Marx's Personal View And Its Modernity Research

The process of the capitalist economy leading and controlling the global order is also the process of the western society constructing the whole superstructure which is based on individualism philosophy.The contemporary socialist China with Marxism as her guiding ideology faces various challenges from inside and outside,and the struggle in the ideological field is becoming increasingly fierce.The report of the 19 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China said,“Culture is the soul of a nation.Ideology determines the direction and development of culture.” However,it has been argued that Marx is a non-humane communitarian who opposes individuals and distorts humanity.It has also been discussed that Marx himself is an individualist who has worked hard for the realization of freedom as well as all-round development of everyone throughout his life,and he has been made as an authoritative spokesman for individualism.In this paper,it is thought that Marx has paid close attention to the demand of personal survival and development,on the meanwhile,he does not violate personal freedom.Although he is not opposed to personal freedom,he is not a western individualist at all.Actually he has maintained a critical attitude towards western individualism,but exactly much more towards the methodological individualism.Marx's theory on individual has experienced a process from rationalism and humanism to the dialectical historical materialism,as well as a process from a nonindependent thinking state to an independent thinking state.He has put forward a concept of “Realistic Individual”,which does not come from the high sky.It is not Marx's own invention,but his genius discovery in the process of recognizing the law of human and social development.It gradually generates in the process of Marx's systematic criticism on existing theories on individuals.Marx's “Realistic Individual” grows in the factory of the real world.The real “material” “active” “social” people are different from the “spiritual” “intuitive” “isolated” ones of old style staying in consciousness.Due to the consideration of practical interests,Marx's philosophical conception has broken through the confinement of Hegel's “Absolute Spirit”.Due to the investigation on the production condition of workers,he defines the essence of human beings as “life activities in consciousness”,which is different from Feuerbach's perceptive and intuitive “speculative individual”.Due to his criticism and reflection on Steiner,Marx clearly recognizes the fatal defects of the western traditional theories on individual and the harm of extreme individualism.According to the discussion in Marx's classical texts,each person is engaged in labor production in a certain historical relationship in order to realize the needs of life.How he is depends on how he shows his life,and what he is means what he produces as well as how he produces.To some degree,human beings are indifferent to good and evil,they are not self-interested or altruistic,and the different manifestations of people are caused by different circumstances and different personal realities.The interrelation between people reflects the whole division of labor and stratum structure of society.The unreal consciousness is the poppy flower that grows in the real world.If the soil is not purified,the poison flower will never be cut off.Marx cares for people and respects their realistic needs.He objects to the false demands imposed on people by the fictitious community.He opposes those people who are too materialistic,and opposes the alienation of human beings.He advocates the self-conscious pursuit of community value.Marx believes that the free development of everyone is the condition for all people to develop freely.At the same time,he points out that only in the collective can individuals obtain the means of all-round development of their talents,that is,only in the community order can there be individual freedom.There is not such a community without no person,nor such a person who does not belong to any community.Leaving out the individual to talk about the community,the community is left only with an empty shell without any practical content.On the meantime,leaving out the community to talk about the individual,such individuals exist only in the imagination of aesthetics.Personal development has gone through a process from “Dependence on Man” and “Dependence on Material” to “Free Individuality”,and each era produces the individual forms adapted to its historical development stage.In the stage of “Dependence on Man”,the norms of social order are prominent and the position of community is higher than that of the individual.In the stage of “Dependence on Material”,capital advocates freedom.In the future society,individuals will be in a more conscious state in social practice.A person can either be the help of history or the resistance of history.Each man makes his own history,and admitting the role of individual in history is not the same as denying the community.The people are the creators of history,and admitting the historical status of the people is not the same as denying the individual,which is not the same as denying the leading role of the outstanding individual in history,either.In the post-Marx era,foreign scholars have not given up exploring Marx's theory on individuals.From the perspective of individual sociality,or from the perspective of individual existence,or from the perspective of individual nature,or from the perspective of individual demand,the western Marxism have vividly depicted the various kinds of strange images of the living people and deeply criticized the distortion of human nature based on Marx's individual theory,combined with the capitalist world they own live.Their exploration of individual theory has gone through a gradual process from the macroscopic to the microscopic as well as from sociology and philosophy to psychology.They have personally experienced the two world wars,have been keenly aware of the state of madness driven by interests of those who own a capital personality,and have witnessed the hard struggle between life and death of the broad masses of the people who suffer too much from capital.They aspire to peace,promote humanitarianism,value human nature,and have become staunch humanitarian defenders eventually.Humanitarianism of western Marxism discuss the problems of man and society with predetermined nature of man.They explain the essence of man with abstract human nature,and they explain social history with human alienation and return movement.They shed specific historical conditions as well as social relations to discuss human nature,and regard them as the decisive forces in the development of social history.Therefore,this humanitarianism is likely to move towards historical idealism and extreme individualism.Moreover,individualism itself in the theories of social culture is on the basis of political and economic individualism.Marx has pointed out that the western individualism is a logical fiction as well as a partial silhouette of the existing society.They take for granted the things that should be explained,and turn the results of history into the beginning of history.In contemporary times western theories on individualism manifest as its form of liberalism.The debate between Rawls and Nozick reflects the theoretical dilemma of contemporary liberalism and the fundamental limitation of the non-historical abstract method of methodological individualism.