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Among the different social movements that have been gaining strength and progress in this first quarter of the century, theoretical training has come to be conspicuous by its absence. Materialist thought in general, and Marxist thought in particular, have suffered a kind of distortions and omissions that can only be understood as due to philosophical laziness and, perhaps, dishonesty. The recovery of philosophical knowledge, the constant going and returning to it and with it, has no other meaning than to guide, direct, affirm, and even, why not say it?, deny these social movements. Ad hoc with the current political context, starting with the recovery of Maoist thought can be useful in this sense, since it would help us understand the development of the current second economic power, without prejudice to the fact that there are points of said thought that have already passed. to the background or have been reformulated. In this regard, we stick to presenting Mao Tsetung's philosophical thesis, On Practice , which will be useful in this double sense: 1) it highlights the importance of returning to the theoretical foundations that allow guiding political practice and 2) putting the finger on the ideological principles from which the People's Republic of China was built .
Keywords: dialectical materialism, practice, Mao Tsetung, theory of knowledge, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels
introduction
The current geopolitical context is being traced by a very particular situation, namely, the decline of the American Empire and, in turn, the rise of the Chinese Empire, vying for place as the leading economic and political power. If we want to understand how it is that this point has been reached, it is necessary to begin by clarifying the economic, political and ideological-philosophical coordinates from which both nations have been built. In the particular case of the People's Republic of China, we consider it necessary not only to understand the Marxist and materialist currents in general, but also, in particular, to understand the ideological-philosophical and political thought of its founder: Mao Tsetung. In this work, you propose us to offer a brief explanation of one of his philosophical theses (On practice, written in July 1937) as an introduction to the thought that marked the course of Communist China.
Entering one of the discussions in which Marxist thought has been involved, it should be noted that materialist philosophy has never had a univocal development. There have already been several philosophical systems to which this adjective has been attributed, without being able to coexist harmoniously with others that did the same. The evolution of materialist philosophy, insofar as each system emerges as a critical negation of previous systems, is evidenced in the first Thesis on Feuerbach written by Marx in the spring of 1845. Thus, he tells us that «the fundamental defect of the whole previous materialism ‒including that of Feuerbach‒ is that it only conceives things, reality, sensibility, in the form of objects or contemplation, but not as sensible human activity, not as practice, not in a subjective way» (Marx, 2018). In this sense, the experience of the world is not for Marx pure passivity, mere sensible perception, but it is also activity, praxis.
The experience of the world as human activity, the construction of the object and, therefore, of the world in terms of revolutionary practice, will be one of the main axes of the entire development of Marxism. This is what Engels (1978) reveals in the prologue to the 1892 English edition of his work From Utopian Socialism to Scientific Socialism. In this context, Engels argues, like Marx, with those agnostic positions of an empiricist nature which he qualifies as "shameful materialism", because, although they base their knowledge on sensory experience, they are reduced to pure perception, pure sensibility: for agnostics, the perception they have of things and their properties is not really these things and their properties, but only "the impressions they leave on their senses." For Engels, perceived things can only be true as long as the implementation of the same brings effective results, because it is in this way that an infallible test is carried out as to its accuracy or falsity.
II Differences within the party
Despite the criticisms and the distances taken by Marx's historical materialism with respect to "previous materialisms", while the former seeks the political implementation of a philosophical system compared to the latter, which would remain in an implementation of the philosophical conscience in a merely «gnostic» character, and despite the fact that these theses of transformation of the world through revolutionary practice have resulted in the formation of the USSR as the second political power of the 20th century through the guidance of Lenin and Stalin, the defense of dogmatic and empirical positions persisted in the Chinese Communist Party. Thus, in a footnote at the beginning of the philosophical thesis On the Practice of Mao Tsetung, it is insisted that:
…a certain group of empirical comrades, who, for a long time, limited themselves to their fragmentary personal experience, ignored the importance of theory for revolutionary practice and did not see the revolution as a whole; Though they worked diligently, they did so blindly.
Mao Tse-tung's work in this thesis was none other than to denounce, with the intention of theoretically and practically counteracting, those dogmatic and empirical elements (especially the former) that with their interpretations of Marxism (which before a dynamic method for the revolution, as a guide to action, they saw it as a dogma) tried to emphasize the subjectivity of the theory while neglecting the practical side.
II. "Between knowing and doing"
There is no doubt that those "earlier materialists" and agnostics against whom Marx and Engels built their critiques advanced along with Marxism, even filtering down into the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party. Now, it will be Mao Tsetung who will undertake such criticism. Thus, it is necessary, in this context, to point out what would be the controversial relationship that exists, from a Marxist-Maoist perspective, between knowing and doing. To do this, the author proposes as the thesis of human knowledge, in the Marxist sense, that it "depends mainly on its activity in material production." In this practice, the human being begins to acquire from the most basic and simple to the most advanced and complex knowledge about phenomena, properties and natural laws, as well as with respect to the relationships that he maintains between himself and nature, even coming to understand the relationships between humans themselves.
In the particular development of a class society, all its members, of all classes, enter into certain production relations, dedicating themselves to producing, they seek to satisfy the needs of the human being, of all the members of society. This in turn constitutes the foundation from which human knowledge is built. However, production is not the only sphere in which human activity takes place, but it occurs in multiple forms: the class struggle, political life, and scientific and artistic activities. In a class society, each person is determined by the social class to which he belongs; each of the ideas they exercise bears their personal class seal, they correspond qualitatively to the social class of origin.
As mentioned above, here the thesis is sustained that the theory of knowledge to which the Marxist perspective appeals, starts from the simplest to the most complex, from unilateral to multilateral thought. For example, it will be understood as a unilateral thought that historical time when the exploiting classes distorted the vision of the world due to certain prejudices and, likewise, production and the productive forces were circumscribed to such a small scale that they limited the vision of the human being. . Thus, says Mao, only when the modern proletariat emerges and the development of gigantic forces of production is it possible to achieve a global, universal and historical vision of the development of society and its transformation, opening the way to the Marxist theory of knowledge, to a multilateral vision.
At this point, it is stated that, from the Marxist perspective, the criterion of truth of a theory will be its success in its implementation. This is what Engels mentions when he says that:
…we subject our sense perceptions to an infallible test as to their accuracy or falsity. If these perceptions were false, so would be our judgment about the possibility of using the thing in question, and our attempt to use it would necessarily fail. But if we achieve the desired end, if we find that the thing corresponds to the idea that we formed of it, that it gives us what we expected from it when using it, we will have positive proof that, within these limits, our perceptions about this thing and its properties coincide with the existing reality outside of us (1978, p. 12).
The knowledge of the human being will be confirmed only when the expected results are achieved in social practice, however, it is to be expected that this will not always happen, since there will be times when the knowledge from which social practice starts will not be sufficient and, therefore, it will become a failure. This is the starting point for the exposition of the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge.
II.i. The dialectical materialist theory of knowledge
For the human being to be successful in what he proposes, he has to make his ideas agree with the objective world that really exists in which he intends to make them operable, otherwise failure will be inevitable. However, failure would only be part of the dialectical process of Marxist practice, since it is from this that the theories from which they are based are refined, polished, reconstructed and brought back to the exercise. "Failure is the mother of success" and "every failure makes us smarter" the author will say.
Hence, the Marxist theory of knowledge has two main parts that characterize it: 1) dialectical materialism is at the service of the proletariat and 2) it has a practical character. It distances itself completely from those theories that seek to reduce philosophical activity to a mere conceptual level, of ideas, completely unrelated to the practice in the world linked to the revolution and transformation of the objective world.
Having said the above, we will begin to expose the dialectical process by which the theory of knowledge starts from the practice as the basis of the theory and this in turn serves and nourishes the practice itself. Thus, the leader of the communist party points out that the practice process takes place in different steps, calling the first the sensory stage. In this, the human it only manages to perceive isolated objects, simple appearances and external connections. An example of this is the case of some researchers who went to Yenan. In the early days, they could only perceive streets, houses, people, receptions, all this will only be appearances of things, with mere extrinsic connections.
As social practice advances, humans begin to account for the internal relationships of things, there is a jump from isolated experiences to concepts. Now, the concepts that humans form of things do not represent mere appearances, sensitive perceptions of objects, but rather reflect the internal connections of things, their essence. This is the second stage of the dialectic of knowledge, where the human being, starting from sensitive and unilateral experiences, comes to formulate multilateral concepts and these in turn lead him to make judgments and develop logical reasoning processes. Mao Tse-tung takes up, to understand the above, the case of the researchers: they have already gathered different data and, based on this, made a "reflection" and have reached the conclusion that "the anti-Japanese national united front policy, applied by the Communist Party, is consistent, sincere and genuine. He calls this second stage of concepts and reasoning the "stage of rational knowledge."
We can emphasize that the true function of knowledge is to arrive from sensations, passing through logical thought, to the relationships and internal contradictions of objective things, their laws and their internal connections between one process and another. For our author, Marxist philosophy is the first that manages to resolve the conflict of knowledge (among those positions that sought to reduce the activity of knowing to mere sensitive perception versus those that advocated only action that disregarded any theoretical and conceptual framework) delving into the dialectical movements of the same, movements by which the human being passes from sensitive and isolated perceptions to the complexity of the internal relations of things, culminating in the inescapable and repeated practice of production and class struggle.
In short, Marxism-Leninism links these two stages of knowledge, the sensitive-perceptual (lower stage) and the logical-rational (higher stage) as part of a single and indivisible cognitive process: practice. Well, each of these movements will correspond to a specific function: on the one hand, perception would solve the question of appearances and, on the other, theoretical rationalization would solve the problem of understanding what is perceived. Therefore, we can say that this theory of knowledge is carried out within a circular scheme, where "our practice testifies that we cannot immediately understand what we perceive, and that we can perceive more deeply only what we already understand" (Tsetung, 1976, p.71).
Taking as the foundation of all legitimate knowledge, Mao begins his attacks against the Gnostics, those "know-it-alls" who seek to know and understand the objective facts of political life without experiencing them themselves:
Who wants to know a thing, will not be able to get it without coming into contact with it, that is, without living (practicing) in the same environment as that thing. In feudal society it was impossible to know in advance the laws of capitalist society, since capitalism had not yet appeared and the corresponding practice was lacking. Marxism could only be a product of capitalist society. Marx, in the epoch of liberal capitalism, could not concretely know, in advance, certain laws peculiar to the epoch of imperialism, since imperialism, the final phase of capitalism, had not yet appeared and the corresponding practice was lacking; only Lenin and Stalin could take on this task (1976, p. 72).
We understand that one of the main reasons why Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin manage to develop their theories was their personal participation in the class struggle and in the scientific analysis of their time. It must be added that, although all authentic knowledge starts from experience, this experience can in turn take place in two different ways, directly or indirectly. Direct experience is understood as that which is immediate to the senses, in the present tense; and the indirect experience would be, for example, all the knowledge of past centuries and of other countries. These second knowledges are, for our ancestors or foreigners, direct experiences that would deserve our trust if and only if they reflect objective reality in a scientific, that is, rational, way.
Likewise, Marx already referred to something similar in the Eighteen Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte :
Men make their own history, but they do not make it at their free will, under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under those circumstances that they directly encounter, that exist and have been bequeathed to them by the past. The tradition of all dead generations oppresses like a nightmare the brain of the living. And when they appear to dedicate themselves precisely to transforming themselves and transforming things, to creating something never seen before, in these times of revolutionary crisis it is precisely when the spirits of the past fearfully conjure to their aid, they borrow their names, their war slogans, their clothing. , to, with this venerable old age costume and this borrowed language, represent the new scene of universal history (2000).
The knowledge of our past generations does not go unnoticed when we carry out the transforming practice of reality, rather, we have to start from them as given objective materials. Therefore, the author concludes, all knowledge, whatever its type, is considered direct experience.
III. dialectical movement of knowledge
The logical figures that Hegel establishes in the Phenomenology of Spirit, can function as a spearhead to open the way to the concrete examples that Mao establishes in his exposition of the materialist dialectic of knowledge. The logical figures of consciousness that we can collect from the Hegelian dialectic to understand the process of knowledge, and self-knowledge, are wrapped within the Master / Slave dialectic. At first, it is mentioned that a consciousness, in order to be such, has to be recognized by another consciousness, that is, “self-consciousness is in and for itself insofar as and because it is in and for itself for another self-consciousness [... ] is only when it is recognized» (2012, p.113).
The first thing that happens from a philosophical plane in the action of the human being, when he seeks to know the world, is to become aware of something, to realize something, but this awareness must always be understood as a syncategorematic relationship: awareness is always awareness of something. In the course of consciousness, it seeks to realize itself as consciousness and in that process it meets another consciousness, and for these to be such, it is necessary to deny the other consciousness, as part of an involuntary process. At this time, consciences are in a "struggle to the death" for recognition. By asserting one over the other, the denied conscience (servant, slave) has renounced the satisfaction of its desires, and its work is seen totally disposed to the recognized conscience (lord, master). However, the Lord, having denied the conscience that is now servile, has denied himself, since he needs another conscience to affirm himself as such, while the servile conscience, thanks to his work, frees himself and affirms himself as conscience and becomes stoic conscience.
The experience of the world as human activity, the construction of the object and, therefore, of the world in terms of revolutionary practice, will be one of the main axes of the entire development of Marxism. This is what Engels (1978) reveals in the prologue to the 1892 English edition of his work From Utopian Socialism to Scientific Socialism. In this context, Engels argues, like Marx, with those agnostic positions of an empiricist nature which he qualifies as "shameful materialism", because, although they base their knowledge on sensory experience, they are reduced to pure perception, pure sensibility: for agnostics, the perception they have of things and their properties is not really these things and their properties, but only "the impressions they leave on their senses." For Engels, perceived things can only be true as long as the implementation of the same brings effective results, because it is in this way that an infallible test is carried out as to its accuracy or falsity.
Now, this same process is recognized by Mao in the construction of knowledge through practice in capitalist contexts. Thus, it tells us that:
In the initial period of his practice […], the proletarian was, in terms of his knowledge of capitalist society, only at the stage of sensory knowledge; he knew only the isolated aspects and the external connections of the various phenomena of capitalism. At that time, the proletariat was still a "class in itself." However, the proletariat became a "class for itself" when, entering the second period of its practice, a period of conscious and organized economic and political struggle, it came to understand the essence of capitalist society, the relations of exploitation of social classes and their own historical tasks, thanks to their practice, their varied experience of long years of struggle and education in Marxist theory... (1976, p. 74).
We can understand that the logical processes established by Hegel embody in the philosophical thought of Mao Tsetung (this without prejudice to the determined influence of the materialist interpretations that Marx made of Hegel himself and from which the leader of the Chinese Communist Party drank) the cognitive development carried out by the proletariat in its work and in the construction of reality itself.
IV. conclusion
In short, the practice, as Mao understands it, has a whole series of steps that have repercussions on each other simultaneously: 1) with the sensory stage we understand that all knowledge, no matter how tiny, is not given as "falling from the sky", but that comes from experience in the world, from the senses; 2) these data collected by the senses are synthesized and ordered, in such a way that they allow the development of logical judgments. However, although there are positions that have defended the supremacy of the first point, the sensory one, over logical and abstract (theoretical) judgments, here we understand that for the dialectical process of knowledge to be carried out, it is necessary to advance the lower (sensory) phase to the upper (conceptual) phase.
However, this dialectical process does not end when concepts and logical judgments are reached, but at this stage it is necessary to return to practice, to the experience of the sensible world, to subsequently allow the reconstruction and refinement of the theoretical schemes used. and are resolved in an effective praxis. In other words: all theories and concepts start from the sensible world, but they have to return to the world to prove their legitimacy, in doing so, they will return to collect elements from the sensible world, and so on until they have the expected results and that the concepts and the practices manage to coordinate with the laws of the objective world.
For Marxism in general, and for Mao in particular, "the most important problem is not to understand the laws of the objective world in order to be able to interpret the world, but to apply the knowledge of those laws to actively transform it" ( Tsetung, 1976). The importance of what is stated here by the leader of the Chinese Communist Party lies, in our opinion, in not delegitimizing the theory, not detaching it from the transforming practice of the world, from the construction of reality, nor the second from the first. From these coordinates, we cannot do without one (practice) or the other (theory), both are moments of the same dialectical process, since, recalling Lenin's phrase in his text What to do?: «Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement either.
Bibliographic references
Engels, F. (1978) From utopian socialism to scientific socialism. Moscow. Editorial Progress
Hegel, G. (2012) Phenomenology of the spirit. Mexico. Fund of Economic Culture.
Lenin, V. (2010) What to do? Available at https://www.marxists.org/espanol/lenin/obras/1900s/quehácer/que_hácer.pdf
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Marx, K. (2018) Writings on Historical Materialism. Madrid. Publisher Alliance.
Tsetung, M. (1976) Selected Texts of Mao Tsetung. Beijing. People's Publisher.
Tsetung, M. (1974) Five Philosophical Theses of Mao Tsetung. Beijing. People's Publisher.