Mao Zedong on the Question of the Integration of the Intellectuals with the Masses of Workers and Peasants

Mao Zedong on the Question of the Integration of the Intellectuals with the Masses of Workers and Peasants

Chinese Masses Standing United for A Better Future for All

Since they are to serve the masses of workers and peasants, intellectuals must, first and foremost, know them and be familiar with their life, work and ideas.

We encourage intellectuals to go among the masses, to go to factories and villages. It is very bad if you never in all your life meet a worker or peasant. Our state personnel, writers, artists, teachers and scientific research workers should seize every opportunity to get close to the workers and peasants.

Some can go to factories or villages just to look around; this may be called “looking at the flowers on horseback’ and is better that doing nothing at all. Others can stay for a few months, conducting investigations and making friends; this may be called “dismounting to look at the flowers’. St6ill others can stay and live there for a considerable time, say two or three years or even longer; this may be called “settling down”.

Apolitical Intellectuals

 

One day

the apolitical
intellectuals
of my country
will be interrogated
by the simplest
of our people.

They will be asked
what they did
when their nation died out
slowly,
like a sweet fire
small and alone.

No one will ask them
about their dress,
their long siestas
after lunch,
no one will want to know
about their sterile combats
with “the idea
of the nothing”
no one will care about
their higher financial learning.

They won’t be questioned
on Greek mythology,
or regarding their self-disgust
when someone within them
begins to die
the coward’s death.

They’ll be asked nothing
about their absurd
justifications,
born in the shadow
of the total lie.

On that day
the simple men will come.

Those who had no place
in the books and poems
of the apolitical intellectuals,
but daily delivered
their bread and milk,
their tortillas and eggs,
those who drove their cars,
who cared for their dogs and gardens
and worked for them,
and they’ll ask: