Dialectics by Mao
taken from
selected works of mao tes tung
Reading notes on the soviet text
political economy 1961-62
68. Philosophy Must Serve the Political Tasks Facing Us
Any philosophy is in the service of its contemporary tasks.
Capitalist philosophy has this function. And every nation, every era has new theoreticians producing new theory for the political tasks of the day. In England such bourgeois materialists as Bacon and Hobbes appeared; materialists like the Encyclopedists then appeared in eighteenth-century France; the German and Russian bourgeoisie also had their materialists. All of these were bourgeois materialists, all of whom served the political tasks of the bourgeois class. Thus the existence of English or bourgeois materialism certainly did not make French bourgeois materialism unnecessary, nor did the existence of English and French bourgeois materialism make the German or the Russian unnecessary.
The Marxist philosophy of the proletarian class is even more vitally concerned to serve contemporary political tasks. For China, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin [Omitted in the 1967 text.: Note by translator.] are necessary reading. That comes first. But communists of any country and the proletarian philosophical circles of any country must create new theory, write new works, produce their own theoreticians to serve the political tasks facing them.
No nation can at any time rely only on what is old. Having Marx and Engels without Lenin’s Two Tactics and other works could not have solved the new problems of 1905 and afterward. Having only Materialism and Empirico-Criticism of 1907 would not have sufficed to cope with the new issues that arose before and after the October Revolution. To meet the needs of this time Lenin wrote Imperialism, State and Revolution and other works. After Lenin, Stalin was needed to write Foundations of Leninism and Problems of Leninismto deal with reactionaries and preserve Leninism. At the end of our second civil war and the beginning of the War of Resistance Against Japan we wrote On Practice and On Contradiction. They had to be written to meet the needs of the times.
Now that we have entered the period of socialism a whole new series of problems has appeared. If we do not meet the new needs, write the new works, give form to new theory, it will not do!
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