II. THE UNIVERSALITY OF CONTRADICTION - 2
In war, offence and defence, advance and retreat, victory and
defeat are all mutually contradictory phenomena. One cannot exist without the
other. The two aspects are at once in conflict and in interdependence,
and this constitutes the totality of a war, pushes its development forward and
solves its problems.
Every difference in men's concepts should be regarded as
reflecting an objective contradiction. Objective contradictions are reflected
in subjective thinking, and this process constitutes the contradictory movement
of concepts, pushes forward the development of thought, and ceaselessly solves
problems in man's thinking.
Opposition and struggle between ideas of different kinds
constantly occur within the Party; this is a reflection within the Party of
contradictions between classes and between the new and the old in society. If
there were no contradictions in the Party and no ideological struggles to
resolve them, the Party's life would come to an end.
Thus it is already clear that contradiction exists universally and
in all processes, whether in the simple or in the complex forms of motion,
whether in objective phenomena or ideological phenomena. But does contradiction
also exist at the initial stage of each process?
Is there a movement of opposites from beginning to end in the
process of development of every single thing?
As can be seen from the articles written by Soviet philosophers
criticizing it, the Deborin school maintains that contradiction appears not at
the inception of a process but only when it has developed to a certain stage.
If this were the case, then the cause of the development of the process before
that stage would be external and not internal. Deborin thus reverts to the
metaphysical theories of external causality and of mechanism. Applying this
view in the analysis of concrete problems, the Deborin school sees only
differences but not contradictions between the kulaks and the peasants in
general under existing conditions in the Soviet Union, thus entirely agreeing
with Bukharin. In analysing the French Revolution, it holds that before the
Revolution there were likewise only differences but not contradictions within
the Third Estate, which was composed of the workers, the peasants and the
bourgeoisie. These views of the Deborin school are anti-Marxist. This school
does not understand that each and every difference already contains
contradiction and that difference itself is contradiction. Labour and capital
have been in contradiction ever since the two classes came into being, only at
first the contradiction had not yet become intense. Even under the social
conditions existing in the Soviet Union, there is a difference between workers
and peasants and this very difference is a contradiction, although, unlike the
contradiction between labour and capital, it will not become intensified into
antagonism or assume the form of class struggle; the workers and the peasants
have established a firm alliance in the course of socialist construction and
are gradually resolving this contradiction in the course of the advance from
socialism to communism. The question is one of different kinds of
contradiction, not of the presence or absence of contradiction. Contradiction
is universal and absolute, it is present in the process of development of all
things and permeates every process from beginning to end.
What is meant by the emergence of a new process? The old unity
with its constituent opposites yields to a new unity with its constituent
opposites, whereupon a new process emerges to replace the old. The old process
ends and the new one begins. The new process contains new contradictions and
begins its own history of the development of contradictions.
As Lenin pointed out, Marx in his Capital gave a
model analysis of this movement of opposites which runs through the process of
development of things from beginning to end. This is the method that must be
employed in studying the development of all things. Lenin, too, employed this
method correctly and adhered to it in all his writings.
In his Capital, Marx first analyses the simplest,
most ordinary and fundamental, most common and everyday relation of
bourgeois (commodity) society, a relation encountered billions of times, viz.
the exchange of commodities. In this very simple phenomenon (in this
"cell" of bourgeois society) analysis reveals all the
contradictions (or the germs of all the contradictions) of
modern society. The subsequent exposition shows us the development (both growth and movement)
of these contradictions and of this society in the [summation] of its
individual parts, from its beginning to its end.
Chinese Communists must learn this method; only then will they be
able correctly to analyse the history and the present state of the Chinese
revolution and infer its future.
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