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Mao Zedong On Dialectical Materialism

The Lecture Notes, and particularly the plagiarised sections, may well have constituted the raw material which Mao elaborated in the course of an oral explication of the basic tenets of dialectical materialism. It seems unlikely that the text of the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism that is available to us in its various versions is the exact transcription of the lecture Mao presented to old cadres of the Red Army.[1-125] Although a record of the lecture was taken by the Political and Propaganda departments, it was subsequently tidied up by them and Mao himself before it was published in the journal of the Anti-Japanese Military and Political University in 1938. It is probable that Mao never regarded the published piece as anything more than a roughly edited version of his own lecture notes, useful as instructional material in a context where teaching materials on philosophy were notoriously scarce, but not pretending to any high degree of originality. His final words of the Lecture Notes display a becoming modesty which suggests as faulty the view that Mao was attempting to pass the document off as anything more than notes designed for a lecture, and hopefully of use to the novice in the subject:

The reason why people feel dialectics is difficult is that there exist no books which explain dialectics well. In China, there are many books on dialectics which, while not incorrect, are explained poorly or none too well, and which frighten people off. Books which are good at explaining dialectics employ everyday language and relate moving experiences. Sooner or later such a book must be put together. This talk of mine is far from adequate since I have myself only just begun to study dialectics. There has been no possibility of writing a useful book on the subject as yet, although perhaps the opportunity may present itself in the future. I wish to do so, but this will be decided by how my study proceeds.[1-126]

Such a passage would hardly have been included in the published version had Mao been consciously attempting to masquerade as an expert on dialectical materialism through an act of plagiarism intended to deceive his readers.

Third, the point needs to be made that the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism have never, as far as I am aware, been officially published for general circulation and consumption in post-Liberation China. The versions of it which are available have been designated as neibu documents, and included in collections of material for study by academics and cadres. As study material for academics and cadres, the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism were intended for exactly the same purpose in post-Liberation China as during the Yan’an period. And it is very obvious that Chinese philosophers and Mao specialists in post-Liberation China were and are well aware of Mao’s textual debt to Soviet texts on philosophy, although this has not led them to reject the philosophy contained in the Lecture Notes.[1-127] Had Mao wished to pursue a conscious act of plagiarism in which there existed an intention to deceive, why were the Lecture Notes not substantially rewritten and re-edited, as many of his other works were prior to official republication, and published as a creature of his own intellect? The answer is, that because there existed no intention to deceive, the Lecture Notes were neither revised nor published as part of Mao’s officially sanctioned oeuvre.