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

"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".