K. This is the 1st working draft of vol. VI. It still ... - From Marx to Mao

66 MAO TSE-TUNG
low-level labour unions with positive leadership so as to regard the
task of land investigation as one of the important tasks of the unions.
6. THE INCORRECT IDEA ABOUT
THE QUESTION OF THE RICH PEASANTS
Our entire strategy in the agrarian struggle is to depend on the
poor peasants, to resolutely ally with the middle peasants, to enable
the poor peasants to play the vanguard role, and to unite all the revolutionary
forces in order to eliminate the landlord class and combat
the rich peasants. Concerning the question of rich peasants the Party
FROM MARX
TO MAO
has already correctly stated: “We must clearly distinguish the land-
⋆
lord from the rich peasant. In the unrelenting struggle to eliminate
the landlord remnants we must under no circumstances allow any
attempt to eliminate the rich peasantry.” During the land investigation
of July, we have not yet found a theory openly advocating the
elimination of the rich peasants but we found the phenomenon in
many places in which a rich peasant element was treated as a landlord
thereby confiscating all his family property. The origin of this
mistake is due to the elimination of labour power of the rich peasant.
When we stated that “those who possess no labour power or
only incidental labour power NOT and exploit FOR rent for land are landlords,”
in some places those who employed a considerable number of labouring
elements in production, which was [thus] considered a kind
of “incidental labour COMMERCIAL
power,” were construed as landlords. In some
places the rich peasants who concurrently practiced usurious exploitation
were regarded as “usurers,” such rich peasants were treated
in accordance with the measures of “eliminating usurers”. In some
places, old accounts DISTRIBUTION
were settled by going back to some years prior
to the [1925-27] Revolution; someone who had employed regular
farmhand five to six years or even a dozen years or so before the
Revolution were also regarded as rich peasants; or well-to-do middle
peasants who had employed regular farmhand merely for one or two
years and have since never done so were also thrown into the rich
peasant category. Even more serious was the case in the past in a
certain place of Hsiangkuo County. The method there differentiated
the landlords from the rich peasants by the type and extent of
exploitation. Those who practiced three kinds of exploitation were
called landlords, two kinds of rich peasants. For instance, if one