[Originally published on marxist.com: Daniel Morley and Parson Young
29 August 2025]
The Chinese Revolution of 1949 was one of the greatest events in human history. Marxists defend that revolution, which freed China from the shackles of imperialism after a heroic, decades-long struggle.
[This article was originally published in #48 of the In Defence of Marxism magazine. Click here to subscribe!]
This revolution was the fruit of the tremendous determination and spirit of sacrifice of the Chinese masses. And at the head of this movement was Mao Zedong.
Since Mao’s death, capitalism in China has been gradually restored by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) bureaucracy. Mao is seen to have led a struggle against ‘capitalist roaders’ in the CCP in his final years. Thus many revolutionaries both inside and outside China have understandably looked towards the ideas of Mao, the original leader of the 1949 Revolution, as a guide to action in the struggle towards a new revolution.
This search for a theoretical basis on which to genuinely defend communist principles is a progressive development that should be supported by all Marxists. Marxism has always been, first and foremost, a scientific theory that looks reality in the face, that calls things by their right names, because without an unflinching attitude towards the truth, it will never be possible to overthrow capitalism once and for all.
Mao’s 1937 philosophical essay On Contradiction is the text most celebrated by Maoists as proof of his contribution to Marxist theory. But the reality is that despite Mao’s leading role in the revolution, he was not a theoretician. It is necessary, therefore, to make a sober analysis of the shortcomings of On Contradiction to properly educate new communists on the correct philosophical method of dialectical materialism, and the historical lessons of this period.
What does contradiction mean?
Since Mao’s text centres around the question of contradiction, it is necessary to explain what it means in Marxist philosophy, which is known as dialectical materialism.
In day-to-day life, change is generally understood as something external and accidental to the thing being changed. In this way, a crisis in society is understood to take place simply because of mistaken political leaders, or due to foreign interference, not because of the inner contradictions of that society.
Dialectical philosophy recognises that each and every thing exists in a constant state of motion owing to its own inner contradictions, which are inherent to it. These contradictions are composed of opposites that presuppose one another. Hegel, whose development of dialectics and the centrality of contradiction enormously influenced Marx and Engels, explained this very clearly:
“Debts and assets are not two particular, self-subsisting species of property. What is negative to the debtor is positive to the creditor. […] Positive and negative are therefore intrinsically conditioned by one another, and are only in relation to each other. The north pole of the magnet cannot be without the south pole, and vice versa. […] In opposition, the different is not confronted by an other, but by its other.”[1]
The poles of a contradiction are inseparable from one another and in fact determine one another. In this respect, polar opposites are also antagonistic – just as the debtor can only exist with a creditor, so the actions of one pole are immediately antagonistic to the other.
Marx was very explicit that the class contradiction between workers and capitalists is precisely such a fundamental contradiction for capitalist society:
“Proletariat and wealth are opposites; as such they form a single whole. They are both creations of the world of private property. […]
“Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to maintain itself, and thereby its opposite, the proletariat, in existence.”[2]
In other words, workers and capitalists cannot exist, as workers and capitalists, without one another. This means that their mutual antagonism is permanent within and inherent to the capitalist mode of production.
This process cannot be paused; to exist is to be in motion, and the motion of capitalist society is, in the last analysis, that of the class struggle. But this struggle of opposites does not travel endlessly in a circle; it drives towards its own transformation, or ‘negation’. As Marx writes:
“The proletariat, on the contrary, is compelled as [the] proletariat to abolish itself and thereby its opposite, private property, which determines its existence, and which makes it [the] proletariat.”[3]
None of this is to say that the only contradiction affecting capitalist society is the struggle between workers and capitalists; it is simply that this contradiction is permanent and fundamental, and ultimately determines all other contradictions.
Principal contradiction
How does Mao tackle the question? First, he states the basic principle of dialectics, that “contradiction exists universally and in all processes”.[4]
He then goes on to explain that each particular thing, or process, possesses its own particular contradiction, or “essence”, which distinguishes it from other things. And each of these different contradictions must be solved by different methods: “the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is resolved by the method of socialist revolution; the contradiction between the great masses of the people and the feudal system is resolved by the method of democratic revolution…”, and so on.[5]
In any “major”, or “complex” thing, such as a social formation like China for instance, there are many processes and contradictions at play. Here we come to the key part of On Contradiction, where Mao argues that of these “many contradictions in the process of development of a complex thing”, “one of them is necessarily the principal [“主要”, which could also be translated as “primary” or “main”] contradiction”.[6]
As Mao explains:
“When imperialism launches a war of aggression against [a semi-colonial] country […] the contradiction between imperialism and the country concerned becomes the principal contradiction, while all the contradictions among the various classes within the country […] are temporarily relegated to a secondary and subordinate position. So it was in China in the Opium War of 1840, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, and so it is now in the present Sino-Japanese War.”[7]
At the time of writing, Japan was invading China, and so Mao concluded that “all [China’s] various classes, except for some traitors, can temporarily unite in a national war against imperialism”.[8]
According to Mao, when the principal contradiction is between imperialism and the nation as a whole, the nation can genuinely unite as if no antagonism existed between the classes at all. The class struggle is simply paused, disconnected, or otherwise irrelevant to the situation.
Mao’s fundamental mistake lies in the fact that the class contradiction is not a ‘principal’ contradiction alongside other, unrelated and less important contradictions, nor can it become a ‘secondary’ contradiction. The class contradiction of capitalist society is fundamental and ever-present. Just as a magnet cannot exist without its poles, so capitalist society cannot pause its class contradiction, and yet remain a capitalist society.
This class contradiction permeates and to a large extent gives rise to other contradictions within society. Imperialist wars, for example, are not waged for exclusively ‘national reasons’, somehow separate from class contradictions. They are, in fact, to a very large extent expressions of the fundamental class contradiction of capitalist society. It is ABC to a Marxist that imperialist wars are waged to defend the interests of a given ruling class, for example to find an outlet for economic or political crises at home, to find new markets and sources of profit so as to lessen or delay these crises, or to distract the working class at home.
It is true that imperialist oppression often has the effect of masking the class fault lines in society as the masses rally behind their own bourgeoisie as a means to defend themselves. The bourgeoisie on the other hand frequently uses this mood of national unity as a means to consolidate its position as the ruling class. The task of communists in such a situation is not to facilitate this masking of class contradictions by the ruling class, but to expose it.
China was no exception to this. The Kuomintang (KMT), led by Chiang Kai Shek, was a bourgeois party founded precisely in order to win China’s independence on a capitalist basis. But as history showed, it was incapable of carrying this out in practice, for when the revolution against imperialism unfolded in the 1920s, it ultimately sided with imperialism against its own working class.
The war with Japan
There is no doubt that China’s war against Japanese imperialism was a national war of liberation. The struggle against imperialism was the defining question of the Chinese Revolution.
Under these conditions, it is absolutely correct for a communist party to advance slogans against national oppression and organise a war of liberation, which will inevitably mean fighting alongside the bourgeois nationalists against the common enemy, at least temporarily.
But, from these correct premises, Mao used his ‘theory’ of principal contradiction to proclaim that in the struggle against Japan, the party should submit itself to the leadership of the bourgeois KMT, rather than maintaining its class independence.
The CCP went so far as to publicly pledge that it:
“… abolishes the present Soviet government [in the CCP controlled territories] and practices democracy based on the people’s rights in order to unify the national political power […] abolishes the designation of the Red Army, reorganises it into the [KMT controlled] National Revolutionary Army, places it under the control of the Military Affairs Commission of the National government, and awaits orders…”[9]
In essence, Mao was arguing that the CCP liquidate itself both politically and organisationally, as it had done in the revolution of 1925-7, in the name of the “Second United Front”.
Mao’s policy of class collaboration flowed from a fundamental theoretical error. It should be elementary to communists that national oppression is carried out for capitalist (as opposed to national) reasons, and that this oppression does not fall on all classes of the oppressed country equally. Nor do the class contradictions within the oppressed nation disappear on the onset of an imperialist invasion.
As Lenin explained at the Second Congress of the Communist International (‘Comintern’) in 1920:
“A certain understanding has emerged between the bourgeoisie of the exploiting countries and that of the colonies, so that very often, even perhaps in most cases, the bourgeoisie of the oppressed countries, although they also support national movements, nevertheless fight against all revolutionary movements and revolutionary classes with a certain degree of agreement with the imperialist bourgeoisie, that is to say together with it.”[10]
This perfectly characterised the behaviour of the Chinese ruling class over the previous 80 or so years. Ever since imperialism, initially mainly British imperialism, had been humiliating, oppressing and exploiting China, the Chinese ruling class generally favoured lucrative collaboration with the imperialists, and did not ‘unite’ with the rest of the Chinese people to oppose them.
If Mao’s ideas were correct, one would expect that the KMT government of the time would have concentrated its efforts in fighting Japan, and even enlisted the support of the Communist Party’s army to do so. Yet the bourgeois dictator of China, Chiang Kai Shek, had a policy of “first internal pacification, then external resistance”[11], i.e. of betraying the struggle against Japanese imperialism in order to continue his brutal civil war against the CCP.
All of this is proven by the events that followed 1937 and the ‘Second United Front’ between the CCP and KMT. Despite giving verbal assurances that he would collaborate with the CCP against Japan, Chiang never intended on doing so.
After having ‘allied’ with the CCP to fight Japan, Chiang’s troops carried out precious little fighting, and instead routinely abandoned entire provinces to the Japanese. By mid 1939, Chiang had committed his best troops (up to 500,000) to blockading the CCP rather than fighting the Japanese[12], based on the assumption that the US would win the war with Japan for them.
This led to a series of major losses and rapid retreats during the first year of full-scale invasion from 1937. By 1938, Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan and Nanjing had all been lost to the Japanese in the most humiliating way. The capital had to be moved several times, and was now in remote Chongqing, Sichuan province.
To secure their last-ditch capital in Chongqing, the KMT could think of no better strategy than to flood the Yellow River by destroying dykes. This destroyed the infrastructure the Japanese would need to advance into Sichuan and other inland provinces. The destruction was so great that up to 89,000 Chinese civilians immediately drowned, and around 500,000 died in total from the resulting famine and plague.
These horrific events encapsulate the Chinese ruling class’ ‘patriotism’: even when fighting imperialism, they did so in such a way as to inflict far more damage on their own people than on the enemy.
The CCP implicitly understood what this meant. They quite correctly started recruiting in the flooded area around the Yellow River and established a Red Army base there. That is to say, they implicitly recognised that the class contradiction was not ‘temporarily relegated’ by the ‘principal contradiction’ of imperialist invasion, but was in fact intensified by the imperialist invasion, since the ruling class were revealed as national traitors. Despite the formal agreement between the CCP and Chiang Kai Shek, there was no class unification against the common enemy of Japan.
The particularity of contradiction
Another argument of Mao’s in On Contradiction is that Marxists must not be ‘dogmatic’ and impose blanket generalisations onto changing political situations. He argues that “our dogmatists […] do not understand that we have to study the particularity of contradiction and know the particular essence of individual things. […] Our dogmatists are lazy-bones. They refuse to undertake any painstaking study of concrete things”.[13]
Mao’s stress on ‘painstaking study of concrete things’ is deeply ironic, because he remains exclusively at the level of abstract assertions and mechanical thinking. The philosophical point Mao makes about studying things in their particularity is simply a commonplace – things change, and different methods are required for different situations. At this highly abstract level, no one can really disagree with it, but it tells us nothing.
Each contradiction is different, yes, but for Mao, it is self-contained – this contradiction has its own solution, which is different to the solution of that contradiction. One only needs to study each particular contradiction in turn to find each one’s self-contained solution, like being presented with different blood samples in a lab to determine who has what infection.
What Mao really means to tell us is that China’s revolution is different to the Russian one, that as a colonial country its revolution was not a socialist one but a national one, and that therefore it had its own particular solution, i.e. deals with the mortal enemy Chiang Kai Shek. Those who disagree, who call this alliance with Chiang a betrayal of the revolution, must be dogmatists incapable of seeing the particularity of the situation.
Mao’s manner of stressing the importance of particularity is in essence an attempt at providing a theoretical basis for a political line of compromise with the ruling class.
Dialectical materialism holds that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. The laws that emerge at the general level – such as the laws of the class struggle or of the capitalist economy – ultimately determine the interests and the conduct of the contending classes and parties.
Marx explained, as long ago as 1848, that capitalism was destined to become a global economic system. Lenin analysed this global system as imperialism, which is based on the fact that production under capitalism has outgrown the national market. This meant that the economy became a world economy first and foremost, into which different countries are subordinated and play definite roles.
As a result, separate ‘contradictions’ such as those “between the great masses of the people and the feudal system” and “between the colonies and imperialism” became inextricably linked to the world system of capitalism. That is the reason for the creation of the Comintern and its successful spread into Asia, most notably into China, by the early 1920s. The Chinese Revolution was not a completely separate process, with its own contradictions, its own timeline and its own solutions. It was part of an international process.
The semi-colonial exploitation of China by a number of foreign powers since the 1840s had created an army of landless peasants and paupers by destroying China’s home economy, which in turn led to the creation of a nascent Chinese working class. At the same time, imperialism propped up the tottering ancien régime, which had become its client. The emerging Chinese capitalist class was dependent on Western imperialism and tied to the world market, but the Chinese working class looked to the international communist movement, hence the rapid growth of the CCP in the 1920s.
This is certainly not to say that the Chinese Revolution did not have its peculiarities that required ‘painstaking study’. No communist party can hope to lead a revolution by relying only on generalities about capitalism and the working class. It must analyse and participate in every stage of the process and advance clear cut slogans that connect with the concrete conditions and consciousness of the country. As Hegel said, the truth is concrete.
To understand the Chinese Revolution ‘concretely’, means to understand it in its proper international context, not by treating it as merely ‘particular’ to itself. The epoch of the Chinese Revolution was, ultimately, the epoch of the world revolution. Each country depended on the world economy for its existence. The revolutionary struggle in each country could only be understood as part of a world struggle against this system. The CCP would never have existed if it were not for the Comintern.
This is not an abstract, pedantic theoretical point. Its significance is proven by the subsequent events of the revolution.
The Chinese Revolution
Since On Contradiction tells us that class antagonism is only temporarily relegated from being the principal contradiction by foreign invasion, presumably it should return to the fore when the invasion ends. Indeed, Mao tells us in the same document:
“… in another situation, the contradictions change position. When imperialism carries on its oppression not by war, but by milder means – political, economic and cultural – the ruling classes in semi-colonial countries capitulate to imperialism, and the two form an alliance for the joint oppression of the masses of the people. At such a time, the masses often resort to civil war against the alliance of imperialism and the feudal classes, while imperialism often employs indirect methods rather than direct action in helping the reactionaries in the semi-colonial countries to oppress the people, and thus the internal contradictions become particularly sharp.”
The situation he is outlining perfectly describes China’s situation after 1945. US imperialism was now the exploiter of China, but in a much milder way than Japan had been. And the KMT and Chiang Kai Shek were working hand-in-glove with the US, receiving enormous military aid from them, in order to resume their war against the CCP. Therefore, Mao would surely have to accept, based on his own conclusions in On Contradiction, that “the internal contradictions [i.e. class struggle] become particularly sharp”.
Yet, Mao continued the truce with the KMT even after the war against Japan ended. In doing so, he developed the perspective of ‘New Democracy’.
This was the position that China’s revolution would not be a socialist one. It would instead establish a ‘new democratic society’, which essentially meant preserving capitalism but nationalising the property of ‘bureaucratic capital’ and ‘reactionaries’ who had collaborated with Japan. It was to be an alliance of all the classes of China, including the capitalist class, against a specific part of the capitalist class.
There was no reason to believe it would be possible to form a stable alliance with the KMT, or any sector of the Chinese capitalists. Nevertheless, under the banner of ‘New Democracy’, Mao instead proposed deals at the top whereby key KMT leaders could remain in power in a coalition with the CCP. In essence this revealed a lack of trust in the working class and its independent movement.
Such deals, however, were always rejected by Chiang Kai Shek. This was inevitable – Chiang came to power precisely in order to crush the revolution and the CCP on behalf of the bourgeoisie, and had spent the previous two decades trying to liquidate it. Now Mao was trying to find an alliance with these same forces. This whole perspective was falsified by the ending of the truce by the KMT in 1947 and the subsequent civil war, which ended with the victory of the CCP in 1949.
As the CCP took power, most of the capitalist class fled China with Chiang Kai Shek, to set up a US-backed capitalist dictatorship in Taiwan. The capitalists that remained in China refused to collaborate with the CCP, no matter how many times the CCP proposed a coalition. As the capitalists saw it, it was a communist party that had been at war with the government for decades, and had been part of the Comintern, which was founded to overthrow capitalism. They could never trust such a party.
The capitalist KMT, on the other hand, was equally linked to US imperialism, which was implacably opposed to communism. Then, within a year, the Korean War started, in which China, the USSR and the US were engaged in an extremely violent struggle over whether Korea would remain capitalist and within the US sphere of influence, or not.
These events, which had an objective and global logic to them, forced the new CCP regime to abandon the programme of ‘New Democracy’. Chinese capitalists took the side of the US and the reactionaries in the Korean War, hoping a victory for them would also deal a blow to the new CCP regime within China. To support North Korea in the war, the CCP had even less room to tolerate economic sabotage from capitalists within its borders.
The CCP lurched to the left by nationalising the vast majority of the economy, as a response to the fact that the capitalists had either abandoned their businesses, or were using them against the new CCP regime. We can see clearly how these ‘national contradictions’ with the imperialists interacted with the fundamental class contradictions of society, and were in turn resolved not purely on a national basis, but by means of class struggle methods.
The expropriation of the capitalists was, of course, correct. The point is that events completely invalidated the theoretical method set out in Mao’s essay. The course of China’s revolution falsifies the notion that the ruling class was capable of or interested in uniting with other classes to fight imperialism. On Contradiction’s idea of the possibility and correctness of class collaboration in colonial countries was part of a general Stalinist position throughout the world.
If Mao and the CCP had carried out an open and thorough evaluation of the course of the revolution, they could have corrected the important mistakes contained in On Contradiction, and equipped communists inside and outside China with the tools to further the world socialist revolution.
Instead, the false method put forward by Mao in 1937 was not only defended but reinforced, which had disastrous consequences wherever this policy was applied, such as in Indonesia and Iran.
Reading On Contradiction today, the question we must ask ourselves is not “Did Mao overthrow capitalism?”, but “Can we overthrow capitalism on this basis?” And the experience of the last 70 years has proven that we cannot.
Bureaucratic outlook
Mao’s points about particular contradictions and particular solutions in On Contradiction are a one-sided and mechanical deviation from dialectical materialism. Its effect was to legitimise opportunist short-sightedness and a zig-zagging programme by stressing that each country, or each stage in a given country, has its own contradictions that require separate solutions, and that the class struggle can be abandoned by communists.
On Contradiction displays a subjective and arbitrary understanding of history. Superficially, Mao makes the right noises to sound like a dialectical materialist. But in actuality, Mao leaves all this behind, and simply lists China’s different historical phases without any explanation of their underlying logic, necessity and contradictions:
“In the period of the first united front, the KMT carried out Sun Yat-sen’s Three Great Policies of alliance with Russia, cooperation with the Communist Party, and assistance to the peasants and workers; hence it was revolutionary and vigorous, it was an alliance of various classes for the democratic revolution. After 1927, however, the KMT changed into its opposite and became a reactionary bloc of the landlords and big bourgeoisie. After the Xian Incident in December 1936, it began another change in the direction of ending the civil war and cooperating with the Communist Party for joint opposition to Japanese imperialism. Such have been the particular features of the KMT in the three stages. Of course, these features have arisen from a variety of causes.”[14]
The ‘variety of causes’ is the key question, but Mao leaves it for the reader to figure them out. For a mass party to change, in a matter of one or two years, from being ‘revolutionary and vigorous’, to a ‘reactionary bloc of the landlords and big bourgeoisie’ would be a fact of enormous historical significance, and not something done on the whim of a single leader. All Mao tells us about this, however, is that the KMT changed. It was good, then it was bad. We allied with it, then it was our enemy. This happened for reasons he won’t go into.
The truth is that Mao did not want to be tied down to a theoretical perspective of the Chinese Revolution. He wanted to sell his membership a vague and slippery ‘dialectics’ to give himself a more-or-less free hand to change positions, to contradict his previous position, and to take advantage of whatever presented itself at that moment.
What this reveals is the bureaucratic regime that already existed in the CCP prior to the seizure of power, and which only became more pronounced after the CCP became the ruling party.
It should be noted that when Mao wrote On Contradiction, the CCP no longer had any base in the cities. Despite having been founded as an urban, working-class party, it had been isolated in remote rural communes since 1928. This was not part of any plan or theory, but was a result of the chaotic defeat of the revolution of 1925-7.
The CCP was betrayed – as predicted by Trotsky – by the very leader Stalin had insisted they must pin their hopes on to lead the revolution: Chiang Kai Shek. From 1926-7, Chiang carried out a brutal counter-revolution against the CCP and the working class, massacring tens of thousands of workers and communists.
So disastrous was the defeat, and so misguided was the party’s reaction to it (thanks to Stalin’s orders), that the CCP members who had not been killed by the counter-revolution were forced to flee into remote parts of the countryside.
Under these conditions the party regime adapted to its conditions, becoming essentially a peasant guerilla army as opposed to a democratic-centralist, Bolshevik party. Bureaucratic, top-down methods thus became inevitable, because the task of military survival when surrounded by superior troops from the government required a ruthless military leadership and no time for discussion. Mao’s essay reflects precisely these methods.
A bureaucratic leadership necessarily has a short-sighted and mechanical outlook. Precisely because it is bureaucratic, it does not see the masses as an independent force capable of changing society on their own, and it tends to think that issuing commands from above achieves results regardless of the interests and dynamics of the classes in question. It thinks it can simply come to power via deals with leaders of other parties, and forgets that this may alienate and demoralise the working class.
In fact, it does not want real mass democratic participation, it does not want members with a high political understanding who can think for themselves. It is not strengthened by discussion and understanding in the rank and file, so instead of operating by means of political argument, persuasion, and inspiration, it operates by issuing commands. It keeps itself in place by manoeuvring, by playing different factions against one another.
From this stems the subjective outlook of Mao. He was inclined to see himself as an all-knowing administrator, for whom contradictions can be controlled via the choices that the subjective factor (i.e. the party) makes. The party determines what is the principal and what are the secondary contradictions, and the party decides (not analyses) what solution corresponds to what contradiction, irrespective of the material processes at play.
Years later, Mao would popularise the phrase “The Party Leads Everything”, a phrase that continues to be heavily emphasised by Xi Jinping today.
The practical implications of this approach can be seen in 1957, when Mao issued another article, “On the Correct Handling of the Contradictions Among the People”, where he prescribed a ready-made set of resolutions to various conflicts happening in Chinese society after the CCP took power. Based on this, the party bureaucracy was tasked to ‘determine’ the nature of each conflict brought to them, and prescribe a solution in accordance with Mao’s guidelines.
This extremely formalistic, prescriptive, and top-down approach did not aim to genuinely solve the problems within the masses, much less to understand their material causes, but simply to place them under tight control of the party by removing any threats to the bureaucracy’s rule.
The need for dialectical materialism
On Contradiction’s schematic cookbook for ‘resolving’ contradictions is a disservice to the task of educating communists around the world. The apparent simplicity of Mao’s formulations may appear easier to grasp, but they do not offer a useful guide for understanding the real, underlying dynamics of the class struggle, war and revolution. In fact, they are positively harmful.
Time and time again, the ideas contained in On Contradiction have been relied upon to justify fundamentally Stalinist, not Marxist, ideas of class collaboration. As much as On Contradiction rails against ‘dogmatism’, the whole of its content defends the Stalinist dogma of searching for a ‘progressive’, ‘patriotic’ national bourgeoisie to submit the communists, workers, and peasants to. This is indeed a dogma, as in a position which is held to be true regardless of the evidence of China’s own history.
Mao did not foresee the real course of the Chinese Revolution, but Stalinists have never foreseen anything. That is precisely what On Contradiction is all about: it is not an explanation of the real logic of China’s revolution, but a cover for the shifting needs of the CCP bureaucracy.
The real purpose of dialectical materialism lies in affording us a genuine understanding of the processes taking place, so that we are not wrongfooted by the class struggle, or overawed by temporary trends. It teaches us to start with the fundamental contradictions of capitalist society, so that we can see how present conditions will turn into their opposites: booms will become slumps, and political alliances and moods will give way to splits and crises.
In power, Mao constantly performed dramatic zigzags. He went from attempting to create autarky and to secure China’s complete independence, to quickly abandoning it after it led to massive famines and deaths. He went from railing against US imperialism for years, to meeting with Nixon in 1972 to counter the USSR. These dramatic somersaults were all done to secure the CCP’s rule in the immediate future, blind to the fundamental truth that you cannot build socialism in one country and without workers’ democracy.
In other words, Mao’s disregard for objective dialectical processes, his failure to appreciate the real contradictions in society, led to a lack of foresight and completely unforeseen consequences to his actions. This is an important reason why China today is a capitalist economy.
Ironically, On Contradiction’s vague talk of rejecting ‘dogma’, studying things concretely and accepting that contradictions change, remains as a useful cover for this betrayal of the planned economy by the Chinese bureaucracy. Whenever they betray their previous positions, such as by moving towards capitalism, they can say, “as Mao said, contradictions and their solutions change. We mustn’t be dogmatic”. That is why to this day the CCP still hails this text as an important achievement.
Communists therefore have a duty to carefully study Marxist theory, above all dialectical materialism, and learn to distinguish it from the revisionist caricatures of Stalinism and Maoism. In an epoch when a successful world socialist revolution is more urgent than ever, we cannot afford the defeats that Stalinist ideas are guaranteed to bring.
References
[1] G W F Hegel, Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), §119, Oxford University Press, 1975, pg 173
[2] K Marx, F Engels, ‘The Holy Family’, Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 4, Progress Publishers, 1975, pg 35
[3] ibid. pg 36
[4] Z D Mao, On Contradiction, Foreign Language Press, 1964, pg 11
[5] ibid. pg 17
[6] ibid. pg 31
[7] ibid. pg 32
[8] ibid.
[9] Original available here, our translation and emphasis
[10] The Second Congress of the Communist International: Proceedings, Publishing House of the Communist International: America, 1921, pg 113
[11] K S Chiang, Soviet Russia in China, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957, pg 208
[12] L E Eastman, The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 13, Part 2, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pg 570
[13] ibid. pg 16
[14] ibid. pg 24-25
