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.
  • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I don't disagree with any of the above, but I think the above blows the whole "materialist" bit of dialectical materialism out of the water. I know Marx and his descendants made efforts to distinguish themselves from "vulgar" materialists, but when you shift the goal from trying to describe the world to trying to describe the irreproducible interaction of the the concrete and abstract in consciousness, you're actually giving up the whole materialist ballgame and adopting a purely abstract or idealist perspective.

    I lean more instrumentalist/pragmatist, so I can kinda just shrug at the forays than verge toward the realism/anti-realism debate.

    • elguwopismo [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      I don't know if I'd call it purely idealist, it is determined by the evolutionary factors of Cognitive development and environmental adaptation. However I agree with the general idea with what you're saying and I think I'd lean more pragmatist. HOWEVER I'm very interested in the concept of Class Consciousness, what that actually could be (outside of the essentialist view that people will just see commonality and deduce nor it being a unique universal concept constant across all peoples), how could it form, and what historical/material and Cognitive factors could be involved. I mean there have been tons of examples of people acting in class interest, and with what I've said obviously they all didn't just follow some internal logic or well structured mode of recognition. Investigation of that requires understanding this process of abstraction. I guess I'd say the important thing in my mind isn't the specifics of the abstractions in of themselves, rather how abstraction arises in response to specific environments and Cognitive systems. Abstraction is only necessary to explain commonality between the previously unconnected, so there are some subset conditions in which commonality is witnessed leading to abstraction. We may never be able to actually map them out, but I think we can try to identify mechanisms that contribute to their arisal if that makes sense

      • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]
        ·
        4 years ago

        it is determined by the evolutionary factors of Cognitive development and environmental adaptation.

        Is that actually how it is, or is that just our abstraction for explaining and analyzing the mixture of abstract theoretical models with concrete empirical observations?

        That's what I mean by the whole materialist ballgame getting washed away. Once you set about analyzing everything in this manner, even, your tools for analysis are up for grabs to be analyzed in this manner. So now we've got abstractions of abstractions and it all seems very divorced from the material world it's supposedly grounded in.

        • elguwopismo [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          100% agree. You wanna shoot me some readings/vids you'd recommend on instrumentalism/pragmatism? At first glance it seems like a good way to explain my own views in general