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.
I like this angle because it doesn't matter if any particular thinkers were doing this on purpose, it reframes the creation of knowledge and the work of philosophy into something weaponizable, a pattern you can see in the neoliberal think tanks of the USA. It's impossible to ignore the leverage provided by dodgy science if it creates "knowledge" that advances a revolutionary cause.
Exactly!
The lesson isn't "the law of contradiction is present in all things"
The lesson is "If i tell people "the law of contradiction is present in all things", I can get them to shoot the tsar."