July 24, 2022
Proletarians of all countries,
unite!
DEFENCE OF
MAOISM
(II)
ON CONCEPTION:
“The Contradiction, sole fundamental law of the incessant transformation of
eternal matter”
“The life of dialectics is the
continuous movement toward opposites. Mankind will also finally meet its doom.
When the theologians talk about doomsday, they are pessimistic and terrify
people. We say the end of mankind is something which will produce something
more advanced than mankind. Mankind is still in its infancy. Engels spoke of
moving from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom, and said that
freedom is the understanding of necessity. This sentence is not complete, it
only says one half and leaves the rest unsaid. Does merely understanding it
make you free? Freedom is the understanding of necessity and the transformation
of necessity — one has some work to do too. If you merely eat without having
any work to do, if you merely understand, is that sufficient? When you discover
a law, you must be able to apply it, you must create the world anew”
(Mao Tse-tung, Talk On Questions Of Philosophy)
We express our
reaffirmation of what was established by the CUMIC in the Basis of Discussion
for the Unified Maoist International Conference (UMIC) on contradiction,
the “sole fundamental law of the incessant transformation
of eternal matter”, which in condensed form expresses the conception of
the international proletariat, dialectical materialism: its condition as
materialist when it says eternal matter and dialectic when it emphasises the
contradiction. Materialism is the basis, dialectics is the guidance, and the
only fundamental law of dialectics is contradiction, others are derivations.
In Part One we
wrote that, from its very name, the UOC (mlm), was already expressing its
contrary conception, moreover, if it denies the principality of Maoism, here we
go deeper into the importance of the great leap that Chairman Mao’s statement
on contradiction as the only fundamental law of dialectics signifies. That to
defend “triplism” against “dialectical materialist monism” is to oppose the
development of Marxism, seeking to set our founders Marx and Engels against the
great Lenin and Lenin against Chairman Mao. This also shows why it is
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, mainly Maoism.
Continuing, it
is necessary to point out that although the organisation Proletarian Power of
Colombia takes position for the principality of Maoism and the proposal of the
Bases of Discussion, on this and other points of the ideology of the
proletariat with its own reservations, it keeps silent or is silent on the
class character of the ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and in politics the
saying “he who is silent consents” is true. That is the name of the ideology of
the proletariat, according to Lenin, an ideology can only be proletarian or
bourgeois. So you are asked to say whether or not you recognise the class
character of our ideology and what is its class character?
Moreover, on the
decisive question of the marrow of our ideology, Marxist philosophy or
dialectical materialism as Engels called it, the comrades of Proletarian Power
say “We consider Lenin’s formulation of dialectics to be
accurate, we would neither add to it nor subtract from it“, i.e. we must leave the
question forever and ever where he left it. These comrades have not understood
the task left by the great Lenin to the continuators of the revolution to
deepen the understanding of contradiction as the nucleus or essence of dialectics,
the fulfilment and crowning of which demanded of Chairman Mao to make the
revolution in China (three revolutions) through active and potential people’s
war as part of and in the service of the world proletarian revolution.
Chairman Mao
said: “Communism is at once a complete system of proletarian
ideology and a new social system. It is different from any other ideology or
social system, and is the most complete, progressive, revolutionary and
rational system in human history.” (Mao Tse-tung, “On New Democracy”)
And moreover, it
is even more true when we consider what Chairman Gonzalo reaffirmed:
“In our case, by
carrying out the communist revolution, the revolution led
by the proletariat in its forms of democratic or socialist or cultural
revolution, we are making the only true revolution in history. Let us
remember what Marx taught us. All revolutions before ours has been the
substitution of some exploiters for others. Only the communist
revolution replaces the power of the exploiters with that of the exploited, and
is the one that initiates the process of the dictatorship of the proletariat
and sets the conditions for the disappearance of everything based on classes,
the state will disappear. That is why it is unprecedented, that is why it
is first, true and absolutely different, new, that is also why it is so complex
and will be victorious; that is why humanity will not be able to enter
communism so easily, we will see great complexities and very hard struggles but
we are aware that we will handle them because already from 1917 we
enter the new era, the era of the world proletarian revolution, we will see
situations never seen before. This is what Marx, Lenin and Chairman Mao
taught us. Socialism, communism will impose itself on the earth, there is no other
goal for humanity because it is a necessary consequence of the unstoppable
process of the process of matter, of mankind.” (Document of the II. Plenum
of the CC of the PCP).
The comrades of
the UOC, in their position, are counter-posing “science of revolution” to ideology as the
scientific conception of the proletariat; that is to say, counter-posing the
scientific connotation it has to its character of being the ideology of the
proletariat. The only true one because it is the ideology of the last class in
history, the proletariat, which has no interest in preserving private property.
Almighty, since true.
With the
bourgeois scientistic criterion, ideologies are denied, following this
criterion, Maoism is also denied as the main one, thus denying the development
of Marxism, which is by leaps and bounds and does not follow a flat, linear
development. They are denying the stages in the development of Marxism. That on
the basis of the previous one and as part of the same process of development
there is a leap to a new and higher stage, which becomes the main one. That the
new shows the victory of dialectics, of contradiction. They are denying the law
of contradiction.
Chairman Mao in
his Talk on Questions of Philosophy, referring to communism as a social system
and that, by the same token, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is applicable to communist
doctrine, says:
“Communism will
last for thousands and thousands of years. I don’t
believe that there will be no qualitative changes under communism, that it will
not be divided into stages by qualitative changes! I don’t believe it! Quantity
changes into quality, and quality changes into quantity. I don’t
believe that it can remain qualitatively exactly the same, unchanging for
millions of years! This is unthinkable in the light of dialectics.
Then there is the principle, ‘From each according to his ability, to each
according to his needs’. Do you believe they can carry on for a million years
with the same economics? Have you thought about it? If that were so,
we wouldn’t need economists, or in any case we could get along with just one
textbook, and dialectics would be dead.
The life of dialectics is the continuous
movement toward opposites … which
will produce something more advanced …”
Applying the
quotation to the development of communist doctrine, this also develops in
stages, and the passage from one stage to another means the “victory of
dialectics” because it allows the new to be born. And who says dialectics, says
contradiction. To think that our doctrine can remain qualitatively exactly the
same, unchanged for more than 174 years since the Manifesto of the Communist
Party of 1848, is unthinkable in the light of dialectics. If it were so,
dialectics would be dead. But, as it is not, dialectical development will
always produce something more advanced, in correspondence between objective
development and the need for the development of its understanding in order to
transform the changing reality.
Our ideology, we
repeat, being a dialectical process, is going to unfold through great leaps;
three great qualitative leaps: Marx, Lenin, Chairman Mao Tse-tung. But these
three great qualitative leaps could not be understood without other great,
medium and even small leaps. It is in this way that a great dialectical
process, then, generated by the proletariat producing men that only the class
can produce, that we have arrived at Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, mainly Maoism.
Next, the
comrades of the UOC show their total lack of understanding of what they read,
like the metaphysicians they are, they mix up the concepts in order to muddle
the discussion and the clarification of the problem. They oppose their law of
the “negation of the negation” to the only fundamental
law of dialectics, saying that this supposed law indicates the direction or “indicates the direction of
the movement”, this is apriorism [see e.g. ‘Anti-Dühring’ or
‘Criticising Lin Piao and Confuzius’] and introducing the necessity of a
superior external force that orients the direction of the processes. This is
teleology, the same that leads to or conceals fideism in philosophy [“Fideism is a
doctrine which substitutes faith for knowledge, or which generally attaches
significance to faith.” – Lenin in ‘Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,
Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy’, 1908], when it is a question of
defining or taking a stand for one of the two conceptions of the law of the
development of the universe, which are the metaphysical conception and the
dialectical conception, which constitute two opposing conceptions of the world.
Engels, in his
introduction to ‘Dialectics of Nature’, wrote
of this viewpoint, that is contrary to dialectical materialism, as follows:
“High as the
natural science of the first half of the eighteenth century stood above
Greek antiquity in knowledge and even in the sifting of its material, it stood
just as deeply below Greek antiquity in the theoretical mastery of this
material, in the general outlook on nature. For the Greek philosophers the
world was essentially something that had emerged from chaos, something that had
developed, that had come into being. For the natural scientists of the period
that we are dealing with it was something ossified, something immutable, and
for most of them something that had been created at one stroke. Science was
still deeply enmeshed in theology. Everywhere it sought and
found the ultimate cause in an impulse from outside that was not to be
explained from nature itself. Even if attraction, by Newton pompously baptised
as “universal gravitation”, was conceived as an essential property of matter,
whence comes the unexplained tangential force which first gives rise to the
orbits of the planets? How did the innumerable species of plants and animals
arise? And how, above all, did man arise, since after all it was certain that
he was not present from all eternity? To such questions natural science only
too frequently answered by making the creator of all things responsible.
Copernicus, at the beginning of the period, shows theology the door; Newton
closes the period with the postulate of a divine first impulse. The
highest general idea to which this natural science attained was that
of the purposiveness of the arrangements of nature, the
shallow teleology of Wolff, according to which cats were created to eat
mice, mice to be eaten by cats, and the whole of nature to testify to the
wisdom of the creator.”
The study of
this paragraph from the introduction to Engels’ masterpiece, Dialectics of
Nature, shows in that period, the first half of the 18th century, how the
philosophical generalisation of the development of the natural sciences, the
conception of nature bogged down in theology and metaphysics, which made an
external impulse and the creator responsible for everything, was to be found in
the philosophical generalisation of the development of the natural sciences,
whose most general idea was that of Wolff’s vulgar teleology, i.e. something
like the idea defended by the UOC comrades from Colombia of the supposed law
of “the negation of the negation” with them saying “which indicates the direction of
the movement“, to oppose it to the law of contradiction as the only
fundamental law of the movement of eternal matter, of the self-movement of
matter. Which is the essence or kernel of dialectics, which in Engels is
already implicit in his introduction to Dialectics of Nature, which we will
soon publish on our website with our highlights.
But, as Chairman
Mao pointed out, synthesising thousands of years of history of Western and
Eastern philosophy, it is a process, without which it is impossible to achieve
this result, to understand perfectly and handle in a totally conscious way the
objective laws. And, as for the study of contradiction, the only fundamental
law of dialectics, because there is no other, Chairman Gonzalo, reaffirming and
specifying what Chairman Mao had established, said:
“Lenin said:
Capital is a monument to dialectics; a monument of contradiction, and if you
think about the commodity and its definition, how he conceives it as a contradiction,
then you will understand how Marx understood it. The problem, many times, is
that the situation is implicit, not explicitly stated many times, this is the
problem. And why is it not given, because it takes more time for a deepening on
the basis of what others like Marx and Engels or the Great Lenin did, could the
Chairman come to that.” (quoted in ‘Defence of Maoism (I)’)
We stand for
Marxism, for the defence of Maoism, we stand for the dialectical materialist
conception, according to which everything is matter in motion and what explains
this self-movement is contradiction as the only fundamental law of dialectical
materialism or Marxist philosophy or proletarian conception. Chairman Mao wrote
about this:
“As opposed to
the metaphysical world outlook, the world outlook of materialist dialectics
holds that in order to understand the development of a thing we should study it
internally and in its relations with other things; in other words, the
development of things should be seen as their internal and necessary
self-movement, while each thing in its movement is interrelated with and
interacts on the things around it. The fundamental cause of the
development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the
contradictoriness within the thing. There is internal contradiction in
every single thing, hence its motion and development. Contradictoriness within
a thing is the fundamental cause of its development, while its interrelations
and interactions with other things are secondary causes. Thus materialist
dialectics effectively combats the theory of external causes, or of an external
motive force, advanced by metaphysical mechanical materialism and vulgar
evolutionism.”
[…] According
to materialist dialectics, changes in nature are due chiefly to the
development of the internal contradictions in nature. Changes in society
are due chiefly to the development of the internal contradictions in society,
that is, the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of
production, the contradiction between classes and the contradiction between the
old and the new; it is the development of these contradictions that pushes
society forward and gives the impetus for the supersession of the old society
by the new. Does materialist dialectics exclude external causes?
Not at all. It holds that external causes are the condition of change and
internal causes are the basis of change, and that external causes become
operative through internal causes. In a suitable temperature an egg changes
into a chicken, but no temperature can change a stone into a chicken, because
each has a different basis. There is constant interaction between the peoples
of different countries. In the era of capitalism, and especially in the era of
imperialism and proletarian revolution, the interaction and mutual impact of
different countries in the political, economic and cultural spheres are
extremely great. The October Socialist Revolution ushered in a new epoch in
world history as well as in Russian history. It exerted influence on internal
changes in the other countries in the world and, similarly and in a
particularly profound way, on internal changes in China. These changes,
however, were effected through the inner laws of development of these
countries, China included.” (Mao Tse-tung, “On
Contradiction”, 1937; our highlights, ci-ic.org)
Chairman Mao
defines precisely what is the driving force or motor of the process of the
development of nature and society without ever mentioning the famous “law” of the “negation of
negation” to
determine the direction of the movement, in this respect as we have already
quoted him saying:
“The life
of dialectics is the continuous
movement toward opposites […] which will
produce something more advanced […]”
The above
quotation condenses what he wrote two decades earlier in ‘On Contradiction’,
which reads as follows:
“Contradiction is universal and absolute, it is
present in the process of development of all things and permeates every process
from beginning to end.
What is meant by the emergence of a new process? The old
unity with its constituent opposites yields to a new unity with its constituent
opposites, whereupon a new process emerges to replace the old.
The old process ends and the new one begins. The new process contains new
contradictions and begins its own history of the development of contradictions.
As Lenin pointed out, Marx in his Capital gave a model
analysis of this movement of opposites which runs through the process of
development of things from beginning to end. This is the method that must be
employed in studying the development of all things. Lenin, too, employed this
method correctly and adhered to it in all his writings.
In his Capital, Marx first analyses the simplest, most
ordinary and fundamental, most common and everyday relation of bourgeois
(commodity) society, a relation encountered billions of times, viz. the
exchange of commodities. In this very simple phenomenon (in this “cell” of
bourgeois society) analysis reveals all the contradictions (or the germs of all
the contradictions) of modern society. The subsequent exposition shows us the
development (both growth and movement) of these contradictions and of this
society in the [summation] of its individual parts, from its beginning to its
end.
Lenin added, ‘Such must also be the method of
exposition (or study) of dialectics in general.’ […]“ (Mao Tse-tung, “On
Contradiction”; our highlights, ci-ic.org)
That is what
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism says and, possibly unwittingly, aligning themselves
with the revisionist Trotskyite-hoxhaite positions, the comrades of the UOC,
maintain the opposite:
“We consider that the philosophical basis of this
error lies in the pretension of reducing the general laws of movement to
contradiction, interpreting that its character of being the most fundamental
law of dialectics or nucleus or essence of dialectics, means that it is the «only law
of dialectics»; wrong idea that was imposed in the extinct RIM (defended also
by the «new synthesis» of Avakian) and that now the comrades of the Committee
try to amend in the proposal with the words «only fundamental law
of dialectics», but preserving the old idea of ignoring the law of negation of
negation, which indicates the direction of the movement, a law openly
recognized by the masters of the proletariat: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and
Mao Tse-tung. In short, we defend the Marxism Leninism Maoism science in
development, integral, coherent and exact.“
Therefore, it is
necessary to continue with the theme of our conception and the leap in the
understanding of the law of contradiction by Chairman Mao Tse-tung and its
significance for Marxist philosophy, the exposition of which with selected
documentation will be the main content of Defence of Maoism (III).
Chairman Mao is
the one who took up the theoretical and practical task of deepening the
understanding of contradiction as the “essence and core of dialectics”, a task
formulated by Lenin, and raised Marxist philosophy or dialectical materialism
to new heights by establishing the law of contradiction as the only fundamental
law of materialist dialectics. Maoism has endowed us with this sharp weapon to
transform the world; wielding it is a theoretical and practical problem. “A
plan is an ideology. Ideology is the reflection of a reality and acts on
reality.”
It is from the
great leap in the core of our ideology achieved by Chairman Mao that Chairman
Gonzalo, fulfilling the task of defining Maoism as the third, new and higher
stage of Marxism, established: “Contradiction,
the only fundamental law of the incessant transformation of eternal matter.” (1st Congress of the PCP,
1988)
The above is the
brilliant condensation, which expresses the conception of the international
proletariat, dialectical materialism: its condition of materialism when it says
eternal matter and dialectics when it stresses contradiction. Materialism is
the basis, dialectics is the guidance, and the only law of dialectics is
contradiction and the others are derivations. Concentrated expression of
Marxist philosophical monism, where materialism, dialectics and the theory of
knowledge from the point of view and the historical interests of the last class
in history, the only class possessing the true scientific ideology, all others
are inverted expressions of reality, all-powerful ideology because it is true.
This condensation of our conception by the one who defined Maoism implies a
leap in Marxist philosophy, that is beyond doubt; the question, whether it is a
big or a great leap is something we leave for the future deepening of its
understanding and deepening of the task completed by Chairman Gonzalo.
Chairman Mao in
‘On Practice’ says: “In the present epoch of the
development of society, the responsibility of correctly knowing and changing
the world has been placed by history upon the shoulders of the proletariat and
its party.”
We once again
reaffirm the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist position, that the only fundamental law is
contradiction and the others are derivations, defended by the CUMIC in the
Basis of Discussion for the UMIC. With Chairman Mao we arrive at philosophical
monism; the sole law, he clearly affirmed the development of Marxism in this
matter of utmost importance for our ideology:
“Engels talked
about the three categories, but as for me I don’t believe
in two of those categories.(The unity of opposites is the most basic law,
the transformation of quality and quantity into one another is the unity of the
opposites quality and quantity, and the negation of the negation does
not exist at all.) The juxtaposition, on the same level, of the transformation
of quality and quantity into one another, the negation of the negation, and the
law of the unity of opposites is ‘triplism’, not monism. The most basic
thing is the unity of opposites. The transformation of quality and
quantity into one another is the unity of the opposites quality and
quantity. There is no such thing as the negation of the negation.
Affirmation, negation, affirmation, negation […] in the development of things,
every link in the chain of events is both affirmation and negation.”
He goes on to
explain the issue as follows:
“Slave-holding
society negated primitive society, but with reference to feudal society it
constituted, in turn, the affirmation. Feudal society constituted the negation
in relation to slave-holding society but it was in turn the affirmation with
reference to capitalist society. Capitalist society was the negation in
relation to feudal society, but it is, in turn, the affirmation in relation to
socialist society.
What is the method of synthesis? Is it
possible that primitive society can exist side-by-side with slave-holding
society? They do exist side-by-side, but this is only a small part of the
whole. The overall picture is that primitive society is going to be
eliminated. The development of society, moreover, takes place by
stages; primitive society, too, is divided into a great many stages. At
that time, there was not yet the practice of burying women with their dead
husbands, but they were obliged to subject themselves to men. First men were subject
to women, and then things moved towards their opposite, and women were subject
to men. This stage in history has not yet been clarified, although it has been
going on for a million years and more. Class society has not yet lasted 5,000
years, cultures such as that of Lung Shan and Yang Shao at the end of the
primitive era had coloured pottery. In a word, one devours another, one
overthrows another, one class is eliminated, another class rises, one society
is eliminated, another society rises. Naturally, in the process of
development, everything is not all that pure. When it gets to feudal
society, there still remains something of the slaveholding system, though the
greater part of the social edifice is characterized by the feudal system. There
are still some serfs, and also some bond-workers, such as handicraftsmen.
Capitalist society isn’t all that pure either, and even in more advanced
capitalist societies there is also a backward part. For example, there was the
slave system in the Southern United States. Lincoln abolished the slave system,
but there are still black slaves today, their struggle is very fierce. More
than 20 million people are participating in it, and that’s quite a few.
One thing destroys another, things emerge, develop,
and are destroyed, everywhere is like this. If
things are not destroyed by others, then they destroy themselves. Why
should people die? Does the aristocracy die too? This is a natural law. Forests
live longer than human beings, yet even they last only a few thousand years. If
there were no such thing as death, that would be unbearable. If we could still
see Confucius alive today, the earth wouldn’t be able to hold so many people. I
approve of Chuang-tzu’s approach. When his wife died, he banged on a basin and
sang. When people die there should be parties to celebrate the victory
of dialectics, to celebrate the destruction of the old. Socialism,
too, will be eliminated, it wouldn’t do if it were not eliminated, for then
there would be no communism. Communism will last for thousands and
thousands of years. I don’t believe that there will be no qualitative
changes under communism, that it will not be divided into stages by
qualitative changes! I don’t believe it! Quantity changes into
quality, and quality changes into quantity. I don’t believe that it
can remain qualitatively exactly the same, unchanging for
millions of years! This is unthinkable in the light of dialectics.
Then there is the principle, ‘From each according to his ability, to each
according to his needs’. Do you believe they can carry on for a million years
with the same economics? Have you thought about it? If that were so, we
wouldn’t need economists, or in any case we could get along with just one
textbook, and dialectics would be dead.”
The life of dialectics is the continuous movement
toward opposites.” (Mao Tse-tung, “Talk on
Questions of Philosophy”; our highlights, ci-ic.org)
In ‘Defence of
Maoism (I)’, we reaffirmed the following truth: Materialism is very old, as is
dialectics, they are parallel, contemporary in origin, they are more than 2550
years old in the West, we owe it to the Greeks. But it was Marx who took the
idea as a derivation of matter, fusing dialectics with matter, who gave the
great transformation generating the new philosophy, the full and complete
philosophy not in a closed sense, that is why we cannot speak of system, system
implies closed circle and knowledge is a spiral, it is not a closed circle nor
are the circles that make up the spiral closed.
Lenin reaffirmed
materialist monism and advanced monism in dialectics, leaving the task of
deepening it to future generations of Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, he
said:
“The materialist
elimination of the “dualism of mind and body” (i.e., materialist
monism) consists in the assertion that the mind does not exist
independently of the body, that mind is secondary, a function of the brain, a
reflection of the external world. The idealist elimination of the “dualism of
mind and body” (i.e., idealist monism) consists in the
assertion that mind is not a function of the body, that,
consequently, mind is primary, that the “environment” and the “self” exist only
in an inseparable connection of one and the same “complexes of elements.” Apart
from these two diametrically opposed methods of eliminating “the dualism of
mind and body,” there can be no third method, unless it be eclecticism,
which is a senseless jumble of materialism and idealism.” (Lenin, “Materialism and
Empiriocriticism”; our highlights, ci-ic.org)
“In his Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels declares
that the fundamental philosophical trends are materialism and idealism.
Materialism regards nature as primary and spirit as secondary; it places being
first and thought second. Idealism holds the contrary view. This root
distinction between the “two great camps” into which the
philosophers of the “various schools” of idealism and materialism are divided Engels
takes as the cornerstone, and he directly charges with “confusion” those who
use the terms idealism and materialism in any other way.
“The great basic
question of all philosophy,” Engels says, “especially of
modern philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and
being,” of “spirit and nature.” Having divided the philosophers into “two
great camps” on this basic question, Engels shows that there is “yet
another side” to this basic philosophical question, viz., “in
what relation do our thoughts about the world surrounding us stand to this
world itself? Is our thinking capable of the cognition of the real world?
Are we able in our ideas and notions of the real world to produce a correct
reflection of reality?” [*]’ ‘“The overwhelming majority of philosophers
give an affirmative answer to this question,” says Engels, including
under this head not only all materialists but also the most consistent
idealists, as, for example, the absolute idealist Hegel, who
considered the real world to be the realisation of some premundane “absolute
idea,” while the human spirit, correctly apprehending the real world,
apprehends in it and through it the “absolute idea.” “In addition
[i.e., to the materialists and the consistent idealists] there is yet a
set of different philosophers—those who question the possibility of any
cognition, or at least of an exhaustive cognition, of the world. To them,
among the more modern ones, belong Hume and Kant, and they have
played a very important role in philosophical development.” (Lenin, “Materialism and
Empiriocriticism”, 1908; our highlights, ci-ic.org)
And among
others, Lenin in his comments draws the following epistemological conclusion:
“In the theory of
knowledge, as in every other sphere of science, we must think dialectically,
that is, we must not regard our knowledge as ready-made and unalterable, but
must determine how knowledge emerges from ignorance, how incomplete, inexact
knowledge becomes more complete and more exact.
Once we accept the point of view that human knowledge
develops from ignorance, we shall find millions of examples of it just as
simple as the discovery of alizarin in coal tar, millions of observations not
only in the history of science and technology but in the everyday life of each
and every one of us that illustrate the transformation of
‘things-in-themselves’ into ‘things-for-us’, the appearance of ‘phenomena’ when
our sense-organs experience an impact from external objects, the disappearance
of ‘phenomena’ when some obstacle prevents the action upon our sense-organs of
an object which we know to exist. The sole and unavoidable deduction to be made
from this—a deduction which all of us make in everyday practice and which
materialism deliberately places at the foundation of its epistemology—is that outside
us and independently of us, there exist objects, things, bodies and that our
perceptions are images of the external world. Mach’s converse theory (that
bodies are complexes of sensations) is pitiful idealist nonsense. … He [Chernov; our note, ci-ic.org] regards
only gelehrte fictions as genuine philosophy and is
unable to distinguish professorial eclecticism from the consistent materialist
theory of knowledge.” (Lenin, “Materialism and Empiriocriticism”,
1908)
Applying the law
of contradiction to the dialectical process of knowledge, Chairman Mao
established that in order to perfectly understand and fully consciously make
use of objective laws, it is necessary to go through a certain process to
arrive at this result:
“Page 446, paragraph 2 [of Reading Notes On The Soviet
Text Political Economy], says that as ownership becomes public
“people become the masters of the economic relations of their own society,” and
are “able to take hold of and apply these laws fully
and consciously.” It should be observed that this requires going through
a process. The understanding of laws always begins with the
understanding of a minority before it becomes the knowledge of the majority. It
is necessary to go through a process of practice and study to go
from ignorance to knowledge. At the beginning no one has knowledge.
Foreknowledge has never existed. People must go through practice to gain
results, meet with failure as problems arise; only through such a process can
knowledge gradually advance. If you want to know the objective laws of
the development of things and events you must go through the process
of practice, adopt a Marxist-Leninist attitude, compare
successes and failures, continually practicing and studying, going through
multiple successes and failures; moreover, meticulous research must be
performed. There is no other way to make one’s own knowledge gradually
conform to the laws. For those who see only victory but not defeat it will
not be possible to know these laws.
It is not easy “to possess and apply these laws fully
and consciously.” […]
The text does not recognize the contradictions between
appearances and essences. Essences always lie behind appearances and cannot be
disclosed except through appearances. The text does not express the idea that
for a person to know the laws it is necessary to go through a process. The
vanguard is no exception.” (Mao Tse-tung, “Reading Notes
On The Soviet Text ‘Political Economy’”; our
highlights, ci-ic.org)
Dialectical
materialism, as the scientific conception of the proletariat, is the
understanding of all that exists, that means understanding of the material
world, understanding of the class struggle, that is the social world, and that
means understanding of knowledge as a reflection of matter in the mind which is
another form of matter from the point of view or position of the proletariat
(monist materialist dialectical conception = the only fundamental law of
contradiction, the others are derivations of this law). There is no movement
without matter, no matter without movement and the motor of movement is
contradiction.
Also, we start
from the great truth established since the beginning of Marxism, that Marxism
has three integral parts: Marxist philosophy, Marxist political economy and
scientific socialism. And in the great statement to define the stages of its
development affirmed by Chairman Gonzalo, that the development in all of them
that generates a great qualitative leap of Marxism as a whole, as a unity at a
higher level, implies a new stage. A development in all three constituent parts
to a higher level, then we have a universal qualitative leap. That is why we
have to start from the Theory, to show the developments in those three parts,
then the one who defined Maoism tells us that if we proceed in that way, it is
impossible to deny Maoism, impossible! And the rest are derivations that can be
included in any of the three parts. And, that the essential thing is to show
that Chairman Mao has generated, as can be seen in theory and practice, such a
great qualitative leap. Here, we have not focused on showing the development of
the three component parts of Marxism by Chairman Mao, but in the ‘Report:
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism’ you see this development (published on ci-ic.org), but will only focus on
highlighting the development of Marxist philosophy or dialectical materialism
by Chairman Mao in terms of the core or essence of dialectics: contradiction.
Therefore, in Part III or later on, we will specifically deal, through quotations
from Chairman Mao himself, with the fulfilment of the task left by Lenin of
deepening his understanding, taking into account, among others, the development
of the particular sciences and mainly of the theory and practice of the
proletarian world revolution.
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