Page 301 - SELECTED WORKS OF MAO TSE-TUNG Volume I.indd

ON PRACTICE

On the Relation Between Knowledge and Practice,
Between Knowing and Doing

July 1937

Before Marx, materialism examined the problem of knowledge
apart from the social nature of man and apart from his historical
development, and was therefore incapable of understanding the de-
pendence of knowledge on social practice, that is, the dependence
of knowledge on production and the class struggle.
Above all, Marxists regard man’s activity in production as the
most fundamental practical activity, the determinant of all his other
activities. Man’s knowledge depends mainly on his activity in material
production, through which he comes gradually to understand the
phenomena, the properties and the laws of nature, and the relations
between himself and nature; and through his activity in production
he also gradually comes to understand, in varying degrees, certain
relations that exist between man and man. None of this knowledge
can be acquired apart from activity in production. In a classless society
every person, as a member of society, joins in common effort with
the other members, enters into definite relations of production with
them and engages in production to meet man’s material needs. In
all class societies, the members of the different social classes also
enter, in different ways, into definite relations of production and

There used to be a number of comrades in our Party who were dogmatists and
who for a long period rejected the experience of the Chinese revolution, denying
the truth that “Marxism is not a dogma but a guide to action” and overawing
people with words and phrases from Marxist works, torn out of context. There
were also a number of comrades who were empiricists and who for a long period
restricted themselves to their own fragmentary experience and did not understand
the importance of theory for revolutionary practice or see the revolution as a whole,
but worked blindly though industriously. The erroneous ideas of these two types
of comrades, and particularly of the dogmatists, caused enormous losses to the
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