Mao Zedong On Dialectical Materialism полностью

In the first, Mao’s philosophical thought is regarded as being overwhelmingly of Marxist origin.[1-137] From this perspective, Mao is considered to be above all a Marxist, his thought emerging in an almost natural progression from the development of the Marxist intellectual tradition. The structure of his thought, its concepts and categories, derived from Marxism, and not from the Chinese classics. The reason for the rejection of Chinese traditional philosophy as a source of influence runs along class lines.

This philosophy, the argument runs, was produced within a class society dominated by a feudal landlord class. According to basic Marxist tenets, such a philosophy was a reflection at a superstructural level of the economic interests of this class; it is thus inevitably coloured by a class characteristic, and it is therefore not possible to employ eclectically elements of it without at the same time absorbing its negative and deleterious class values. As a Marxist, Mao was thus constrained to reject the Chinese intellectual tradition, emerging as it did from and serving the interests of a largely stagnant feudal mode of production. This viewpoint appears to be very much in the minority, particularly as its rejection of traditional Chinese philosophy tends to undermine the claim that Chinese Marxism developed its own national form and characteristics while abiding by the universal principles of Marxism. A rejection in toto of the Chinese tradition is perceived by other scholars as leaving Chinese Marxism in something of a cultural no-man’s-land, with no sense of historical continuity or cultural adaptation to provide it a form recognisable by and acceptable to the Chinese people.

The second perspective regards Mao’s philosophical thought to be the product of both the Marxist and Chinese intellectual traditions, plus the influence of Soviet and Chinese texts on philosophy of the 1930s. The distinguishing characteristic of this perspective is that it highlights the immediate influence of texts on philosophy from the Soviet Union and China.

The third and dominant perspective does not distinguish such philosophical texts from the Marxist tradition generally, and avers that the origins of Mao’s philosophical thought are to be found in Marxist philosophy and Chinese traditional philosophy. In terms of the weighting of influence between these two intellectual traditions, the emphasis is placed overwhelmingly on Marxism. Consequently, Mao was first and foremost a Marxist; his methodology, standpoint, and world view were constituted of dialectical and historical materialism, and in this respect Mao owed a considerable intellectual debt to the writings of the 1930s which elaborated the philosophical laws and categories of Marxism in a concise and accessible form. While Mao’s philosophical thought drew largely on the Marxist tradition, he was also influenced by modes of dialectical thought which had been present in Chinese philosophy from very early times. Mao did not, however, draw on this tradition of thought in an undiscerning way, but critically inherited and continued (pipan jicheng) those positive aspects which were compatible with Marxism and which served to provide Marxism with a national form which was Chinese.[1-138]

The influence of Chinese philosophy and Mao’s critical continuation of it, this perspective suggests, can be discerned in five areas. First, Mao directly utilised the correct principles and propositions of ancient Chinese dialectics. In particular, the concepts of yin and yang which appeared in the Yi Jing and were subsequently elaborated in the Dao De Jing created an intellectual predisposition to view the world as constituted of opposites – life and death, large and small, strength and weakness, difficulty and facility, above and below – which was further elaborated by philosophers such as Han Fei Zi. This dialectical approach within traditional Chinese philosophy was to facilitate Mao’s development of the Marxist theory of contradictions, with its emphasis on the unity of opposites. Nevertheless, early Chinese dialectics was not based on a scientific foundation, was simplistic, and often mixed together materialism and idealism, and dialectics and metaphysics; it could not, therefore, be incorporated into modern Chinese Marxism without undergoing a process of critical scrutiny and selection, in which elements incompatible with dialectical materialism were sifted out and rejected.