The Law Of The Unity Of Opposites And The Misuse Of Mao’s Critique Of Stalin
There are articles on or related
to the subject, in different languages, written by sectarians of different
factions who ‘criticize’ Stalin, or Mao, or Hoxha in relation to the
writers' hostility to one or the other.
Yet, as ‘pure-Marxists ’, they end up
with an identical argument that is totally anti-Marxist; the “unity of
opposites” is a “fallacy. Each varies in its approach due to subjectivity,
but each ends up in a somewhat similar conclusion. I will take up one case in
which the claim is presented as a corrective to Mao—as though Mao had
invented the theory, and as though its refutation were the mark of a more
rigorous Marxism. Both suppositions are false. The theory is not Mao’s
invention; it is the core of materialist dialectics as Lenin formulated
it, and Mao himself opened his On Contradiction with the statement of
its status:
“The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the fundamental law of materialist dialectics.”
The critique of Mao that rests on
this basis is not correct, because it mistakes a law of dialectics for a
fallacy. Then, he uses that mistake to indict Mao, who had made the same methodological
mistake in his critique of Stalin on the subject. The argument must be
taken objectively in its dialectical order.
What the Unity of Opposites Actually Is
The confusion begins with the
word “contradiction.” In formal logic, a contradiction is an inconsistency
in thought, a violation of the laws of identity and non-contradiction, and
it must be eliminated. In dialectics, a contradiction is an objective
relation within things themselves: mutually exclusive aspects that are at the
same time interdependent, that exist only in relation to one another,
and that drive the movement of the whole. The first is a defect of thought; the
second is the structure of reality. To confound the two is already to have
abandoned dialectics.
Marx stated the law in its
classical form:
“The coexistence
of the two contradictory sides, their struggle, and their fusion
into a new category—that is the essence of dialectics.”
Engels drew out what this means
for motion itself:
“Motion
itself is a contradiction: even simple mechanical change of place can only
come about through a body being both in one place and in another place at one
and the same moment, being in one and the same place and also not in it.”
Lenin, in On the Question of
Dialectics, stated the relation between the two moments of the law
with a precision that leaves no room for the charge of “sophistry”:
“The unity
(coincidence, identity, equal action) of opposites is conditional, temporary,
transitory, relative. The struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute,
just as development and motion are absolute.”
And in the same text he
identified the cognitive content of the law as the essence of dialectics:
“The splitting
of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts … is the
essence of dialectics.”
Two things
follow, and they must be held together. First, unity is real but
relative: it is the concrete condition under which opposites coexist
within a single system, and it is always temporary, always subject
to dissolution. Second, struggle is absolute: it runs through the
entire course of a contradiction, persists in the transition from one
contradiction to another, and is the motive force that breaks old
unities and forms new ones. The relativity of unity does not make unity
fictitious; it makes unity conditional—which is precisely what
allows it to be analyzed, specified, and acted upon. A unity without conditions
would be a static identity, and a static identity is exactly what
metaphysics, not dialectics, posits.
This is why Lenin insists that
the knowledge of things “in their ‘self-movement,’ in their spontaneous
development, in their real life” is the knowledge of them “as a unity of
opposites.” The alternative conception—development as mere increase and
decrease, as repetition—leaves the source of motion in the dark or
places it outside the thing (in God, in the subject, in an external push). Only
the unity of opposites furnishes the key to self-movement, to leaps, to the
break in continuity, to the transformation of one thing into its opposite. To
call this a “fallacy” is to deny that things move by their own internal
contradiction—which is to deny motion itself.
Mao put the same point in the
plainest terms, precisely to show that the law is not a piece of abstraction
but the structure of every concrete thing:
“All things are
the unity of opposites. The five fingers: four point in one direction, the
thumb in the other—only then can one grasp something. … Impurity is absolute,
purity is relative; this is the unity of opposites.”
If opposites could not be
united, nothing could be grasped, because nothing would hold together long
enough to be a thing at all. The law is not a speculative ornament; it
is the condition of intelligibility of any concrete object—including any
concrete political situation.
The practical content of the law
was stated with complete clarity by Kaganovich in his speech on the
tenth anniversary of the Institute of Red Professors:
“What exactly
does the unity of opposites mean in the ordinary language of our Party? It
means not to be afraid of difficulties. Not to be afraid of those
contradictions of life which spring up on our journey, but instead to conquer
them with Bolshevik energy and staunchness.”
“Conquer them”—not evade them,
not dissolve them into a verbal harmony. Unity, in the Bolshevik vocabulary,
names the terrain on which contradiction is engaged; struggle names the
activity by which it is resolved. And Stalin’s warning—do not get
carried away with the unity of opposites; this is Hegelian
terminology—belongs to the same conception. The warning is not a denial
of the law; it is a guard against the use of the Hegelian phrase to smuggle
in the idea that opposites culminate in a peaceful reconciliation. In the
class struggle, that idea has a name: conciliationism.
Nor was this a departure in
Stalin’s systematic statement of dialectics. In Dialectical and Historical
Materialism he wrote:
“In contrast to
metaphysics, dialectics holds that internal contradictions are inherent in
all things and phenomena of nature, for they all have their negative and
positive sides, a past and a future, something dying away and something
developing; and the struggle between these opposites, the struggle
between the old and the new, between that which is dying away and that which is
being born, between that which is disappearing and that which is developing, constitutes
the internal content of the process of development, the internal content of
the transformation of quantitative changes into qualitative changes.”
Here the unity of opposites is
not cancelled but located: contradiction is internal to the thing, and
it is the internal content of development. That is the Leninist law,
stated in the vocabulary of the era of socialist construction.
Mao’s Critique of Stalin: A
Critique of Concrete Application, Not of the Law
Mao’s 1957 remark—“he spoke only of the struggle of opposites, not of the unity
of opposites”—is routinely torn from its context and brandished as
proof that the theory itself is suspect. Read in context, it proves
something else: that Mao’s critique is itself incorrect, and cannot bear
the weight the sectarians place on it. The full passage is:
“Stalin spoke only
of the struggle of opposites, not of the unity of opposites. According to
the fundamental law of dialectics, the unity of opposites, opposites struggle
and are also united, mutually exclude and are also mutually connected, and
under given conditions transform into each other. … Opposites in struggle
and unity—Stalin could not connect them. Some people in the Soviet
Union think metaphysically, so rigidly, either this or that; they do not
recognize the unity of opposites.’”
The critique rests on a false
dichotomy. If the unity of opposites is the struggle of opposites, then
Stalin’s emphasis on struggle is not a neglect of unity—it is an
emphasis on the content of the unity. To say that Stalin “spoke only of
struggle and not of unity” assumes that unity is something other than
struggle, a separate moment that can be emphasized or neglected alongside
it. But the law does not permit that separation. The unity is the unity
of opposites; the opposites are united in struggle; the unity is the
struggle. Stalin spoke of struggle—which is to say, he spoke of the unity of
opposites. The charge that he neglected unity is the charge that he
neglected the very thing he was emphasizing, which is incoherent.
This is not a merely semantic
point. Mao’s own On Contradiction states the correct relation: “struggle
is inherent in identity; without struggle there is no identity.” If
struggle is inherent in identity, then identity is not a separate moment that
can be played off against struggle. The 1957 critique presupposes a
separation that the 1937 text explicitly denies. The critique is therefore
inconsistent with the law as Mao himself had stated it—and it is the law,
not the critique, that is authoritative.
Moreover, the critique disregards
the concrete conditions of each country at the time. Stalin’s 1938 text
was written for the era of transition from capitalism to socialism,
under capitalist encirclement, in the struggle against reformism and
conciliationism on a world scale. In that context, the emphasis on the
absoluteness of struggle had a precise political target: the reformist
currents that sought to dissolve class antagonism into a harmony of interests.
To have emphasized “unity” in isolation from struggle in that context
would have played directly into the hands of conciliationism. Stalin’s emphasis
was correct for the Soviets under those conditions.
Mao’s 1957 wrong or misplaced critique
was made in a different context: socialist China, after the completion of the
socialist transformation, addressing the problem of contradictions among the
people. The task Mao set himself was to distinguish antagonistic from
non-antagonistic contradictions and to find, for the second type, methods
of resolution that do not proceed by the suppression of one side—
“unity—criticism—unity,” “cure the sickness to save the patient.” In that
concrete setting, a one-sided emphasis on struggle, transplanted from a
different setting, could indeed have been disastrous: it could have turned
non-antagonistic contradictions into antagonistic ones and treated the people
as the enemy. So Mao’s critique may have had a temporary, condition-specific
validity for China, not for the Soviets.
But that is precisely the point:
it had validity for China, under China’s conditions, and temporarily. It does
not and cannot apply to the Soviets. The attempt to generalize Mao’s
critique—to use it as a basis for declaring the theory a fallacy—is doubly wrong.
It misreads the theory (by separating unity from struggle), and it misapplies
the critique (by transplanting a China-specific, condition-specific judgment
onto the Soviet Union and onto the law itself). The sectarians have taken a
critique that may have been valid for a particular time and place, detached it
from those conditions, and converted it into a refutation of the law. That is
not Marxism; it is the substitution of a slogan for a concrete analysis.
And the ground of the critique is
concrete, not abstract. Mao was speaking in the period of socialist
construction in China, addressing the problem of contradictions among
the people. The task he set himself was to distinguish two types of
contradiction—antagonistic and non-antagonistic—and to find, for the second
type, methods of resolution that do not proceed by the suppression of one side
but by the transformation of the relation between the sides: “unity—criticism—unity,”
“cure the sickness to save the patient,” the deliberate cultivation of the
identity between the opposites so that the contradiction can be resolved
without the destruction of either side. In that concrete setting, a
one-sided emphasis on struggle, transplanted from a different setting, would
have been disastrous: it would have turned non-antagonistic contradictions into
antagonistic ones and treated the people as the enemy.
Stalin’s 1938 text was
written for a different setting—the transition from capitalism to socialism,
the era of the intensification of class struggle on a world scale, the
construction of socialism in one country under encirclement. In that
setting, the emphasis on the absoluteness of struggle had a precise
political target: the reformist and conciliationist currents that sought to
dissolve class antagonism into a harmony of interests. Mao’s critique, therefore,
was wrong. It is a critique of the application of a correct general
principle to conditions for which its one-sided emphasis was unsuited—and
it is itself an exercise of the very principle Mao was defending. As he
had written twenty years earlier in On Contradiction:
“‘Opposition’
means that the two aspects of a contradiction mutually exclude or struggle
against each other. ‘Complementarity’ means that under given conditions
the two aspects of a contradiction become interconnected and acquire identity.
And struggle is inherent in identity; without struggle there is no
identity.”
That sentence is the standard against
which Mao measured Stalin’s emphasis—and it is a sentence that affirms
unity, not one that dissolves it.
This is the decisive point. Mao’s
critique of Stalin was a critique of application under the concrete conditions
of socialist China. It was not a theoretical refutation of Stalin’s formulation
of the law, and it cannot be made into one. To use it as evidence against the
law is to mistake the application for the principle, and to convict the
principle of a fault that exists only in the sectarian’s own reading. The
sectarians have not surpassed Mao; they have not even understood him. They have
taken his condition-specific critique and turned it into a general indictment
of the law—which is precisely what Mao, in 1937, had forbidden.
The Bolshevik Perspective on
Struggle, and the Reformist Inversion
The whole political stake of the
question lies here. The unity of opposites is the unity of opposites—capital
and labor, socialism and capitalism, the old and the new. Unity does
not soften the opposition; it locates it, specifies its conditions, and thereby
makes the struggle concrete. The struggle is what drives the transformation;
unity is what the struggle works upon and finally breaks. Lenin put the
identity of the two moments in the sharpest possible form:
“Dialectics is
the doctrine of how the opposites can be and are identical—under what
conditions they are identical, becoming transformed into one another.”
The conditions are the whole
point. To specify them is to make the struggle concrete; to omit them is to
make it either abstract or conciliatory.
The reformist tradition
inverts this. Having detached “unity” from struggle, it converts unity into
a state of harmony to be preserved rather than a condition to be transformed.
From this follows the entire political grammar of reformism: the harmony of
interests between bourgeoisie and proletariat, compromise between the classes,
the gradual amelioration of antagonism without its abolition. Lenin’s charge
against the Second International was exactly this—that its theoreticians
regarded development as “decrease and increase,” as “repetition,” and so
left the source of motion in the shade:
“The two basic …
conceptions of development (evolution) are: development as decrease and
increase, as repetition, and development as a unity of opposites (the
division of a unity into mutually exclusive opposites and their reciprocal
relation). In the first conception of motion, self-movement, its driving
force, its source, its motive, remains in the shade (or this source is made
external—God, subject, etc.). In the second conception, the chief
attention is directed precisely to knowledge of the source of ‘self-movement.’”
And against the first conception
he insisted:
“Development
is the ‘struggle’ of opposites.”
The second conception alone, he
wrote, “furnishes the key to the ‘leaps,’ to the ‘break in continuity,’ to the
‘transformation into the opposite,’ to the destruction of the old and the
emergence of the new.”
The sectarian claim that the
unity of opposites is a “fallacy” is the reformist inversion turned inside out.
Reformism keeps “unity” and cancels struggle; the sectarian keeps an abstract
“struggle” and cancels unity. Both proceed from the same premise: that
unity and struggle cannot inhabit a single concept, that one must be
sacrificed to the other. Both thereby destroy the law. For struggle without
unity has no concrete object—it becomes a posture, a ritual of denunciation, a
refusal to analyze the conditions under which the enemy actually exists and
can actually be defeated. And unity without struggle has no motive force—it
becomes the harmony of the reformists. The Bolshevik conception refuses
both mutilations: it holds that struggle is absolute because unity is
relative, and that unity is analyzable because it is the concrete
terrain of struggle. This is what distinguishes Marxism-Leninism from every
variety of conciliationism—and from every variety of sectarian posturing that
mistakes its own abstract militancy for rigor.
Conclusion
The theory of the unity of
opposites is not a fallacy, and the argument that it is, constitutes the
real sophistry. It is a sophistry because it trades on the equivocation between
the formal-logical and the dialectical senses of “contradiction,” because
it isolates one moment of a law and declares the whole law invalid, and
because it performs this operation in the service of a political posture
that avoids the concrete analysis of concrete conditions—which is precisely
what the law demands. Lenin named that demand the living soul of
Marxism:
“The most
essential thing in Marxism, the living soul of Marxism, is the concrete
analysis of concrete conditions.”
The sectarianism that declares the law a fallacy has, by that
very act, exempted itself from the demand.
Nor is Mao’s critique of Stalin
correct on this basis. Mao’s critique of Stalin was condition-blind: it disregarded the
different concrete conditions of the USSR in the 1930s and China in 1957. It does
not and cannot apply to the Soviets, for whom Stalin’s emphasis on the
absoluteness of struggle was the correct application of the law under
the conditions of capitalist encirclement and the struggle against reformism.
It may have had a temporary validity for China, under China’s
conditions, in the period of socialist construction. But it cannot be
generalized into a refutation of the law, and it cannot be used to
convict Stalin of neglecting “unity”—because the unity of opposites is
the struggle of opposites, and Stalin’s emphasis on struggle was an
emphasis on the content of the unity.
The sectarians have taken a
condition-specific critique, detached it from its conditions, and
converted it into a general indictment of the law. That is the
ideological operation, and it is against that operation, and not against
the law, that the argument of this article is directed.
The unity of opposites is the
struggle of opposites; the law stands; and the claim that it is a fallacy is
the sophistry of those who would rather denounce than analyze.
Erdogan A
October 25,2026
Note on the quotations used
Mao: On Contradiction
(opening thesis on the law of contradiction as the fundamental law; the passage
on “opposition”/“complementarity” and the inherence of struggle in identity);
the 1957 critique of Stalin (Moscow meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties);
the “five fingers” passage on all things being the unity of opposites.
Marx: The Poverty of
Philosophy (“coexistence … struggle … fusion into a new category—that is
the essence of dialectics”).
Engels: Anti-Dühring
(“motion itself is a contradiction”).
Lenin: On the Question
of Dialectics (unity conditional/struggle absolute; the splitting of a
single whole as the essence of dialectics; the two conceptions of development;
“development is the struggle of opposites”); Philosophical Notebooks
(dialectics as the doctrine of how opposites can be and are identical); the
formulation on the concrete analysis of concrete conditions.
Stalin: Dialectical and
Historical Materialism (internal contradictions as the internal content of
development); the caution against “getting carried away with the unity of
opposites” as Hegelian terminology, used here in its political-functional sense
as a guard against conciliationism.
Kaganovich: speech on the
tenth anniversary of the Institute of Red Professors (the Party-language
meaning of the unity of opposites as the conquest of difficulties).
