ON THE CONDITION OF A PEOPLE 11 shall take precedence in our f consciousness5? Shall it be the managerialists^ ^power struggle5, or the definition of an abstract ^praxis'? Or shall it be, When I was thirteen, I became a silk weaver. We wove silk, but walked in rags. The owners wore smart clothes, and thought ^You workers are coarse people". They thought that without themselves, the factories would stop working. They even thought that without them the world would stop turning. I compare my life now with the death from misery and disease of my mother. I ask myself the reasons. It is because we became masters of the country. We learned that we could change nature with our empty hands. We learned that the world did not stop turning. Shall it be the over-developed, over-ripe, and decadent superfluity of ^Marxist5 metaphysics, the fetishized and competitive overproduction of abstract theory by a ^Marxist' intelligentsia whose intellectual work reflects, in mirror-image, the decadent political culture of capitalism to which they are in appearance and even in intention opposed? Or must we re-learn how to understand what is meant by I have been a Shanghai docker for thirty years. Before the revolution, we shouldered the cargoes from the boats. W^ moved the heavy sacks of rice and soda on our shoulders. We carried on our backs iron and girders. We did not have enough food, or clothing. (weeping) I toiled all day, but remained a beggar. We were not treated as men, but as draft-oxen, and as beasts of burden. The docks were called hell on earth. We lived in the lower depths of hell. We had no right to speak, and died like our fathers of cold and starvation. We slept in lavatories and in the streets and in the doorways. There are eighteen floors of hell. We lived at the lowest level. All men oppressed us, the capitalist, the slavish compradol, and the reactionary classes. W^ were treated like rags and torn papers (wiping his eyes) we were abused and beaten, because we had no political position. Eyes to a Society Is the expression of such experience—or knowledge—when set against the sophistications of our ^knowledge5 of this or that ^social science5, or of this or that new refinement in the exegesis of ^Marxism5, a naivete of mind? Is it a form of simplicity and simplification, unworthy of more than a passing and dismissive attention by readers in search of their own theoretical self-improvement? That some attention (looking over its shoulder) might be paid to this ^form* of'consciousness5—as if there were any other—is occasionally conceded by those who have a moment to spare from theii exploration of that abstract idealism which is constantly confused with a materialist science. But this is insufficient. The head must be fully raised; and both eye and mind must learn once