To mark the 129th anniversary of the birth of Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong on December 26, Fight Back News Service is circulating his famous 1937 article “Combat Liberalism.” Combat Liberalism

By Mao Zedong

We stand for active ideological struggle because it is the weapon for ensuring unity within the Party and the revolutionary organizations in the interest of our fight. Every Communist and revolutionary should take up this weapon.

But liberalism rejects ideological struggle and stands for unprincipled peace, thus giving rise to a decadent, Philistine attitude and bringing about political degeneration in certain units and individuals in the Party and the revolutionary organizations.

Liberalism manifests itself in various ways.

To let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong, and refrain from principled argument because he is an old acquaintance, a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague or old subordinate. Or to touch on the matter lightly instead of going into it thoroughly, so as to keep on good terms. The result is that both the organization and the individual are harmed. This is one type of liberalism.

To indulge in irresponsible criticism in private instead of actively putting forward one's suggestions to the organization. To say nothing to people to their faces but to gossip behind their backs, or to say nothing at a meeting but to gossip afterwards. To show no regard at all for the principles of collective life but to follow one's own inclination. This is a second type.

To let things drift if they do not affect one personally; to say as little as possible while knowing perfectly well what is wrong, to be worldly wise and play safe and seek only to avoid blame. This is a third type.

Not to obey orders but to give pride of place to one's own opinions. To demand special consideration from the organization but to reject its discipline. This is a fourth type.

To indulge in personal attacks, pick quarrels, vent personal spite or seek revenge instead of entering into an argument and struggling against incorrect views for the sake of unity or progress or getting the work done properly. This is a fifth type.

To hear incorrect views without rebutting them and even to hear counter-revolutionary remarks without reporting them, but instead to take them calmly as if nothing had happened. This is a sixth type.

To be among the masses and fail to conduct propaganda and agitation or speak at meetings or conduct investigations and inquiries among them, and instead to be indifferent to them and show no concern for their well-being, forgetting that one is a Communist and behaving as if one were an ordinary non-Communist. This is a seventh type.

To see someone harming the interests of the masses and yet not feel indignant, or dissuade or stop him or reason with him, but to allow him to continue. This is an eighth type.

To work half-heartedly without a definite plan or direction; to work perfunctorily and muddle along—“So long as one remains a monk, one goes on tolling the bell.” This is a ninth type.

To regard oneself as having rendered great service to the revolution, to pride oneself on being a veteran, to disdain minor assignments while being quite unequal to major tasks, to be slipshod in work and slack in study. This is a tenth type.

To be aware of one's own mistakes and yet make no attempt to correct them, taking a liberal attitude towards oneself. This is an eleventh type.

We could name more. But these eleven are the principal types.

They are all manifestations of liberalism.

Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads. It is an extremely bad tendency.

Liberalism stems from petty-bourgeois selfishness, it places personal interests first and the interests of the revolution second, and this gives rise to ideological, political and organizational liberalism.

People who are liberals look upon the principles of Marxism as abstract dogma. They approve of Marxism, but are not prepared to practice it or to practice it in full; they are not prepared to replace their liberalism by Marxism. These people have their Marxism, but they have their liberalism as well—they talk Marxism but practice liberalism; they apply Marxism to others but liberalism to themselves. They keep both kinds of goods in stock and find a use for each. This is how the minds of certain people work.

Liberalism is a manifestation of opportunism and conflicts fundamentally with Marxism. It is negative and objectively has the effect of helping the enemy; that is why the enemy welcomes its preservation in our midst. Such being its nature, there should be no place for it in the ranks of the revolution.

We must use Marxism, which is positive in spirit, to overcome liberalism, which is negative. A Communist should have largeness of mind and he should be staunch and active, looking upon the interests of the revolution as his very life and subordinating his personal interests to those of the revolution; always and everywhere he should adhere to principle and wage a tireless struggle against all incorrect ideas and actions, so as to consolidate the collective life of the Party and strengthen the ties between the Party and the masses; he should be more concerned about the Party and the masses than about any private person, and more concerned about others than about himself. Only thus can he be considered a communist.

All loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.

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In our study of the three laws of dialectics presented by Engels, we’ve examined the law of contradiction and the law of the transformation of quantity into quality. Finally, Engels says that the third law of dialectics is the “law of the negation of the negation.”

We have seen that Mao Zedong has argued that the law of contradiction is the primary law of dialectics. In our last article we looked at how the transformation of quantity into quality was, in fact, an instance of the law of contradiction. Here, we will examine Mao’s argument against the negation of the negation as a dialectical law.

First, what does the negation of the negation mean, and why have Marxists thought of it as a worthwhile way to explain dialectical progress? The concept comes from the most advanced philosophy of the time in which Marx and Engels were working: Hegel’s dialectical idealism. It describes a process in a sequence of steps, starting with an affirmation, followed by a negation that arises as a result of that affirmation, and then followed by a negation of that negation. Hegel was talking about ideas, and so talked about this in terms of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

Engels makes use of this Hegelian language in referring to the negation of the negation as a dialectical law, but this has the potential to create some confusion among Marxists that we would benefit from sorting out.

Materialist dialectics is concerned with material reality, not just ideas. So to illustrate this sequence, let’s consider capitalism as our first affirmation. Marx says the bourgeoisie creates its own gravediggers. In other words, bourgeois society creates its own negation, the proletariat, a class born out of capitalism itself. Capitalism itself gives rise to the necessity of socialist revolution. The proletariat, through socialist revolution, therefore negates the bourgeoisie, capitalist relations, and so on, step by step. But in doing so, the proletariat also eliminates the conditions for its own existence as a class. This is what Lenin describes in The State and Revolution as socialism’s “withering away,” which allows for a stateless and classless society – communism – to come forth. This is the second negation, the negation of the negation, by this way of looking at it.

Taken step by step we see that first we have the original affirmation, the thesis. This is capitalism in our illustration. This is followed by an antithesis, which arises from and negates the original thesis. This is the first negation: socialism. Finally we have the synthesis, which negates the antithesis that had negated the original thesis: communism. Thus the final synthesis is the negation of the negation. Essentially, in this progression of thesis – antithesis – synthesis, the final synthesis serves to negate the antithesis that itself negated the original thesis, while also preserving elements of both in a new unity or identity.

In this process, the “law of the negation of the negation” is what accounts for the “spiral development” that makes progress, rather than mere repetition, possible. This synthesis carries forward something from both the original affirmation and the first negation, synthesizing them, that is uniting them, into something qualitatively new. This new unity becomes a new thesis, or a new affirmation, and the sequence begins again, but at a higher level than before.

This conception of the dialectic accounts for progress by describing how this step-by-step process leads from one thing to the next, based on resolving the contradictions that arise from the process. Of course this isn’t entirely incorrect, but it is inaccurate. This inaccuracy can lead to some confusion as to what is really taking place, dialectically. The “law of the negation of the negation” is helpful to a point, but we have to go further. Revolutionary science can’t rest with simple explanations.

The thinking behind the “law of the negation of the negation” confuses the issue in two interrelated ways. First, it gives us too linear an understanding of dialectics, which doesn’t account for the complex processes where multiple contradictions are at work at the same time, which we’ve described in our articles on contradiction. And second, by starting and ending with identity, it enshrines identity, or unity, as primary over contradiction, or struggle.

To truly put the dialectic on a materialist basis also means, as Mao says in his “Talk on Questions of Philosophy,” to understand that “every link in the chain of events is both affirmation and negation.” In other words, thesis, antithesis and synthesis aren’t separated from each other in a metaphysical way. Affirmation and negation are present at every moment of any given process.

In his essay “On Contradiction,” Mao made a great contribution to the Marxist-Leninist philosophy of dialectical materialism by clearly explaining that the materialist dialectic cannot be understood as a simple, linear sequence, but as a complex structural matrix of many unevenly developed contradictions all at work simultaneously. It is important to note that if we ignore the complexity of contradiction in favor of a simple, linear sequence, we risk taking a mechanical approach to solving problems by failing to recognize the significance of secondary contradictions in the situation. People who claim that everything that isn’t pure class struggle is a distraction are guilty of this error.

Furthermore, the “law of the negation of the negation” preserves a Hegelian metaphysical framework. The Hegelian dialectic begins and ends with identity, mediated by struggle. This first identity is the “thesis” of Hegel’s triad, the original affirmation, and the Hegelian “synthesis” (the negation of the negation) is a new identity, with struggle (“antithesis”) acting merely as a bridge between them. This is an important point: in the Hegelian sequence contradiction exists primarily between identities rather than within them. Here identity is absolute and struggle is relative. In reality, on the contrary, contradiction is present within and essential to every moment of the process. Bourgeois society contains a multitude of contradictions (affirmations and negations), as does socialism, and so will communism. Struggle is inherent in every part of the process. Every identity is teeming with contradictions. If we don’t grasp this point we will think that external contradictions should be the focus of our attention, rather than internal contradictions that tend to drive things forward.

The law of contradiction, as Marxism-Leninism understands it, means that the main thing in dialectics is division, rather than identity. To sum this up, the Chinese revolutionaries put forward the slogan “one divides into two,” against the Hegelian “two fuse into one,” emphasizing the primary place of contradiction. Struggle isn’t just a bridge between the old identity and the new. No, in fact, identity without contradiction cannot exist: everything divides into two.

This may seem like an overly philosophical point, but it is important for revolutionaries to grasp to avoid errors based in metaphysical thinking. The “law of the negation of the negation” would have it that dialectics is a continuous movement towards unity, or synthesis. Mao Zedong argues, on the contrary, that “the life of dialectics is the continuous movement towards opposites.” The Hegelian sequence leaves us with a dialectic that sees unity as absolute, and contradiction as relative, temporary, and conditional. On the contrary, affirmation and negation exist within every moment of every process. Contradictions exist within the very essence of things, not just between them, and it is those internal contradictions that are the primary motivators of change.

Qualitative change doesn’t result from a drive towards synthesis, but from the transformation of the principal and secondary aspects of a contradiction into their opposites. It isn’t by uniting two contradictory things that we make historical progress, but by dividing them. We don’t make socialist revolution by uniting with the bourgeoisie. It is true that socialism carries forward elements of capitalist relations of production in the transition to communism, but the main thing isn’t to preserve those elements, but to destroy and uproot them piece by piece. Qualitative change results from the quantitative accumulation of force which changes the balance of power.

In privileging identity over struggle, the “law of the negation of the negation” can also put Marxists at risk of a kind of fatalism, where Communism exists as the “final cause” at the End of History, drawing everything towards it as the final identity where everything is ultimately resolved. Communism isn’t a final identity without any contradictions. Contradictions will exist within communism as well. Change and progress will continue. History will never end.

Again, the “law of the negation of the negation” is useful to a point, but if we don’t take it farther we are left open to metaphysical errors. It gives us too linear a description of the dialectical process, and it separates affirmation and negation in a metaphysical way that privileges identity. As Marxism-Leninism has advanced it has advanced the philosophy of dialectical materialism beyond the metaphysical, linear framework of Hegelianism. Mao accomplished this by theorizing the concepts of the principal contradiction, principal and secondary aspects of contradictions, and the uneven development of contradictions within a process. Mao’s writings on dialectical materialism give us a powerful weapon to analyze the forces at work in the complex processes we face.

Next in our series we’ll look at how these processes shape history. In the following articles we’ll look at the categories and concepts of the materialist conception of history, that is, historical materialism, and what they offer Marxist-Leninists as theoretical tools for changing the world.

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In our last article we looked at some of the core concepts of dialectical materialism. We broke down the meaning of contradiction, and we looked at how contradictions develop unevenly in complex processes, into principal and secondary contradictions. We also looked at how any given contradiction has its own principal and secondary aspects, with the principal aspect playing the dominant role. Now let's look more closely at identity in contradiction and the role of antagonism in resolving contradictions of different types.

In “On Contradiction” Mao Zedong writes, “In speaking of the identity of opposites in given conditions, what we are referring to is real and concrete opposites and the real and concrete transformations of opposites into one another.”

In one sense, identity means that the two aspects of a given contradiction are also conditions for each other's existence. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without the proletariat, and vice versa. The class of exploiters depends entirely on the existence of a class of exploited from whom they draw their wealth and over whom they wield their power. Without the class of exploiters, the exploited too would not exist as a class. In this contradiction, the capitalist class plays the dominant role. They control the means of production along with the superstructure of the state and its repressive and ideological apparatuses.

However, the two aspects of this contradiction can exchange places. As Mao puts it, “by means of revolution the proletariat, at one time the ruled, is transformed into the ruler, while the bourgeoisie, the erstwhile ruler, is transformed into the ruled and changes its position to that originally occupied by its opposite.” From this qualitatively new position, the proletariat can wield state power in the socialist transition to eliminate exploitation, thereby eliminating the conditions for the existence of both itself and the bourgeoisie as classes.

One way to think about this is to say that identity is what holds things together. In other words, identity represents the real, concrete relationships that bind these opposing forces to each other. In the case of the working class and capitalists, these are the real, concrete relations of production. The capitalists own the means of production, and workers have to sell their labor to the capitalists to survive. Nevertheless, Lenin makes an important point here. “The unity (coincidence, identity, equal action) of opposites is conditional, temporary, transitory, relative. The struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, just as development and motion are absolute.” This is crucial for revolutionaries to grasp. Struggle and change are both constant and necessary.

So, to sum up, identity is the concrete relationship between contradictory aspects. On the one hand, it means that the two aspects of a contradiction are interdependent. On the other hand, it means that they can exchange places between which aspect is principal and which is secondary.

But what role does antagonism play in the identity and struggle of opposites? Mao says that “antagonism is one form, but not the only form, of the struggle of opposites.” In his essay “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” Mao divides contradictions into two categories: those between the masses of the people and the enemy, and those among the people themselves. Contradictions between the people and the enemy are antagonistic. Contradictions among the people are non-antagonistic. For example, under capitalist society, the contradiction between the capitalists and the working class is an antagonistic contradiction. The capitalists derive their wealth through the exploitation of the workers. They get rich from the surplus value produced by workers, that is, the difference between the value added by living labor and the amount the capitalists pay the workers for that labor power. Over the long run, the more wealth the capitalists accumulate, the less the workers are able to take home in pay, and vice versa. This means the material interests of these two classes are directly and irreconcilably opposed to one another. One benefits only at the expense of the other.

But there also exist contradictions among the masses of the people themselves. These contradictions are not antagonistic, not irreconcilably opposed to one another. Non-antagonistic contradictions are resolved through a process of unity-criticism-unity. This is a peaceful and democratic method of resolving non-antagonistic contradictions that means “starting from the desire for unity, resolving contradictions through criticism or struggle, and arriving at a new unity on a new basis.” This is the way communists should seek to resolve contradictions among themselves and among the broad masses of the people.

This brings to a close our preliminary discussion of the primary law of dialectics, the law of contradiction, which Engels called the law of the interpenetration of opposites. It is one of our most powerful and important theoretical tools and deserves serious and ongoing study, well beyond the limitations of these short articles. From here we understand how contradiction operates well enough to proceed, and so in our next article we will look more closely at how contradiction operates in the transformation of quantity into quality.

See our full series of articles on Marxist-Leninist theory here.

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Friedrich Engels lists three laws of dialectics, but, as we shall see, the most important is the law of contradiction, which he calls the law of the interpenetration of opposites. Before we discuss the other two (the transformation of quantity into quality, and the negation of the negation), let’s look closely at contradiction.

Many of the great theorists of Marxism-Leninism wrote about dialectics in general and contradiction in particular. Mao Zedong extrapolated from the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, along with the direct experience of the Chinese revolution, a systematic theory of materialist dialectics, particularly in his essay “On Contradiction.” He was the first to explain dialectics in terms of the uneven development of contradictions, of principal and secondary contradictions, and, within that, of principal and secondary aspects of those contradictions.

What, then, is a contradiction? When we talk about a contradiction, we are talking about two opposing forces within any given concrete process. Contradiction is universal. The interaction of opposing forces takes place within all phenomena. Lenin said, “The splitting in two of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence of dialectics.” Marx’s great work, Capital, is an analysis of the particular contradictions at work, from top to bottom, within bourgeois society. Through looking at those contradictions Marx was able to demonstrate the laws of motion that govern capitalist society.

Capitalism is a complex process. Thus, in capitalism, there are many contradictions at work at the same time. There is the contradiction between the ruling class of exploiters (the bourgeoisie) and the class of exploited (the working class, or proletariat). But capitalism also brings with it monopolies, imperialism, national oppression, and so on. There are numerous classes and social groups with their own interests and struggles. Even among the various strata of a particular class there are different contradictions. But if we look closely at all of these contradictions, we find that capitalism is at the root of all of them.

In his analysis of capitalism, Marx found that the basis of the class struggle within the capitalist mode of production is the contradiction between the social character of production and the private character of accumulation.

Millions of people work in a complex division of labor to produce the wealth of society, while that wealth is accumulated in the hands of a small minority of people who own the means of production. In other words, production is social, but profit is private. This contradiction is the basis of the class struggle and the driving force behind the cycles of capitalist crisis. Mao says this contradiction is fundamental and points out that even as capitalism developed into its current stage, imperialism, this fundamental contradiction at the core of capitalism itself remained. As long as capitalism continues to exist, this fundamental contradiction continues to sharpen. The eventual resolution of this contradiction through proletarian revolution will mark the end of capitalism and the beginning of a new process, that of socialist construction.

While the fundamental contradiction between social production and private accumulation is basic to what capitalism is, there are still many other contradictions at work in such a complex process, and these contradictions can play lesser or greater roles at different times and under different conditions. The principal, or determining, contradiction within that can also change, given the dynamics of the situation. Mao argues that “in capitalist society the two forces in contradiction, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, form the principal contradiction.” However, Mao argues that in national liberation wars against imperialism, the principal contradiction is different, as the class conflicts within that nation take a back seat to the struggle for liberation. We can expand or reduce the scope of our analysis, to look at contradictions operating on a global scale, down to the contradictions operating on a very small, local scale.

Currently, we live in the era of imperialism. Imperialism, led by the United States, strives to dominate the world, politically, militarily and economically, and the principal contradiction on a global scale is the contradiction between imperialism and the oppressed nations. To say that other contradictions are secondary isn’t to diminish their importance, but rather to say that these contradictions are influenced and determined by the principal contradiction. We can’t deal with principal or secondary contradictions if we don't know which is which. For this reason Mao stresses that “Once this principal contradiction is grasped, all problems can be readily solved.”

Likewise, contradictions develop unevenly. In any given contradiction, one side of that contradiction is the principal, or dominant, aspect. The principal aspect of the contradiction is what plays the leading role within that contradiction, and the nature of a thing is determined by the aspect which plays this leading role. But the principal and secondary aspects also can exchange places. For example, in capitalist society the bourgeoisie and the proletariat exist side by side, but the bourgeoisie plays the leading role. In socialist society the proletariat will take over the leading role to dismantle capitalist productive relations and build socialism. So we see then that when the principal and secondary aspects of a contradiction exchange place it causes a qualitative change in the situation.

This understanding of how contradictions operate in complex processes gives us a deeper understanding of the laws of motion that govern that process. For this reason, dialectical materialism is a powerful tool for revolutionaries to break down a complex process and determine where and how to act.

It is on the basis of this dialectical analysis of the terrain of struggle in the United States that we talk about a united front against monopoly capitalism, under the leadership of the working class and its party, with the strategic alliance of the multinational working class and the movements of oppressed nationalities as its core. This is a strategy for revolution, based on the concrete analysis of our concrete conditions, which takes into account the complex matrix of principal and secondary contradictions, both within the imperialist United States and on a global scale.

This method of analysis also functions on a tactical level, in particular, on the ground struggles. We can use dialectical materialism to find the principal and secondary contradictions at work in a given struggle, such as in a union contract negotiation or in struggles against police brutality, and use that analysis to look at the interests of the different forces at work, how they interact, and where to aim our blows.

In our next article we will proceed to look more deeply at the identity and struggle of the aspects of a contradiction, and then at the question of the role played by antagonism in a contradiction. This will further help us to understand how to apply this method, especially when it comes to questions of different ways of handling contradictions between the masses and the enemy and contradictions among the masses of the people themselves.

See our full series of articles on Marxist-Leninist theory here.

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