Hi everyone, welcome to another entry of our Short Attention Span Reading Group
The Text
We will study On Contradiction by Mao.
It is divided into 6 sections (7 if we count the very short conclusion), none of them will take you more than 20min to read (most will take less) :).
I think this essay can be summarized by its first sentence
The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics.
And this is all it studies, starting to what is the difference between dialectics and metaphysics, the law of contradiction, what are contradictions, how are they defined, what are their different types, and so on. And of course what it means for Marxism.
The biggest question I am left with after reading this essay is the place of Nature in materialist dialectics...
Supplementary material
- On Practice by Mao Tse-tung. It is significantly shorter than On Contradiction, and they both go hand in hand.
Any section that stands out as particularly unclear/obscure? I certainly can't say I got it all, and discussing specific points might help clear them out for everybody
I'm studying the colonization of the Americas right now, and the foremost example I can think of is how the conflict between slavers and the enslaved created whiteness, an identity that brought more people — jews and the white working class — onto the side of the slavers, transforming the contradiction from european slaveholders vs. the enslaved into whites vs. everyone else.
The principal contradiction changes only subtly, while the principal aspect of the contradiction — the ruling class into whites — changes radically, and with it the secondary aspect is changed in response: the enslaved becomes non-whites, a new superset.
My question is what insight does this provide? These concepts are laid out in the text I'm reading without deploying the language of On Contradiction.