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.
  • Multihedra [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I just want to preface this by saying that I am not well-read; I have read very little MLM and am not in a position to offer a coherent defense of their thoughts or writings.

    All these writers keep dropping these words with highly specific meanings into applications where they clearly make no sense.

    I again think this is a fair point. At the same time, Lenin writing about dialectics or Mao on contradiction are surely trying to abstract features they see common to many different things (math, physical sciences, society, etc). They can either invent new terminology, or co-opt terminology from one (or several) of these subjects. I would expect there to be some friction when the latter happens. I personally find it excusable, but I do sympathize with the spirit of your critique (or at least what I perceive it to be).

    1 and -1 one represent opposites (as opposed to just additive inverse?),

    I think this terminology--"opposites" or "contradictions" instead of the highly-specific "additive inverses"--would be excused by virtue of the fact that we're trying to generalize, or draw comparisons between things.

    and in their addition (unity?), you get (0). What sense does it make to describe 1 and -1 as mutually exclusive as opposed to just distinct?

    Perhaps in this example, it is the positiveness and negativeness which are mutually exclusive. In light of this, perhaps here the "unity" is the totality (or group) of the set of real numbers. The group as a whole decomposes into "opposites".

    I do want to repeat that I would not consider myself to have even a basic understanding of what "dialectics" is. Maybe everything I've written is astrology for math nerds, and maybe Lenin and Engels did that too. But my background in math is evoking all of these vague ideas when I read some passages, and allowing me to say "OK, maybe in a given system (the additive group of real numbers, or a capitalist society) there is a feature or features we can pick out (positiveness vs. negativeness, wage-laborer vs. owner) which separates the components of our system into two mutually exclusive camps, that our system couldn't exist without these two camps, and that we can look at our system in terms of how these camps interact among and between themselves".

    I also should add that these things did not immediately spring to my mind fully-formed, that your questions encouraged me to try and be more specific about vague analogies I felt. I'm also not trying to say that Mao's or Lenin's writings are faultless and that you're wrong, but I am trying to see if different framings might make more or less sense.

    • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      At the same time, Lenin writing about dialectics or Mao on contradiction are surely trying to abstract features they see common to many different things (math, physical sciences, society, etc).

      “OK, maybe in a given system (the additive group of real numbers, or a capitalist society) there is a feature or features we can pick out (positiveness vs. negativeness, wage-laborer vs. owner) which separates the components of our system into two mutually exclusive camps, that our system couldn’t exist without these two camps, and that we can look at our system in terms of how these camps interact among and between themselves”.

      That's sorta my point; this commonality is found only if you presuppose it. Sure you can map the language of dialectics and contradictions onto literally any field you want by squinting hard enough and assign some notion of "oppositeness" to individual elements. But why bother? Is it so unquestionably useful that I should insist on thinking only dialectically, as so many on the leftists insist?

      • gammison [none/use name]
        ·
        4 years ago

        This is my biggest problem with dialectics of nature and I've had long discussions on the discord about it. It's all based in presupposing the universality of contradiction and adhoc finding it. There's no reason to do it and as a theoretical computer science person, yeah the math analogies are laughable. The whole western marxist tradition basically chucked dialectics of nature as not a useful thing and I'm inclined to agree with them. Look up a paper called on engles intentions in the dialectics of nature, it sums up the now century long debate on the whole thing really well.

        Doing dialectics with history served the purpose of making a theory of history to interpret, and make predictions, and morally situate ourselves. Finding the contradiction in a rock or some mathematical object serves no purpose as far as I can tell.

      • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Imagine a scholar, upon realizing that any given word might be mapped, with some level of difficulty and precision, to the Greek language, proudly proclaiming "Every text is fundamentally Greek".