The version of Dialectical Materialism which appears in the supplementary volumes of the Mao Zedong ji is also significant because the two sources from which it was drawn also contain versions of On Practice and On Contradiction.[1-27]On Practice appears in both sources, while On Contradiction appears only in the volume entitled Dialectical Materialism published by Dazhong Shudian. The publication of all three philosophical essays in one volume under the title Dialectical Materialism reinforces Schram’s view that they represent “a single intellectual enterprise”.[1-28] It moreover suggests that the attempt to understand the development of Mao’s philosophical thought needs to confront the philosophy contained in all three essays, rather than concentrating on the two officially sanctioned essays which appear in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung as has been the case in many Western interpretations, or On Practice alone, as has been the tendency of contemporary Chinese Marxism. The evaluation of these texts in concert can, it is argued below, allow significant insights which may be concealed if analysis is limited to one or both of the two better known texts.
It might be queried whether Dialectical Materialism deserves serious consideration as a philosophical essay reflecting Mao’s own philosophical views. After all, as Wittfogel and Schram have pointed out, Dialectical Materialism is in many parts a direct plagiarism of a number of Soviet essays on philosophy.[1-29] Wittfogel estimated that some 40 per cent of Chapter 1 “consists of passages that are either literally or with some editing taken from Chinese translations of Soviet presentations of dialectical materialism”. Moreover, he argues that the rest of Chapter 1 is merely a paraphrase of ideas which can be found in these Soviet sources.[1-30] We will return subsequently to a more detailed consideration of this plagiarism and also of the influence on Mao’s philosophical thought of Ai Siqi and Li Da, the Chinese philosophers who translated into Chinese and edited the Soviet sources on which Mao relied, and who themselves wrote extensively on the philosophy of dialectical materialism.
However, to dismiss Dialectical Materialism as unworthy of serious analysis and consideration on the basis of Mao’s heavy reliance on Soviet philosophical sources of the 1930s is to miss a number of significant points.
First, it is important to note that when pressed to provide an explanation of Marxist philosophy it was to Soviet sources, replete with categories and themes of contemporary Stalinist Marxism, that Mao turned. Obviously, Mao’s choice of reference materials was severely limited due to the nature of the historical context, as several commentators have pointed out.[1-31]Nevertheless, it is significant that Mao regarded the philosophy contained in these reference materials as reflecting the orthodox response to problems of philosophy within the Marxist tradition.
This indicates that Mao was undoubtedly influenced by categories and concepts of Soviet philosophy, and although his adherence to some of these wavered over time, they contributed significantly to the construction of the theoretical framework from within which Mao observed and interpreted the world.
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.
1-29
1-31
See, for example, T.A. Bisson,
1-33
See Lucio Colletti’s “Introduction” to Karl Marx,
1-35
See in particular, the famous “Preface” to