On the Question of Philosophy

#PUBLICATION NOTE

This edition of On the Question of Philosophy has been prepared and revised for digital publication by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism under the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Switzerland on the basis of the following edition: Talk on Questions of Philosophy, in the Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Third English Edition, Vol. 9, Foreign Languages Press, Paris, 2021.

#INTRODUCTION NOTE

This is a talk given by Comrade Mao Zedong to Kang Sheng, Chen Boda, Guang Feng, Wu Jiang, Gong Yuzhi, Shao Tiezhen, and others in Beidaihe, Qinhuangdao, Hebei, China on the 18th of August, 1964. It was first published in the Red Guard collection Long Live Mao Zedong's Thought! in 1968.

#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!

#ON THE QUESTION OF PHILOSOPHY

#TALK WITH KANG SHENG, CHEN BODA, GUANG FENG, WU JIANG, GONG YUZHI, SHAO TIEZHEN, AND OTHERS

#Mao Zedong

#18th of August, 1964

#★

MAO ZEDONG: It is only when there is class struggle that there can be philosophy. It is a waste of time to discuss the theory of knowledge 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 isn't good should go, too. Going down won't kill you. All you'll get is a cold, and if you just put on a few extra layers of clothes, you'll be all right.

The way they go about it in the universities at present is no good. They go from book to book, from concept to concept. How could philosophy come from books? The three component parts of Marxism are Scientific Socialism, philosophy, and political economy. The basis is social science, the class struggle. There is struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Marx and other people recognized this. The Utopian Socialists were always trying to convince the bourgeoisie to be charitable. This cannot work; it is necessary to rely on the class struggle of the proletariat. At that time, there had already been many strikes. The British Parliament made an inquiry and recognized that the 12-hour workday was less favourable to the interests of the capitalists than the eight-hour workday. It was only by taking the standpoint of the class struggle of the proletariat as the starting point that Marxism appeared. The class struggle is the basis. The study of philosophy can only come afterward. Whose philosophy is it? Bourgeois philosophy or proletarian philosophy? Proletarian philosophy is Marxist philosophy. There is also proletarian political economy, which has transformed classical political economy. Philosophers believe that philosophy comes first. The oppressors oppress the oppressed, while the oppressed need to resist and seek a way out before they can start looking for philosophy. It was only once people took this as their starting point that they discovered philosophy and Marxism-Leninism came into being. We have all gone through this process. Other people wanted to kill me, Jiang Jieshi wanted to kill me. Thus, we came to wage class struggle and to philosophize.

The university students should start going down this winter -- I am referring to students of the humanities. Students of natural science shouldn't be relocated for now, though they can take a short trip or two. All those studying the humanities -- history, political economy, literature, law -- all of them must go down. Professors, assistant professors, administrative employees, and students should all go down for a limited period of five months. If they go down to the countryside or to a factory for five months, they will acquire some perceptual knowledge. Horses, cows, sheep, chickens, dogs, pigs, rice, sorghum, beans, wheat, and 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 will still see the land and the people. To get some experience in the class struggle -- that's what I call a university! They are arguing about which university is better -- Beijing University or the People's University. I myself am a graduate of the university of the green woods, where I learned a bit. In the past, I studied Confucius and spent six years reading the Four Books and the Five Classics. 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 13 years. I studied all the usual bourgeois stuff -- natural science and social science. They also taught some pedagogy. This included five years of normal school, two years of middle school, and also the time I spent in the library. At that time, I believed in Kant's dualism, and especially in his idealism. Originally, I was a feudalist and then an advocate of bourgeois democracy. Society forced me to participate in the revolution. I spent a few years as a primary-school teacher and a principal of a four-year school. I also taught history and Chinese in a six-year school. I also taught for a short period in a middle school, but I did not understand anything. 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 thing imperialism was, still less did I understand how we could make revolution against it. None of the stuff I had learned in 13 years was any good for making revolution. I used only the instrument of 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.»¹ «A benevolent person loves others.»² But whom did he love? All people? Not at all. Did he love all the exploiters? It wasn't quite that, either. He loved only a part of the exploiters. Otherwise, why wasn't Confucius able to stay a high official? People didn't want them. He loved them and wanted them to unite, but when it came to people starving, and to the precept, «The superior person can endure poverty», he almost lost his life, the people of Kuang wanted to kill him. There were also those who criticized him for not visiting the State of Qin 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 Shaanxi. There is also The Yellow Bird, which talks about the incident in which three high officials of Duke Mu of Qin were killed and buried with him upon his death. Sima Qian had a very high opinion of the Book of Odes. He said that the 300 poems it contains were all written by sages and worthies of ancient times when they were agitated. A large part of the poems in the Book of Odes are in the styles of the various States, they are the folk songs of the common people -- the sages and worthies were none other than the common people. «Written when they were agitated» means that when a person's heart was filled with anger, they wrote a poem!

You neither sow nor reap;

How do you get the paddy for your three hundred round bins?

You do not follow the chase;

How do we see the quails hanging in your courtyards?

O that superior person!

They would not eat the bread of idleness.

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 ruling class. Confucius, too, was rather democratic. He included in the Book of Odes poems about romantic love. In his comments, Zhu Xi characterized them as poems about secret love affairs. In reality, some of them are and some of them aren't; the latter borrow the imagery of romantic love to write about the relationship between a sovereign and their subject. In the State of Shu, during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period, there was a poem entitled Ballad of the Lady Qin by Wei Zhuang. He wrote it in his youth, and it is about his longing for his sovereign.

To return to the question of people going down, people should start going down 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 get sick. Clothing, food, housing, and exercise are the four big factors causing disease. If, from enjoying good living conditions, you change to somewhat worse conditions, if you go into the midst of the «Four Cleanups» and the struggle against the «Five Evils», and undergo some tempering, then you intellectuals will have a new look about you.

If you don't wage class struggle, then what is your philosophy about?

Why not go down and try it? If you get too sick, you should come back -- you have to draw the line at dying. If you get so sick that you are on the verge of dying, then you should come back. As soon as you go down, you will get some spirit.

KANG SHENG: All the people at the research institutes in the Departments of Philosophy and Social Science at the Academy of Science should 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 Guangming Ribao [Enlightenment Daily].

MAO ZEDONG: I read only the Enlightenment Daily and the Wenhui Bao [Literary News], not the Renmin Ribao [People's Daily], because the People's Daily doesn't publish theoretical articles; at most, they publish our resolutions after we adopt them. The Jiefangjun Bao [Liberation Army News] is lively and readable.

KANG SHENG: The Institute of Literature pays no attention to Zhou Gucheng, and the Institute of Political Economy pays no attention to Sun Yefang and his support for Libermanism, his support for capitalism.

MAO ZEDONG: Let them support capitalism. Society is very complex. If one only supports socialism and not 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, and take up arms to rebel -- I approve of all these things. Society is very complex, and there is not a single people's commune, county, or department of the Central Committee which one cannot divide into two. Just look, hasn't the Rural Work Department been dissolved? It devoted itself exclusively to accounting on the basis of the individual household, and to propagating the «Four Big Freedoms» -- freedom to lend money, to engage in commerce, to buy labour-power, and to buy and sell land. In the past, they put out a statement to this effect. Deng Zihui had a dispute with me. At a Plenary Session of the Central Committee, he put forward the idea of implementing the «Four Big Freedoms».

To consolidate the new-democratic social order, and to go on consolidating it forever, is to engage in capitalism. New Democracy is a bourgeois-democratic revolution led by the proletariat. It touches only the landlords and the comprador bourgeoisie; it doesn't 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, and Napoleon did it, too. Land reform cannot abolish capitalism, nor can it lead to socialism.

In our State at present, approximately 1/3 of the political power is in the hands of the enemy or of the enemy's sympathizers. We have been going for 15 years and now control 2/3 of the realm. At present, you can buy a Party branch secretary for a few packs of cigarettes, not to mention marrying one of your children to them. There are some localities where the land reform was carried out peacefully, and the teams carrying it out were very weak; now you can see a lot of problems in those places.

I have received the material on philosophical questions. I have had a look at the draft article criticizing «two combine into one». I haven't been able to read the rest. I've also looked at the material on analysis and synthesis.

It is a good thing to collect material like this on the law of the unity of opposites -- what the bourgeoisie says about it, what Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin said about it, and what the revisionists say about it. As to the bourgeoisie, Yang Xianzhen talks about it, and old Hegel talked about it, too. Such people existed back in the day. Now they are even wrose. Bogdanov and Lunacarskij used to talk about God-building. I've read Bogdanov's political economy. Lenin read it, and he seemed to approve of the part about primitive accumulation.

KANG SHENG: Bogdanov's economic doctrine was perhaps somewhat more enlightened than those of modern revisionism. Kautsky's economic doctrine was somewhat more enlightened than that of Hrusev, and Yugoslavia is also somewhat more enlightened than the Council Union. After all, Djilas said a few good things about Stalin; he said that Stalin made a self-criticism on the question of China.

MAO ZEDONG: Stalin felt that he had made mistakes in dealing with the question of China, and they were no small mistakes. We are a big country of several hundred million people, and he opposed our revolution and our conquest of political power. We prepared for the conquest of political power throughout the country for many years; the whole of the anti-Japanese war constituted a preparatory period. This is quite clear if you look at the documents of the Central Committee from that period, including On New Democracy. That is to say, you cannot set up the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, you can only establish New Democracy under the leadership of the proletariat, you can only set up the people's democratic dictatorship under the leadership of the proletariat. In our country, for 80 years, all the democratic revolutions led by the bourgeoisie failed. We said that the democratic revolution led by us would certainly win victory. This was the only way out; there was no other way out. This was the first step. The second step is to build socialism. Thus, On New Democracy constituted a complete programme. It discussed politics and economics, as well as culture; it only failed to discuss military affairs.

KANG SHENG: On New Democracy is of great significance for the international Communist movement. I asked the Spanish comrades, and they said that they had wanted to establish bourgeois democracy, not New Democracy. In their country, they did not concern themselves with the questions of the army, the countryside, and political power. They completely subordinated themselves to the wishes of Soviet foreign policy and achieved nothing at all as a result.

MAO ZEDONG: This is Chen Duxiu-ism!

KANG SHENG: They said that the Communist Party organized an army and then handed it over to other people.

MAO ZEDONG: This is useless.

KANG SHENG: They also didn't want political power, nor did they mobilize the peasantry. At that time, the Council Union told them that if they imposed proletarian leadership, England and France might oppose it, and this wouldn't be in the interests of the Council Union.

MAO ZEDONG: What about Cuba? In Cuba, they concerned themselves precisely with setting up political power and an army, and also mobilized the peasants, as we did in the past; therefore, they succeeded.

KANG SHENG: Also, when the Spanish fought, they waged regular war, in the style of the bourgeoisie, they defended Madrid to the last. In all things, they subordinated themselves to Soviet foreign policy.

MAO ZEDONG: Even before the dissolution of the Third International, we didn't obey its orders. At the Zunyi Meeting, we didn't obey them, and afterward, for a period of ten years, including the Rectification Movement and down to the Party's Seventh National Congress, when we finally adopted the Resolution on Certain Questions in Our Party's History and corrected the «Left-wing» errors, we didn't obey them at all. Those dogmatists utterly failed to study China's particular characteristics; ten-odd years after they had gone down to the countryside, they still had utterly failed to study the land question, property relations, and class relations in the countryside. You cannot 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 questions before I finally clarified them for myself. You must make contact with all kinds of people, in tea-houses and gambling dens, and survey them. In 1925, I was active at the Peasant Movement Training Institute and conducted rural surveys. In my native village, I sought out poor peasants to survey them. Their life was pitiful, they had nothing to eat. There was one peasant whom I sought out to play mahjong, afterward inviting him to have a meal. Before, during, and after the meal, I talked with him, and I came to understand why the class struggle in the countryside was so sharp. The reasons why he was willing to talk with me were, first, that I saw 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. I have a friend who still came to visit me twice after Liberation. Once, in those days, he was in really dire straits, and he came looking for me to borrow a dollar. I gave him three as non-refundable assistance. In those days, such non-refundable assistance was hard to come by. My father took the view that if someone didn't look after themself, Heaven and Earth would punish them. My mother opposed him. When my father died, very few people came to the funeral. When my mother died, very many people came to the funeral. One time, the Elder Brother Society robbed our family. I said that they were in the right, because the people had nothing. Even my mother couldn't accept this at all.

Once in Changsha, rice riots broke out, in which the provincial governor was beaten up. There were some hawkers from Xiangxiang who had sold their broad beans and were straggling back home. I stopped them and asked them about the situation. The Red Band and the Green Band in the countryside also held meetings and were «big eaters».³ This was reported in the Shanghai newspapers, and the disturbances only ended once troops were sent in from Changsha. They didn't maintain good discipline; they took the rice of the middle peasants, and thus isolated themselves. One of their leaders fled, finally taking refuge in the mountains, but he was caught there and executed. Afterward, 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 forced us onto the political stage. Who ever thought of indulging in Marxism previously? I hadn't even heard of it. I had only heard of and read about Confucius, Napoleon, Washington, Peter the Great, the Meiji Restoration, and the Italian Resurgence -- in other words, all the heroes of capitalism. I also read a biography of Franklin. He came from a poor family; afterward, he became a writer, and also conducted experiments on electricity.

CHEN BODA: Franklin was the first to put forward the proposition that humanity is a tool-making animal.

MAO ZEDONG: He talked about humanity being a tool-making animal. Previously, people used to say that humanity was a thinking animal: «The organ of the heart can think.»² They said that humanity was the soul of all creation. Who called a meeting and elected humanity to that post? It conferred this dignity on itself. This proposition existed in the feudal era. Afterward, Marx put forward the view that humanity is a tool-making, social animal. In reality, it was only after undergoing 1'000'000 years of evolution that humanity developed a large brain and a pair of hands. In the future, animals will continue to evolve. I don't believe that humanity alone is capable of having two hands. Can't horses, cows, and sheep evolve? Can only primates evolve? Moreover, can it be that, among all the primates, only one species is capable of evolution, and all the others are simply incapable of evolution? In 1'000'000 years, in 10'000'000 years, will horses, cows, and sheep still be the same as today? I think they will continue to evolve. Horses, cows, sheep, and insects will all evolve. Animals evolved from plants, they evolved from seaweed. Zhang Binglin knew all this. In the article, A Refutation of Kang Youwei's Letter on Revolution, he expounded these principles. The Earth was originally dead; there were no plants, water, nor air. Only after I don't know how many tens of millions of years was water formed; hydrogen and oxygen aren't just transformed into water in any old way. 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 form 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 big difference between reading because of the necessities of our present struggles and reading aimlessly. Fu Ying 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 combine into one». He is right about this, too; I want to look him up and have a talk with him. Lu Bing, you people shouldn't oppose absolutely everything Fu Ying says.

Until now, analysis and synthesis have not been clearly defined. I had a talk about this with Ai Siqi.⁴ He said that nowadays, all people talk about is conceptual synthesis and analysis, and not about objective, practical synthesis and analysis. How did we analyse and synthesize the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the landlords and the peasants, China and imperialism? How did we do this, for example, in the case of the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party? The analysis was simply a question of how strong we were, how much territory we had, how many Party members we had, how many troops we commanded, how many base areas like Yan'an we had; what were our weaknesses? We did not hold any big cities, our army numbered only 1'200'000 troops, we had no foreign aid, whereas the Nationalist Party had a big amount of foreign aid. If you compared Yan'an and Shanghai, Yan'an had a population of only 7'000; adding to this the personnel of the Party and Government bodies and the troops stationed in Yan'an, the total came to 20'000 people. There were only handicrafts and agriculture. How could this compare with a big city? Our strong points were that we had the support of the people, whereas the Nationalist Party was divorced from the people. They had more territory, troops, and weapons, but their soldiers were obtained by press-ganging, and there was antagonism between the officers and the soldiers. Naturally, a fairly large portion of their armies also had considerable fighting capacity, and it wasn't the case at all that they just collapsed after a single blow. But this was their weak point, the key link -- their being divorced from the people. We were united with the masses of the people, whereas they were divorced from the masses of the people.

They said in their propaganda that the Communist Party established public ownership of property and of women, and they propagated these ideas right down to the primary schools. They composed a song: «Where Zhu De and Mao Zedong 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 parents and siblings about it, thus producing the opposite effect of what was intended, an effect favourable to us. One little boy would go home and ask his dad. His dad would reply: «You mustn't ask; after you've grown up, you'll see for yourself, and then you'll understand.» He was a Centrist. Then, the boy would ask his uncle. The uncle would scold him and reply: «What is this about killing and burning? If you say that again, I'll beat you.» The uncle had formerly been a Communist Youth League member. 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? Not at all! We have some experience with Chinese affairs. China is like a «sparrow», which we have dissected to understand its internal organs. In foreign countries, too, it's also just rich and poor people, counter-revolution and revolution, revisionism and Marxism-Leninism, just as different sparrows have the same organs. You mustn't believe that everyone will believe in anti-Communist propaganda and join in opposing Communism. Didn't we read the newspapers at that time? Yet we were not influenced by them. I've read The Dream of the Red Chamber five times, yet I haven't been influenced by it. 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. Leng Zixing describes the Rongguo mansion and composes songs and notes. The fourth chapter, «The Hu Lu Bonze Adjudicates the Hu Lu Case», talks about «office phylactery» and introduces the «Four Big Families»:

The Jia family is not jia, a myth; white jade forms the halls; gold composes their horses! The A Fang Palace is 300 li [150 kilometres] in extent, but is no fit residence for a Shi of Jinling. The Eastern Sea lacks white jade beds, and Long Wang, the King of the Dragons, has ccome to ask for Wang Jinling. In a bountiful year, the Xue family are bountiful like xue [snow]; their pearls and gems are like sand, their gold like iron.⁵

The Dream of the Red Chamber describes each of the «Four Big Families». It concerns a fierce class struggle, involving the fate of many dozens of people, though only 20 or 30 of these people belong to the ruling class. (It has been calculated that 33 of them belong to this category.) The other people are all slaves, over 300 of them, such as Yue Yang, Siqi, Second Sister Yu, Third Sister Yu, and so on. In studying history, unless you take the standpoint of the class struggle as your starting point, you will get confused. Things can only be analysed clearly by the use of class analysis. More than 200 years have elapsed since The Dream of the Red Chamber was written, and research on the book has still not cleared up these questions, even down to the present day; from this, we can see the difficulty of the problem. Both Yu Pingbo and Wang Kunlun are specialists. He Qifang also wrote a preface for the book. A person called Wu Shichang has also appeared on the scene. All this is recent research on The Dream of the Red Chamber; I won't get into the older studies. Cao Yuanpei's view of The Dream of the Red Chamber was incorrect; Hu Shi's was somewhat more correct.

What is synthesis? You have all witnessed how the two opposites, the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party, were synthesized on the mainland. The synthesis took place like this: Their armies came, and we devoured them, we ate them bite by bite. It wasn't a case of «two combine into one», as expounded by Yang Xianzhen; it wasn't a case of two peacefully coexisting opposites being synthesized. They didn't want to coexist peacefully with us, they wanted to devour us. Otherwise, why would they have attacked Yan'an? Their army penetrated everywhere in North Shaanxi, except for three border counties. They had their definition of freedom, and we had our definition of freedom. In 1937, they started out with 250'000 troops, and we started out with 25'000 troops. We had a few brigades, a little more than 20'000 troops. Having made the analysis, how do we make the synthesis? If you want to go somewhere, you go right ahead; we'll still swallow your army mouthful by mouthful. If we could fight victoriously, we fought; if we couldn't win, we retreated. From March 1947 to March 1948, one whole enemy army disappeared into the landscape, for we annihilated several tens of thousands of their troops. When we surrounded Yichuan, and Liu Kan came to relieve the city, Commander-in-Chief Liu Kan was killed, two of his three divisional commanders were killed, and the third taken prisoner, and the whole army ceased to exist. This was synthesis. All of their guns and artillery were synthesized over to our side, and the soldiers were synthesized, too. Those who wanted to stay with us could stay, and to those who didn't want to stay, we gave money for their traveling expenses. After we had annihilated Liu Kan, the brigade stationed in Yichuan surrendered without a fight. In the three great campaigns of Liaoxi-Shenyang, Huai-Hai, and Beijing-Tianjin, what was our method of synthesis? Fu Zuoyi was synthesized over to our side with his army of 400'000 troops without a fight, and they handed over all their rifles. One thing eats another, the big fish eats the small fish -- this is synthesis. It has never been put like this in books. I never put it this way in my books, either. For his part, Yang Xianzhen believes that «two combine into one» and that synthesis is the indissoluble tie between two opposites. What indissoluble ties are there in this world? Things may be tied together, but in the end, they must be severed. There is nothing that cannot be severed. In the 20-odd years of our struggle, many of us were also devoured by the enemy. When the 300'000-strong Red Army reached the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region, it only had 25'000 troops left. Of the others, some had been devoured, some scattered, and some killed or wounded.

We must take real life as our starting point in discussing the unity of opposites.

KANG SHENG: It won't do merely to talk about concepts.

MAO ZEDONG: When analysis is taking place, there is also synthesis, and when synthesis is taking place, there is also analysis.

When people eat animals and plants, they also begin with analysis. Why don't we eat sand? When there's sand in rice, it's not good to eat. Why don't we eat grass, as d horses, cows, and sheep, but only things like cabbage? We must analyse everything. Emperor Shennong tasted the «Hundred Herbs» and came up with their uses for medicine. After many tens of thousands of years, analysis finally revealed clearly what could be eaten and what could not. Grasshoppers, snakes, and turtles can be eaten. Crabs, dogs, and aquatic creatures can be eaten. Some foreigners don't eat them. In North Shaanxi, they don't eat aquatic creatures, they don't eat fish. They don't eat cat there, either. One year, there was a big flood of the Yellow River, which cast up on shore several tens of thousands of pounds of fish, and they used it all for fertilizer.

I am a native philosopher, whereas you are foreign philosophers.

KANG SHENG: Chairman, could you say something about the three laws of dialectics?

MAO ZEDONG: Engels talked about the three laws of dialectics, but as for me, I don't believe in two of those laws. (The unity of opposites is the most fundamental law; the transformation of quality and quantity into one another is the unity of the opposites quality and quantity; and the negation of the negation does not exist at all.) Putting the transformation of quality and quantity into one another, the negation of the negation, and the law of the unity of opposites on the same level is «triplism», not monism. The most fundamental thing is the unity of opposites. The transformation of quality and quantity into one another is the unity of the opposites quality and quantity. There is no such thing as the negation of the negation. Affirmation, negation, affirmation, negation, and so on -- in the development of things, every link in the chain of events is both affirmation and negation. Slaveowning society negated primitive society, but with reference to feudal society, it constituted, in turn, the affirmation. Feudal society negated slaveowning society, but with reference to capitalist society, it constituted, in turn, the affirmation. Capitalist society negated feudal society, but with reference to socialist society, it constitutes, in turn, the affirmation.

What is the method of synthesis? Is it possible that primitive society can exist side by side with slaveowning society? They do exist side by side, but this is only a small part of the whole. The overall picture is that primitive society gets eliminated. Moreover, the development of society takes place by stages; primitive society, too, is divided into a great many stages. At that time, the practice of burying women alive together with their dead husbands didn't exist yet, but they were obliged to subject themselves to men. First, men were subject to women, and then, things turned into their opposites, and women were subject to men. This stage in history has not yet been clarified, although it went on for more than 1'000'000 years. Class society hasn't even existed for 5'000 years. The Long Shan and Yang Shao Cultures at the end of the period of primitive society had coloured pottery. In a word, one devours the other, one overthrows the other, one class is eliminated, another class is elevated, one society is eliminated, another society is elevated. Naturally, in the process of development, nothing is actually that pure. When it gets to feudal society, there still remains a part of the slaveowning system, though the greater part of the social formation is characterized by the feudal system. Capitalist society is not all that pure either, having some serfs and some indentured servants, such as handicraftspeople. Even in the advanced capitalist societies, there is still a backward part. For example, the US South had the slave system. Lincoln abolished the slave system, but there are still Black slaves today, and their struggle is very fierce -- more than 20'000'000 people are participating in it, and that's quite a few.

One thing destroys another, things emerge, develop, and are destroyed -- it is like this everywhere. If something isn't destroyed by something else, then it destroys itself. Why do people die? Did the aristocracy die? This is a law of nature. Forests live longer than human beings, yet even they last only a few thousand years. If there were no such thing as death, that would be unbearable. If Confucius were still alive today, the Earth wouldn't be able to hold so many people. I approve of Master Zhuang's approach. When his wife died, he banged a drum and sang. When people die, we should throw parties to celebrate the victory of dialectics, to celebrate the destruction of the old by the new. Socialism, too, will be eliminated; it wouldn't do if it weren't eliminated, for then, there would be no communism. Communism will last for thousands and thousands of years. I don't believe that there will be no qualitative changes under communism, that it won't be divided into qualitatively different stages; I don't believe it! Quantity transforms into quality, and quality transforms into quantity. I don't believe that something can remain qualitatively exactly the same, unchanging for millions of years! That is unthinkable in the light of dialectics. Then, there is the principle: «From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.»⁶ Do you believe that we can carry on for 1'000'000 years with the same political economy? Have you thought about it? If that were so, we wouldn't need political economists, or in any case, we could get along with just one textbook, and dialectics would be dead.

The life of dialectics is the continuous transformation of things into their opposites. Humanity will also meet its doom in the end. When theologians talk about the apocalypse, they are pessimistic and trying to scare people. We say that the end of humanity will produce something more advanced than humanity. Humanity is still in its infancy. Engels spoke of moving from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom, and said that freedom is the recognition of necessity. This sentence is not complete; it only says half and leaves the other half unsaid. Does merely recognizing necessity make you free? Freedom is the recognition of necessity and the transformation of necessity -- one has to do some work, too. If you merely eat and don't work, if you merely recognize and don't transform, is that sufficient? When you discover a law, you must be able to apply it, you must remake the world, you must break the ground and construct buildings, dig mines, and industrialize. In the future, there will be more people, and there won't be enough grain, so people will have to get food from minerals. Thus, it is only through transformation that freedom can be obtained. Will it be possible to be that free in the future? Lenin said that, in the future, there would be as many aeroplanes in the sky as flies, rushing everywhere. They will collide everywhere, and what will we do about it? How will we manoeuvre them? And if we figure out how to do it, will we be free? In Beijing at present, there are 10'000 buses; in Tokyo, there are 100'000 vehicles (or is it 800'000?), so there are more car accidents. We have fewer cars, and we also educate the drivers and pedestrians, so there are fewer accidents. What will they do in Beijing 10'000 years from now? Will there still be 10'000 buses? Maybe they'll invent something new, so that they can dispense with these means of transportation, so that people can fly, using some simple mechanical device, and fly right to any place and land wherever they want. It won't do just to recognize necessity, we must also transform it.

I don't believe that communism won't be divided into stages and that there will be no qualitative changes in communist society. Lenin said that everything is divisible. He gave the example of the atom, and said that not only can the atom be divided, but the electron, too, will be divided one day. Formerly, however, it was held that these things couldn't be divided; the branch of science devoted to splitting the atomic nucleus is still very young, only 20 or 30 years old. In recent decades, scientists have resolved the atomic nucleus into its component parts, such as protons, anti-protons, neutrons, anti-neutrons, mesons, and anti-mesons. These are the heavy particles; there are also light ones. For the most part, these discoveries only got underway during and after the Second World War. As for the fact that one can separate the electrons from the atomic nucleus, this was discovered some time ago. An electric wire makes use of dissociated electrons from the outside of copper or aluminium. In the 300 li [150 kilometres] of the Earth's atmosphere, it has also been discovered that there are layers of dissociated electrons. There, too, the electron and the atomic nucleus are separated. As yet, the electron has not been split, but some day, they will certainly be able to split it. It is said in The Writings of Master Zhuang: «Take a pole one foot long, cut away half of it every day, and there will always be something left.» This is the truth. If you don't believe it, just think about it: If it could be reduced to zero, then there would be no such thing as science. The countless different things develop continuously and without limit, and they are infinite. Time and space are infinite. As regards space, it is infinite both macroscopically and microscopically, and it can be divided endlessly. So, even in 1'000'000 years, scientists will still have work to do. I very much appreciate the article on fundamental particles by Sakata Shoichi in the Bulletin of Natural Science. I have never seen an article like this before, it is pure dialectical materialism. He even quotes Lenin!

The weakness of philosophy is that it hasn't produced practical philosophy, but only theoretical philosophy.

We should always create new things. Otherwise, what are we here for? Why do we want descendants? New things are to be found in reality; we must grasp reality. In the final analysis, is Ren Jiyu a Marxist or not? I greatly appreciate his articles on Buddhism. There is some research behind them; he's a student of Tang Yongtong's. He discusses only the Buddhism of the Tang Dynasty and doesn't touch directly on the Buddhism of later times. The metaphysics of the Song and Ming Dynasties developed out of the Zen Buddhism of the Tang Dynasty, and it was a movement from subjective idealism to objective idealism. There is both Buddhism and Daoism, and it's wrong not to distinguish between them. How can it be appropriate not to pay attention to them? Han Yu didn't make any sense. His slogan was: «Learn from their ideas, but not from their mode of expression.» He copied his ideas entirely from other people, and he changed the form, the mode of composition, of their essays. He didn't make any sense, and the little bit of sense he made was basically taken from the ancients. There's a little bit of new things in writings like the Discourse on Teachers. Liu Zihou was different, he knew the ins and outs of Buddhist and Daoist materialism. And yet, his Heaven Answers is too short, just a little bit too short. His Heaven Answers is a reply to Qu Yuan's Asking Heaven. For several thousand years, only this one person wrote a piece like Heaven Answers. What are Asking Heaven and Heaven Answers all about? If no editor's notes are made to explain it clearly, you can't understand it when reading them, you'll only get the general idea. Asking Heaven is really fantastic, raising all kinds of questions about the Universe, nature, and history thousands of years ago.

As to the question of «two combine into one», let the Hongqi [Red Flag] reprint a few good articles and write a report on the subject.