Marx's View Of Democracy And Its Enlightenment

Marx's concept of democracy runs through the three major components of Marxism and has profound theoretical origins,development history,rich content and scientific connotation.The history of society development has already proved how scientific and guiding Marx's democratic thoughts could be in numerous times.To this end,studying Marx's concept of democracy can not only deepen the understanding of Marxist theory,but also contribute to the enrichment and innovation of it so as to upgrade the way to better guide Marx's democratic thoughts in the practice of building socialist democratic politics with Chinese characteristics.This thesis deploys a variety of research methods and conducts an in-depth study of Marx's concept of democracy,emphasizes on its implications for democratic politics in China.It is divided into four following parts.In Chapter One,it summarizes the previous theoretical thoughts and whole development process of Marx's concept of democracy on the basis of a large amount of literature.The theoretical thoughts include democratic thoughts of Plato and other ancient Greek philosophers,of Rousseau and other European Enlightenment thinkers,of the classical political economists and of the German classical philosophers as well as of the Utopian socialists.While the whole development process involves the germination stage,the development stage and the improvement stage as three main components.In Chapter Two,it discusses the main contents of Marx's concept of democracy in which democracy functions as a kind of purpose and means in state system and it is not only the content and form but also a category of the whole people.That explain why democracy has its practical,historical and classy attributes.Besides,the essence of democracy is that the people are the masters of the country and the ultimate goal is to ensure a free and comprehensive development for everyone in the class society.Furthermore,the realization of democracy requires the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat where appropriate conditions on economics,individuals' intellectual and legal laws are ensured and the new democratic supervision mechanism with people as supervisor is established.In Chapter Three,it mainly analyzes the three relationships that need to be grasped in Marx's concept of democracy,namely,the relationship between democracy and economic foundation,class struggles and between freedom and equality.In Chapter Four,it relates with some enlightenment and implications of Marx's democratic thoughts on the development of Chinesedemocratic politics after a thorough review of Marx's democratic thoughts and are shown as follow.Firstly,the essence of democracy is that the people are the masters of the country while electoral democracy and deliberative democracy are pivotal ways to realize it.Secondly,democracy is not an abstract concept,but a concrete and historical one which must be rooted in the basic national conditions and economic reality of Chinese society.That means,a gradual self-correction and self-improvement is necessary to make it.Thirdly,the supervision of power needs to be strengthened based on the fact that power comes from the people and its great importance,long latency and the wide influence and close relationship with the interests of the people also necessitate the work to achieve it.