To the Central Research Group and the
High-Level Research Groups¹ (September 29, 1941)

To all comrades of the Central Research Group and the high-level research groups: The overall guideline for the research work of this group has as its objective the
combining of theory and practice. With regard to the materials concerning practice, the comrades should please read the documents issued since the Sixth Congress (see separate listing).² As for theory, emphasis for the moment is to be laid
on the study of methods of thinking. All comrades should please read the following materials first:
1. Left-wing Infantilism³ (use the edition published in 1939 by Jiefangshe);
2. Chapter VIII of Ai [Siqi]'s translation of the Outline of the New Philosophy,
"The Process of Cognition" (i.e., Chapter 4 of Selected Philosophical Writings);4
3. Chapter VI of Li [Da]'s translation of A Course in Dialectical Materialism,
"Materialist Dialectics and Formal Logic";5 4. "Introduction" to An Outline of Economics, by Kawakami (mimeographed
copies have been distributed).

Central Research Group Group leader Mao Zedong
Deputy leader Wang Jiaxiang7

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Notes

Our source for this text is Mao Zedong shuxin xuanji, pp. 189-90, where it is printed from
the manuscript.

--- Notes

1. "Research group" (yanjiu zu) was an alternate name for what are referred to above, in
the document dated September 26, as "study groups" (xuexi zu).

2. This refers to the collection of documents that were formally published for inner-Party use in December 1941 under the title Liuda yilai (Since the Sixth Congress). On the
preparation of this volume, see Apter and Saich, Revolutionary Discourse, p. 276.

3. The reference is to Lenin's Left-wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.

4. Mao had read this chapter in 1939 in the second of the two sources cited here, but had
little to say about it in his reading notes on philosophy.

5. Mao had read the Course in Dialectical Materialism, by M. Shirokov and others,
translated by Li Da, in 1937, and taken copious notes, though his comments on Chapter VI
are limited to a few question marks. For a complete translation of these materials and a
discussion of the issues they raise, see Volume VI of this edition.

6. Kawakami Hajime (1879-1946) was a Japanese Marxist economist.

7. Here Wang's name is signed with the alternate character he sometimes used, as Wang
Jiaqiang.