Historical Materialism As The Domain Of Communication Theory

People in society are always in communication. With the rapid development of economic globalization and integration of the world, every corner has been involved in the process of global communication. To study the communicative theory is a need of the development of the times being and the inherent requirement of paradigm conversion in philosophy. Marx's philosophy is historical materialism in a broad sense and communication is an important category in the system of historical materialism. The formation of communicative theory and the foundation of historical materialism are the same process in the history of Marxist philosophy. To study Marx's communicative theory and other's in the view of historical materialism can help us understand historical materialism better and solve the communicative predicament in reality. So this research will have great theoretical significance and practical value.Marx drew and absorbed the results of previous studies, especially Kant's communicative view in his critical philosophy, Fichte's communicative view of the identicalness between"self"and"non-self", Hegel's thought of self-consciousness and master-slave dialectic and Feuerbach's study on the relationship between"I"and"you", and then Marx found his own communicative theory. Marx brought up the concept of communication from the aspect of socio-economic development and subrogation of social patterns and studied his own communicative theory from the view of social historicity. In Marx's view, communication was a very broad concept covering all the social relationships and a product from the interaction between different individuals, classes, nationalities and social groups as well as different countries. Marx's communicative theory is a complete theoretical system which includes communicative basis theory, communicative process theory, communicative types theory and communicative stages theory and takes people's freedom and all-round development as its aim. These all reflect the basic characteristics of Marx's communicative theory, namely putting communication on the basis of material production and making economic communication as the core, taking the realistic people as the starting point and at the same time going back to them, seeing communication as a product of history and interrelating it with historical development and subrogation of social patterns.Afterwards, Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse and so on who were the members of the early Frankfurt School reflected and criticized the industrial civilization of capitalism, opened the history of researching human and the alienation of their communication in Western Marxism. Since then, Habermas founded the theory of communication action which based on communicative rationality and in the frame of the binary fission between system and the life-world. Habermas hoped that the principle of discourse can solve the crisis of legitimacy and outlined a blueprint for the future. Honneth went along with the logic of Habermas', taking Mead's social psychology to renovate Hegel's recognizing theory, so that he made love, law and solidarity as three forms of recognition in modern society. And then, Honneth founded his own theory of recognition. But communicative theory in Western Marxism is an analyzing on communicative norms and they don't find the material reason as the motives behind, so their theory will never come true.The essence of harmonious society and harmonious world is the harmonious communication between people. For the time being, to practice the scientific concept of development and to construct a harmonious society must take the premise of understanding communication correctly and take Marx's communicative theory as the guide to solve the problem in economic communication, political communication, cultural communication and international communication.