The Actual Unity Of Individuals And Society

The fundamental aim and ultimate goal of Marx’s theory is to subvert the existent institutions by means of communist revolutions and to accomplish social emancipation. The three years from 1843 to 1845 witness the maturation of the young Marx’s thought:he gradually casts off Hegel’s and Feuerbach’s influences, returns to the human world from heaven, and finally brings forward historical materialism, which firmly grounds social emancipation on reality. Therefore, the present thesis has as its main references Marx’s early texts such as On the Jewish Question, the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:Introduction, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the German Ideology, compares the different forms of Marx’s early theory of social emancipation, and seeks to reveal the development of Marx’s thought thereof. This development can be roughly divided into three stages. The first of them is that of On the Jewish Question and the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction. At that time Marx sets out from the emancipation both of the Jews and of the status quo of Germany, directs the critique of religion to that of the state, and then advances to the actual negation of the status quo. He points out that an emancipated man is the unity of a citizen that embodies the species-life and a participant of civil society that is self-interested, i.e., the unity of an abstract universality and a real atomized individual, and then inquires the actual conditions of this revolution raised "to the height of humanity". Hereby Marx for the first time articulates his theory of social emancipation in a comprehensive and systematic manner. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx bases the theory of emancipation on alienation, investigates the relation of alienation and private ownership, and regards social emancipation as consisting in the sublation of that type of ownership. The present thesis, however, argues that therein actually exists a logical gap, and it is the immediate, self-conscious connection between men that is the Archimedean point of social emancipation. In the German Ideology, Marx founds his theory on real, empirically verifiable activities, and claims with reference to the division of labor that the origin of social contradictions lies in the fact that such division results in the real separation of production and consumption as well as the subordination of individuals to the sum of productive forces. It is his assertion that social emancipation consists in the self-conscious association of individuals that is to actualize the reconciliation of individuals and society and even the ownership of the sum of productive forces by individuals. The present thesis argues that this theory falls short of a detailed account of the "communist regulation", which is nevertheless the crucial moment at which communist revolutions are to make their way from theory to reality. Generally speaking, social emancipation appears in the critique of the state to be the actual ownership of the "species-life" by men, in the logic of alienation to be the immediate connection between men, and in the logic of the division of labor to be the self-conscious association of men. The present thesis contends accordingly that Marx’s theory, albeit having various starting points, comes to be a theory of social emancipation whose center is the relation of individuals and society, whose basis is the social intercourse of men, and whose notion of emancipation is the actual unity of individuals and society.