Leftist Reading: On Practice and Contradiction Part 5

Leftist Reading

Episode 81:

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

[Part 5 - This Week]
4. On Contradiction
Section [iv] - 01:00
Section [v] - 18:58

[Part 6?]
4. On Contradiction
Section [vi] - [vii]
5. Combat Liberalism

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

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

[Part 9-11?]
10. On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People

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

Footnotes:
15) 16:24
V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, Collected Works, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961, vol. V, p. 369.

16) 20:26
Lenin, ‘Conspectus of Hegel’s The Science of Logic’, Collected Works, vol. xxxviii, pp. 97–98.

17) 29:43
[Shan Hai Ching (Book of Mountains and Seas) was written in the era of the Warring States (403–221 BC). In one of its fables Kua Fu, a superman, pursued and overtook the sun. But he died of thirst, whereupon his staff was transformed into the forest of Teng.]

18) 29:50
[Yi is one of the legendary heroes of ancient China, famous for his archery. According to a legend in Huai Nan Tzu, compiled in the second century BC, there were ten suns in the sky in the days of Emperor Yao. To put an end to the damage to vegetation caused by these scorching suns, Emperor Yao ordered Yi to shoot them down. In another legend recorded by Wang Yi (second century AD), the archer is said to have shot down nine of the ten suns.]

19) 29:58
[Hsi Yu Chi (Pilgrimage to the West) is a sixteenth-century novel, the hero of which is the monkey god Sun Wu-kung. He could miraculously change at will into seventy-two different shapes, such as a bird, a tree and a stone.]

20) 30:07
[The Strange Tales of Liao Chai, written by Pu Sung-ling in the seventeenth century, is a well-known collection of 431 tales, mostly about ghosts and fox spirits.]

21) 30:42
Karl Marx, ‘Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy’, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Chicago, 1904, pp. 310–11.

22) 33:24
Lenin, ‘On the Question of Dialectics’, p. 358.

23) 36:44
[The saying ‘Things that oppose each other also complement each other’ first appeared in the History of the Earlier Han Dynasty by Pan Ku, a celebrated historian in the first century AD. It has long been a popular saying.]

24) 37:28
Lenin, ‘On the Question of Dialectics’, p. 358.