Mao Zedong On Dialectical Materialism полностью

It is evident, therefore, that one can find a good number of references to the concept of the “negation of the negation” in the Mao texts of the late 1950s and early 1960s, It would appear that Mao’s August 1964 “rejection” of the concept is thus at odds with his otherwise relatively frequent and positive references to it. However, parallel to such references to the “negation of the negation” emerges a different appellation for the concept, one which suggests that Mao was seeking a label more in keeping with the more fundamental philosophical category of the unity of opposites. In his important “Sixty Articles on Work Methods” of January 1958, we discover that in referring to the three categories of Marxist philosophy, Mao did not actually employ the title of the “negation of the negation”:

The formula used here to describe the third philosophical category – “affirmation” (kending) and “negation” (fouding) – is identical to that used by Mao in his August 1964 talk on philosophy; “affirmation, negation … in the development of things, every link in the chain of events is both affirmation and negation”.[1-81] What we have here is merely a change in title, for the substance of the concept remains unchanged. The concept of the “negation of the negation” assumes that the factor which negates the negative (for example, capitalism’s negation of feudalism) will initially constitute a positive factor, the affirmative. Over time, however, its positive character will transform into its opposite, the affirmative becoming the negative, as a new and historically progressive force emerges to challenge it. This cycle, of negation, affirmation, negation as described by Mao in August 1964, is in essence no different from that described earlier by himself and other Marxist philosophers, including Lenin and Engels, under the rubric of the “negation of the negation”.[1-82] Mao’s demonstrable predilection for linking and using oxymoronic categories (life and death, truth and falsehood, materialism and idealism, right and wrong, finite and infinite, advanced and backward, to name but a few) suggests that he would have been unsympathetic to a formula which described a contradictory process and yet appeared to link like to like: the negation of the negation. By renaming the concept “affirmation and negation”, Mao could leave the substance of the concept unaltered while bringing its title into line with the pervasive idea that the unity of opposites exists in all things and processes.

At a speech in Hangzhou in December 1965, Mao was to return to the problem of the three categories and to the theme of the primacy of the law of contradiction; and here again, Mao was to describe the third category by the title “affirmation and negation”: