Page 321 - SELECTED WORKS OF MAO TSE-TUNG Volume I.indd

ON CONTRADICTION 315

proletariat by the big bourgeoisie came about through the opportunism
then to be found within the Chinese proletariat itself (inside the
Chinese Communist Party). When we liquidated this opportunism, the
Chinese revolution resumed its advance. Later, the Chinese revolution
again suffered severe setbacks at the hands of the enemy, because
adventurism had risen within our Party. When we liquidated this
adventurism, our cause advanced once again. Thus it can be seen that
to lead the revolution to victory, a political party must depend on
the correctness of its own political line and the solidity of its own
organization.
The dialectical world outlook emerged in ancient times both in
China and in Europe. Ancient dialectics, however, had a somewhat
spontaneous and naive character; in the social and historical condi-
tions then prevailing, it was not yet able to form a theoretical system,
hence it could not fully explain the world and was supplanted by
metaphysics. The famous German philosopher Hegel, who lived in
the late 18th and early 19th centuries, made most important contribu-
tions to dialectics, but his dialectics was idealist. It was not until
Marx and Engels, the great protagonists of the proletarian movement,
had synthesized the positive achievements in the history of human
knowledge and, in particular, critically absorbed the rational elements
of Hegelian dialectics and created the great theory of dialectical and
historical materialism that an unprecedented revolution occurred in
the history of human knowledge. This theory was further developed
by Lenin and Stalin. As soon as it spread to China, it wrought
tremendous changes in the world of Chinese thought.
This dialectical world outlook teaches us primarily how to observe
and analyse the movement of opposites in different things and, on the
basis of such analysis, to indicate the methods for resolving contradic-
tions. It is therefore most important for us to understand the law of
contradiction in things in a concrete way.

II. THE UNIVERSALITY OF CONTRADICTION

For convenience of exposition, I shall deal first with the univer-
sality of contradiction and then proceed to the particularity of con-
tradiction. The reason is that the universality of contradiction can be
explained more briefly, for it has been widely recognized ever since