A persistent feature of Chinese philosophical thought is its non-divorce from the rest of life. This belief is itself a manifestation of a bedrock assumption in the Chinese outlook, that the universe is a whole before it is its parts, and that its ideal state is harmony. Thus philosophers in China have always been expected to live their philosophy, and the subject has not, at least until very recently, been divorced from religion or academized as it has largely been in the West. Taoists, Confucians and Buddhists all put their philosophy into practice. With this in mind it is to that extent understandable that Marxism, as filtered through the experience of Russian revolutionaries, should have been found acceptable in China. Of course, it provides a justification for political revolution and a programme for modernization, but Marxism does more than that. It is a philosophy involving a set of ethical and political goals which can be striven for, and so touches almost every area of existence. It supplies its adherents with a vision of the future and a mission to fulfil. Were it not for its denial of the reality of mind or spirit, it would invite classification as an atheistic religion. Mao Tse-tung became convinced of its truth as a young man, and lived by its light throughout his entire political career. He did not simply accept Marxism with Leninist additions, however, but added emphases and interpreted key concepts in such a way that it is legitimate to speak of Maoism as a special variant of Marxism.
Mao was born, eldest of four children, into a peasant family in the village of Shaoshan (Hunan province) on 26 December 1893. During his childhood, Mao’s father, who had hitherto been poor, managed to become a reasonably affluent farmer, and so his childhood was spent in comparatively comfortable surroundings. However, his early experience of the lives of the peasantry and the hardships they suffered never left him. At the age of 7, he went to his local primary school and was set to work on the Confucian classics. By the time he was 13, Mao had begun to rebel against his father’s authority. The latter had intended that Mao should be educated only enough to be useful as a book-keeper, but the boy had other ideas. He was determined to pursue his education, and in 1913 entered a teacher training school in Changsha, from which he graduated five years later. Here he became politically aware, and read not only Chinese but some western works.
From Changsha, Mao went in 1918 to Peking to work in the University Library. While there, he fell under the influence of two leading intellectuals who were to be central to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Li Ta-chao and Ch’en Tu-hsiu. He also read the few available Chinese translations of Marxist texts. When in the summer of 1921 the first meeting of the CCP took place in Shanghai, Mao was present, thus becoming one of its founder-members. Between 1921 and his assumption of its leadership in 1935 Mao worked constantly for the party. He survived the massacres, notably that of 1927, of CCP members organized by the Kuomintang under Chiang Kaishek. The leaders of the CCP, following training in Russian Marxism, had concentrated their efforts in the cities, thus making it easy for the Kuomintang forces to round them up. Mao, by contrast, saw the source of a Chinese revolution in the peasantry, and transferred his major effort to organizing ‘soviet’ areas in the countryside in Kiangsi and Hunan. This did not escape the notice of Chiang, who began a series of five campaigns aimed at the destruction of the CCP (1930–1935). It was in response to the fifth campaign that Mao set out on the Long March, abandoning Kiangsi for northern Shensi via a circuitous route almost 6,000 miles long. During this march, especially at the Tsunji conference in January 1935, Mao was acknowledged as leader of the CCP.
The period 1936–1949 was one of almost constant warfare, first, in a very fragile alliance with the Kuomintang, against the Japanese (1937–1945), and then against the Kuomintang in the civil war of 1947–1949. Chiang was forced to withdraw to Taiwan in 1949, and on 1 October in that year Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. Between 1949 and his death in September 1976, Mao’s energies were devoted to the modernization of China on communist lines. The main features of this period – the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, relations with the USSR and the USA, and the Lin Piao affair – are all the subject of extensive literature. Whatever the final verdict on these events, Mao’s place in history is manifestly secure.1
Mao’s philosophy is his own variation on Marxism-Leninism, and it is necessary to have a brief outline of this world-view in mind in order to understand Mao’s version of it. Marxism-Leninism is epitomized in histories of thought as dialectical materialism. It is called materialism because of one of its basic metaphysical assertions, namely that all that exists is material in nature and none of it is mental. Mind or spirit is not a second type of substance, discrete from matter, but can only be a mode or property of matter. It is called dialectical because it is held that the unfolding of the changes in matter, which is another way of referring to history, follows an inevitable, discernible and repeated pattern which is called dialectical.2 The dialectical progression of history unfolds as follows: at no time is reality stable. It always consists of elements which are in tension with one another, and these tensions are referred to as contradictions. The set of contradictions obtaining at a given time, T1, is called the thesis in the dialectical progression. Because there is internal tension, there will be change, resulting in the formation of some new contradictions at time T2, and this is called the antithesis. The second state will inevitably mutate into a third state at T3 which will embody elements of the conditions obtaining in both T1 and T2, and is called the synthesis. This synthesis is also the thesis in the next triadic movement of the dialectical progression. This dialectical progression of change is held to be a law of history, in the same sense of ‘law’ as that term is used in science, i.e. as a basis for verifiable prediction.
Further, Marx divides all the elements of a given society into two classes, the base (in German Unterbau) and the superstructure (Oberbau). The base comprises the economic conditions at the time: what counts as wealth and how it is distributed, the ‘relations of production’ in Marxist terms. The super-structure contains all other important social institutions: the system of govenment; the legal and educational systems; philosophy and the arts, and religion. Marx contends that the base always determines the super-structure, that is, that when changes occur in government, the law, etc., no matter what justifications are given for them in terms of the ‘progress of justice’ and the like, the real cause is always an economic one. In capitalist society, he argues, the main function of the superstructure is to disguise from the proletariat that they are being exploited, or to make them accept this situation. In classical Marxism, only one important institution stands outside the dialectic, and that is science, which is held to be objectively true. This move is needed in order to avoid Marxism’s being self-refuting: were Marxism to be classed as a philosophy it would merely be part of the superstructure. Instead, Marx classes his views as science and therefore objectively true, and in this he is followed by Mao.3
This set of ideas is used by Marx as the basis for an analysis of society and its future. He holds that capitalism will inevitably collapse because of its own internal contradictions, and that after revolutionary change the classless society of communism will emerge, in which each will produce according to his or her ability and give to others according to their need. The future is one in which a perfect human society will inevitably come about. There will be ‘an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’.4 None will be oppressed, alienated or exploited. Marxism-Leninism is, like Maoism, profoundly optimistic in its vision of the future.
Mao Tse-tung accepted all the foregoing, though occasionally (as will be seen) with certain modifications. His main philosophical interests were first in the concept at the centre of the dialectical thought of both Hegel and Marx, that of contradiction, and second in epistemology, where he elaborates on the ideas of Lenin.
The concept of contradiction (C: mao-tun) is to be understood in an extended sense in Mao’s thought. It is not used in the restricted logical sense of the term in which two incompatible propositions, p and not-p, are said to contradict one another. Rather, contradiction in Mao’s sense is a tension between the components of any thing or situation, and is an omnipresent, fundamental property of reality, from the realm of the laws of physics to complex social phenomena:
mechanical motion under external force occurs through the internal contradictoriness of things. Simple growth in plants and animals, their quantitative development, is likewise chiefly the result of their internal contradictions. Similarly, social development is due chiefly not to external but to internal causes.5
It follows that the only way to understand any aspect of reality is to grasp its internal contradictions, for they constitute its nature:
materialist dialectics holds that in order to understand the development of a thing we should study it internally and in its relations to 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.6
It is to be stressed that for Mao contradiction is ubiquitous and ceaseless: ‘without contradiction nothing would exist.’7
This basic notion Mao elaborates at some length, and his elaboration is itself dialectical in form. He asserts next that looked at from one point of view, contradiction is universal and looked at from another, is characterized by particularity. To say that contradiction is universal is to stress that it is present in all things at all times: ‘contradiction exists in the process of development of all things, and . . . in the process of development of each thing a movement of opposites exists from beginning to end’,8 and this applies in equal measure both to the inner process of human thought and to external social interactions. It is not enough, however, to know that contradiction is omnipresent. If one is to be successful in politics and in other areas of life, it is necessary to have the sharpest possible grip on the particular instance of contradiction with which one is confronted, for ‘This particular contradiction constitutes the particular essence which distinguishes one thing from another’.9
This is a point to which Mao returns repeatedly in his writings, and for good reason. There is a danger involved in the study of comprehensive world-views like Marxism that its adherents can be as much blinded by it as alerted through it to the nature of reality. The theory can supply ready-made, as it were, an analysis of any kind of situation, e.g. that it is a complex of mutable contradictions whose progressive change is inevitable, and so on. Successful political action, or indeed successful action of any kind, does not come from resting content with generalities of this kind. Success in politics, Mao argues, comes from precise knowledge of the particular circumstances of the here and now. He warned consistently of the danger of assuming that courses of political action which had worked in Russia would work without change in China. Many CCP officials had been trained in Moscow, and Mao saw in their subsequent behaviour evidence of what he called ‘dogmatism’, i.e. a tendency to apply pure Marxist dogma without any regard to political reality. This he saw as a path to certain failure, and his main reason for writing his chief philosophical essays was to combat precisely this tendency:
Our dogmatists are lazy-bones. They refuse to undertake any painstaking study of concrete things, they regard general truths as emerging out of the void, they turn them into purely abstract unfathomable formulas . . . They understand nothing of the Marxist theory of knowledge.10
Much of the further analysis Mao devotes to contradiction is aimed precisely to reinforce the need for exact scrutiny of existing conditions. He next introduces the concepts of principal contradiction and the principal aspect of a contradiction. Contradictions very rarely occur singly in the real world: the situations requiring our attention are almost invariably a complex of two or more contradictions, and one of these will always be more important than the rest. This principal contradiction we must seek to identify, since it is this which is the chief determinant of the nature of the situation as a whole.11 Further, within any individual contradiction, of the two elements in tension, one will be more important than the other, and this is the principal aspect of the contradiction. It is important to identify this, because ‘The nature of a thing is determined mainly by the principal aspect of a contradiction, the aspect which has gained the dominant position’.12 Because the nature of reality is one of constant change, the role of principal and subordinate aspects in a single contradiction is not fixed: these positions can and do change, and when this happens, the nature of the thing constituted by the contradiction changes also. Mao’s elaboration of this point leads him to diverge from Marx in an important respect. Marx had held that, in the case of the base: superstructure relation, the roles of each component never change, in that the base always determines the superstructure. This Mao rejects, consistently with his view that reversal of the role of aspects is possible in any contradiction:
it must also be admitted that in certain conditions, such aspects as the relations of production, theory and the super-structure in turn manifest themselves in the principal and decisive role. When the superstructure (politics, culture, etc.) obstructs the development of the economic base, political and cultural changes become principal and decisive.13
Mao continues with the assertion that, although in one sense a contradiction consists of two aspects which are in tension, in another these aspects are identical. This at first sight puzzling assertion becomes far less so in the light of Mao’s spacious definition of the concept of identity: it does not mean either numerical identity or identity of sets of properties. Instead: ‘identity, unity, coincidence, interpenetration, interdependence (or mutual dependence for existence), interconnection or mutual cooperation – all these different names mean the same thing.’14 Granted this very broad sense of identity, Mao can assert that ‘in given conditions, each of the contradictory aspects within a thing transforms itself into its opposite, changes its position to that of its opposite’.15 The change of position of the aspects of a contradiction from subordinate to principal or vice versa Mao calls an example of conspicuous change, a type of change he contrasts to what he terms relative rest. This distinction is needed to answer an obvious objection to the basic metaphysical thesis that contradictory change is omnipresent, and that is that some institutions or phenomena exist for so long that to say that they exemplify change and tension is far-fetched. Mao replies that what appears to be stasis is merely relative, an even balance of opposing forces. Such conditions always degenerate, and conspicuous change results.16
Finally, in his attempt to combat dogmatism in Marxist thinking on contradiction, Mao argues that not all contradictions are antagonistic. Consistently with his thesis of omnipresent change, Mao argues that non-antagonistic contradictions may come to be antagonistic, and vice versa. For example, contradiction between the exploiting and exploited classes exists in all forms of society – slavery-based, feudal, or capitalist – but for most of the time this contradiction is not antagonistic. However, it follows from the principle of the constancy of change that states of relative rest do not continue indefinitely, and when ‘the contradiction between the two classes develops to a certain stage . . . it assumes the form of open antagonism and develops into revolution’.17 This distinction is needed because Mao accepts that contradiction will not cease under socialism, and nor was it absent between different groupings within the CCP. However, to fail to see that these two classes of contradiction are non-antagonistic is likely to lead to inappropriate modes of action to resolve them: different classes of contradiction must be treated differently.
The theme of the need to pay the closest attention to the real facts of any situation recurs in Mao’s epistemology, his second main philosophical interest. He begins from the assertion that knowledge arises not from the disinterested desire to know the truth, but as a result of our need to understand the world in order to produce what we need to survive:
Man’s knowledge depends mainly on his activity in material production, through which he comes gradually to understand the phenomena, the properties and the laws of nature, and the relations between himself and nature . . . None of this knowledge can be acquired apart from activity in production.18
The truth of any assertion is to be measured not in terms of logical consistency or theoretical cogency but by successful applica tion to the world: ‘Only social practice can be the criterion of truth. The standpoint of practice is the primary and basic standpoint in the dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge.’19 Further, it follows from the metaphysical assertions that change is constant and progress inevitable, that human knowledge, if always incomplete, is always progressing step by step to higher levels.20
The process whereby knowledge arises from practice is said by Mao to have two major stages of which the first is ‘the stage of senseperceptions and impressions’.21 In this stage, objects in the world impinge on the sense organs and evoke sense-perceptions of these objects together with a rough impression of their relations. The first stage of knowledge does not penetrate to the heart of reality: this occurs only at the second, rational or conceptual stage. As social practice continues,
a sudden change (leap) takes place in the brain in the process of cognition, and concepts are formed. Concepts are no longer the phenomena, the separate aspects and the relations of things; they grasp the essence, the totality and the internal relations of things.22
Though these stages are separable in analysis, in life they are unified in the experience of practice. Neither sensation alone nor reason alone is an adequate foundation for knowledge: each complements the other, and the findings of their joint product must be tested against reality in action. Consistently with his metaphysics of change, Mao is insistent that theory must be constantly measured against a mutable world. He identifies two common groups of thinkers in communist circles who fail to do this and who in consequence make mistakes: the first is the group who become set in their convictions and whose ideas lag behind the changing facts (‘die-hards’), and the second are those who fantasize ahead of the possible (‘leftists’), whose ideas ignore the pace at which change can realistically be made to occur.23
Mao shows a willingness to follow his own line of thought against Marxist authorities not only on the question of the base:super-structure relationship but also in respect of his attitude to those features of the super-structure normally referred to as the culture of the period. In the thought of Lenin, all aspects of culture are to be controlled to serve political ends, and one result of this was the set of aesthetic prescriptions for artists called Soviet Realism. Mao’s theoretical position is different. In the fields of art and science, differences are to be settled
through free discussion in artistic and scientific circles and through practical work in these fields . . . We think that it is harmful to the growth of art and science if administrative measures are used to impose one particular style of art or school of thought and to ban another,24
and this policy is that of ‘Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend’.25
This philosophy involves a number of difficulties. Some are those inherent in all forms of Marxism, e.g. whether its claim to be a science can be sustained; whether its ‘laws’ of history can produce testable predictions; whether the concept of class can be defined in such a way as to do all the work required of it, and the like. Other difficulties are peculiar to Maoism, e.g. whether the concept of contradiction (in the Maoist sense) can usefully be applied to natural as opposed to social phenomena; or whether the distinction between Mao’s two stages of knowledge is defensible (since both are conceptual). In certain respects, by contrast, Maoism is refreshing, especially in its consistent stress on the need to avoid falling into dogmatic habits of thought. Mao was certainly no blind follower of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. He had the firmest grip on the fact that, in politics, to ignore the hard facts is to court disaster, and this realism marks him out from many lesser Marxist thinkers.
References to the four-volume Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Peking, Foreign Languages Press, 1967, are given as SW + Vol. number + page.
1 For more detail on Mao’s life, cf. S. Schram, Mao Tse-tung, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966.
2 The concept of dialectic, like so much else, Marx took over from the philosophy of Hegel (1770– 1831). In Hegel’s philosophy, however, ultimate reality is spiritual in nature, and so his philosophy is epitomized as dialectical idealism; cf. the articles on Hegel and Marx in D. Collinson, Fifty Major Philosophers, London, Routledge, 1988.
3 Whether the claim of Marxism to be a science is sustainable is another matter, cf. the classic critique in H.B. Acton, The Illusion of the Epoch, London, Cohen & West, 1955.
4 K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1965, p. 75.
5 On Contradiction (1937), SW, I, p. 313. In extending the application of the concept of contradiction from society to natural processes, Mao is following a line of thought initiated by Engels, cf. his Anti-Dühring (1878), 2nd edn, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959, Pt I, ch. xii, pp.164 sqq.
6 On Contradiction, SW, I, p. 313.
7 op.cit., SW, I, p. 316.
8 ibid.
9 op.cit., SW, I, p. 320.
10 op.cit., SW, I, p. 321.
11 op.cit., SW, I, p. 331.
12 op.cit., SW, I, p. 333.
13 op.cit., SW, I, p. 336.
14 op.cit., SW, I, p. 337.
15 op.cit., SW, I, p. 338.
16 op.cit., SW, I, p. 342.
17 op.cit., SW, I, p. 343.
18 On Practice (1937), SW, I, p. 295.
19 op.cit., SW, I, p. 297: though he does not say so explicitly, Mao accepts Lenin’s copy theory of knowledge, according to which true knowledge is a mirror-like reflection in the mind of reality. This theory denies the Kantian assertion that the structure of knowledge reflects the structure of the mind. cf. V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1947.
20 op.cit., SW, I, p. 296.
21 op.cit., SW, I, p. 297.
22 op.cit., SW, I, p. 298; reiterated in Where Do Correct Ideas Come From? (1963) in Four Essays on Philosophy, Peking, Foreign Languages Press, 1968, pp. 134–136.
23 op.cit., SW, I, pp. 305–306.
24 On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People (1957), in Four Essays on Philosophy, op. cit., p. 114.
25 op.cit., p. 113.
Though the collected writings of Mao run to many volumes, his philosophical thought is concentrated in four essays:
On Practice, 1937
On Contradiction, 1937
On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, 1957
Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?, 1963
These essays are printed in the various selected and collected editions of Mao’s works, but are conveniently available printed together as Four Essays on Philosophy, Peking, Foreign Languages Press, 1968.
(1) Mao Tse-tung
Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, 4 vols, Peking, Foreign Languages Press, 1967
Four Essays on Philosophy, Peking, Foreign Languages Press, 1968
‘On dialectical materialism – a fragment’, trans. C.S. Chao in Studies in Soviet Thought, vol. III, no. 4, December 1963, pp. 270–277
(2) About Mao Tse-tung
Schram, S., Mao Tse-tung, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966
Soo, F.Y.R., Mao Tse-tung’s Theory of Dialectic, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1981 (Sovietica series, Vol. 44)
(3) Other works referred to
Acton, H.B., The Illusion of the Epoch, London, Cohen & West, 1955
Engels, F., Anti-Dühring (1878), Eng. trans., 2nd edn, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959
Lenin, V.I., Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, (1909), Eng. trans., Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1947
Marx, K. and Engels, F., Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Eng. trans., Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1965