The contents of Li Da’s Shehuixue dagang would obviously have been of great significance for Mao, attempting as he was to master orthodox Marxist philosophy and to prepare lectures on this subject for delivery at the Anti-Japanese Military and Political University.[1-154] The text is divided into five major sections: Materialist dialectics, historical materialism, the economic structure of society, the political structure of society, and social ideology.[1-155] Each section contains subject matter discussed by Mao in his own philosophical essays. For example, the section on materialist dialectics contains a chapter on the laws (faze) of dialectical materialism, in which Li Da not only discusses the three major laws discussed in a previous section of this Introduction, but also the categories of essence and appearance, form and content, chance and necessity, and possibility and reality, to which Mao refers in his Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism. In describing the unity of opposites, Li employs language remarkably similar to that which appears in both On Contradiction and the Lecture Notes. The law of the unity of opposites is the “basic law” of dialectics, it is its kernel; all of the things existing in the world contain contradictions, for without the struggle between contradictions, there would be no movement, development, or life.[1-156] Virtually all areas covered by Mao in his own philosophical essays are covered in like fashion in Li’s volume, and couched in language very similar to that employed by Mao.
Are we then to assume that Li Da’s exposition of the philosophy of dialectical materialism constituted a major influence on Mao’s thought at the time he was writing On Contradiction, On Practice, and the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism? On the assumption that Mao did indeed have access to Shehuixue dagang in mid-1937 when he was writing these texts, there can be no doubt that the contents of this volume would have been extremely useful as source material. However, it would be wrong to exaggerate this work as an influence in its own right, for it is evident that one of Li Da’s major purposes in writing the text was to systematise and explain the philosophy of dialectical materialism as this was emerging in the Soviet Union following the overthrow of the Deborin school in 1931. As such, Shehuixue dagang, while a massive tome and clearly a work of considerable scholarship, does not project an impression of originality. Li consciously employed the philosophy contained in the Soviet texts of the early to mid-1930s as the basis for his own exposition, and indeed took A Course on Dialectical Materialism (which he had translated) as the model for Shehuixue dagang.[1-157] We know this Soviet text, A Course on Dialectical Materialism, was the one most heavily annotated by Mao in late 1936 and early 1937. It could be suggested, then, that the influence of Li Da’s Shehuixue dagang was thus limited to that of reinforcing the views expressed in this and other Soviet texts on philosophy, and providing in one accessible volume discussion of the whole range of issues canvassed by Mao in his own writings on dialectical materialism. Consequently, Li Da’s writings should not be seen as an influence separate from the influence of Soviet philosophy generally.
A similar judgement can be made on the influence of Ai Siqi on the development of Mao’s philosophical thought. There can be no doubt that Ai was enormously important in making available through his translations Soviet texts on philosophy; he was also a prolific populariser and disseminator of the ideas of dialectical materialism. Nevertheless, as with Li Da, Ai Siqi’s writings on philosophy added little that was original to the general corpus of concepts, categories, and ideas of orthodox Soviet Marxist philosophy. As Ai himself openly acknowledged, he was a “reteller and copier” of the basic theory of dialectical materialism.[1-158]
