Mao Zedong’s Dialectical Understanding: Critique of Economic Determinism, the Political Subject, and the Chinese Intellectual Tradition

This study examines Mao Zedong’s understanding of dialectics and its political implications. It evaluates Mao’s thought through three principal dimensions: his critique of economic determinism and bureaucratic-technocratic socialism, his emphasis on the constitutive role of the masses in political struggle, and his engagement with China’s traditional intellectual heritage. Mao’s dialectical approach is examined comparatively in relation to Stalin’s interpretation of historical materialism. The findings show that Mao’s understanding of dialectics departs significantly from the classical Soviet approach centered on the economic base by emphasizing the role of culture, ideology, political struggle, and mass mobilization in social transformation. This perspective underpins his concept of the mass line, according to which socialism depends not only on the development of the productive forces but also on the active political participation of the masses. The study further argues that Mao’s dialectical thought emerged through the interaction of the Chinese intellectual tradition and Marxist theory, while his effort to accelerate revolutionary transformation through social contradictions generated a tension between traditional Chinese dialectics and the modern revolutionary-progressivist worldview. Consequently, Mao Zedong Thought offers an original theoretical framework for understanding economic determinism, the political subject, and social transformation.