According to Shi Zhongquan,[1-131] there is a direct relationship of text and content between On Contradiction and On Practice and two of his sources – A Course on Dialectical Materialism (Bianzhengfa weiwulun jiaocheng) and Dialectical and Historical Materialism (Bianzhengweiwulun yu lishiweiwulun). There is an indirect relationship – that of the absorption of ideas (sixiang) – between Mao’s two essays and Mitin’s Outline of New Philosophy. Shi argues that the relationship between Mao’s essays and these Soviet texts on philosophy can be looked at from two perspectives. First, it should be acknowledged that Mao’s two essays absorbed and employed the positive conclusions of the Soviet texts. Any major thinker must employ accumulated intellectual sources in the process of elaborating his theory, and Mao was no exception when he came to write On Contradiction and On Practice. Points of view and analysis from A Course on Dialectical Materialism and Dialectical and Historical Materialism were absorbed by Mao to become an organic component of his own essays on philosophy. In writing On Practice, Shi continues, Mao absorbed the viewpoint of A Course on Dialectical Materialism that, apart from practice, one could not come to know the external world, and that the process of cognition involved the stages of perception and cognition; and from Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Mao assimilated the concepts that practice could assume a multiplicity of forms, and that pre-Marxist materialism, in not stressing the social character of man, failed to comprehend the dependent relationship of knowledge to social practice. Similarly, concepts and ideas to be found in the Soviet text were to find their way into Mao’s On Contradiction. In particular, Mao drew from A Course on Dialectical Materialism the following concepts and viewpoints: the restriction which the principal contradiction imposes on other contradictions and the determining role played by the principal aspect of a contradiction, the resolution of different contradictions requires different methods, there is mutual connection and interpermeation (shentou) between a pair of opposites, difference is contradiction, the analysis of the particularity of contradiction in each process and each aspect of a process, the struggle of opposites is absolute whereas the unity of opposites is relative, and the critique of the theory of equilibrium. From Dialectical and Historical Materialism, the following views and concepts found their way into On Contradiction: the two theories of development and the critique of the theory of external causation, the analysis of the various forms of motion and the particularity of contradiction in the various stages of development, and the model examples provided by Marx and Engels of concretely analyzing concrete conditions.
Anyone familiar with the content of Mao’s On Contradiction and On Practice will recognise at once that this list of concepts and viewpoints cuts a broad swathe through the content of those essays. Given the degree of indebtedness to Soviet philosophical sources now acknowledged by Chinese Mao scholars, to what extent can On Practice and On Contradiction be regarded as independent creations of Mao’s? In response to this, Shi insists that the acknowledgement of Mao’s debt to Soviet philosophical texts must be balanced by recognition of a number of other considerations. In the first place, the content of these Soviet texts on philosophy were themselves based on the theories and concepts of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, their primary function being the elaboration and development of these theories and concepts into a philosophical system. As such, these texts on philosophy were to have a significant influence on Marxists in China and abroad and on the world of Marxist philosophy generally. It was not just Mao who was influenced by this systematization of Marxist philosophy in the Soviet Union during the 1930s.
A second consideration is that the substance of On Practice and On Contradiction involves the utilisation of the viewpoint of Marxist philosophy to sum up the experiences of the Chinese revolution, and to critique subjectivism and dogmatism in its conduct; threading through the two essays is a spirit of integrating Marxist theory and the reality of the Chinese Revolution, and they are the embodiment of “practical materialism”, devoid of bookish and academic theorizing.
