Dear Elder Brother Hesen:

Your letter was forwarded to me by Zisheng¹ only at the end of last year. The
materialist conception of history is the philosophical basis of our Party. It is
all facts, and is not like rationalism, which cannot be substantiated and is
easily undermined. I had not studied this question previously, but there are
substantial reasons for my present refusal to recognize that the principles of
anarchism can be verified. The political organization of a factory (the arrangement, management, etc. of production in the factory) differs only in
size, not in nature, from that of a nation or of the world. Syndicalism regards
the political organization of a nation as qualitatively different from the political organization of a factory; it claims this is a different matter, which should
be handed over to a different kind of people. This is either a deliberate
attempt to make lame excuses for being resigned to circumstances, or evidence of stupidity and lack of common sense. Furthermore, there is an extremely important argument [against this view] in terms of method: without
achieving political power, it is impossible to launch, maintain, and carry
through the revolution! The view put forward in this letter of yours² is entirely appropriate, there is not a single word with which I disagree. As far as
the Party is concerned, Mr. Chen Zhongfu and others have already started
organizing it. In the matter of publications, I expect The Communist,³ published in Shanghai, is available to you there [in France]. It really merits the

This letter was first published in January 1921 in Vol. 3 of the Xinmin xuehui huiyuan
tongxinji. Our source is the version in Xinmin xuehui ziliao, pp. 162-63, reproduced in
Mao Zedong ji. Bujuan, Vol. 2, pp. 13-14.
1. Xiao Zisheng.
2. Cai Hesen had asserted that the only solution for China lay in a proletarian dictatorship, exactly like that in Soviet Russia. For the text of his letter, dated September 16, 1920,
see Cai Hesen wenji, pp. 63-72.
3. Gongchandang, literally "The Communist Party," but more commonly rendered as
"The Communist."
description "to take a clear-cut stand" (Zhongfu was the author of the Manifesto).4 I'll write you in more detail later.

Your younger brother Zedong
January 21, tenth year, in the southern part
of the city

4. Zhongfu was the zi of Chen Duxiu (1879-1942), original name Chen Qiansheng,
hao Shi'an, who had been the prime mover in the foundation of the first Communist Group
in Shanghai in August 1920. (For more details regarding Chen, see, in Volume I, pp.
325-30, Mao's article of July 14, 1919, "The Arrest and Rescue of Chen Duxiu," especially note 1, p. 325.) The Shanghai group had prepared a "Manifesto of the Chinese
Communist Party" in November 1920, calling for the abolition of the state and the creation
of a new Communist society. "The whole world," it declared, "can be viewed as a single
capitalist institution. Therefore class struggle in one country can have repercussions in
others." For the full text, see Tony Saich, The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist
Party: Documents and Analysis, 1920-1949 (hereafter Saich, Rise to Power), Doc. A.2,
pp. 11-13.