From "World History" To "Globalization"

Marx's concept of "world history" is rooted in Hegel. Hegel's concept of "world history" is a result to understand real world history. He understands real world history by "spirit". Concretely speaking, Hegel thinks that the world history is development of "spirit" in time and accomplishment in real life. The nature of "spirit" is free. So the so-called world history is the process of free to accomplish itself in human life and by human life. Marx critically inherit Hegel's concept of world history, he accepted Hegel's idea that the word history is a rational process, and try to make history become a science, but Marx refused Hegel's abstract forms to understand history by understanding world history in real history. By changing Hegel's concept of "world history", Marx finds a new method to explain history. Marx applies the new method to study capitalist society and give "world history" concept new connotation: in the general sense, the world history is the outcome of material production; In particular, the world history is the outcome of capitalist production that tries to expand to the global. The world history is a peculiar phenomenon of capitalist era, the capitalist mode of production that regards capital as the axis makes history become world history."Transition from history to world history"is the core of Marx's theory of world history。On the one hand, Marx not only discourses the transition in The German Ideology, but also discourses it in The Communist Manifesto. He think that the transition from history to world history is not some pure abstract actions from "self-consciousness",the universal spirit and some strange shadows of metaphysics, but completely material and can be proved through experience and daily life. That is to say, the transition from history to world history is the outcome of material production. On the other hand, Marx also point out the transition is the outcome of capitalist production in the second volume of Capital Theory by discoursing his theory of capital accumulation. In other words, the nature of capital drives the transition. The theory of capital accumulation is more concrete interpretation of Marx's theory of world history. Based on the interpretation, Marx's theory of world history gained further development. Specifically, Rosa Luxembourg and Lenin develop Marx's theory through criticizing or inheriting Marx's theory of capital accumulation. The theory of "third party" from Rosa Luxembourg and the theory of imperialism from Lenin formed first expansion of Marx's theory of world history, then the dependency theory and the world system theory formed second expansion. In short, we can find a clear logical clue from first expansion to second expansion.The problem between Marx's theory of world history and today's hottest topic of globalization is very important. Because "Globalization" is a complex historical phenomenon, we should grasp it by division between "as the objective facts of globalization" and "as the theoretical discourse of globalization". Based on former, we find that globalization is a changing, objective and complex course, and we should use diversified and multidimensional method to comprehend it. Based on latter, we find that globalization has heavily loaded with ideology, so we should analyze it according to Marxism. Based on the analysis, we conclude that Marx's theory of world history is not only the globalization theory in the 19th century, but also can be applied to our era if we regard it as method, because our era is still capitalist era.All in all, our study shows that Marx is still our contemporaries. The contemporary value of Marx's theory of world history is not only changing our thinking mode, namely we should explore and analyze social problem from world historical perspective, but also is an effective method by that we can analyze and criticize the era named globalization.