Empiricism and Subjectivism of Mao Tse-tung
p The chief features of the epistemology of dialectical materialism (the list is far from exhaustive) are as follows:
p a) the object and reality are regarded as man’s "objective activity”, i.e., Marxism associates the process of knowledge 155 as the reflection of the objective world with man’s revolutionary, practical-critical activity;
p b) Marxism holds that: "Dialectics is the theory of knowledge of (Hegel and) Marxism. This is the ‘aspect’ of the matter (it is not ’an aspect’ but the essence of the matter) to which Plekhanov, not to speak of other Marxists, paid no attention.” [155•1 ;
p c) Marxism demands that "each proposition should be considered (a) only historically, (P) only in connection with others, (i) only in connection with the concrete experience of history.” [155•2 ;
p d) Marxism has adopted and develops the materialist theory of reflection. "From living perception to abstract thought, and from this to practice—such is the dialectical path of the cognition of truth, of the cognition of objective reality.” [155•3 Lenin emphasised that dialectics understood as epistemology reveals the history of knowledge and the inner laws of the transition from ignorance to knowledge.
p On the basis of this fundamental premise the theory of knowledge of dialectical materialism examines a wide range of general methodological problems concerning the relationship between mind and matter, thereby revealing the dialectical link between mind and matter, the role of labour and other forms of human activity in the emergence and development of consciousness, the active role of language in expressing consciousness and in the accumulation and transmission of knowledge. Marxism-Leninism also examines the reverse process—the influence of man as a thinking being on the world.
p Marxist epistemology is largely concerned with exploring the paths of knowledge, its forms and stages. Great stress is placed on the dialectical essence of the process of cognition, and careful study is made of the various forms of logic, the laws of thought, the nature of concepts, judgements, views, conclusions and the role of theories and hypotheses in the discovery of truth.
p A basic premise of Marxism-Leninism is that the truth is a process of the movement of knowledge from subjective 156 ideas to objective truth via practice (and technology). This was noted by Lenin. The aim is to reveal the relationship between theory and practice and demostrate the active role of this relationship in man’s efforts to transform the world.
p In order to acquire a correct understanding of Marxist epistemology it is essential to examine the materialist theory of reflection in close association with the dialectics of absolute, relative and objective truth, bringing out their contradictory unity, their mutual transition into one another, the spiral nature of the process of cognition of truth, the relationship between the historical and the logical, the importance of the principle of elevation from the abstract to the concrete in understanding the essence of things in their dialectical concretion and many aspects, their interpenetration and mutual transition.
p Another major question of Marxist epistemology is the problem of dialectical logic, the study of categories as forms of cognition of the essence of the objective world, analysis of the laws and features of the dialectical process of cognition of nature, society and thought.
p We have no intention of expounding in detail the theory of knowledge of dialectical materialism. However, a brief look at the basic problems of Marxist epistemology and a comparison with the way they are treated in the articles of Mao Tse-tung, shows the absurdity of the claims that vulgarised repetition of a few elementary premises from manuals of Marxist philosophy constitute "the very best generalisation of the basic content of the theory of knowledge of dialectical materialism”. The “profound” content of the Maoist "theory of knowledge" can be summed up in the following statement. "Often, correct knowledge can be arrived at only after many repetitions of the process leading from matter to consciousness and then back to matter, that is, leading from practice to knowledge and then back to practice. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge, the dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge.” [156•1
p In "On Practice" Mao repeats and chews over the basically correct idea that practice is the source of knowledge, but in so doing he vulgarises and distorts it, identifying practice with experience and making direct personal experience the 157 source of all knowledge. Thus, he writes: "Anyone who wants to know a thing has no way of doing so except by coming into contact with it, i.e., by living (practising) in its surroundings.... If you want to gain knowledge, you must participate in the practice of changing reality.... If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must participate in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates from direct experience.” [157•1 Or again: ”. . .Marxism teaches that in our approach to a problem we should start not from abstract definitions but from objective facts and, by analysing these facts, determine the way we shall go, our policies and methods.” [157•2 A reader who is unaware that Mao identifies practice with subjective perceptual experience and reduces objective reality as necessary being to the sum of facts (the insertion of the word “objective” makes no real difference) might well be duped into regarding the above statements as correct Marxist theses. Mori Nobushige points out that Mao fails to draw a distinction between materialist, and positivist individual, concretion and that the former is dissolved in the latter, so that Mao’s references to "specific essence" and "specific contradictions" can contain nothing but pragmatism. Nobushige notes how Mao, in both theory and practice, confuses the concepts of “reality” and “actuality”. This represents a failure to draw a distinction between phenomena in their totality and empirical facts as simple actual being, on the one hand, and reality as the manifestation of what is essential and fundamental in the development of nature, society and knowledge, on the other.
p Since Maoist epistemology does not distinguish between the logical and the historical in the development of the process of knowledge and ignores the method of elevation from the abstract to the concrete, Mao Tse-tung’s conclusions are abstract postulates, devoid of the wealth of concrete reality. Mao’s vague general formulae, although "derived from analysis" of certain "objective facts”, remain lifeless, incomplete, one-sided postulates, since they are not enriched with concrete content in the course of collation with practice, with experience. In contrast to Maoism, Marxism-Leninism reviews practice as the sum practice of the working class of 158 a given country and the practice of the working class of all other countries taken together, as national and international experience (in the case of social experience) in their entirety, as the sum of the scientific experience of past and present, the experience derived from experiments in a given science and allied sciences (in the case of knowledge in the social sciences).
Marx wrote that the method of elevatoin from the abstract to the concrete is simply a method by means of which thought takes hold of the concrete and reproduces it as the spiritually concrete, and that it is never under any circumstances the process of emergence of the concrete itself. Since Mao Tsetung’s concepts and deductions never go through the stage of taking hold of the concrete, with Mao the combination of theory with practice is frequently achieved by postulating reality from abstract definitions. In this case theory simply becomes an apology for subjectivist practice.
Notes
[155•1] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38, p. 362.
[155•2] Ibid., Vol. 35, p. 250.
[155•3] Ibid., Vol. 38, p. 171.
[156•1] Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, pp. 208–09.
[157•1] Mao Tse-tung, Selected Works, Volume One, pp. 286, 288.
[157•2] Ibid., Volume Four, p. 69.
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