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.
  • 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".