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316 MAO TSE-TUNG

the materialist-dialectical world outlook was discovered and material-
ist dialectics applied with outstanding success to analysing many
aspects of human history and natural history and to changing many
aspects of society and nature (as in the Soviet Union) by the great
creators and continuers of Marxism — Marx, Engels, Lenin and
Stalin; whereas the particularity of contradiction is still not clearly
understood by many comrades, and especially by the dogmatists.
They do not understand that it is precisely in the particularity of
contradiction that the universality of contradiction resides. Nor do
they understand how important is the study of the particularity of
contradiction in the concrete things confronting us for guiding the
course of revolutionary practice. Therefore, it is necessary to stress the
study of the particularity of contradiction and to explain it at adequate
length. For this reason, in our analysis of the law of contradiction in
things, we shall first analyse the universality of contradiction, then
place special stress on analysing the particularity of contradiction, and
finally return to the universality of contradiction.
The universality or absoluteness of contradiction has a twofold
meaning. One is that contradiction exists in the process of develop-
ment of all things, and the other is that in the process of development
of each thing a movement of opposites exists from beginning to end.
5
Engels said, “Motion itself is a contradiction.” Lenin defined
the law of the unity of opposites as “the recognition (discovery) of
the contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies in all
6
phenomena and processes of nature (including mind and society)”.
Are these ideas correct? Yes, they are. The interdependence of the
contradictory aspects present in all things and the struggle between
these aspects determine the life of all things and push their develop-
ment forward. There is nothing that does not contain contradiction;
without contradiction nothing would exist.
Contradiction is the basis of the simple forms of motion (for
instance, mechanical motion) and still more so of the complex forms
of motion.
Engels explained the universality of contradiction as follows:

If simple mechanical change of place contains a contradiction,
this is even more true of the higher forms of motion of matter, and
especially of organic life and its development. . . . life consists
precisely and primarily in this — that a being is at each moment
itself and yet something else. Life is therefore also a contradiction