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

    it is determined by the evolutionary factors of Cognitive development and environmental adaptation.

    Is that actually how it is, or is that just our abstraction for explaining and analyzing the mixture of abstract theoretical models with concrete empirical observations?

    That's what I mean by the whole materialist ballgame getting washed away. Once you set about analyzing everything in this manner, even, your tools for analysis are up for grabs to be analyzed in this manner. So now we've got abstractions of abstractions and it all seems very divorced from the material world it's supposedly grounded in.

    • elguwopismo [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      100% agree. You wanna shoot me some readings/vids you'd recommend on instrumentalism/pragmatism? At first glance it seems like a good way to explain my own views in general