A lone dissenting voice is that of Stuart Schram who found it hard to take seriously the view “that Mao’s text was a mass of crude blunders”. Schram’s judgement was based on the fact that Dialectical Materialism was heavily dependent on Soviet philosophical texts of the 1930s (an issue we will return to), and that the philosophical level of the essay was therefore at least the equal of that to be found in these sources.[1-11] Schram also argues that it is a mistake to regard the three philosophical essays – On Practice, On Contradiction, and Dialectical Materialism – as written separately and for different purposes; they belong, rather, “to a single intellectual enterprise, namely Mao’s attempt to come to terms with the philosophical basis of Marxism from the time he was first exposed to it in July 1936 until the Japanese attack of September 1937 turned his attention to more practical things”.[1-12] The implication of this judgement is that Dialectical Materialism must be given due consideration in the attempt to understand the origins and development of Mao’s philosophical thought; not only was this text contemporaneous with On Contradiction and On Practice, many of the concepts contained in it emerge and are evident in these other better known essays and in his subsequent writings. I will argue below the validity of Schram’s judgement that these three essays represent a “single intellectual enterprise”, and will suggest that a more constructive and less dismissive analysis of the philosophy contained in Dialectical Materialism is consequently called for than it has hitherto received.
