Method of Contradiction Analysis

The basic method for applying materialist dialectics to study, analyze and resolve contradictions to push the progress of things forward. It is the basic method for the proletariat and its political parties to seize victory in the struggle for reshaping nature and society.

The law of contradiction of things, i.e., the law of the unity of opposites, is the most fundamental law of materialist dialectics. Materialist dialectics holds that, in the objective world, contradictions exist universally and all the time. To correctly understand the laws of development and essence of objective things, it is necessary to uphold the method of contradiction analysis. This involves a wide range of contents, including: the two world outlooks; the universality of contradiction; the particularity of contradiction; the principal contradiction and the principal aspect of a contradiction; the identity and struggle of the aspects of a contradiction; the antagonistic form and non-antagonistic form of the struggle of opposites and the transformation of one into another under certain conditions.

The combination of analysis and synthesis is the basic method of contradiction analysis. Lenin classified “the union of analysis and synthesis—the breakdown of the separate parts and the totality, the summation of these parts” as one of the elements of dialectics. The so-called analysis is to analyze the contradiction of things, that is, to decompose the object of knowledge (things, systems) into various parts, elements, properties, relations, etc., and to study them separately. The so-called synthesis is to integrate the parts, elements, properties and relations obtained in the analysis and grasp them as an organic and unified whole. Analysis and synthesis enable to grasp the totality of the contradictions of a thing and the particularity in their interconnection, understand their essence and trend of development, find and ways to resolve their contradictions. Analysis and synthesis are interdependent and complement each other; there is no synthesis without analysis, and there is no analysis without synthesis.

Mao Zedong attached great importance to the method of contradiction analysis and regarded it as the most fundamental method to know things. Regarding the combination of analysis and synthesis, which is the basic method of contradiction analysis, Mao Zedong’s interpretation is that the dialectical method of combining analysis and synthesis is the process of posing, analyzing and solving problems. What is a problem? A problem is the contradiction in a thing. Where one has an unresolved contradiction, there one has a problem. To pose the problem is to make an investigation and study of the various aspects of the contradiction and to understand the nature of the contradiction. This is the discovery of the problem. To analyze the problem is to carry out a systematic and consistent investigation and study of the various aspects of a contradiction, exposing the internal connections of things. To solve the problem is to make a synthesis of the results of the analysis pointing to the nature of the problem and providing the method for solving it. The systems approach in systems science, its essence, core or basis is the method of contradiction analysis. The method of contradiction analysis is incompatible with infantile, naïve, philistine and formalist methods.