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.
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.