in the newspapers and listening to other people’s oral reports. When they went out themselves, it was merely to look at flowers while riding on horseback—they were content with a superficial understanding, and for a period made some assessments and took some decisions based on data that did not correspond to the actual situation or that were of a biased nature. During this period, exaggeration was indulged in and the abominable work-style of making personal feelings a substitute for policy, reared its head once again. This is a major lesson, and leading comrades at all levels throughout the Party absolutely must not neglect or forget this lesson for which a price has been paid."

--- Zhongfa No. 261, Letter from the CCP Centre to the Regional Bureaus and the Party Committees of the Provinces, Municipalities, and [Autonomous] Regions Concerning the Matter of Conscientiously Carrying out Investigations
[23 March 1961]

Hello all and welcome back to the China Study Group! Having finished our months-long deep dive into modern Chinese history with the multi-part Sorghum and Steel reading, we're now changing gears rapidly with a read-through of Mao Zedong's short, punchy but profoundly influential text No Investigation, No Right to Speak, also known as Oppose Book Worship. Find it here:

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-6/mswv6_11.htm

Written in May 1930 from the liberated base area known as the Jiangxi Soviet Republic during the height of the first period of the Chinese Civil War, this text encapsulates Mao's contributions to communist political and military theory. If there's anything unique in Chinese Marxism, it's this insistence on detailed, region-by-region, city-by-city, street-by-street collection of what today might be called political "data". Even today, the CPC's major theoretical journal Quishi takes its name from the idiom first coined by Mao and later promoted by Deng Xiaoping - seek truth from facts.

The text quoted above comes from a document published by the CPC journal Zhongfa in the years just before the start of the Cultural Revolution (find the text here if you're curious). It speaks to the immense emphasis which was at that time starting to be laid once again on the carrying-out of "investigation and research work" after years of neglect.

It may seem elementary, but spend a decade on the British left with the Trotskyists and other groups that draw on the Soviet experience as their primary source of inspiration, and you'll see how common it remains today, as in Mao's time, for communist know-it-alls to take what they think they know about the working and other classes for granted. All too often, we assume that workers, students, intellectuals, the so-called middle classes and other groups are monolithic, with uniform interests and universal experiences. Meanwhile, things on the ground are never simple. What it's like to be a worker not only varies from job to job, industry to industry but even house-to-house among workers who on paper have the same background.

Social investigation as a key communist practice wasn't unprecedented when Mao was writing, of course. Marx introduced the idea of "worker's inquiry" to the labour movement, a thread which was later picked up by the Italian Autonomists of the mid-century and carried on today by groups like Notes From Below and the Angry Workers Collective, whose work we've previously studied at LMRG.

This kind of attention to detail in political, trade-union and community organising has paid dividends for many, so let's investigate it! Join us for a discussion of the social investigations of the Chinese Civil War, their connections to other forms of Marxist theory-of-practice like workers' inquiry, the prospects for and use-values of social investigations in Britain today, and more. Happy reading and see you there!

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About the China Study Group:

What can we learn from the Chinese Revolution? That's the question we'll seek to answer as LMRG brings the heat to you once again, now on Tuesday nights, with our all-new China Study Group. In this long-form reading series, we'll meet monthly for in-depth discussion of a series of texts on China, its revolution, the socialist market economy, and more. As the New Cold War heats up, it's never been more important to learn what we can about the country which the US, UK and EU have all described - following the American phrasebook - as a "systemic rival".

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle: PART TWO [Chapters 3-6]

Thu, Apr 2 · 7:30 PM BST

LARC, 62 Fieldgate Street Next to East London Mosque E1 1ES, London, GB

"In this complex and terrible development which has carried the epoch of class struggles toward new conditions, the proletariat of the industrial countries has completely lost the affirmation of its autonomous perspective and also, in the last analysis, its illusions, but not its being. It has not been suppressed. It remains irreducibly in existence within the intensified alienation of modern capitalism[.]"

- Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

Welcome back readers! By popular request, we're bringing back (for a new generation of LMRG readers) an old favourite: the always-relevant Guy Debord and his masterful Society of the Spectacle.

This is meeting two, where we'll be reading the fourth, fifth and sixth chapters.

Find the classic text here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm

Or an alternative, possibly more readable translation here: https://files.libcom.org/files/The%20Society%20of%20the%20Spectacle%20Annotated%20Edition.pdf

Often maligned as theorymaxxed nonsense but little-read, this slim volume is certainly dense with ideas - all of which carry as much relevance today as those half-forgotten postwar years when the Situationist International made its mark on the world, if not more. With the rise of the Internet and social media, the decline of literacy and the closing of the mass mind, the endless doom-loop of doomscrolling and bed-rotting, increasingly performative protest, the commodification of everything, the Epstein-approved culture war, and the theatre of spectacular cruelty that is imperialist colonial policy from Gaza to Venezuela, we really are living an age where everything that was once directly participated in has passed into representation. Every hand-grip one searches for to get some kind of grasp on the world seems to be a mirage; "participation" in anything, from politics to culture, has been reduced to fandom - limited to nothing more than expressing approval or disapproval through totally mediated social media platforms.

Above it all stands an utterly corrupt, irresponsible elite class more and more transparent in how it relishes in conspiratorial play, power-games with unlimited stakes for us and no consequences for them. Such a world where power wears a shit-eating grin and keeps us off our balance by endlessly "flooding the zone" (in Steve Bannon's terms) with distractions so intricate they short-circuit the collective brain is exactly what Debord not only predicted but described in frightening detail, with more than a little bit of humour.

So let's dig in and find out: just what can we do to unplug from the spectacle? Is the spectacle even un-plug-from-able? Debord haters, cope and seethe: as a much more orthodox Marxist than he ever gets credit for, there really are some strategies in here. We just need to be creative.

Take care and happy reading!

NRWITBD 2026: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism [Selections]

Thu, Apr 9 · 7:30 PM BST

London Action Resource Centre, 62 Fieldgate Street, Whitechapel, E1 1ES, London, GB

Welcome back to No, Really: What Is to be Done?, our deep-dive series on Lenin, Leninism, and the theory of the revolutionary party.

You may be wondering when and if we're ever actually going to read WITBD itself, the actual text. Rest assured we will. For now, we're going to keep on psyching ourselves up with another one of the foundational documents of Leninism, one which feels grimly relevant right now: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.

Find the text here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/

Feel free to read as much as you like, but we'll focus on the Preface and Chapters 1, 3, 6, 7 and 8. These are:

I. CONCENTRATION OF PRODUCTION AND MONOPOLIES
III. FINANCE CAPITAL AND THE FINANCIAL OLIGARCHY
VI. DIVISION OF THE WORLD AMONG THE GREAT POWERS
VII. IMPERIALISM AS A SPECIAL STAGE OF CAPITALISM
VIII. PARASITISM AND DECAY OF CAPITALISM

It's often claimed that Lenin's identification of imperialism as capitalism's "highest stage" is a textbook example of Marxist hubris. How can capitalism have reached its highest stage in the year 1916, when Lenin was writing? Surely technofeudalism, or neocolonialism, or monopoly corporatism - take your pick - represents a higher stage?

Without giving too much away, let's say this much, at least by way of starting a debate: the confronting truth is that capitalism did indeed reach its highest stage with the exact kind of monopolist, oligarchic, feudalistic (when Imperialism was published, literal crowned heads still ruled much of Europe by decree), militarised imperialism Lenin describes in this work. If that suggests that nothing has really changed in the 100+ years since, except perhaps to get worse, it's because nothing has. A century of "progress" and we haven't progressed at all. Still wage slaves, still debt peons, still cattle for a rapist ruling class. And it all still runs on the blood and oil of the Global South.

So let's not kid ourselves: Imperialism is as relevant today as when it was written. Don't believe me? Join us and see for yourself! We'll discuss Lenin's framework of analysis, his concrete conclusions and strategic recommendations and break down whether we think these insights are applicable to our times in all their brutality.

Take care and happy reading!

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A bit about the NRWITBD series:

[Fade in] The year is 2026. Picture this: industrial-scale war on multiple continents. Cities in ruins, millions dead and millions more made refugees - starvation, disease, mutilations, deportations, pogroms, genocides, dispossessions. Across every land, a working class on its knees before an ever-shrinking class of oligarchs with an ever-growing pile of treasure, weapons and slaves - determined to pit brother against brother in endless wars for resources that can only end when the whole earth is a toxic wasteland. And what they call "peace" is not much better.

This is the brutal present, a Second Gilded Age, but we could travel back a hundred years and describe more or less the exact same scene. In the century since Lenin lived and walked the earth, less has changed than the eternal optimists - Panglossian techno-liberals like Steven Pinker and the other intellectuals of the Epstein class - would like us to think. Really, we're back where it all began in the First Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th century: on the outside looking in, asking the age-old question: what is to be done? Things are really getting quite bad. No, really - what is to be done!!?

In our gatherings of late, we've been tinkering around the edges of a few answers. Prior Lenin readings as well as our exploration of the Yan'an Forum and our whistle-stop tour through the last twenty years of street protests with Vincent Bevins have given us some things to chew on. Now there's been a clamour from plenty of regulars, as well as a few newcomers, that we continue to pull at the vital thread that seems to be running through all our discussions and see where it might lead us: namely, the revolutionary theories of Lenin.

This will be a series of readings running every other Thursday night in Whitechapel. With No, Really: What is to be done?, we'll be taking a deep dive into revolutionary Marxism with a read-through of texts like Lars Lih's Lenin rediscovered: what is to be done? in Context, non-standard biographies like Carter Ellwood's Non-Geometric Lenin: Essays on the Development of the Bolshevik Party 1910-1914 as well as some articles, essays and discussion prompts which most readers likely won't have encountered before.