A Research On Marx’s Subjective Social Formation

There are two significant discoveries of Karl Marx, one of the discoveries is historical materialism. In the theory of historical materialism, the social formation is one of the focuses of the content. "Social formation" is one of the important concepts in the view of history and society, and is used to grasp the basic categories of human social relations in Marxism, and is also the basic unit of its historical evolution. Human social relations exist concretely and realistically as a part of social formation. The process of historical development of human social relations is the process of evolution of social formation from a low level to high. In a sense, the purpose of the investigation of the historical evolution of social relations is to reveal the inherent contradictions and seek social interest relationship of historical origin, evolution and solution, and for humans to explore the path of liberation.There are constantly disputes on the division of Marxism’s social formation and its meaning in theoretical area. Marx insists that the process of history is dialectically decisive,in other words, on the basis of theories of historical materialism, he tried to divide the human history in many ways and perspectives, so as to research fully of human history.The “five-step theory” and “three-step theory” are two representatives, they respectively divide the human history from different perspectives. However, they both have advantages and the range of usage. The five-step theory is the most widely accepted, and the essence of the material for production is concrete, but many countries go beyond one or several forms in the process of development, or their social formations are not very classic. The three-step theory divides the human history from the subjective side, so as to highlight the people’s subjective position, but the steps are very vague and the boundaries are not clear enough. Therefore, this essay will make an attempt to combine the two together in order to use their advantages respectively.Marx and Engels points out when they discuss the development of human history, that the whole history is just the transformation of human nature and their needs are their nature.The needs of people is their inner motivation to create history. Thus the need of people can be the bridge to bring the five-step and three-step theories together as one.