Das Kapital And Realistic Road To Human Emancipation

Since the reform and opening-up,in the research of Marxism,more and more scholars hold the view that the realistic road to human emancipation revealed by Marxism has been intensively manifested in the book Das Kapital.This perspective is taken as a “conclusion”,also constitutes the “standpoint” or the “basic point of view.Whereas,such a “conclusion” that serves as the “basic point of view” has only summed up the fact serving as “result”,which has yet to be the “truth itself”.Before reaching the result,it is the “process in which the content unfolds itself” that constitutes the truth itself.Centering on the basic points of view above,this paper conducts an exploration for the realistic road to human emancipation as revealed in Das Kapital,that is,to answer an array of important questions such as the inherent contradictions of commodities,the relationship between the logic of capital movement and logic of human emancipation,and the communism manifested in the Das Kapital through inquiries into the “starting point”,“main line” and “destination” of the realistic road,so as to present those rich but specific contents within the realistic road to human emancipation in itself and for itself,thereby reasonably supporting the above conclusion through the argument of its evitability.This is the fundamental goal of this paper.The structure of this paper is laid out as follows:In the first chapter,the relationship between the Das Kapital and the realistic road to human emancipation has been grasped in general.The reason to assert that the Das Kapital is the fundamental route to understand the realistic road to human emancipation as revealed by Marx is that it has realized a revelation of the realistic road to emancipation through its critique of the capitalist society and capitalist political economy,of the capitalist social ideology and capitalist politic economics,and of the existence forms of human in a sense of existential ontology underlying in the former two critiques.Since other works of Marx have not criticized the capitalism in such a complete way,they thus haven't conducted a systematic revelation on the realistic road;therefore,it is the Das Kapital that remains to be the fundamental route to understand the realistic road to emancipation.The second chapter argues that the concept of commodity,as the starting point or opening of the entire work of Das Kapital,constitutes the first inevitable link or the inevitability of the link for the realistic road to emancipation.The labor theory of value proposed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo had exerted significant influences on the ultimate formation of Marx's concept of commodity.By sublating the both,Das Kapital has not only discovered the two factors of commodities and the two-fold character of labor,but also discovered the fetishist forms within the capitalist economic relations from the value forms of commodities.Fetishism make individuals subject to the domination of commodity,currency and capital,reflecting a social reality in which the relationship between human are concealed by the relationship of exchanges between objects,manifesting a social relationship of human inequality and of injustice,and portending the loss of morality and ethics for people in the capitalist society.In the third chapter,the movement from the logic of capital movement to the logic of human emancipation serves as the body of this paper.In Das Kapital,with a revelation of the capital logic movement mainly comprised of the production,realization and distribution,etc.of the surplus value,Marx's quest for the realistic road to human emancipation,on the one hand,is to further explore and corroborate the self-negation nature of capitalist logics and the grounds of economic crisis of capitalism.They are mainly manifested as: the possibility of economic crisis caused by the underlying contradictions between the law of value and the law of surplus value;the shift from the possibility to reality of economic crisis resulting from the integrative process of the law of value and the law of surplus value;the historical inevitability that economic crisis will inevitably take place as a result of the law of value and the law of surplus value;and the modern economic crisis resulting from financial capitalism.On the other hand,through such revelations the Das Kapital also makes people further realize their nature of being free and conscious,as well as the “conditions for self-emancipation”,thereby embarking on the class struggle of the proletariat.Das Kapital has not only elaborated the historical fact of the proletariat and their struggles in reality,but also endowed the category of proletariat and its struggle doctrine with constructivism,thus leaving out sufficient theoretical and practical spaces for later Marxists in the west to “redefine the revolutionary subjects”.The negation-unity relationship between connotative logics of capital movement and human emancipation points to the main line for the realistic road to human emancipation.In this relationship,the capitalist economic relation,as well as the overproduction economic crisis resulting from it,is a basic material condition for the proletariat to embark themselves on class struggle in realistic history;while the class struggle,in turn,forms a political situation for the self-negation and self-disintegrating of the capitalist economic relation;thus,the logic of human emancipation must be the force driving the immanent transcendence and self-negation of the logic of capital movement.The fourth chapter discusses the fact that the Das Kapital makes communism manifest.In Das Kapital Marx predicted and narrated the future communist society,which reflected the fact that the theoretical purport lay in “discovering the new world by criticizing the old one” when Marx was exploring the communism.Das Kapital construes communism as a communist movement for the critique of capitalism.As a movement and a “process of negation”,communism is both Marx's “ethical ideal” and his “ontological commitment”,as well as the most realistic realization process for the logic of human emancipation.These three aspects collectively construct the understanding to the essential connotation of scientific communism.Centering on the basic points of view above,this paper also attempts to re-delve into the humanistic logic(the dimension of value)of Marx by presenting his scientific logic(the dimension of fact)in his most important work the Das Kapital.Only from a real negation-unity relationship between these two theoretical perspectives can one discover a complete Marx,rather than a biased one.Therefore,the changes from chapter one two chapter four throughout the overall structure of the paper reflects a transformation process from the dimension of fact(scientific logic)to the dimension of value(humanistic logic);while specific contents deep in every chapter also endeavors to reflect the transformation principle above.