Marx's Appraisals Of The Historical Functions Of Capitalism And Its Time Enlightenment

The 20^th century witnessed the coexistence of two different social systems: socialism and capitalism. What we should pay special attention here is that the 20^th century is quite different from other eras in which two social systems coexisted in that both the two systems of the 20^th century have been remarkably developed. For contemporary people, this phenomenon has brought about many ideological disputes. Nevertheless, no matter we want to diagnose the vitality of capitalism which has quite a long history, or we are going to summarize the superiorities of the newborn socialism, we have to take into consideration both of the splendid civilizations created by the two systems respectively. As a matter of fact, we should take a rational attitude toward the historical fuctions and evolution course of capitalism, which 'once has played a special and revolutionary role in history'. Only by doing this can we pave the way theoretically to scientifically analyze socialism and its future trend, and to ultimately understand the development law of human society.This thesis is started with a brief summary of Marx's argumentation about the many aspects of the historical role played by capitalism, and is then extended to analyses of the historical functions of the capitalist society of the past, the present and the future, including a careful study of the historical functions of its basic economic, political and cultural systems. Afterwards, based on a scientific investigation on the new changes and trend of contemporary capitalism, this thesis moves on to demonstrate how we can use those new momentums of capitalism as reference for advancing our socialist course, and accordingly educes some common laws of development between today's socialism and capitalism.Basically there are two writing characteristics in this thesis: in the first place, it makes an inductive summary of Marx's literature concerning the appraisals of the historical role of capitalist society (i.e: the capitalist society under construction); in the next place, by analyzing the historical role and evolution course of capitalism, it provides time enlightenment and reference for advancing the development of our today's socialist society.