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p At the 9th Congress of the CPC it was declared that for 50 years (that is, from 1919) Mao had been combining the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism with the practice of the Chinese revolution. In the light of the historical facts, this assertion is quite groundless. In his earliest works, Mao was already elaborating non-Marxist ideas: in his first work, “An Essay on Physical Education" (1917), the 24-year-old Mao declared the physical health of the nation to be a means of China’s national resurgence. In his second work, an article entitled “The Great Alliance of the People" (1919), he said nothing about the working class as the vanguard and leader of the revolution, and made no mention of the proletarian dictatorship. In 1926, as one of the leaders of the CPC, Mao wrote an article, “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society”,  [27•1  which gave a petty-bourgeois view of China’s social structure.

p That is not at all surprising. Mao’s traditional education naturally excluded the study of Marxist theory. As he set out to educate himself, Mao was unable to gain a correct idea of Marxism, because he obtained his information about it mainly from the writings of various petty-bourgeois socialists.

p Moreover, Mao was able to obtain an idea about Marxism only in translation, because he knew no foreign languages and was unable to read the writings of the Marxist-Leninist classics in the original. What is more, by the early 1940s, and in fact even as late as 1949, a very insignificant part of these works had been translated into Chinese.  [27•2 

p His main source for the study of Marxism were popular writings, mainly textbooks by Soviet philosophers, which were made available to the CPC’s active members through the translations of Ai Szu-chi and others.

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p Although these Soviet philosophical textbooks did consider some of the important theoretical problems directly connected with the practice of socialist construction, specifically the problem of contradictions in exploitative and socialist societies, their authors’ main purpose was to provide a popular aid on Marxist philosophy for a mass readership.

p In the Soviet Union, these writings were of great importance in the struggle against the mechanistic and idealistic distortions of Marxism, and in educating Party members, government functionaries and scientists in the spirit of Marxist philosophy. In China, the Soviet textbooks on philosophy helped the Communists to obtain a knowledge of Marxism and raise the theoretical level of CPC cadres.

p Mao thus had ample opportunity to acquire a correct understanding of the fundamentals of Marxist philosophy, but the content of his philosophical writings shows that he failed to master the whole body of knowledge in the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism contained in the Soviet textbooks.

p As has been said, Mao’s first philosophical work was the pamphlet, Dialectical Materialism, which he wrote in Yenan on the basis of a series of lectures he gave at a Party school. The contents of the pamphlet give an idea of the problems he dealt with.

p Chapter I. Idealism and Materialism.

p 1) The war between two armies in philosophy.

p 2) The difference between idealism and materialism.

p 3) The source of the rise and development of idealism.

p 4) The source of the rise and development of materialism.

p Chapter II. Dialectical Materialism.

p 1) Dialectical materialism—a revolutionary weapon of the proletariat.

p 2) The attitude of dialectical materialism to the legacy of the old philosophy.

p 3) The unity of world view and methodology in dialectical materialism.

p 4) The problem of the subject of materialist dialectics (what does materialist dialectics serve to study?).

p 5) On matter.

p 6) On motion (on development).

p 7) On space and time.

p 8) On consciousness.

p 9) On reflection.

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p 10) On truth.

p 11) On practice (on the connection between cognition and practice, theory and reality, knowledge and action).

p Chapter III. Materialist Dialectics.

p 1) The law of the unity of opposites.

p a) Two views of development.

p b) The formal-logical law of identity and the dialectical law of contradiction.

p c) The universality of contradiction.

p d) The specific nature of contradiction.

p e) The principal contradiction and the principal aspect of contradiction.

p f) Identity and struggle of opposites.

p g) The place of antagonism in the line of contradictions.

p The pamphlet was published at Talien sometime between 1945 and 1949. Earlier, in 1940, the journal Minchu carried its first chapter, entitled “Dialectical Materialism”.

p Our detailed study of the text of the Dialectical Materialism pamphlet shows that it was written on the basis of two Soviet works: the textbook Dialectical Materialism (written under the direction of Academician M. Mitin), which was published in Moscow in 1933, and the article “Dialectical Materialism”, in Volume 22 of the first edition of the Bolshaya Sovietskaya Entsiklopedia.

p Mao’s pamphlet is essentially a digest of these two works. Now and again, he simply “borrows” various propositions from Soviet writings and slightly modifies them. This applies especially to philosophical problems which were either not dealt with in traditional Chinese philosophy at all, or were treated on a low theoretical level, because their treatment required both a grounding in natural science and information about the world-wide historico-philosophical process. This applies to the problems of the material nature of the world, matter and the forms of its existence, notably space and time, consciousness, and the relationship between objective, relative and absolute truth.

p But even while recapitulating in his Dialectical Materialism pamphlet the correct propositions taken from the abovementioned works, Mao oversimplifies and vulgarises them. Here are a few examples.

p 1. Characterising the class essence of the two main philosophical trends, the authors of the Soviet textbook 30 Dialectical Materialism quite rightly remarked on the possibility of idealist theories reflecting the social needs of the epoch. They said: “In its historical development, idealism was the ideology of the exploiting classes and as a rule had a reactionary part to play. Materialism, whose development was an expression of the world outlook of the revolutionary classes, had to make its way in the class society in ceaseless struggle against idealism, the philosophy of reaction. Of course, no obligatory historical pattern can be established in this sphere. There are instances when immature social classes expressed their new revolutionary demands in the language of idealism (German idealism in the early 19th century, the theories of natural law, and, in part, Utopian socialism). On the other hand, the militant French materialism of the 18th century was the ideology of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie. The materialism of the 17th century, Engels said, had an aristocratic origin."  [30•1 

p Mao Tse-tung borrowed only the first two ideas: “In the process of its historical development, idealism was the form of consciousness of the exploiting classes and had a reactionary role to play. By contrast, materialism is the world outlook of the revolutionary classes. It originates and develops in class society in ceaseless struggle against idealism, the reactionary philosophy.” The result is a primitive and vulgarised scheme of the history of philosophical thought which rules out the possibility of recognising the achievements of the idealists in developing theoretical thinking.

p 2. According to Mao, the basic social cause behind the origination of idealism is the antithesis between mental and physical labour. He says: “...Initially, idealism emerges as the product of the superstition and ignorance of a savage primitive man. But with the development of production the gap between physical and mental labour comes to be the main condition promoting the formation of idealism as a philosophical trend. The social division of labour is the result of the development of the productive forces of society; it subsequently results in the separation of men among whom mental labour becomes the main speciality. But so long as the productive forces remained weak, the gap between the 31 two forms of labour was not yet complete. Only after classes and private property appear and exploitation becomes the basis for the existence of the ruling class, does a great change occur: mental labour becomes the privilege ol the ruling class, and physical labour, the lot of the oppressed classes. The ruling class begins to take a distorted view of its relations with the oppressed classes, claiming that it is not the working people who provide the means of subsistence for the members of the ruling class but that, on the contrary, it is the members of the ruling class who provide the means of subsistence for the working people. That is why they have contempt for physical labour, and that is the way idealistic views appear. The elimination of the distinctions between physical and mental labour is one of the conditions for eliminating idealistic philosophy."  [31•1 

p Mao wrongly identifies the causes producing the illusion that ideology develops independently, and the social roots of idealism. Actually, the division into mental and physical labour does deform men and establishes definite social functions for some of them, but it also gives an impetus to the development of society’s productive forces, science and the arts. Evidence of this comes from the history of the first society with antagonistic classes. Engels wrote: “It was slavery that first made possible the division of labour between agriculture and industry on a larger scale, and thereby also Hellenism, the flowering of the ancient world. Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science...."  [31•2  As for the social roots of idealism, they lie in the division of society into classes and in the urge of the exploiting classes to maintain and consolidate their domination.

p Let us add that when writing his pamphlet, Mao himself had a very modest opinion of it. He wrote: “This lecture course of mine cannot likewise be considered a good one, because I myself have just started to study dialectics and am unable to write a good book."  [31•3 

p When preparing his Selected Works for the press in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Mao included in them only a part of his Dialectical Materialism pamphlet, namely, the 32 last section of Chapter II, as an article, “On Practice”, and Chapter III (with the exception of Section 2, “The formallogical law of identity and the dialectical law of contradiction”) as an article “On Contradiction".  [32•1  These articles also contain a number of borrowings from the above-mentioned textbook, Dialectical Materialism, and the article “ Dialectical Materialism" in the Bolshaya Soinetskaya Entsiklopcdia.

p Does the fact of Mao’s borrowing and use of various propositions from popular Soviet works give ground to regard him as a rank-and-file Marxist philosopher, let alone an “outstanding Marxist-Leninist"? Is it right to say that Marxist terminology “mastered” in this way is evidence that Soviet philosophers are to blame for the emergence of Maoism, as bourgeois propaganda and some scientists in the West have claimed? The answer to both questions is an emphatic no.

p The fact is that the borrowing of Marxist propositions from Soviet writings goes hand in hand not only with oversimplification and vulgarisation in interpreting a number of problems but also with anti-Marxist propositions. This is especially evident in Mao’s treatment of the principal law of dialectics. In fact, his digest gives way to downright distortion, to say nothing of the fact that in range and depth Mao’s pamphlet does not bear any comparison with the works of Soviet philosophers.

p The fact that the terminology in Mao’s articles “On Contradiction" and “On Practice" is outwardly similar to those in Marxist writings, a fact which is due to Mao’s borrowing of various propositions from Soviet textbooks, creates the wrong impression about their real content and true value.

We find a further distortion and vulgarisation of Marxism in Mao’s articles and statements on philosophy in the 1950s and the 1960s (for instance, in his article “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People”, 1957, and in his “Directions Concerning the Discussion on ‘Dichotomy of Unity’ ”, 1964). The Maoists have tried to obscure the real essence of the “thought of Mao Tse-tung" by 33 playing up his use of Marxist phraseology, his extensive quotations from the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, and the formal similarity of some Maoist postulates with Marxist ideas.