Post by saracenePost by 7Hmmm... philosophers have never killed a priest.
Some would have liked to have done "Let us strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest." (Diderot)
Mao Tse Tung certainly fancied himself as a philosopher.
https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/sri-lanka/mao-2.pdf
Some Thoughts on Mao’s Philosophy
Comrade N. Sanmugathasan
Comrade Mao Tse-tung was not only a great Marxist-Leninist
revolutionary but also a great philosopher. It is not possible within the
scope of a single article to analyse all of Mao’s contributions to
philosophy. I shall try to dwell on one or two basic points of Mao’s
philosophy.
On Contradiction
One of Mao’s main philosophical works is his essay ‘On Contradiction’,
in which he deals with the universality of contradiction in men and matter
and how development takes place as a result of clash of the contradictions
that are always present. The first sentence of this essay states: “The law
of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the
basic law of materialist dialectics”. It is a most profound statement.
Simply, this law means that motion is inherent in all forms of matter and
that motion, i.e. development, takes place as a result of the development
and clash of contradictions that are always present, and, further, between
the different aspects of each contradiction there is both identity and
struggle; and that, through the process of developing contradictions, a
thing or a phenomenon changes into its opposite. Thus, Comrade Mao
Tse-tung in one sentence explained the basic law of materialist dialectics.
A most systematic exposition of Marxist dialectics by one of the founders
of scientific socialism, Engels, is to be found in one of his most famous
works ‘Anti-Dühring’. This is a very important book because it refutes
all forms of fallacies spread so assiduously by Dühring. The most
important mistake of Dühring was that he had negated the law of
contradiction. He held that contradictions were only artificia etc etc