Marginalia Written While Rereading
“Investigation of Changgang Township”
(1965)
The workers in the countryside were handicraftsmen—such as masons, blacksmiths, papermakers, tailors, carpenters, basket weavers, and barbers—yet their numbers were very small. If they were to form unions separately and lead the broad masses of peasants, the peasants would not accept it. Since they had to serve agriculture, few went off to join the Red Army or leave farming to work full-time for the government. Apart from a few factory-handicraft workshops in the paper industry employing several to a dozen people, the rest were individual artisans who owned their own tools; some even combined farming with craftwork. During the land reform, these workers faced unemployment and were allocated small plots of land, placing them roughly on par with poor peasants. Therefore, the peasants did not regard them as their leaders. For their part, the workers also did not believe they were qualified to lead the vast peasant population. Instead, they feared that if the peasants stopped hiring them—or hired them less frequently—they would face the risk of unemployment or underemployment. Consequently, during the land revolution, they strongly demanded land distribution. However, because the “left”-leaning central leadership of the Chinese Communist Party at the time insisted on ordering workers to lead peasants both in rural areas and in backward small towns (where only handicraft industries existed but no machine-based industry), and neither workers nor peasants truly understood this directive, it was never genuinely implemented. This issue dragged on for many years until after the Anti-Japanese War in 1937.
I


This piece is a marginal note Mao Zedong wrote while rereading his “Investigation of Changgang Township,” originally composed in November 1933, specifically in the section titled “This Election,” following the passage on “Voter Registration.” The second piece is another marginal note Mao penned beside the same section, “This Election,” in the “Investigation of Changgang Township.”


Marginalia Written While Rereading “Investigation of Changgang Township”


Only then did such absurdities cease, as the leadership line had by then changed. (Mao Zedong’s note, 1965)


What is Marxism? At that time, the central leaders111 really knew very little—if anything at all—and thus perpetuated this long-standing absurdity. Yet this was inevitable: humanity must inevitably make certain mistakes before it can discover what is correct. To be governed by objective laws without understanding them is to become a slave of external reality. This condition will persist indefinitely, both now and in the future, and cannot be avoided. Blindness in cognition and human freedom will always alternate and expand their respective domains, with error and correctness coexisting eternally. Otherwise, development would come to a halt, and science itself would cease to exist. It should be understood that errors often precede correctness, and blind necessity is frequently the progenitor of freedom. Humans are simultaneously slaves to nature and society, yet also their masters. This is because our understanding of the objective material world, of human society, and even of ourselves—that is, of our own bodies—is forever incomplete. Should there ever come a day when such complete understanding is achieved, and society becomes entirely good and beautiful—as some theological doctrines claim—this would lead to absolute subjective idealism and metaphysics, which is antithetical to a Marxist worldview.
[I]
Refers to the central leaders who committed “left”-leaning dogmatist errors from early 1931 to late 1934.