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

    This is my biggest problem with dialectics of nature and I've had long discussions on the discord about it. It's all based in presupposing the universality of contradiction and adhoc finding it. There's no reason to do it and as a theoretical computer science person, yeah the math analogies are laughable. The whole western marxist tradition basically chucked dialectics of nature as not a useful thing and I'm inclined to agree with them. Look up a paper called on engles intentions in the dialectics of nature, it sums up the now century long debate on the whole thing really well.

    Doing dialectics with history served the purpose of making a theory of history to interpret, and make predictions, and morally situate ourselves. Finding the contradiction in a rock or some mathematical object serves no purpose as far as I can tell.