This is a recap of Mao’s On Practice, written in 1937.

I’ve taken this from the “Selected Works of Mao Zedong”, published by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Mao means to combat two errors he saw in the party: dogmatists who were more interested in theory than in practice, and empiricists who restricted their ‘knowledge’ to their own limited experience, refusing to look further. 

Mao says there are two stages to knowledge. The first is the perception of what is happening. This is a knowledge based in the reality of what is. Human knowledge can’t be separated from practice.  

The second stage is to form concepts that grasp the essence, the totality and the internal relations of things. From these, one forms judgments and references. 

Mao says the dialectical-materialist theory of the process of the development of knowledge, basing itself on practice and proceeding from the shallower to the deeper, was never worked out by anybody before the rise of Marxism. Marxist materialism solved this problem correctly for the first time. 

“Marxist philosophy has two outstanding characteristics: one is its class nature, the second is its practicality. Theory depends on practice, and in turn, serves practice. The truth of any knowledge or theory is determined not by subjective feelings, but by objective results in social practice.” 

“The people with real personal knowledge are those engaged in practice the wide world over. If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience. But one cannot have direct experience of everything: as a matter of fact, most of our knowledge comes from indirect experience, for example, from past times and foreign lands.” 

Two points must be emphasized: the first is that perceptual knowledge is dependent on rational knowledge, and the rational is reliable precisely because it has its source in sense perceptions; the second is that knowledge needs to be deepened. “It is necessary through the exercise of thought, to reconstruct the rich data of sense perception, discarding the dross and selecting the essential, eliminating the false and retaining the true, proceeding from the one to the other and from the outside to the inside, in order to form a system of concepts and theories. It is necessary to make a leap from the perceptual to rational knowledge.” 

“Marxist philosophy holds that the most important problem does not lie in understanding the laws of the objective world and thus being able to explain it, but in applying the knowledge of these laws actively to change the world. Marxism emphasizes the importance of theory, precisely, and only, because it can guide action. Knowledge begins with practice, and theoretical knowledge is gained through practice, and must then return to practice.” 

“the objective world which is to be changed also includes all the opponents of change, who, in order to be changed, must go through a stage of compulsion before they can enter the stage of voluntary, conscious change. The epoch of world communism will be reached when all mankind voluntarily and consciously changes itself and the world.” 

My own notes: 

The idea that one looks around at the world, sees what is happening, and then formulates hypotheses about why the phenomena occurs is the scientific method. Mao formulates it in Marxist terms as perception leads to theory, but it’s the same process. It’s also perfectly rational that one should discard hypotheses that don’t bear out in reality, and in so doing, one will come to a closer notion of the truth, truth being defined here as ‘that which corresponds with reality’.  

The odd thing to me is that while the Marxists say these things, they don’t really seem to ever turn the focus to the real-world examples of Marxism itself. Even in 1937 when Mao was writing this, it was already apparent that much of what Marx thought would occur in the capitalist world, was not occurring. It should also have been apparent that the beliefs about communism as a functional system were also false. When Mao wrote that truth is determined by objective results in social practice, these things were becoming evident already after 18 years of socialism in Soviet Russia. The Marxists should have “reconstructed the rich data of sense perception, discarded the dross and selected the essential, eliminated the false and retained the true”, yet they were so married to their theory of Marxism, that they were blinded to the failures of their own system. While they proclaimed to be the most scientific, the most committed to reality, they were in fact committing the very error Mao himself condemned by being wedded to unproven ideas. Marxists said that “social practice alone is the criterion of the truth of one’s knowledge….man’s knowledge is verified ONLY when he achieves the anticipated results in the process of social practice”.  

Yet, in actual practice, communist systems were notorious for lying, manufacturing data to support their predetermined conclusions, and shutting down any dissenting voices that would contradict the official narrative.  

Now perhaps I’d give the Chinese communists in these days some credit along these lines when they ditched communism for a market system. I know the ostensible reason was that the markets would have to develop to the point where socialism would then take over, but I doubt anybody really buys that, particularly when the CCP has been overseeing the effort on its watch. But they could only claim faithfulness to the dialectical materialist process then by ditching Marxism in favor of markets.