Leftist Reading: On Practice and Contradiction Part 1

Leftist Reading

Episode 77:

This week we’re starting On Practice and Contradiction by Mao Zedong
The two halves of the book are available online here:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_16.htm
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm

[Part 1 - This Week]
1. A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire - 01:40

[Bonus 1, from the archives]
2. Oppose Book Worship

[Part 2]
3. On Practice: On the Relation between Knowledge and Practice, between Knowing and Doing

[Part 3-5?]
4. On Contradiction

[Part 6]
5. Combat Liberalism
6. The Chinese People Cannot Be Cowed by the Atom Bomb
7. US Imperialism Is a Paper Tiger

[Part 7]
8. Concerning Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR
9. Critique of Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR

[Part 8-10?]
10. On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People

[Part 11?
11. Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?
12. Talk on Questions of Philosophy

Footnotes:
1) 05:17
Comrade Fang Chih-min, a native of Yiyang, Kiangsi Province, and a member of the Sixth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, was the founder of the Red area in north-eastern Kiangsi and of the Tenth Red Army. In 1934 he led the vanguard detachment of the Red Army in marching north to resist the Japanese invaders. In January 1935 he was captured in the battle against the counter-revolutionary Kuomintang troops and in July he died a martyr’s death in Nanchang, Kiangsi.

2) 06:34
The subjective forces of the revolution: organized forces of the revolution.

3) 09:36
Lu Ti-ping, a Kuomintang warlord, was the Kuomintang governor of Hunan Province in 1928.

4) 09:53
The war of March—April 1929 between Chiang Kai-shek, the Kuomintang warlord in Nanking, and Li Tsung-jen and Pai Chung-hsi, the Kuomintang warlords in Kwangsi Province.

5) 09:58
The third invasion of the Red Army’s base area in the Chingkang Mountains by the Kuomintang warlords in Hunan and Kiangsi lasting from the end of 1928 to the beginning of 1929.

6) 16:12
The quotation is from Mencius, who compared a tyrant who drove his people into seeking a benevolent ruler to the otter which ‘drives the fish into deep waters’.

7) 16:35
The Sixth National Congress of the Communist Party of China was held in July 1928. It pointed out that after the defeat in 1927, China’s revolution remained bourgeois-democratic in nature, i.e., anti-imperialist and anti-feudal, and that since the inevitable new high tide in the revolution was not yet imminent, the general line for the revolution should be to win over the masses. The Sixth Congress liquidated the 1927 Right capitulationism of Chen Tu-hsiu and also repudiated the ‘Left’ putschism which occurred in the Party at the end of 1927 and the beginning of 1928.

8) 16:46
The statement in brackets was added by the author of the letter.

9) 20:44
The regime set up in western Fukien came into being in 1929, when the Red Army in the Chingkang Mountains sallied eastward to build a new revolutionary base area and established the people’s revolutionary political power in the counties of Lungyen, Yungting and Shanghang in the western part of that province.

10) 21:44
Stable base areas were the relatively stable revolutionary base areas established by the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army.

11) 25:47
Chiang Po-cheng was then the commander of the Kuomintang peace preservation corps in Chekiang Province.

12) 26:02
Chen Kuo-hui and Lu Hsing-pang were two notorious Fukien bandits whose forces had been incorporated into the Kuomintang army.

13) 26:15
Chang Chen was a divisional commander of the Kuomintang army.

14) 26:37
Chu Pei-teh, a Kuomintang warlord, was then the Kuomintang governor of Kiangsi Province.

15) 26:40
Hsiung Shih-hui was then a divisional commander of the Kuomintang army in Kiangsi Province.