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.
  • ChaiTRex [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    It doesn't quite matter how absurd it appears to you. What matters is that it fulfills the definition of function you said it didn't.

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

      Sure it matters. I've already acknowledged you can shoe-horn the assertion into any system. But I've also pointed out that this makes the assertion meaningless.

      So now I'm looking to see if you can provide me a kinematic example of a particle moving in R1 occupying two places at once, where the second point it's occupying isn't meaningless nonsense.