Mao Zedong On Dialectical Materialism полностью

Trotsky sets out from a different extreme, but also regards contradiction and antagonism as one and the same thing. As a result, he considers that under socialism there not only exists a contradiction between workers and peasants, but that this will develop into an antagonism like the contradiction between labour and capital, which can only be resolved by employing revolutionary methods. The Soviet Union however has used the method of the socialization of agriculture to resolve it, and moreover has resolved it under the conditions of socialism in one country, without having to wait for the international revolution alleged as necessary by the Trotskyites.

Bukharin has reduced contradiction to the point of elimination, while the Trotskyites have elevated contradiction into antagonism; neither of the two extremes of the right or left wing understands the problem of contradiction.

[p. 278] The method for resolving a general contradiction is fundamentally different from the method of resolving antagonism; this is the particularity of contradiction and the particularity of the method of resolving contradiction. This is a problem which should be given specific recognition. Whatever is antagonistic contains contradictoriness, but not all contradictions necessarily adopt an antagonistic form, and here we have a general distinction.[4-625]

The law of the unity of contradictions is the fundamental law of the universe, and the fundamental law of ideological method (sixiang fangfa).[4-626] Lenin called it the kernel of dialectics, and it stands opposed to the metaphysical view of development It is opposed to the absolute law of identity of formal logic. Contradiction exists in all objective and subjective processes of things, and throughout all processes from beginning to end;[4-627] this is the universality and absoluteness of contradiction. The aspects of contradiction and the universe each have their respective characteristics;[4-628] people’s minds are all different just like their faces, and contradictions likewise all differ in the form they take. This is the particularity and relativity of contradiction. In given conditions, opposites possess identity and consequently can coexist in a single entity and can transform themselves into each other; this again is the particularity and relativity of contradiction. But the struggle of opposites is ceaseless, it goes on both when the opposites are coexisting and when they are transforming themselves into each other, and becomes especially conspicuous when they are transforming themselves into one another; this again is the universality and absoluteness of contradiction. In studying the particularity and relativity of contradiction, we must give attention to the distinction between the principal[4-629] aspect and the non-principal aspect of the contradiction. When studying the struggle of contradictions we must give attention to the general and the particular forms of the struggle of contradiction — that is, the distinction in which contradiction develops into antagonism. This is what we know of the law of the unity of contradictions.[4-630]

Source: Ai Siqi, Zhexue yu shenghuo (Yunan People’s Publishing House, 1980). See also Zhongguo zhexue (Chinese Philosophy) Vol. 1 (April 1979), pp. 5‒30. Translated by John Hanafin.