Conversation While Swimming in the Yangtze River (Excerpts)
(September 5, 1957)

Source: Kau & Leung, The Writings of Mao Zedong 1949-1976, Vol. II
Pages 675-675
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JULY ~ SEPTEMBER 1957 / 671

and you ought to cultivate [this interest]. You should read some, at a leisurely pace,
and your interest is bound to be enhanced. [If you can treat this reading] as you
would chewing sugar cane for the second time around, and let things move
gradually into a state of enjoyment, it would be good. [This I send to you] for
reference.

Mao Zedong

August 4, 1957

Note

1. What Is to Be Done? is a book-length essay written by Lenin in 1902 and can be found
in V. I. Lenin, Selected Works (1970 ed.), I, pp. 119-272. The “April Theses” refers to the
Strategic proposals contained in or incorporated as part of Lenin’s speech on April 4, 1917,
the day after he returned to Russia from abroad. The title of the speech, as it was published
in Pravda on April 7, 1917, is “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution.” This
speech and the theses can be found in V. I. Lenin, Selected Works, II, pp. 41-47. Mao’s
interest in these two essays at this time is instructive in the context of the anti-Rightist
campaign. The book What Is to Be Done? is subtitled Burning Questions of Our Movement.
In the book, Lenin attacked Bernsteinism-Economism, whose advocates had advanced the
slogan of “freedom of criticism” after Marx’s and Engels’ deaths. Here we find Lenin saying:
“The only choice is between bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course... . To
belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to
strengthen the bourgeois ideology.” Lenin pointed out that the essential task of the Party was to
struggle for the purity of socialism and to combat bourgeois influence among the working class.
Then, in April 1917, Lenin faced the revolutionary strategic need to wrest political power,
peacefully if possible, from the provisional government. In the “April Theses,” he suggested a
theoretical strategy for doing so. He described the situation in Russia at the time as one in which
“the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution, which . . . placed power in the hands
of the bourgeoisie . . . to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat
and the poorest sections of the peasants.” The critical element for this transition, Lenin suggested,
was the growing class consciousness and organization of the proletariat. The political form that
would embody this transition would be the establishment of a soviet republic. Here Lenin
announced the famous slogan: “‘All power to be transferred to the soviets.” It is obvious that Mao
was seeking to draw strength for the current struggle against “bourgeois Rightists” in these two
“classical works” of Marxism-Leninism.