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.
    • vertexarray [any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      I gotcha, so I'm mixing levels of abstraction in that example, and need to pull back to a broader perspective.

      If I were to say then that slaveholding mercantilism transformed into white supremacist mercantilism by way of the existential threat of a slave revolt, and the internal possibility of whiteness is the lever upon which this force acted, would that be a more appropriate framing for Mao's conceptualisation of contradiction?

        • vertexarray [any]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Right, I think we're thinking along essentially the same lines, it's just a matter of phrasing

        • Ectrayn [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Haiti was exactly the point I wanted to bring up, but wasn't sure how, I think this is a very clear point!

            • Ectrayn [he/him]
              ·
              4 years ago

              Finished reading it, I am knowledgeable with regard to Hegel (and in fact the only time I tried reading Hegel I quickly gave up), but all the discussion about Haiti was super interesting thank you. I can see how it connects with our discussion with this passage

              At first consideration the master's situation is "independent, and its essential nature is to be for itself"; whereas "the other," the slave's position, "is dependent, and its essence is life or existence for another."81 The slave is characterized by the lack of recognition he receives. He is viewed as "a thing"; "thinghood" is the essence of slave consciousness-as it was the essence of his legal status under the Code Noir (PM, p. 235). But as the dialectic develops, the apparent dominance of the master reverses itself with his awareness that he is in fact totally dependent on the slave. One has only to collectivize the figure of the master in order to see the descriptive pertinence of Hegel's analysis: the slave-holding class is indeed totally dependent on the institution of slavery for the "overabundance" that constitutes its wealth. This class is thus incapable of being the agent of historical progress without annihilating its own existence

              That's really well put and @vertexarray I think this part might interest you too

            • Ectrayn [he/him]
              ·
              4 years ago

              Not at all, thank you for the resource, will read it over the week end, it will be a welcome break from plain books