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.
Imagine a scholar, upon realizing that any given word might be mapped, with some level of difficulty and precision, to the Greek language, proudly proclaiming "Every text is fundamentally Greek".