Vol. 1: Interests Decide Where People Stand: Telling Friend from Foe with "Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society"

Everything that people struggle for is connected with their interests. —Karl Marx, Rheinische Zeitung

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Why Did Mao Write "Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society"?

Answers only come from questions.

So in 1925, what question was Mao facing?

He gets straight to the point in the very first lines.

Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution.

Today that looks like a simple question. But back in 1925, the Communist Party of China had no clear thinking on it.

Whom should the revolution rely on? Whom should it ally with? Whom should it strike at? None of this was settled. There were two main tendencies in the Party at the time. One, represented by Chen Duxiu, leaned on the bourgeoisie and the Kuomintang to push the revolution forward and paid little attention to the workers' and peasants' movements. The other insisted that workers and peasants were the basic force of the revolution.

Why did Mao call it "a question of the first importance for the revolution"? Simple: whatever the answer turned out to be would decide where all of the organization's resources went.

That's why Mao stressed right at the start:

A revolutionary party is the guide of the masses, and no revolution ever succeeds when the revolutionary party leads them astray.

This sentence says only one thing: there is no room for even one trial and error here. You can only succeed. Pick the wrong teammates and the only outcome is failure.

And failure back then didn't mean "no big deal, start over." It cost lives.

So go back to the opening line: "Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution."

With that one sentence Mao was saying: we have to get this straight now, so that the Communist Party of China can reach a consensus.

And so "Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society" was born.

How Did Mao Write "Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society"?

"Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society" is a short piece. A fast reader can finish it in under ten minutes.

Yet it became the opening essay of Volume I of the Selected Works of Mao Zedong.

Good writing has momentum. Most great classical essays have it: they open like a mountain coming down, with the force of thunder, and seize you before you know it.

As a short piece, "Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society" opens with tremendous momentum. Right away Mao tells everyone: today, I'm going to settle this question.

Put the essay in the context of the whole Selected Works, and it's a powerful opening there too.

It's like Romance of the Three Kingdoms. As a long novel, its opening line, "The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide," is praised by everyone for its momentum.

Taken as a whole and placed at the head of the entire Selected Works, "Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society" carries the same force of thunder. It says just one thing: if we don't settle this question, nothing else is worth talking about.

To distinguish real friends from real enemies, we must make a general analysis of the economic status of the various classes in Chinese society and of their respective attitudes towards the revolution.

So what method did Mao use for this analysis?

In one sentence: a person's economic status decides their class, and their class decides their political choice.

With that sentence in mind, let's look inside the essay and see how many classes Mao divided the Chinese people of the time into.

1. The landlord class and the comprador class. They were well off and depended on imperialism and the feudal system. A revolution would directly hurt their interests, so they didn't support it.
2. The middle bourgeoisie, also called the national bourgeoisie in the essay. This class was well off, but unlike the landlords, it was oppressed by imperialism. So its attitude was contradictory: it wanted to throw off the oppression, but didn't want the revolution to hurt its own interests.
3. The petty bourgeoisie
   1. Small landlords with surplus grain. They had enough money to live on, kept a low profile, and weren't oppressed much, so they were conservative about the revolution and afraid of it.
   2. People who were neither short of money nor rich, with just enough to live on. They felt no need to join the revolution. They didn't oppose it, but they didn't support it either.
   3. People who used to be well off but were getting worse year by year. They were very positive about the revolution, because they felt the deterioration themselves.
4. The semi-proletariat. This class was mostly poor peasants, handicraftsmen, and the like. They were economically very unstable and lived hard lives, so they strongly supported the revolution.
5. The proletariat (industrial workers). The proletariat had nothing at all. Not only did they survive entirely by selling their labor, their surplus value was being exploited all the time. This was the most oppressed and most organized class, so Mao considered it the most determined force among the people.
6. The lumpen-proletariat. These people weren't part of production and were wavering. They could be used by the revolution, or they could turn against it. They needed to be guided correctly.

Now that we've sorted out the classes in the essay, let's use a table to see how class shapes choice.

Class	Economic situation	Attitude toward revolution
Landlord class and comprador class	Own large amounts of land or depend on imperialist capital; at the very top economically	Firmly against the revolution; its targets
Middle bourgeoisie (national bourgeoisie)	Own mid-sized industry and commerce, but squeezed by both imperialism and the warlords	Wavering; want to resist oppression but fear the revolution going too far
Petty bourgeoisie (upper)	Have spare money and grain; fairly stable lives	Doubt the revolution; afraid of losing what they have
Petty bourgeoisie (middle)	Barely self-sufficient	Don't oppose the revolution, but don't take part on their own
Petty bourgeoisie (lower)	Living standards falling every year; can't make ends meet	Lean toward revolution; feel real pressure to survive
Semi-proletariat (semi-owner peasants, poor peasants, small handicraftsmen, shop assistants, etc.)	Highly unstable; live by selling part of their labor	Strongly want revolution
Proletariat (industrial workers)	Own nothing; live entirely by selling their labor	The most determined revolutionary force
Lumpen-proletariat	Cut off from production; no fixed income	Can be used by the revolution or bought by the reactionaries; direction uncertain

Look closely at the table and it's not hard to see: the worse off people are and the fewer ways out they have, the more determined they are about revolution. The better off they are, the more they hesitate or even oppose it.

Interests decide where people stand, layer by layer, very clearly.

It reminds me of something I once heard: if you want to know what someone will do, don't listen to what they say. Look at where their interests lie.

A hundred years ago, Mao was already using this method to analyze the classes of China.

At its core, the method says: in most situations, predict behavior from the objective structure of interests, not from subjective statements.

Here's an example. In my first couple of years out of school, I was always giving my boss suggestions.

Most of them would have made the product better, but he adopted almost none.

Back then I thought he was too conservative. Later I slowly understood: if I were in his position, I probably wouldn't change anything either.

The company had been running for more than twenty years, and in recent years its results hadn't improved much. It was basically a steady, gentle upward curve, or a flat one. Precisely because growth was so stable, the company's costs had stabilized too, and for him any change was a risk, not an improvement.

The boss figured: what we have works fine, and the business has no real problems. So he decided to keep things as they were.

The more stable a person's current interests, the higher the opportunity cost of change. That's exactly why the landlords and the bourgeoisie a hundred years ago resisted the revolution.

It wasn't a question of whether they wanted to support it. Swap the people who supported the revolution into the shoes of the landlords and bosses, and their enthusiasm for revolution would drop on its own.

This is the same logic Mao used to analyze class: where you stand isn't decided by your personality. It's decided by your position, and your position is decided by your economic status.

Which brings us back to "economic status decides class position, and class position decides political position."

What makes this so elegant? It's a rational structure with nothing subjective in it.

With this structure, when we can't tell friend from foe and don't know what someone is really thinking, we don't have to guess by instinct. We can just take it apart with the structure.

If you compare the history of New China to the story of a startup, "Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society" was a crucial move, because it directly shaped the Party's line.

Our era is no longer one of great upheaval. For most people, one wrong friendship or one wrong choice of side probably won't cost their life.

But in our era, losing your life isn't actually the scariest thing. The truly frightening thing is a choice that keeps your life tied up in something for years and years.

So the question from a hundred years ago still holds today: who are your enemies? Who are your friends? Don't listen to what they say. Look at where their interests lie.

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