How Marxism Understands "Justice"
Fairness and justice are the eternal and unremitting value pursuit of mankind. However, due to the complexity and multifaceted nature of the connotation of fairness and justice, people have discussed fairness and justice in various ways since ancient times, and have not been able to form a unified and comprehensive discussion. In the classical view of justice, fairness and justice are mainly regarded as social ethical concepts related to the good of the community, so social justice is more about the unity of individual virtues and community virtues.
Since modern times, with the rise of civil society and the development of commodity economy, individuals have begun to be liberated from feudal blood-related patriarchal relations, their independence and autonomy have been continuously strengthened, and the free space of society has been continuously expanded. People have begun to turn from yearning for the sacred and lofty world of the noumenon to the pursuit of personal interests in the empirical world and the secular world. Fairness and justice have thus turned into a question of whether individual rights can be realized in the real society. The equal rights between individuals have begun to be intrinsically linked with social justice. Under the dual arguments of liberal political philosophy and liberal political economics, a liberal justice concept of freedom, equality, and ownership has been formed, with rights as the core and based on the "principle of free trade", "principle of equal exchange" and "principle of labor ownership". Especially as capital has become the basic system of modern society, the liberal justice concept has become more deeply rooted in the hearts of the people and has increasingly become the dominant concept of modern justice and a strong barrier to modern politics.
Hegel inherited the basic tradition of modern liberal political philosophy and classical political economics, and recognized the core position and constructive significance of private property rights in modern economic and political life. However, what is more profound than modern liberalism is that while Hegel saw the importance of property rights, he also discovered the defects of modern civil society based on private property rights, and thus launched a sharp criticism of private property rights, opening up the ideological path of criticizing and transcending the modern liberal concept of justice from the perspective of state philosophy.
Marx's overall critique of the classical and modern liberal concepts of justice was made in his critique of Hegel's philosophy of law. In Marx's view, the concepts of justice from ancient Greece to modern times mostly presuppose an ideal and principle of justice. They either place the realization of justice on the realistic concern of a sacred entity that exists independently of humans, or place the realization of justice on a certain pre-existing human nature and its continuous improvement, and then use this principle and ideal of justice to explain and criticize the real world. Therefore, it is essentially a speculative concept of justice that transcends reality and only seeks to explain the world. After arduous theoretical exploration, Marx finally established the historical materialist methodology for studying the issue of social justice in "The German Ideology", which marked the birth of historical materialism, namely, "not to look for a certain category in each era, but always to stand on the basis of real history, not to explain practice from the perspective of ideas, but to explain various forms of ideas from the perspective of material practice." This means that Marx did not understand social justice from the perspective of metaphysical value suspension, but firmly based the study of social justice issues on actual material production and economic relations, thus completely drawing a line between himself and the previous philosophy of understanding justice from the perspective of ethics or legal rights, and achieving a fundamental change in methodology.
However, due to the lag in economic research during the period of The German Ideology, Marx could not go deep into the capitalist economic structure for in-depth analysis. In Capital and its manuscripts, Marx, guided by the basic principles of historical materialism, through the political economics critique of the overall capitalist mode of production, revealed the "social justice paradox" dominated by capital logic, including the paradox of freedom, the paradox of equality, the paradox of ownership, and the paradox of utility, that is, capitalism retains the justice concept that is compatible with the individual private ownership and simple commodity production of workers at the level of commodity exchange, but it pushes this justice to its opposite at the level of commodity production, thus forming a paradoxical concept of social justice that is compatible with capitalist private ownership and capitalist commodity production. As a result, Marx profoundly revealed the dialectical relationship between modern justice and capital logic, which is both coupled and negated, and pointed out that modern freedom and equality are nothing more than the conceptual embodiment of the freedom of contract and freedom of will of both parties in equal exchange under commodity economy conditions, which serve and obscure the social essence of capital rule. However, unlike Hegel, Marx did not resort to the ethical entity of the state to carry the ideal of justice for the development of human society, but based the realization of social justice on the transformation of the mode of production and the form of labor. Through the transformation of the mode of production and the form of labor, the united workers were able to re-possess the means of production and directly meet their own needs in society through socialized labor. In this process, the "mediators" such as the state, class, and ideology that maintain the mode of production on which they depend must eventually be negated by history.
From this perspective, the criticism and construction of justice based on the mode of production is the normative characteristic of Marx's view of justice. In Marx, there is a factual dimension of examining the concept of justice based on the mode of production. In Capital and its manuscripts, Marx analyzed the duality of the capitalist mode of production as both simple commodity production and capital production, and saw through the overall existence of capitalism as exchange justice and production injustice, and then revealed the historical limits of capitalist justice - "justice" in the name of "justice". But at the same time, Marx's revelation and criticism of the justice of the capitalist form does not mean the lack of normative dimensions such as rights, freedom, equality, and justice in the perspective of historical materialism, but Marx has left liberalism and used justice as a theoretical basis for remedial value. He explained his unique view of social justice from a completely new theoretical perspective and a higher theoretical level. The basis of this view of social justice is the self-realization of people in the association of free people. This means that the essence of social justice is not only the distribution of material wealth and living materials, nor is it just the realization of individual rights of people in civil society, but the ultimate goal of self-realization of everyone based on the principle of difference. This ultimate goal establishes a social justice standard based on the ontology of freedom, but it is by no means an abstract and speculative existence of justice. Instead, it places freedom in the historical field of real material production and economic relations, and takes freedom and its realization as the value basis of social justice. Taking human self-realization as the value paradigm, Marx expounded the self-negation and internal transcendence of the principle of rights, the principle of contribution, and the principle of need, thus forming a historical and holistic social justice sequence based on the mode of production. It can be seen that in Marx, as a normative dimension, the existence of justice does not negate the scientific nature of historical materialism based on the analysis of the mode of production, but is supported by the factual dimension. In this sense, Marx's view of social justice is a unity of factuality and normativity based on the materialist conception of history.
The materialist conception of history foundation of Marx's view of justice is more clearly and vividly presented in the context of the criticism of the liberal view of justice and the vulgar socialist view of justice. In Capital and its manuscripts, Marx made a profound criticism of the human basis, institutional basis, theme of justice, and speculative principle of the liberal view of justice, as well as the speculative and non-historical nature of the methodology of the vulgar socialist view of justice, the theoretical misunderstanding and practical trap of "distributive justice", and the theoretical purpose of returning to small private ownership, which made Marx's thinking path based on historical foundations to criticize and construct his view of social justice clear, thus highlighting the scientific and revolutionary nature of Marx's view of social justice. For Marx, the nature of social justice is no longer a moral issue derived from natural law and abstract human nature, but a historical norm rooted in economic relations and real life; the theme of social justice is no longer the issue of the distribution of rights and obligations, but the issue of the rationalization of economic structure and class structure; the way to achieve social justice is no longer the self-movement process of self-consciousness or some speculative ideas, but the revolutionary practice of changing reality.
In solving the problem of social justice in contemporary China, we must break the ideological myth of Western justice theory, always adhere to Marx's historical materialist method of examining social justice, and take the Marxist view of social justice as a guide to continuously promote the solution of social justice in the practice of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and thereby enrich and expand the breadth and depth of the Marxist view of social justice. First, we should take the unity of idealism and reality as the basic principle, combine Marx's ideal of justice with the reality of the primary stage of socialism with Chinese characteristics to seek a solution to the problem of real justice. Second, we should take the main contradictions in society as the problem to grasp the unique connotation of the problem of real justice. Third, we should take common prosperity as the basic orientation and take the people as the subject of realizing social justice. Fourth, we should take the comprehensive deepening of reform as the fundamental driving force to continuously meet the people's needs for a better life.
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