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.
  • vertexarray [any]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Goddamn this is ridiculously abstract. I feel like I have exerted all my mental energy for the afternoon in just trying to grasp it, much less trying to apply it outside of the given examples.

    • Ectrayn [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Any section that stands out as particularly unclear/obscure? I certainly can't say I got it all, and discussing specific points might help clear them out for everybody

      • vertexarray [any]
        ·
        4 years ago

        I'm studying the colonization of the Americas right now, and the foremost example I can think of is how the conflict between slavers and the enslaved created whiteness, an identity that brought more people — jews and the white working class — onto the side of the slavers, transforming the contradiction from european slaveholders vs. the enslaved into whites vs. everyone else.

        The principal contradiction changes only subtly, while the principal aspect of the contradiction — the ruling class into whites — changes radically, and with it the secondary aspect is changed in response: the enslaved becomes non-whites, a new superset.

        My question is what insight does this provide? These concepts are laid out in the text I'm reading without deploying the language of On Contradiction.

      • vertexarray [any]
        ·
        4 years ago

        I gotcha, so I'm mixing levels of abstraction in that example, and need to pull back to a broader perspective.

        If I were to say then that slaveholding mercantilism transformed into white supremacist mercantilism by way of the existential threat of a slave revolt, and the internal possibility of whiteness is the lever upon which this force acted, would that be a more appropriate framing for Mao's conceptualisation of contradiction?

          • vertexarray [any]
            ·
            4 years ago

            Right, I think we're thinking along essentially the same lines, it's just a matter of phrasing

          • Ectrayn [he/him]
            ·
            4 years ago

            Haiti was exactly the point I wanted to bring up, but wasn't sure how, I think this is a very clear point!

              • Ectrayn [he/him]
                ·
                4 years ago

                Finished reading it, I am knowledgeable with regard to Hegel (and in fact the only time I tried reading Hegel I quickly gave up), but all the discussion about Haiti was super interesting thank you. I can see how it connects with our discussion with this passage

                At first consideration the master's situation is "independent, and its essential nature is to be for itself"; whereas "the other," the slave's position, "is dependent, and its essence is life or existence for another."81 The slave is characterized by the lack of recognition he receives. He is viewed as "a thing"; "thinghood" is the essence of slave consciousness-as it was the essence of his legal status under the Code Noir (PM, p. 235). But as the dialectic develops, the apparent dominance of the master reverses itself with his awareness that he is in fact totally dependent on the slave. One has only to collectivize the figure of the master in order to see the descriptive pertinence of Hegel's analysis: the slave-holding class is indeed totally dependent on the institution of slavery for the "overabundance" that constitutes its wealth. This class is thus incapable of being the agent of historical progress without annihilating its own existence

                That's really well put and @vertexarray I think this part might interest you too

              • Ectrayn [he/him]
                ·
                4 years ago

                Not at all, thank you for the resource, will read it over the week end, it will be a welcome break from plain books