April 5, 1956

[Extracted from an editorial in the People's Daily of 5 April 1956 entitled 'On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat'.]


Some naive ideas seem to suggest that contradictions no longer exist in a
socialist society. To deny the existence of contradictions is to deny dialectics.
The contradictions in various societies differ in character as do forms of
their solution but society at all times develops through continual
contradictions. Socialist society also develops through contradictions between
the productive forces and the conditions of production. In a socialist or
communist society, technical innovations and improvement in the social system
inevitably continue to take place; otherwise the development of society would
come to a standstill and society could no longer advance. Humanity is still
in its youth. The road it has yet to traverse will be no one knows how many
times longer than the road it has already travelled. Contradictions between
progress and conservatism between the advanced and the backward, between
the positive and the negative will constantly occur under varying conditions
and different circumstances. Things will keep on like this: One contradiction
will lead to another, and when old contradictions are solved new ones will
arise. It is obviously incorrect to maintain as some people do, that the
contradiction between idealism and materialism can be eliminated in a socialist
or communist society. As long as contradictions exist between the subjective
and the objective between the advanced and the backward and between the
productive forces and the conditions of production, the contradiction between
materialism and idealism will continue in a socialist or communist society
and will manifest itself in various forms. Since man lives in society he
reflects in different circumstances and to varying degrees the contradictions
existing in each form of society. Therefore not everybody will be perfect,
even when a communist society is established. By then there will still be
contradictions among the people, and there will still be good people and
bad people, people whose thinking is relatively correct and others whose
thinking is relatively incorrect. Hence there will still be struggle between
people though its nature and form will be different from those in class
societies. Viewed in this light the existence of contradictions between the
individual and the collective in a socialist society is nothing strange...


Transcription by the Maoist Documentation Project.