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.
Yeah, I was trying to call attention to that, although not very clearly. So the question then is "what is a contradiction?".
Which reminds me of a particular M.A.S.H, as Hawkeye pleads to know what B.J.'s actual name is, what does B.J. stand for, B.J. replies
"Anything you want"
The focus on calling out dogmatists makes me think the text is meant more as a blow to people holding onto old ideas rather than a specific framework for understanding the world. A seriously overwritten "fuck you, everything can change, everything will change, nothing is isolated, go get your hands dirty".
That's not a uniquely dialectical conclusion though, so even if that is the case, it's couched in all so much of this drivel that everyone who agrees with the conclusion has to swallow a mountain of methodological objections and cosign it, or get lumped in with the dogmatists.
I mean, you can create a seriously overwritten “fuck you, everything can change, everything will change, nothing is isolated, go get your hands dirty” polemic in the language of literal astrology, but doing so would be somewhat self-defeating.
In that scenario, the only rationale I can come up with for writing such a simple concept in such an obtuse way is that the obtuseness is the point, either to give the concept credence because people respect many big words strung together, or to get your good-faith ideological opponents stuck in the trap of trying to understand what you're saying. Not that either of these ends are necessarily bad, and it might well have been the right thing to do for someone trying to swat down dogmatism in the party.
Kinda strikes me as a loyalty test, in the same way the Word of Wisdom is for LDS types
Honestly, if your goal is to produce a party bureaucracy that moves and acts as a single unit, there's worse ways to go about it...
Wait wait, I unironically think I've figured it out.
The point of these works by Lenin, Mao, and Stalin, et al, is not to make sense or to accurately describe the world, but to show how the synthesis of ideological gibberish with material action can fundamentally bring about massive societal transformations.
So when leftists go about mining these tomes for intellectual insight, they're missing the point entirely. The point isn't in the gibberish, is in how the application and context of the gibberish is used to catalyze social change.
I'd say Lenin did both. Early in his life he was doing sociology to understand Russian class relations and imperialism. Later though he would do these weird justifications to practically run the ussr which went against some of his earlier theorizing.
Just emailed Chomsky about this.
Chomksy wrote back
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That's funny, he just replied "John Kerry" a thousand times to my follow up.
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Great, now he's bappin.
That might be a good take, do you mean it in the sense that they build in a "thinking framework" that allows people to consider and realize said massive societal transformations?
Think of it like the Book of Mormon; it isn't at all what it purports to be, and the people who wrote it knew that, but they used it as a springboard to be able to create a massive movement out of it that changed the course of history.
So Mao/Marx/Lenin would have more or less believed that Hegel is (more or less) full of shit but that it gives a near mystical/super deep appearance to whatever rigorous theory/social movement they were building, is that what you mean? I'm not necessarily disagreeing, and I can see the point of doing so, don't get me wrong. I am just not sure whether they thought Hegel was mystical "bs" or if they were carried themselves by said mystical "depth". I'd lean towards the later.
Also, I do believe there is something of value under all this, but yeah, this is belief :p
Sure, and I think it's plausible that Joseph Smith even came to genuinely believe and rationalize what he was doing; it's just that the content of these theoretical papers isn't what's important; thesis/anti-thesis, law of contradiction, dialectics, it's not what to take away from these historical works. The important bit, the thing to analyze, the meta-dialectic is how these theoretical works wore able to catalyze material change, and I think some of them (Lenin) may have been smart enough to realize that was the actual ballgame.
I think Lenin was smart enough to advance an intellectual argument in bad faith, because he's wasn't playing for a bourgeois intellectual win.
I think when you read Marx and Lenin in this light, especially when they go after other philosophers, you can see winks and nods of this all over the place.
I'm not saying this was definitely the case, but I like 3D Chess Lenin over unironic Dialectics of Nature Engels.
I like this angle because it doesn't matter if any particular thinkers were doing this on purpose, it reframes the creation of knowledge and the work of philosophy into something weaponizable, a pattern you can see in the neoliberal think tanks of the USA. It's impossible to ignore the leverage provided by dodgy science if it creates "knowledge" that advances a revolutionary cause.
Exactly!
The lesson isn't "the law of contradiction is present in all things"
The lesson is "If i tell people "the law of contradiction is present in all things", I can get them to shoot the tsar."
Might be the case, and it's plausible take (I guess it would be hard to prove or disprove). I do feel like Mao is quite serious when he writes On Contradiction and On Practice though, and even 30 years later is his still seriously talking about dialectical materialism.
My impression though is that there is something in there that "works". I mean, Žižek is one of the two writers who made me be able to move left, in the sense that I had some feeling something was wrong, but he helped me destroy some barriers that I wasn't able to overcome and my own, and well, I don't think we can argue that žižek does anything but dialectism (we certainly can't blame him for being too clear or too formal). I think part of the reason this worked is because it forced me to consider things in relation to each others in ways that I had not considered before, and this is what dialectical materialism is all about right, drawing all kind of connections between "things" and seeing how they come into play (through contradictions from which new things emerge yadda yadda).
Here's a thermonuclear take:
If you want to neutralize the bourgeois conditioning in someone's thought patterns, it's better to create the antithesis of that bourgeois thought pattern, resulting in something more akin to mutual annihilation rather than a mere convincing.
If the target bourgeois thought pattern isn't present in the reader's mind, the antithesis can sail harmlessly through their psyche like a radio wave through flesh.
So maybe the reason this bit of philosophy isn't playing nice with the bulk of this reading group is because those brainworms have already been annihilated.
And there is precedent for bureaucrats talking like that.