Marx's Theory Of Civil Society And Its Chinese Interpretation

Human liberty and liberation has been the theme of all ages since the Enlightenment. Locke, Rousseau and other thinkers are advocates of civil society in modern history. Based on liberalism, with the premise of individual life, liberty and property, these thinkers argue for the relationships between individuals, between individuals and society, between individuals and the state, and attempt to construct a community for the individual's free development. Karl Marx is at once the product and internal critic of the Enlightenment. He criticizes the illusory "freedom" of liberalism and argues that human nature is the sum of social relations, therefore, individual liberation and social liberation bear intrinsic connection and human liberation is to transcend modern civil society.Marx's civil society theory is the core of his ideology. He repudiates Hegel's view that the state determines civil society and proposes that the civil society is the foundation of the political state, and hence the premise of human liberation is how "the human" frees himself from the oppression of the civil society. He demonstrates the duality of modern civil society by means of historical materialism. On the one hand, the modern civil society creates for human liberation a wealth of material precondition and universal exchange; on the other, modern civil society has become a place of alienation. Via political economics, Karl Marx dissects the inner structure of the civil society and reveals that the root cause of alienation between people is capital domination over labor, thus laying a theoretical foundation for the self-emancipation of civil society, i.e. proletarian revolution.The social changes since 1978 China's reform and opening to the outside world ask for Marxism timely response, as Marx's civil society theory is the basic approach to social changes in China. Chinese development of socialist market economy is the premise of the socialist civil society. Compared with western modern civil society, China's socialist civil society is characteristic of its development and shares the nature of all civil societies. Socialist countries are open to self-criticism, restrict and eliminate voluntarily the inadequacies in the socialist civil society.