Mao Zedong On Dialectical Materialism полностью

Mao here restates his long-held position that the law of contradiction – the unity of opposites – is the most basic law of materialistic dialectics. What is even more significant, however, is that Mao does not overtly reject the law of the “negation of the negation”; rather, as in his “Sixty Articles on Work Methods” of 1958, Mao chooses to describe the law by the title “affirmation and negation”, a title which immediately suggests a unity of opposites. It is also significant that Mao listed this law along with a number of other categories of materialist dialectics which appear in his Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism. This reinforces the point made throughout this Introduction: that the philosophy enunciated in the Lecture Notes, which derived largely from Soviet sources, was to have a marked and sustained influence on the development and structure of Mao’s philosophical thought; and that it is thus illegitimate to dismiss this document as irrelevant to an understanding of Mao’s philosophy because of its derivation from and reliance on Soviet sources.

As a postscript to this discussion of Mao’s supposed rejection of the “negation of the negation” it is worth noting that its level of orthodoxy within Soviet philosophy has been far from static. As Marcuse points out, the concept “disappeared from the list of fundamental dialectical laws” following Stalin’s example of 1938.[1-84] Wetter, too, comments on the “checkered history” of this concept,[1-85] noting that Stalin’s omission of “the law of the negation of the negation” from Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938) meant the disappearance of this law from Soviet philosophy until after Stalin’s death.[1-86] It is also interesting that on its revival in the mid-1950s, Soviet philosophers turned to the writings of Mao Zedong, especially On Contradiction, as a basis from which to elaborate the “negation of the negation” from a fresh perspective,[1-87] one which concentrated on “preserving what is worthwhile of the old state and in elevating and transforming it to a higher positive level”.[1-88]

At the very least, the “checkered history” of the law of the “negation of the negation” in Soviet philosophy calls into question the propriety of peremptory judgements regarding Mao’s heterodoxy on the issue, particularly when such judgements are based only on a single textual reference to a transcript of a conversation never intended for publication.