Mao Zedong On Dialectical Materialism полностью

This challenge to prevailing interpretations of Mao’s epistemology has implications beyond the narrow confines of philosophical debate. If it is once conceded that Mao’s epistemology was not an undiluted empiricism, it raises a series of questions about the development of his political and philosophical thought, his adherence to Marxism, his relationship to and conception of the “reality” of Chinese society, his views on the future, the sources of his thought and action, and so on. At the very least, it calls into question the basic premise of the “in vivo” interpretation elaborated by Womack[1-102] and endorsed by Schram[1-103] which regards Mao’s paradigm for political action emerging from his experience of pre-Yan’an days; for such an interpretation makes virtually no allowance for the orienting role of theory in the development of political strategies and tactics. And this in turn leads to the unfortunate tendency to give less than sufficient attention to the theory which drove Mao’s practice and that of the Chinese revolution generally.

As stated earlier, one of the reasons for the generally dismissive treatment by Western Mao scholars of the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism is its heavy reliance on translations of Soviet texts on philosophy of the 1930s. I have argued that an overemphasis on the issue of plagiarism and reliance on Soviet philosophy has resulted in a tendency to downplay the significant influence that the categories, concepts, and laws of Soviet Marxist philosophy was to have on the development of Mao’s philosophical thought. The reasoning for this latter position runs as follows: if Mao did indulge, while writing the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism, in a wholesale exercise of plagiarism and borrowing, then the philosophical content of these Lecture Notes cannot really be taken as equivalent to Mao’s own philosophical thought, which is to be found rather in the essays On Contradiction and On Practice, essays apparently written by Mao himself. As suggested, this form of logic ignores the point that the issues of authorship of a document and that of influence are not synonymous; in other words, while there is no gainsaying that Mao did rely heavily on Soviet philosophical sources in the writing of this text, it is clear from his absorption of the philosophical categories contained in these sources and their persistent reemergence in his subsequent writings, that the exercise of reading (and in some cases, repeatedly reading) Soviet texts on philosophy had a major impact on his own thought at a critical juncture in its development. To deny this position on the basis of Mao’s plagiarism is thus to deny the possibility of serious consideration of the relationship between Mao’s philosophical thought (or for that matter, Chinese Marxism generally) and Soviet Marxist philosophy of the 1930s. This would constitute a serious analytical error, for one of the significant elements of the foundation of Mao’s philosophy and Chinese Marxism is the form of Marxist philosophy which became formalised and legitimised as orthodoxy in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. I emphasise that the Soviet philosophy of the 1930s was one of the influences on Mao’s thought, for it is as equally erroneous to suggest that it was the only influence; Mao’s philosophical thought drew on a number of sources (including some aspects of traditional Chinese philosophy and the Chinese proverbial tradition). But the totality of Mao’s philosophical thought is more than the sum of its constituent influences; for he took these influences and created a synthesis of his own, a synthesis which, nevertheless, clearly exhibits parallels to its sources.