Serving the People With Dialectics

Serving the People With DialecticsServing the People with Dialectics is a pamphlet of essays by workers and peasants concerning the use of dialectics in everyday work. It shows how the ability to comprehend phenomena in line with the new philosophy not only serves to advance social forms, but also in increasing yields for crops, preserving vegetables and extending the limits of medicine. All these, in turn, serve the basic economic law of socialist society the maximum satisfaction of

Serving the People with Dialectics is a pamphlet of essays by workers and peasants concerning the use of dialectics in everyday work. It shows how the ability to comprehend phenomena in line with the new philosophy not only serves to advance social forms, but also in increasing yields for crops, preserving vegetables and extending the limits of medicine. All these, in turn, serve the basic economic law of socialist society Ñ the maximum satisfaction of the people's livelihoods. As today bourgeois society has primed a great mass of people, the proletariat, to take state power into their hands, the individuals who constitute this mass must, out of necessity, use philosophy to solve everyday problems and serve the people.

There are, however, drawbacks to the text, which NEPH has noted inside. As a pamphlet from Mao-era China, it was necessarily stamped with some errors of Mao Zedong Thought, namely Chinese exceptionalism. For example, it states as fact a myth that weather has something to do with superstition and that the old Chinese peasant who followed the lunar calendar to predict rain was correct. Another example is the position that modern medicine could merely be a combination of ancient Chinese and Western medicine. These errors, occasionally grave, follow from the line Mao Zedong put forward of giving Marxism-Leninism "an indubitably Chinese character." In fact, such things as science, both natural and social, are the universal experience of the proletariat and all humanity. That being said, the pamphlet is still of great merit and use for its ability to bring dialectics out of the realm of pages and into the realm of life.