Ah, for note taking, gotcha. Here are my notes from when I last read On Practice:

On Practice

-Man’s activity in production is the most fundamental practical activity. This production is what creates knowledge of relations, social and otherwise.

-Dogmatists tend to reject the importance of practice on knowledge, and empiricists tend to not be quite as bad as the dogmatists as though the empiricists are skeptical of theory, they still form their own knowledge through practice.

-Class Struggle in particular has a large influence on the ideas of someone, as the class one belongs to stamps their thinking in other aspects of life through forming the basis of their viewpoints as the primary mode of practice.

-Both production and knowledge move from simpler to more complex as time goes on, building on themselves. Previous production was small-scale, and thus so was knowledge, but the proletariat within large industry has an ever-expanding base for knowledge in particular, giving rise to Marxism.

-Dialectical Materialism has two outstanding characteristics:

1. It’s purpose is to serve the proletariat as a useful tool for analysis, to identify problems more correctly.
2. It is practical, theory must be tested by practice in order to have merit. Only social practice can determine truth.

-Knowledge is formed in steps, including a jump from quantitative perceptions to qualitative knowledge formation:

1. People percieve stimuli, forming a “rough sketch” of an idea. At this stage, conclusions cannot yet be drawn based on stimuli.
2. Eventually, quantitative buildup of stimuli results in a qualitative formation of concepts, which can draw conclusions.
3. Cognition involves the internal use of various concepts to apply to logically solve problems.

-Knowledge goes from shallower to deeper, from perceptual to logical, and incomplete to more complete, one-sided to many-sided.

-Perceptual and rational are qualitatively different but united.

-“All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.”

-Knowledge can be direct or indirect based on direct or indirect experience.

-The Proletariat as a whole was only in the first stage of knowledge when it attacked machinery, etc but through class struggle gained awareness of how best to organize.

-Data must be rich, ie not fragmentary, and connected to reality, ie not illusory, to provide correct bedrock for analysis to be made.

-2 important points to stress:

1. Rational knowledge depends on perceptual knowledge.
2. Perceptual knowledge needs to be deepened to rational knowledge through practice, inner-contemplation does not directly deepen knowledge as practice does, ie no “mind palaces” to construct. Discard the useless without mercy, retain and refine that which has merit.

-It is important to reconstruct the data of sense perception in order to turn it into rational knowledge from perceptual.

-Those who despise theory and only uphold practice fail to analyze correctly and can steer comrades down the wrong path.

-Rational knowledge must return to practice, thus applying to revolutionary purpose.

-Processes can be completed, but the continuous dialectic is ever in motion, so to speak.

-In a revolution, the situation changes very rapidly, and thus must be grasped properly and flexibly to succeed.

-Those who grasp ideas too slowly, “die-hards,” form Right deviationists. They grumble against progress and cannot lead humanity forward.

-Those who try to realize lofty future goals in the present conditions are often Left deviationists. They usually take on adventurism and are also dangerous.

-“The sum total of innumerable relative truths forms absolute truth.”

Summary

Social practice and perceptual stimuli gradually builds up data to be converted into concepts, then rational knowledge upon reconstruction. This rational knowledge must then be used to guide practice, test it, and refine it endlessly in pursuit of attaining the aims of the Proletariat and achieving Communism.

See, it’s not so bad!