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ABSTRACT:
The concept of "non-antagonistic contradiction" (NAC) was developed in the early 1930s in the Soviet Union to describe the social contradictions of Soviet society. This concept was employed to claim that Soviet social contradictions could be resolved without becoming intense or leading to social upheavals. The numerous attempts by Soviet philosophers to explain the NAC concept resulted in theories that are subject to decisive objections. In particular, the contradictions among the working class, the peasantry, and the intelligentsia of the USSR did not prove to be non-antagonistic according to any of the theories designed to support that characterization. The reasons for the failure of the NAC concept are not confined to the Soviet context, and suggest that the NAC concept represents an important error in dialectical theory.
IN ITS ROUGHLY 75 YEARS OF EXISTENCE, philosophy in the Soviet Union made relatively few innovations in the dialectical philosophy it had received from Marx and Engels. One of the most important of these was the concept of "non-antagonistic (dialectical) contradiction" in social relations (NAC), introduced by Soviet philosophers in the early 1930s. Soviet accounts typically claimed that NACs undergo resolution by a gradual process of merging or equalization, as opposed to intensification and abrupt transformation.
Other formulations described the resolution of an NAC as gradual, without an outburst, or not requiring either violence or the destruction of one of the contradicting sides. This concept (or concepts) was applied extensively in Soviet philosophical, political, and economic works up to the end of the Soviet period. It was also adopted and developed in Eastern Europe and China. The NAC concept was developed and used for the political purpose of describing the socialist system as capable of gradual and peaceful resolution of its internal conflicts as it moved toward communism, a process which obviously did not take place in the USSR. In the present paper, however, we study the formulation of this concept primarily as an episode in the history of philosophy. Since the political relevance of NACs is obvious, however, political topics will have to be discussed in our evaluation of this concept. The view of NACs advanced here is that Soviet accounts do not sustain the claim that all of the contradictions of socialist society are...