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.
Might be the case, and it's plausible take (I guess it would be hard to prove or disprove). I do feel like Mao is quite serious when he writes On Contradiction and On Practice though, and even 30 years later is his still seriously talking about dialectical materialism.
My impression though is that there is something in there that "works". I mean, Žižek is one of the two writers who made me be able to move left, in the sense that I had some feeling something was wrong, but he helped me destroy some barriers that I wasn't able to overcome and my own, and well, I don't think we can argue that žižek does anything but dialectism (we certainly can't blame him for being too clear or too formal). I think part of the reason this worked is because it forced me to consider things in relation to each others in ways that I had not considered before, and this is what dialectical materialism is all about right, drawing all kind of connections between "things" and seeing how they come into play (through contradictions from which new things emerge yadda yadda).
Here's a thermonuclear take:
If you want to neutralize the bourgeois conditioning in someone's thought patterns, it's better to create the antithesis of that bourgeois thought pattern, resulting in something more akin to mutual annihilation rather than a mere convincing.
If the target bourgeois thought pattern isn't present in the reader's mind, the antithesis can sail harmlessly through their psyche like a radio wave through flesh.
So maybe the reason this bit of philosophy isn't playing nice with the bulk of this reading group is because those brainworms have already been annihilated.