Second, if Mao was not to derive his understanding of Marxist philosophy from Soviet sources, from where was he to obtain it? The answer to this question is never directly broached by Mao scholars concerned with this issue, but the implicit suggestion is that Mao should either have come out with something startlingly original, or at the very least avoided reliance on the Soviet theoretical writings of the period with their “extraordinarily low level”.[1-32] While the former expectation might well be warranted given the often exaggerated claims for Mao’s prowess as a philosopher, the latter suggestion appears to ignore not only the contextual limitations on the development of Mao’s philosophical thought, but also the genealogy of many of the categories incorporated within Soviet Marxism. Such categories did not emerge from a theoretical vacuum, but can be traced back, as Lucio Colletti and other scholars have demonstrated, via the writings of Lenin and Plekhanov to Engels.[1-33] Engels’ various forays into the realm of philosophy (Anti-Dühring, Dialectics of Nature, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy) were assumed by many Marxists to reflect faithfully the philosophical views of Marx himself, indeed they are still so regarded by many commentators on Marxist philosophy.[1-34] Yet, and as Colletti argues, there is a significant difference in approach to questions of philosophy contained in the writings of Marx and Engels. Engels’ philosophical writing elaborates a materialistic position which is rather mechanistic in its approach to problems of ontology and epistemology, attempting as it does to create a philosophical system in which all phenomena are invariably constituted of matter which observes a number of fundamental natural laws. For the most part, it was to these writings of Engels that Marxists turned in the attempt to elaborate a Marxist philosophical position. Mao’s own Dialectical Materialism and the Soviet sources on which he relied are thus not surprisingly replete with references to Engels, and to Lenin who built on the materialist foundation provided by Engels. And the reasons for this reliance on a philosophy whose pedigree begins primarily with Engels are not far to seek. In the first place, Marx himself wrote comparatively little on purely philosophical questions, consciously abandoning philosophy for political economy from the mid-1840s;[1-35] and in the second place, those philosophical writings of Marx from the early 1840s were to become available-only in the late 1920s and early 1930s,[1-36] by which time the formalisation of Soviet Marxist philosophy based on Engels was well developed. The philosophical writings of the so-called “early” Marx (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, etc.) could not easily be incorporated into Soviet Marxist philosophy, based as they were on concepts such as alienation and estrangement, “themes absent from the work of Engels, Plekhanov and Lenin alike”.[1-37]These philosophical writings of the young Marx were thus largely ignored, emerging from hibernation only in the post-Stalin period to contribute to the renewed interest in Marxist philosophy which has developed within European intellectual circles. To judge harshly Mao’s reliance on contemporaneous Soviet philosophical sources is thus to be wise with the benefit of hindsight, for neither the Marxian texts on philosophy nor a willingness seriously to entertain their content were present when Mao commenced his theoretical apprenticeship in Marxist philosophy.
Mao’s heavy reliance on Chinese translations of Soviet philosophical sources is thus not accepted here as sufficient grounds for the dismissal of Dialectical Materialism as unimportant to the project of understanding the development of Mao’s philosophical thought. At the very least, Mao’s use of Soviet Marxist categories in the 1930s and their subsequent reemergence in later writings throws doubt on the widely held view that Mao broke entirely with the orthodox Marxist tradition in a number of important respects. Let us take a few examples.
<p><strong>Ontology and epistemology</strong></p>