Leftist Reading: On Practice and Contradiction Part 4

Leftist Reading

Episode 80:

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

The previous episode that already covered chapter 2 of this book can be found here:
https://www.abnormalmapping.com/leftist-reading-rss/2020/8/31/guest-leftist-reading-oppose-book-worship

[Part 1]
1. A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire

[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]
4. On Contradiction
Section [i]
Section [ii]

[Part 4 - This Week]
4. On Contradiction
Section [iii] - 00:49

[Part 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:
10) 11:52
[See ‘Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War’, Selected Works, vol. I, p. 251, n. 10.]

11) 13:53
[See ibid., p. 249 n.]

12) 13:59
[Wei Cheng (AD 580–643) was a statesman and historian of the Tang dynasty.]

13) 14:24
[Shui Hu Chuan (Heroes of the Marshes), a famous fourteenth-century Chinese novel, describes a peasant war towards the end of the Northern Sung dynasty. Chu Village was in the vicinity of Liangshanpo, where Sung Chiang, leader of the peasant uprising and hero of the novel, established his base. Chu Chao-feng, the head of this village, was a despotic landlord.]

14) 15:21
V. I. Lenin, ‘Once Again on the Trade Unions, the Present Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Bukharin’, Selected Works, New York, International Publishers, 1943, vol. IX, p. 66.