The Science Of Real Men And Of Their Historical Development

With the establishment of various disciplines in natural sciences in the 17 th century,social studies stepped onto the “broad road” of science.As an important part of social sciences,the scientization of historical research constituted one of the most important research methods in the 19 th century.In this process,thinkers debated the two issues,namely,“what is the real content of history” and “which method can be used to describe the historical process”.In the course,thinkers mainly focused on the interpretation of “historical facts” and the comparative study of dialectical methods and empirical methods.It is in this historical context that Marx launched the construction of “historical science”.In order to interpret the scientific connotation of “historical science” comprehensively,Marx analyzed the classical political economics and Hegel's philosophy.On this basis,he not only showed that “historical science” was “the science of real men and of their historical development” through his work Das Kapital,but also scientifically answered the two questions “what is the reality of history” and “which methods can be adopted to describe the historical process”.For one thing,Marx manifested the double situations of “real men” by “revealing the law of economy movement in modern society”,namely,“the situation that individual is ruled abstractly” and “the situation that the social relationship between people is to exploit and to be exploited”.Facing the reality crisis of capitalism,neither Adam Smith nor David Ricardo solved the problem,i.e.“labor decided the contradiction between value and profit.”Moreover,they didn't reveal the true origin of the surplus value.They “were always in a state of fictional origin”,and thought that in the capitalist society,“each class was able to gain the general social wealth in such a society”and “people were able to guarantee the social order and the development of productivity by the regulation through the market”.Therefore,they would “take the production relations of the bourgeois as the eternal economic category”,and thus completely ignored the historical social relations.As a result,the solution to the problem of capitalist society they proposed was nothing other than utopia.Although Hegel tried to resolve the crisis consciously,his theory turned to creationism due to his inversion of the real field of historical process,which led to the mystification of the historical process.Hence,Hegel imposed his “Die Spekulative Logik” on the historical process of reality,and thus took it as the real historical process.Therefore,it can be seen that Hegel didn't solve the theoretical difficulties.He didn't deal with the adversary relationship in reality,either.Therefore,the only way he could take was the “abstract,logic and speculative” expression,understanding the history of the self-generation of human as a self-motion process of “reason excluding the real existence of human”.Thus,Marx is keenly aware that,in order to decode the mystery of history,we must walk out from Hegel's “self-movement within consciousness”,and must focus on the critique of political economy to investigate the industrial production activities so that we could “reveal the rules of economic movement in modern society”,which constituted the research object of “historical science”.Marx took goods as the logical starting point of Das Kapital.By distinguishing labor and labor force,surplus value and profit,and variable capital and constant capital,Marx showed us the real exchange relationship between capital and labor,clarified the secret of capital proliferation,and confirmed that the surplus labor of the salary earner was the only source for the capitalists to get rich.Besides,Marx further pointed out that with the development of production mode of capitalism and the consistent updating of technology,compared to the rising of labor materials,compared with the constant capital such as the increasing means of labor and machines,human labor which was dominated by a certain quantity of alterable capital would relatively decrease.In this way,Marx “revealed the law of economic movement in modern society”,that is,“the declining trend of average profit rate”.Under this trend,the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie was included,as well as a series of inherent contradictions in the capitalist society.For another thing,Marx promoted the construction of the methodology of “historical science”in the exploration of “the precise research methods” and “the reasonable expression way”.The pair of contradictions in Smith's economic methods gave rise to two different research methods in the classical political economy.One was the vulgar economics method delegated by Zair.The method was based on empirical facts,emphasizing conclusion and induction of a variety of data,but it couldn't reveal the hidden structure of the capitalism because it didn't go deep into the interior of the capitalist production relations,and this only led to the vulgarization of the established theory.The other method was the “bourgeois system physiology” method delegated by David Ricardo.This method started from the stipulation that “value is determined by the labor time”,and used the abstract speculation to understand the internal organic connections and the life process of the capitalist system,trying to reveal the contradiction between the surface movement and actual movement of the capitalist system to us.Although “the classical political economy was almost exposed to the reality of things,it didn't express the reality consciously”.Based on this,Marx realized that “from abstract to concrete” constituted the important “scientific way of thinking” and “the theoretical elaboration way” of Hegel's concept dialectics.This method not only overcame the heterogeneity of the perceptual materials,but also removed the emptiness of abstract form.Therefore,it realized the dialectical unity of abstraction and concreteness.However,this method converged with the traditional metaphysics and was beyond its own boundary.For one thing,the concept dialectics of Hegel cut itself from the historical premise of reality,presenting us an “abstract and absolute production history of thought,namely a logic and speculative production history of thought”.However,he couldn't understand such abstract or idea was only “the theoretical demonstration of the material relation,which ruled the individual”.Hegel also confused the distinction between thinking concreteness and reality concreteness and regarded “the concrete representation of the spirit” as “the generation process of concreteness itself”.It was based on the method of classical political economics and the method of Hegel's philosophy that Marx divided the study of history into two different areas: One revolution area studied the material revolution on the economic conditions of production.The other studied the revolution of the form of ideology.On this basis,Marx limited the “historical science” to the economic conditions of the production whose revolution “can be specified by the precision of natural science”.In order to establish the precise research method,Marx,on the one hand,took the method “from the concrete to the abstract” as the premise to take possession of material,in order to realize the abstract mastery of the representation of chaos.Furthermore,Marx did not stay on this.In Das Kapital,he reasonably illustrated the internal relation between the motion process of “commodity-currency-capital” and the process of conversion from value to surplus value through the analysis of the boundary of Hegel's Concept Dialectics by using the methodology “from abstract to concreteness”.In this way,according to the importance of economic category in the modern bourgeois society,Marx reorganized the categories to form a “transcendental structure”,offering us the research methods of “historical science.”...