Mao’s Contributions to Marxism and Dialectical Materialism

This article raises the question of whether the thought of Mao Zedong is simply derivative from Marxist thought, whether it represents a deviation from Marxist thought, or whether it contains any original contribution to Marxist thought. It discusses such topics as Mao’s concepts of the principal and the non-principal aspect of the contradiction, Mao’s concept of permanent revolution, Mao’s replacement of the industrial proletariat with the peasant farmer class, Mao’s inversion of the classical Marxist position of the base determining the superstructure, Mao’s concept of the complementarity of opposites, Mao’s concept of antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions, Mao’s reduction of all laws of dialectic to one law.