The importance of a rationalist perspective to the activities of a Marxist revolutionary are obvious. In the first place, a concerted and protracted political struggle required more than the random and erratic insights which experience alone could provide. What was necessary was an elaborated theoretical framework which could allow questions to be asked about the nature of the historical process, which provided premises for an understanding of social structure, and which constructed criteria by which the effectivity of particular actions could be evaluated.[1-99] Secondly, a theoretical framework of the kind supplied by dialectical and historical materialism could provide motivation towards a future state of society hitherto unexperienced by humankind. No crude empiricist could talk, as Mao was wont to do during the Yan’an period, of an era of “perpetual peace” founded on communism as the inevitable future of humanity; for experience could not allow the possibility of such grand predictions.[1-100] It is very clear that the predictive element of Marxism was to exert a profound influence on Mao’s approach to revolutionary struggle, a predictive element which derived from a largely abstract conception of the potentialities of humankind and human society. It is consequently no coincidence that one of Mao’s favourite sayings is drawn from Lenin’s What is to be Done?, a saying which nicely illustrates the importance he attached to theory in directing revolutionary struggle; “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement”.[1-101]
This challenge to prevailing interpretations of Mao’s epistemology has implications beyond the narrow confines of philosophical debate. If it is once conceded that Mao’s epistemology was not an undiluted empiricism, it raises a series of questions about the development of his political and philosophical thought, his adherence to Marxism, his relationship to and conception of the “reality” of Chinese society, his views on the future, the sources of his thought and action, and so on. At the very least, it calls into question the basic premise of the “in vivo” interpretation elaborated by Womack[1-102] and endorsed by Schram[1-103] which regards Mao’s paradigm for political action emerging from his experience of pre-Yan’an days; for such an interpretation makes virtually no allowance for the orienting role of theory in the development of political strategies and tactics. And this in turn leads to the unfortunate tendency to give less than sufficient attention to the theory which drove Mao’s practice and that of the Chinese revolution generally.
Reliance on Soviet sources and the issue of plagiarism
As stated earlier, one of the reasons for the generally dismissive treatment by Western Mao scholars of the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism is its heavy reliance on translations of Soviet texts on philosophy of the 1930s. I have argued that an overemphasis on the issue of plagiarism and reliance on Soviet philosophy has resulted in a tendency to downplay the significant influence that the categories, concepts, and laws of Soviet Marxist philosophy was to have on the development of Mao’s philosophical thought. The reasoning for this latter position runs as follows: if Mao did indulge, while writing the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism, in a wholesale exercise of plagiarism and borrowing, then the philosophical content of these Lecture Notes cannot really be taken as equivalent to Mao’s own philosophical thought, which is to be found rather in the essays On Contradiction and On Practice, essays apparently written by Mao himself. As suggested, this form of logic ignores the point that the issues of authorship of a document and that of influence are not synonymous; in other words, while there is no gainsaying that Mao did rely heavily on Soviet philosophical sources in the writing of this text, it is clear from his absorption of the philosophical categories contained in these sources and their persistent reemergence in his subsequent writings, that the exercise of reading (and in some cases, repeatedly reading) Soviet texts on philosophy had a major impact on his own thought at a critical juncture in its development. To deny this position on the basis of Mao’s plagiarism is thus to deny the possibility of serious consideration of the relationship between Mao’s philosophical thought (or for that matter, Chinese Marxism generally) and Soviet Marxist philosophy of the 1930s. This would constitute a serious analytical error, for one of the significant elements of the foundation of Mao’s philosophy and Chinese Marxism is the form of Marxist philosophy which became formalised and legitimised as orthodoxy in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. I emphasise that the Soviet philosophy of the 1930s was one of the influences on Mao’s thought, for it is as equally erroneous to suggest that it was the only influence; Mao’s philosophical thought drew on a number of sources (including some aspects of traditional Chinese philosophy and the Chinese proverbial tradition). But the totality of Mao’s philosophical thought is more than the sum of its constituent influences; for he took these influences and created a synthesis of his own, a synthesis which, nevertheless, clearly exhibits parallels to its sources.
Stung by Wang Ming’s criticism of “narrow empiricism” during the early 1930s, Mao made a personal commitment to study theory and philosophy when the historical context permitted.[1-104] The opportunity to indulge in a bout of extended philosophical study presented itself during the early years of the Yan’an period and culminated in the writing of On Practice, On Contradiction, and the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism in July and August 1937. The timing of this exercise in philosophical study is significant also because it occurred just subsequent to a period in which a number of Soviet philosophical texts had been translated into Chinese.[1-105]According to Chinese scholars, three of the five or six sources so heavily employed by Mao during this period of intense study and writing were translations of Soviet texts on philosophy; the other two or three were volumes by the Chinese Marxist philosophers Ai Siqi and Li Da, whose influence we will examine in a subsequent section.[1-106]
Let us look a little more closely at these Soviet texts on philosophy. Our purpose is twofold. The first is to provide a brief description of the content of each volume. In so doing, the striking similarity of these volumes in their coverage of the philosophy of dialectical materialism will become evident. This similarity would suggest that each text was engaged in presenting a philosophy whose orthodoxy severely curtailed variation. In other words, each text was not merely metonymic, but representative of mainstream Soviet philosophy in a very real sense. Mao’s search for comprehension of this intellectual tradition, while inevitably premised on a fairly narrow textual basis, was thus made more fruitful through the repetitive nature of the texts he employed.[1-107] Moreover, the intertextual congruence of these Soviet texts also serves to query the importance of establishing the exact textual source of Mao’s plagiarism. Such an exercise has already been carried out for sections of the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism by Wittfogel and Schram.[1-108] However, if Mao’s sources are perceived as a constellation of interlocking and overlapping texts whose essential function was the same, then the issue of the direct appropriation of words, phrases, passages, even sections, assumes less significance than the general influence which these texts exercised on his thinking at that time and subsequently.
1-99
Arif Dirlik has come closest to grasping the importance of theory in Mao’s thought See “The Predicament of Marxist Revolutionary Consciousness: Mao Zedong, Antonio Gramsci, and the Reformulation of Marxist Revolutionary Theory”,
1-100
See
1-101
This quote from Lenin appears in the pre-Liberation texts of both
1-103
Stuart R. Schram, “Mao Studies: Retrospect and Prospect”,
1-104
Guo Huaruo, “Mao zhuxi kangzhan chuqi guanghui de zhexue huodong” [The glorious philosophical activities of chairman Mao during the early stage of the War of Resistance], in
1-105
For a lengthy list of the Soviet and Chinese philosophical sources read by Mao during the Yan’an period, see “Mao Zedong dushu shenghuo” [Mao Zedong’s life as a reader] in
1-106
Tian Songnian, “Dui ji ben zhexue shuji de pizhu [On the annotations on several texts on philosophy]”, in Gong Yuzhi et al. (eds),
1-107
On the issue of the repetitive nature of Soviet texts on philosophy, see De George,
1-108
Wittfogel, “Some Remarks”; Schram, “Mao Tse-tung and the Theory of Permanent Revolution”, pp. 223‒224.