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.
By development he means the typical "thesis/antithesis/synthesis", and this is where the contradiction is, between the thesis and the antithesis, and the development is this new synthesis that emerges from both the thesis and the antithesis.
So of course, in the material world there is the difficult task of finding what is the thesis and antithesis of, in your example, a battle, a war, a victory etc. In your example
That is already the synthesis step of the battle, the thesis and antithesis were the two opposing armies and their goals and objectives. And I think this illustrates the hardest part of this discussion, is that it's hard to figure out what should be the "thing" studied, and what are its contradictory aspects, and that the more concrete the situation is (unlike for example the abstract system construct of "capitalism" vs its material realization) the harder it is to pinpoint these.
By the way, regarding the unity of opposite, I think I might have found something worth studying on ncatlab: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/adjoint+modality and there is also https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Aufhebung
I did not read them yet (although I did read a few pages of a different paper that also formalizes the unity of opposites through adjoint functors, it made sense, but then there was the reverse question: how can I take this formalism and use it in the real world?)