Marx and Engels' Criticism and Transcendence of the Capitalist World Order
[Abstract] On the basis of criticizing various conservative or abstract cosmopolitanisms and their world order views, Marx and Engels formed a material and structural understanding of world history when examining the interconnectedness between civil society and world history in the capitalist era, and achieved a methodological change in understanding the world order. Through the empirical analysis of the game between European capitalist powers in the 19th century, they critically exposed the hypocrisy of the foreign policies of European powers, the injustice of Britain's hegemony over the world, the power politics of the alliance of great powers, and the ideology that provided a rational basis for the capitalist world order, and clarified the hegemonic nature of the capitalist world order. Through the continuous deepening of political economics research, they accurately grasped the essential provisions of the world order, and in the unity of logic and history, they saw the global expansion and disorder characteristics of the capitalist world order shaped by the logic of capital, and then conceived the future prospects and transformation plans of the world order. Marx and Engels' criticism and transcendence of the capitalist world order still have important implications for the transformation and reshaping of the contemporary world order.
"World order" is a term widely used and discussed in the fields of international politics and political philosophy. From the perspective of word meaning, "order" in the context of modern Chinese is a concept that implies value judgment, meaning "an orderly and non-chaotic situation"; "order" in the context of English focuses more on the description and explanation at the empirical level, meaning "the arrangement of society, the world, etc. and its system of rules and customs." This cognitive difference means that to understand the meaning of world order, it is necessary to anchor it in the historical context.
In the era of Marx and Engels, capitalist free competition accelerated its development and then transitioned to a monopoly form, the world system accelerated its shaping, and the world economic connection in the form of world market, world trade, international division of labor and world currency, as well as the construction of modern nation-states and liberal ideology adapted to it, constituted the historical context of the evolution of the world order during this period. Based on the realistic concern for the development of human society and the fate of mankind, Marx and Engels abandoned the a priori rationalist interpretation of world history in classical political philosophy, and used the scientific historical view to systematically examine and analyze the birth process, hegemonic attributes, internal logic and development laws of the capitalist world order, and then proposed a new view of world order.
1. Methodological Changes in Understanding the World Order
Before the establishment of the materialist conception of history, "world order" was an abstract philosophical category about human freedom and liberation. As early as when various nations were still in a state of dispersion and isolation, Western political philosophers had already tried to think about the ultimate meaning of mankind and the development prospects of the world from the perspective of speculative philosophy, forming a far-reaching tradition of cosmopolitan thought. Cosmopolitanism originally meant world citizenship, and then gradually extended to a universal historical concept with the view of world citizenship as the core. Cosmopolitans of different times took abstract categories such as universal human nature, natural rights, moral ethics, and absolute rationality as theoretical bases, and took the realization of permanent world peace and development, freedom and equality as value goals, and made prospect predictions and model designs for the world order they knew, providing an ideal blueprint for the formation of the modern European international system. However, with the gradual deepening of the world historical process, cosmopolitanism and the world order view it constructed have increasingly shown theoretical weakness and fallacies. Marx and Engels' economic, political and philosophical criticism of various abstract world order views based on "cosmopolitanism" as the philosophical basis constituted an important part of their worldview and methodological revolution.
In the economic dimension, Marx and Engels analyzed the bourgeois position of the "cosmopolitan" economic view of British classical political economics. Political economists such as Adam Smith and Bentham believed that the world-wide free trade system could achieve the unity of individual interests and social interests, and the development of a country and the world by giving full play to market rationality. In commenting on the above view, Engels pointed out that the national economics constructed by Smith was only to "subordinate cosmopolitanism to the purpose of the state and elevate the national economy to the essence and purpose of the state"; the essence of Bentham's utilitarian economic thought was to make free competition the essence of ethics and morality and adjust human relations according to the laws of things, which only brought "the end of the old, Christian, naturally formed world order, that is, the highest point of externalization, rather than the beginning of a new order that should be created by people who are aware of themselves under conditions of complete freedom." Marx also pointed out in his criticism of national economics that it attempted to "develop a cosmopolitan, universal energy that destroys all boundaries and constraints, so that it can replace these regulations as the only policy, universality, boundaries and constraints." In short, the "cosmopolitan" economic view of classical political economics cannot promote the realization of a world order that is more in line with human nature.
In the political dimension, Marx and Engels exposed the conservatism of the feudal hierarchical order, and analyzed and criticized various supra-historical "cosmopolitan" political views that denied national differences. In 1840, Engels criticized the two erroneous tendencies of "Germanism" and "cosmopolitan liberalism" on the issue of German national liberation, emphasizing that the latter "denies national differences and is committed to creating a great, free, and united human race", which is essentially a weak and pious wish, just like a priori religious rationalism. In 1842, Marx analyzed the view of Prussian politicians who compared society to nature and regarded general class differences as the ultimate result of "God's world order" and stopped moving forward, believing that this "only shows that his research on this world order is superficial." In response to Louis Blanc's shallow view that the French are cosmopolitans and that "the future of France is the future of all mankind", Engels emphasized: "The most notable feature of true democracy is that it should deny its own history and refuse to take any responsibility for the past full of poverty, tyranny, class oppression and superstition."
In the philosophical dimension, Marx and Engels criticized the metaphysical and idealist positions of German classical philosophy and the Young Hegelians on cosmopolitanism and world order, as well as Carlyle's salvation fantasy about the modern Christian world order. After Kant embedded the logic of historical teleology into cosmopolitanism, Hegel regarded world history as the process of self-development and self-realization of absolute spirit, emphasizing that "the only supreme judge of relations between countries is the universal absolute spirit, that is, the world spirit". Influenced by this, the world order view of the Young Hegelians such as Bauer and Stirner became more abstract. On the one hand, they abstracted the economic relations and political forms of Britain and France into philosophical concepts, and then talked about world history in the philosophical speculation of "critical criticism". On the other hand, they did not recognize the world historicity of other nations, and emphasized the superiority of the German nation over other nations under the influence of national prejudice and national limitations. Marx and Engels made a profound criticism of the above views, believing that these "hypocritical bourgeois cosmopolitanism and human concepts" had regressed to the "ideological fanaticism" of the German nation at this time, and its essence was "proclaiming Germany's world domination under the banner of theoretical world domination". In addition, when criticizing Carlyle’s religious views, Engels pointed out that the Christian world order, which elevated interests to “the bond of mankind”, not only caused the general dispersion and atomization of mankind, but also made money the ruler of the world and made people slaves of things. “It is bound to collapse within itself and give way to a humane and rational system.” Thus, Marx and Engels had initially explored the true face of the capitalist world order.
While drawing a clear line between themselves and various conservative and abstract cosmopolitan and world order views, Marx and Engels recognized and defined the development of human society from the perspective of material production, and clarified the interconnectedness between civil society and world history in the capitalist era. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx used Feuerbach's humanism as an ideological medium. On the one hand, he examined the philosophical and economic significance of labor from the perspective of human nature, and regarded world history as "the process of the birth of man through human labor, the process of nature's generation for man." On the other hand, he took alienated labor and private property as the entry point, emphasizing that when private property is presented in the form of industrial capital, it completes its domination over man, "and becomes a world-historical force in the most universal form." In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels initially constructed and elaborated the basic content of historical materialism, clarified the historical content and class attributes of civil society, and emphasized that the increasing concentration of wealth caused by market competition and the inherent expansionary nature of the capitalist mode of production determine that civil society must not only be based on the nation-state as the basic unit, but also transcend the specific spatial scope of the nation-state. The competitive and hierarchical characteristics of civil society are therefore replicated and reproduced on a global scale. Individuals "are increasingly dominated by forces that are alien to them (they imagine this oppression as a trap of the so-called world spirit, etc.), by the ever-expanding forces that ultimately manifest themselves as the world market."
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels further explained the embedded mechanism of civil society structure in the world. They pointed out that the bourgeoisie established a unified nation-state and a competitive, hierarchical social order based on "free competition and the social and political systems that are compatible with free competition, the economic and political rule of the bourgeoisie" within a country. At the same time, relying on the competitive advantages of production tools, transportation methods and commodity prices, the bourgeoisie replicated this order on a global scale, forming a hierarchical structure in which uncivilized and semi-civilized countries are subordinate to civilized countries, peasant nations are subordinate to bourgeois nations, and the East is subordinate to the West. At this point, Marx and Engels completely abandoned the cosmopolitanism based on a priori rationality of classical political philosophy. Their understanding of the materiality and structure of world history laid the fundamental methodological premise for their subsequent political economics critique of the capitalist world order.
II. The hegemonic nature of the capitalist world order
Under the conditions of world history, the modern nation-state, as the basic unit of world politics, and the world constitute a "relationship between an organ and a body". The former can only realize its own survival and development through universal exchanges with the world, and has formed a hierarchical development order in the capitalist world order. Through the empirical analysis of the game between European capitalist powers, Marx and Engels revealed the interactive relationship formed by modern nation-states in the process of pursuing territory, wealth and power, and the hegemonic nature of the capitalist world order endowed by this relationship.
First, it exposed the hypocrisy of the foreign policies of the European powers. "To judge successive governments and their actions, one must use the times in which they live and the conscience of their contemporaries as the yardstick." In The Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century, Marx exposed and condemned the diplomatic secrets of Britain and Russia in the 18th century, which sacrificed the interests of other countries by any means. He also took the tsarist Russia's perfidious actions of switching alliances and tearing up treaties in order to divide the Swedish Empire and seek hegemony in Europe as an example, pointing out that the foreign policies of the European powers were only tools to expand their own power and did not have the real effect of achieving peace and stability in Europe. In the 1850s, the "Eastern Question" became the intersection of various conflicts of interest and contradictions among the European powers. The so-called "Eastern Question" refers to a series of international issues caused by the European powers' competition for the territory and rights of the Ottoman Empire and its vassal states, and its direct consequence was the outbreak of the Crimean War (Eastern War) from 1853 to 1856. In a series of political articles related to the Crimean War, Marx and Engels examined the course, causes and nature of the Crimean War, and exposed the selfish motives of the participating countries in the Crimean War: as a bastion and pillar of European reactionary forces, the purpose of Tsarist Russia was to seek hegemony and "command the whole of Europe"; the purpose of Britain and France to join the war was to snatch Crimea and the Caucasus from Russia, thereby weakening Russia's power in the Near East. Therefore, whether it was politicians and official newspapers in Britain, France and other countries describing the Anglo-French war against Russia as "defending" Turkey's independence, opposing "despotism", and fighting for "freedom" and "civilization", or Tsarist Russia describing its aggressive behavior as a "liberation war" of the Slavic people, they were just false lies to cover up their pursuit of national interests and the purpose of competing for hegemony. Marx and Engels also believed that the "Eastern Question" could only be solved by a European revolution.
Second, analyze Britain's barbaric behavior in dominating the world. Marx and Engels pointed out that the main goal of Britain's foreign policy was to maintain the balance of power order in Europe to ensure its economic monopoly and avoid the outbreak of European revolution due to the expansion of war, and to establish its world hegemony through colonial aggression and expansion in the world. "Britain, a country that has turned many nations into its hired workers, strangled the entire world with its own giant hands, and once bore the cost of Europe's restoration...Britain dominates the world market." Regarding Britain's colonial expansion and aggression in Asia, Marx pointed out the interest motives and political coercive characteristics behind it: the real purpose of Britain's war against China was to seek the interests of opium smuggling at the expense of China's interests, protect pirate rowing boats, and realize the permanent residence of ambassadors in the capital; in India, Britain's colonial policy brought great disasters to the local people, "it pretended to be decent in its homeland, but it did not cover up in the colonies." Although Britain's colonial expansion objectively brought the possibility of modernization to India, its despicable selfish motives determined the irrationality and injustice of its actions, and fully exposed the extreme hypocrisy and barbaric nature of capitalist civilization.
Third, it reveals the power politics nature of the alliance of great powers. After the fall of the Napoleonic Empire, the "Quadruple Alliance" of Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia led the establishment of the Vienna System (also known as the "European Concert") in 1815, and held regular meetings to discuss issues related to "common interests". As a by-product of the Vienna System, the "Holy Alliance" established by Russia, Prussia and Austria took the realization of "justice, love and peace... those ideas that surpass sacred religion" as its slogan. However, the Vienna System, backed by military strength, is nothing more than a tool to maintain the monarchical order on the European continent, and it did not bring Europe "a hundred years of peace" as later scholars said. From the perspective of specific political actions, on the one hand, the major powers used various diplomatic means to avoid war, and on the other hand, they prevented and suppressed the bourgeois democratic revolution in Europe, thereby "suppressing all second-rate countries no matter what their names are." For the communist movement that was emerging in Europe, they even united to "carry out a sacred encirclement and suppression." In essence, the Vienna system is a "small circle" and "big power club" formed with power politics as its underlying logic, various conspiracies and transactions as its means, and at the expense of the interests of weak countries and nations. The inherent structural contradictions and reactionary nature of the Vienna system that went against the historical trend determined its inevitable fate of collapse, and the Crimean War was a landmark event in its collapse.
After the Crimean War, a new round of adjustments began to be made to the power structure among the European powers. After four major wars, France, Savoy and Italy against Austria (1858-1859), Prussia and Austria against Denmark (1864), Prussia and Italy against Austria (1866), and Prussia and the German states against France (1870-1871), the fear of total war slowly emerged and enveloped the citizens of the bourgeois world. In the 1870s, Russia returned to the Balkans and carried out armed intervention, and signed the unequal Treaty of San Stefano with the Ottoman Empire. After achieving unification, Germany was committed to improving its geopolitical environment by building a continental alliance system. Under the mediation and auspices of Bismarck, the European powers made a new partition of the Balkans at the Berlin Conference in 1878 by amending the Treaty of San Stefano, and the Balkan people "did not have any effective representatives at the conference." At the Berlin Conference in 1884, the powers partitioned Africa in the same way. Whether it was war, treaty or the two Berlin Conferences, they were all power games based on the interests of the great powers, and therefore it was impossible to truly achieve peace and development in Europe and even the world. By the end of the 1880s, under the influence of Bismarck's diplomatic strategy of union and alliance, Europe had basically formed two opposing military groups. In 1890, Engels summarized the international situation in Europe at that time as "the major military powers on the continent are divided into two mutually threatening military camps: Russia and France on one side, Germany and Austria on the other. Smaller countries have to gather around one of the camps", and while exposing the reactionary nature of the military groups, he predicted the outbreak of future world wars.
Fourth, it criticizes the liberal ideology that provides a rational basis for the capitalist world order. In the era of Marx and Engels, Western international relations theory advocated nationalism with bourgeois chauvinism and patriotism as its connotation, as well as abstract "universal values" that regard freedom and equality as universal human rights. In essence, this nationalism is nothing more than a discourse tool to cover up the struggle of major powers for hegemony in Europe and even the world. Specifically, bourgeois chauvinism "is a means of perpetuating international struggles with the help of standing armies, a means of suppressing domestic producers by inciting domestic producers against their brothers in another country, and a means of obstructing the international cooperation of the working class", while bourgeois patriotism "is reduced to a deceptive cover" due to the global nature of bourgeois financial, commercial and industrial activities. The "universal values" it advocates are nothing more than hypocritical rhetoric to glorify the bourgeoisie's global rule: free competition only achieves "free development based on the rule of capital", and the view that free competition is the ultimate form of development of productivity and human freedom "is nothing more than saying that the rule of the bourgeoisie is the end of world history"; the moral and spiritual inequality caused by the rule of the bourgeoisie is used at the ideological level to justify "all the shameful acts committed by civilized predatory countries against backward nations", the essence of which is to affirm the legitimacy of achieving equal rights through violence and coercion.
III. The Capital Logic of the Hegemonic Order
The logical approach refers to "getting rid of the historical form and the disruptive contingency" and revealing the essence and laws of things with scientific abstraction. Capital logic is the objective regularity of capital movement. On the basis of examining the structural order of various economic relations within modern bourgeois society, Marx and Engels abstracted capital as "universal light" and "special ether" in capitalist society, and used it to grasp the essence, operation mechanism, internal contradictions and development laws of capital, clarifying the direct driving role of the historical emergence of capital in world history and its shaping role in the capitalist world order, and then insight into the economic roots of the hegemonic nature of the capitalist world order in the unity of logic and history.
The transformation of history into world history is actually the process of capital establishing its global domination. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels analyzed the manifestations of capital in different stages of division of labor in the phased investigation of the formation process of world history, taking division of labor and communication as the main axis. At the same time, they emphasized the universal shaping of production and communication relations by industrial capital, which dominated under the conditions of capitalist large-scale industry, and its role in promoting the formation of world history. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels further clarified the expansion of capital and its basic manifestation as a world power: the bourgeoisie "forces all nations - if they do not want to perish - to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it forces them to promote the so-called civilization in their own country, that is, to become bourgeois. In a word, it creates a world for itself in its own image." In the "Six-Book Structural Plan" of The Critique of Political Economy, Marx intended to study the various international relations and conditions of capitalist production in the fifth book "Foreign Trade" and to examine the universal development and deepening of various contradictions and economic crises in capitalist society in the world history in the sixth book "World Market". In Capital and its manuscripts, Marx used the logic of capital as the main line to analyze the historical reality of the inverted nature of the capitalist economic operation rules and capitalist society, and gave a scientific account of the development process and basic picture of world history promoted and dominated by the logic of capital.
The historical development of capital directly promoted the transformation of history into world history. In the Economic Manuscripts of 1857-1858, Marx pointed out that the particularity of capitalist society lies in breaking through the "local development of mankind and the worship of nature" that existed in all previous social stages, and for the first time incorporating the entire world into its unique expansionary power. In other words, world history has a distinct capitalist nature since its formation, and is an inevitable product of the operation of capital logic. "Capitalist production, like Christianity, is essentially cosmopolitan." The economic operation mechanisms such as the world market, world trade, international division of labor and world currency formed under the dominance of capital logic have made the production and consumption of all countries a global activity, shaping the global expansion and disorder characteristics of the capitalist world order.
First, as the real field for the establishment of the capitalist world order, the world market in a narrow sense constitutes the place and field for international circulation and commodity exchange among countries in the world. In a broad sense, it is a general concept of the capitalist world economy. Its essence is the bourgeois international society formed after "bourgeois society goes beyond the boundaries of the country". The narrow world market originated from the production needs of large-scale industry, but its formation and development in the early days were mainly promoted by coercive means such as the establishment of colonies, slave trade, commodity exports and international wars. The increasing expansion of the world market has promoted the development of world trade, the international division of labor in capitalism and the international flow of capital, and further established the dominant position of the capitalist mode of production in the world. In the process of countries being drawn into the world market, backward nations and regions that are still in the pre-capitalist production stage are forced to "bear the civilized atrocities of overwork on top of the barbaric atrocities of slavery, serfdom, etc."
Second, as a direct manifestation of capital power relations, world trade is a necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. It originated in the period of primitive accumulation of capitalism, with slavery and colonial expansion as its historical premise and satisfying production needs as its first priority. Therefore, it is not a natural product, but is carried out under the circumstances of strong countries oppressing weak countries and rich countries exploiting poor countries. It is one of the important means for developed countries to grab high profits. Whether it is free trade or protective tariffs, they are ways or means to serve capitalist production and the special interests of the bourgeoisie: the essence of the former is "the freedom of capital" and "worldwide exploitation", and the essence of the latter is the bourgeoisie of backward countries "aggregating their own strength and realizing domestic free trade means".
Third, as an economic manifestation of the hegemony of a great power under the dominance of capital logic, the binary international division of labor of "industrial country-agricultural country" is not only a direct manifestation of Britain's economic hegemony, but also a key link in Britain's realization of economic monopoly in the world. When discussing the free trade advocated by British political economists in the 1840s, Engels pointed out that the goal of the British free trade faction was to "build a world with Britain as the great industrial center, and all other countries became agricultural areas dependent on it." In the eyes of the British bourgeoisie, "Britain is the great industrial center of the agricultural world, the industrial sun, and the increasing number of satellites producing grain and cotton revolve around it." In "Das Kapital", Marx made a theoretical argument for the capital logic behind the binary division of labor of "industrial country-agricultural country". He pointed out that this form of division of labor actually reflects the differences in production capacity and capital accumulation capacity of different countries, because "the more developed a country's capitalist production is, the more the intensity and productivity of the national labor there will exceed the international level." When overproduction and a decline in the average rate of profit occur within a developed industrial country, the country's capital will seek conditions that are more favorable to capital reproduction worldwide in order to obtain higher profit rates by exploiting surplus value worldwide. The objects of exploitation will economically become the source of raw materials and product sales market of the colonial power, and politically become colonies of developed industrial countries.
Fourth, as an important manifestation of international finance, world currency has a clear attribute of external expansion. In the era of Marx and Engels, gold and silver as world currency "are both the product of general commodity circulation and the means of further expanding the scope of circulation". Once formed, world currency reacts on capitalist production and trade, and reshapes the values and behavioral norms of commodity owners. "The cosmopolitanism of commodity owners develops into a belief in practical rationality, which is opposed to traditional religious, national and other prejudices that hinder human material transformation". In addition, world currency affects the two-way interactive model between nation-states and the world. On the one hand, the infinite accumulation attribute inherent in currency makes it constantly transformed into capital to enter social production and reproduction, which in turn drives the spatial colonization of the capitalist mode of production and the expansion of the world market. Money hoarders "are like world conquerors, who regard the conquest of each new country as only the acquisition of new national boundaries." On the other hand, under the conditions of the international credit system, there is an inevitable connection between world currency circulation and world market crises: in the crisis phase of the industrial cycle, the contradiction between the huge demand for loan capital and the outflow of precious metals may lead to the outbreak of a credit crisis in a country, and the international overproduction caused by international commercial credit and capital credit means that the outflow of precious metals and credit crises will occur in all countries in turn, eventually causing the total collapse of the world economy.
IV. Future Prospects and Change Plans for the World Order
Based on the grand vision of world history and the theoretical height of dialectics, Marx and Engels, while conducting in-depth research on the decisive role of capital logic in world history and the capitalist world order, revealed the historical inevitability of change in the world order with a critical and revolutionary attitude, and further conceived the future prospects and transformation plans of the world order.
The inherent contradictions of capital logic determine that the capitalist world order will inevitably be replaced by a new world order. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels made a preliminary analysis of the consistency between the degree of human liberation and the degree of historical transformation into world history, pointing out that with the overthrow of the existing social system by the communist revolution and the elimination of private ownership, "only can individuals break free from various national and regional limitations and have actual contact with the production of the entire world (also with spiritual production), and only then can they gain the ability to utilize this comprehensive global production (people's creation)", and only then can they consciously control the universal development of productivity and the universal development of communication. In the subsequent critique of political economy, while affirming the historical role of capital, Marx revealed that the restrictive role of capital is to make all development appear in a form of opposition to people. This one-sided development "has the tendency to restrict productivity", and the world market crisis constitutes "the real synthesis of all contradictions of bourgeois economy and the balance of violent methods". Engels regarded the increasingly fierce competition between countries caused by the formation of large-scale industry and the world market as "Darwin's individual struggle for survival moved from nature to society with double madness". Only by transcending the world order of capitalist logic can true human liberation be achieved.
The reality of capitalist private ownership and transnational class structure requires the proletariat and its political parties to transform the capitalist world order through world revolution. Marx and Engels pointed out that the existence of capitalist private ownership constitutes "the conditions for some countries to exploit other countries", and the international unity of the bourgeoisie and its global exploitation and oppression of the proletariat means that "the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie is also a signal for the liberation of all oppressed nations". For the proletariat, one of the primary conditions for liberation is "united action, at least the united action of civilized countries", so as the leaders of the proletariat, the Communists must take into account both immediate and long-term interests, and must support all revolutionary movements against the existing social and political system within a country with the purpose of eliminating private ownership, and "strive for unity and coordination among democratic parties around the world". Based on the above-mentioned principled understanding, Marx and Engels actively participated in the international workers' movement and provided feasible ideas for the proletarian world revolution based on the principle of internationalism.
First, under the guidance of the scientific theory of Marxism, we should strengthen the organization of the international unity of the working class. In the 1860s, based on the reality that the theoretical understanding and struggle strategies of the working class in international unity were still very limited, Marx and Engels actively promoted the establishment of the First International, providing an organizational basis for the international mobilization and struggle of the proletariat. In the Declaration of the International Workingmen's Association, Marx emphasized that if the working class wants to realize its historical mission of liberating the world, it must first recognize the reactionary nature of the foreign policy of the bourgeoisie, actively carry out the struggle against the rule of the bourgeois oligarchy and the secret foreign policy, and realize "the brotherly cooperation of workers" with the code of action of proletarian internationalism, by "seeing through the secrets of international politics, monitoring the diplomatic activities of the government of the country, and resisting it by all means when necessary; when it is impossible to prevent such activities, unite and expose them at the same time, and strive to make the simple moral and just principles that should be followed in private relations the supreme principles in the relations between nations". At the same time, Marx and Engels fought uncompromisingly against various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois internationalist ideas and sectarian groups that split the international workers' movement. In response to the German Workers' Party's proposal in the Gotha Programme to realize the so-called "international fraternal union of nations", Marx pointed out: "This phrase, borrowed from the bourgeois alliance of peace and freedom, is intended to replace the international fraternal union of the working classes of various countries in their common struggle against the ruling classes and their governments."
Second, the proletariat and its political parties must abandon narrow "nationalism", actively oppose national oppression, and realize equal exchanges and cooperation between countries. Marx and Engels once used the Irish issue as an example to emphasize that the proletariat of oppressed nations "has the primary and most urgent duty to fight for their own national independence", and that the proletariat of the sovereign country Britain should sympathize with and support the desire and struggle of the people of the colonies and dependent countries for national liberation, because "Irish national liberation is not an abstract question of justice or fraternity for them, but the primary condition for their own social liberation". In 1882, when talking about the Polish national liberation struggle, Engels pointed out that the struggle of the working class against the rule of the exploiting class is closely linked to the struggle of the oppressed nations for national liberation, because the independence and equality of all nations are important prerequisites for the international movement of the proletariat, "the international movement of the proletariat is only possible within the scope of independent nations in any case", "international cooperation is only possible among equals...eliminating national oppression is the basic condition for all healthy and free development".
V. Conclusion
Marx and Engels' criticism and transcendence of the capitalist world order followed a theoretical path that unified logic and history, criticism and construction: by criticizing various abstract cosmopolitanisms and their a priori understanding of world history and world order, Marx and Engels clarified the logic of the transformation of history into world history, and achieved a methodological change in understanding the world order through the construction of historical materialism; they accurately grasped the essential provisions of the world order, critically revealed the hegemony of the world order dominated by the logic of capital and the inevitable global expansionism and disorderly characteristics of the capitalist world order; they scientifically analyzed the historical destiny that the capitalist world order will be replaced by a new world order in the future, and the main role of the proletariat in transcending the logic of capital and transforming the world order.
After a long 19th century, capitalism entered a new stage at the beginning of the 20th century. The world economy expanded in breadth (extending to non-capitalist regions) and depth (economic ties developed in depth and became increasingly close), forming a capitalist world economic system. The world entered the era of colonial empires, and the global imperialist colonial system was established, forming a "world system in which a very small number of 'advanced' countries practice colonial oppression and financial strangulation on the vast majority of the world's residents." The evolution of the imperialist pattern exceeded the control capabilities of capitalist countries, and the irreconcilable contradictions between the old and new imperialisms "inevitably led to the resolution of controversial issues with fire and sword", and ultimately led to the outbreak of the imperialist world war. Lenin deeply analyzed the nature of imperialism and its hegemonic behavior, profoundly criticized the illusion and reactionary nature of the attempt to establish a so-called "European Federation" under the capitalist system to avoid war, and called on the proletariat to fundamentally change the old world order through world revolution and realize the free union of all countries and nations under socialism. Lenin's criticism of the imperialist world order and his leadership in the victory of the October Revolution in Russia, which created a new world political and economic pattern of "one world, two systems", left valuable theoretical heritage and practical experience for changing and reshaping the world order.
After experiencing the disasters of the two world wars and the Cold War in the 20th century, mankind has entered the 21st century. Peaceful development and win-win cooperation have increasingly become the trend of the times. However, in the reality of international relations, the hegemony of the powerful still prevails, unilateralism is prevalent, the shadow of war has not dissipated, and the peace deficit, development deficit, security deficit and governance deficit have increased. What kind of order the world needs and how to promote the change of the world order are still urgent questions of the times that need to be answered. Both history and reality have shown that the international system and international order dominated by Western countries and based on their social system, development model and values cannot achieve world peace and development; attempting to maintain a world order dominated by unipolarity is contrary to the rise of the "global South" and the general trend of multi-polarization in the world, and cannot cope with the increasing global challenges. At a historical turning point when the contemporary world order is undergoing transformation and reshaping, China, upholding the concept of “humanity first”, has clearly proposed to promote the common values of all mankind, advance the building of a new type of international relations and a community with a shared future for mankind, and with a series of constructive global initiatives, has set the direction for promoting the formation of a more equitable, democratic and multipolar world order, injected stability and positive energy into an uncertain world, and made far-reaching Chinese contributions to the creation of a new form of human civilization.
(Notes omitted, please refer to the paper version of this magazine for the full version)
(Author's unit: School of Marxism, Peking University, Journal of Peking University (Philosophy and Social Sciences); School of Marxism, Peking University)
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