The Path of Specifying Historical Materialism

In a letter to Conrad Schmidt dated 5 August 1890, Engels wrote: “For many of the younger writers in Germany, the word ‘materialist’ is just a catchphrase with which they label anything and everything without further study, that is, they stick this label on and then think the matter is settled.” It can be seen that many young Germans merely used the “catchphrase” of materialism to construct their rather meager historical knowledge into a “general system.” In contrast, “our conception of history (Marx and Engels — author’s note) is above all a guide to study, not a lever for construction in the manner of the Hegelian school. All history must be studied anew,” and this conception of history requires a detailed study of “the conditions of existence of the various social formations” before attempting to derive from these conditions the corresponding political, juridical, philosophical, religious, and other views.

恩格斯在1890年8月5日写给康拉德·施米特的信中谈道，“对德国的许多青年著作家来说，‘唯物主义’这个词大体上只是一个套语，他们把套语当做标签贴到各种事物上去，再不作进一步的研究，就是说，他们一把这个标签贴上去，就以为问题已经解决了”。可见，许多年轻的德国人只是用唯物主义的“套语”来把自己的相当贫乏的历史知识建构成“一般体系”。与此不同，“我们（马克思和恩格斯——引者注）的历史观首先是进行研究工作的指南，并不是按照黑格尔学派方式构造体系的杠杆。必须重新研究全部历史”，这种历史观要求详细研究“各种社会形态的存在条件”，然后设法从这些条件中找出相应的政治、法律、哲学、宗教等的观点。

Transcending the Interpretation of “General Theory”

超越“一般理论”阐释

Engels’s restatement of the materialist conception of history responds to a common misunderstanding in the development of Marxism. For a long time, historical materialism has been regarded as a philosophical category concerning the inevitable process of history or a general social theory. Within this framework, concepts such as productive forces and relations of production, economic base and superstructure, class and exploitation, have all been interpreted as “general theories” divorced from any empirical process. This interpretation creates a fundamental difficulty: although historical materialism inevitably engages in a certain degree of scientific abstraction and conceptual construction in order to explain social development, once these “general categories” based on scientific abstraction are used to subsume empirical objects, one falls into the error of applying a transhistorical logic and thereby substituting it for a historical analysis of concrete objects. It is in this sense that Marx and Engels early on noted that their contemporary “Marxists” merely used the materialist conception of history “as an excuse for not studying history” and simplistically abstracted it into a universal formula applicable everywhere. Marx pointed out that general determinations common to all stages of production, abstracted by thought, certainly exist, but it is impossible to understand any real, historical stage of production by using these “general determinations.” In *The German Ideology*, when discussing production, Marx and Engels particularly emphasized that a “definite mode of production” or a “definite stage of industry” is linked to a “definite form of intercourse” or a “definite stage of society,” rather than any abstract “production in general.” In other words, understanding the “definite” character of production or social activity is the key to transcending the idealist conception of history and entering “real history.” The inherent tendency of historical materialism requires ascending from “general theory” and “general determinations” to concrete theories and concrete determinations with historical specificity.

恩格斯对唯物史观的重述回应了马克思主义发展中的一个常见误解。长期以来，历史唯物主义都被视为关于历史必然过程或一般社会理论的哲学范畴。其中，诸如生产力与生产关系、经济基础与上层建筑、阶级与剥削等，也都被阐释为脱离了任何经验过程的“一般理论”。这种解读造成了一个根本性的难题：尽管历史唯物主义为了解释社会发展，不可避免地要进行一定的科学抽象和范畴建构，然而，一旦运用这种基于科学抽象的“一般范畴”来归纳经验对象，就陷入了运用超历史的逻辑并据此代替对具体对象作历史分析的错误。正是在这个意义上，马克思和恩格斯很早就注意到同时代的“马克思主义者”，只是把唯物史观“当作不研究历史的借口”并简单抽象化为可以随处套用的万能公式。而马克思指出，一切生产阶段所共有的、被思维抽象出的一般规定当然是存在的，但用这些“一般规定”不可能理解任何一个现实的历史的生产阶段的。在《德意志意识形态》中，马克思恩格斯论述生产时特别强调“一定的生产方式”或“一定的工业阶段”，是与“一定的共同活动方式”或“一定的社会阶段”相联系的，而非任何抽象的“生产一般”。换言之，理解生产或社会活动的“一定的”性质，是超越唯心史观进入“现实的历史”关键，历史唯物主义的内在倾向就要求从“一般理论”“一般规定”上升到具有历史特定性的具体理论、具体规定中。

If *The German Ideology* still largely remained within the “general theory” of the mode of production, then when Marx entered the period of the critique of political economy in 1858, this “definite” character of production was grasped concretely. Marx realized at this point that, in order to grasp the concreteness of this social process, this investigation could not begin with the most primitive stage of the production system but must instead be directed at the most developed form, namely, the bourgeois economic form. Bourgeois society, as “the most developed and the most complex historical organization of production,” allows the understanding of the categories expressing its social relations not only to point to the deep structure of bourgeois society but also “to afford us a view of the structure and the relations of production of all the past social formations that have collapsed.” Marx called this the “method of reasoning backwards,” whose true meaning lies in revealing the fundamental tendency of society’s self-sublation through the analysis of the internal structure and historical character of the bourgeois economy. For “historical development is always based on the fact that the last form regards the previous ones as steps leading up to itself, and, since it is only very rarely and only under quite definite conditions that it is capable of self-criticism.” Thus, historical materialism transitions from a “general theory” of history to a theory of the bourgeois mode of production and social process. To understand the essence of bourgeois society, the critique of political economy must serve as the intermediary. According to Engels, “political economy is the theoretical analysis of modern bourgeois society” and the entry point for understanding modern society. However, because political economy “is based on the nature of estrangement” and “fixes the specific sphere of estranged activity,” it thereby accepts such things as private property, wage labor, and the monetary system as given premises of civil society, which become solidified in people’s minds as unreflective natural understandings. To this, the critique of political economy poses the question in epistemological terms: how is this objective knowledge of the historically specific, reified social relations of bourgeois society possible? I call this Marx’s problem of social epistemology. As a social epistemology, historical materialism not only achieves the rational resolution of “the mystical things that lead theory into mysticism” “in the practice of human beings and in the understanding of this practice” through the critique of the abstract subjectivity and abstract objectivity (thought and being) shaped by the problematic of modern epistemology, which are rooted in the social mode of production. Moreover, the genuine knowledge established on the basis of social epistemology also contains the demand to transform bourgeois social relations and realize scientific socialism. Therefore, the specification of historical materialism is not a value-neutral, cold empirical science, but rather a “science of real human beings and their historical development” aimed at the revolution of human existence in an alienated world.

如果说《德意志意识形态》中仍更多地停留在生产方式的“一般理论”中，那么，当马克思1858年进入政治经济学批判时期，这种生产的“一定的”性质才被具体地把握到。马克思此时意识到，为了把握这种社会过程的具体性，这种考察不能从生产制度的最原始阶段开始，而是必须指向最发达形态，也即资产阶级经济形式。资产阶级社会作为“最发达的和最多样性的历史的生产组织”，对表现其社会关系的诸种范畴的理解不仅指向资产阶级社会的深层结构，“同时也能使我们透视一切已经覆灭的社会形式的结构和生产关系”。马克思称之为“向后思索法”，其真正意涵在于通过分析资产阶级经济的内部结构和历史性质，揭示社会自我扬弃的根本趋势。因为“历史发展总是建立在这样的基础上的：最后的形式总是把过去的形式看成是向着自己发展的各个阶段，并且因为它很少而且只是在特定条件下才能够进行自我批判”。这样，历史唯物主义就从关于历史的“一般理论”过渡到关于资产阶级生产方式和社会过程的理论，而要认识资产阶级社会的本质，就必须以政治经济学批判为中介。按照恩格斯的说法，“政治经济学是现代资产阶级社会的理论分析”，是理解现代社会的入口。但由于政治经济学“以异化的本质为根据”“把异化的本质活动的特殊范围固定下来”，由此也就把诸如私有财产、雇佣劳动、货币制度等都视为市民社会的既定前提接受下来，并在人们的头脑中固化为一些非反思的自然认识。对此，政治经济学批判是以认识论的方式来提出问题的，即：这一关于具有历史特定性的物化的资产阶级社会关系的客观认识何以可能？我称其为马克思的社会认识论问题。作为社会认识论的历史唯物主义，不仅通过对形塑近代认识论总问题的抽象主体性和抽象客体性（思维和存在）的社会生产方式的批判，实现“在人的实践中以及对这种实践的理解中”合理解决“把理论引向神秘主义的神秘东西”，并且，基于社会认识论所确立的真正知识，也蕴含着变革资产阶级社会关系、实现科学社会主义的诉求。因此，历史唯物主义具体化，并不是一种价值无涉的冷冰冰的实证科学，而是以人在异化世界中的生存革命为旨趣的“现实的人及其历史发展的科学”。

Reconstructing the Object of Knowledge

重建认识对象

The foundation of the intellectual revolution of historical materialism lies in the reconstruction of the object of knowledge. Marx believed that classical political economy started from a mistaken methodology (empiricism) to establish a mistaken object of knowledge (empirical appearances), thereby producing knowledge with a fetishistic character that became an unconscious expression of commodity production. In contrast, scientific social knowledge transcends the representational thinking of empiricism, leaps beyond any isolated fact or link in historical development, and advances to the knowledge of the “concrete totality.” Marx established the object of knowledge as “totality,” with the profound implication that “parts” are not only defined as elements of the “totality” but are also reproduced based on the validity of the “totality.” In the context of the knowledge of bourgeois society, this means not taking a certain “part” of bourgeois society as the object, but rather taking the “totality of bourgeois society” as the object. For the “concrete totality,” as a “totality of thought” or a “concrete in thought,” is certainly a product of thinking and understanding, and Marx’s concept of the “totality of bourgeois society” is the category that best expresses this understanding, and is therefore the object of social epistemology.

历史唯物主义思想革命的基础在于认识对象的重建。马克思认为，国民经济学一开始就从错误的方法论（经验主义）出发建立了错误的认识对象（经验表象），进而产生出一些具有拜物教性质的知识，成为对商品生产的无意识表达。相反，科学的社会认识超越了经验论的表象思维，跳出任意一个孤立实事或历史发展的环节，进展到对“具体总体”的认识上。马克思把认识对象确立为“总体”（totality），深意在于强调“部分”不仅作为“总体”的要素而被规定，并基于“总体”的有效性而被再生产。在资产阶级社会认识的语境中，这意味着不是把资产阶级社会的某一“部分”存在，而是把“资产阶级社会总体”存在作为“对象”。因为“具体总体”作为“思想总体”或“思想具体”，当然是思维的、理解的产物，而马克思的“资产阶级社会总体”概念是最能表达这一理解的范畴，因此是社会认识论的对象。

Taking the “totality of bourgeois society” as its object has a dual significance that transcends both national economics and Hegelian philosophy. If national economics remains at the level of empirical appearance, taking alienated social relations as the starting point of cognition and falling into fetishism, then Hegel represents the rationalist fallacy in social epistemology. Hegel indeed grasped the “totality” characteristic of truth as the object of philosophical cognition, but he understood this process as the “self-movement of thought.” As a result, “comprehending thought” and “the comprehended world” replaced real human beings and the real world as the objects of cognition. Marx, however, argued that “the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete and reproduces it as a concrete in the mind. But by no means is it the process of the concrete itself.” Although Marx’s application of dialectics still clearly bears the imprint of Hegel, the two are entirely different on the question of how to understand the “object of cognition.” For Marx, “even in the theoretical method, the subject, society, must always be kept in mind as the presupposition.” That is to say, although the “concrete in thought” is a product produced through the process of thinking, this does not mean that categories can be independent of reality, or that theoretical abstraction can be detached from concrete reality and the real object. On the contrary, concrete reality and the real object are precisely Marx’s objects of cognition; it is only through the complete process of the “two roads” (“on the first road, the full conception evaporates to yield abstract determinations; on the second road, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought”) that this object is conceptually grasped as rational determinations. Therefore, Marx’s critique of empiricism does not mean denying concrete reality and the real object as the objective source of cognition; nor does the “concrete in thought,” as a result of synthesis occurring in cognition, mean that the object of cognition is something immanent to consciousness. For Marx, historical materialism always takes the revelation of the perceptual world and its objective essence as the starting point of “genuine positive science,” and when it passes through the complete determinations of epistemology, it becomes logical, systematic “genuine knowledge.”

把“资产阶级社会总体”作为对象，具有超越国民经济学和黑格尔哲学的双重内涵。如果说国民经济学停留在经验表象上，以异化的社会关系为认识起点，陷入拜物教中，那么，黑格尔则代表了社会认识论中的唯理论谬误。黑格尔固然把握到了作为哲学的认识对象的真理的“总体”特质，但他却把这个过程理解为“思想的自我运动”。结果，“正在理解着的思维”和“被理解了的世界”代替了现实的人和现实世界成为认识对象。马克思则认为，“从抽象上升到具体的方法，只是思维用来掌握具体、把它当作一个精神上的具体再现出来的方式。但决不是具体本身的产生过程”。尽管马克思对辩证法运用仍明显地体现了黑格尔的痕迹，但在如何理解“认识对象”问题上，二者却截然不同。对马克思而言，“就是在理论方法上，主体，即社会，也必须始终作为前提浮现在表象面前”。这就是说，尽管“思想具体”是通过思维过程所生产的结果，但这并不意味着范畴能够独立于实在、理论抽象可以脱离于现实具体和现实对象。相反，现实具体、现实对象就是马克思的认识对象，只不过，对这个对象的捕获经历了“两条道路”（“在第一条道路上，完整的表象蒸发为抽象的规定；在第二条道路上，抽象的规定在思维行程中导致具体的再现”）的完整过程，才在思维中概念化为合理性的规定。因此，马克思对经验主义的批判并不意味着否认了现实具体和现实对象作为认识的客观性来源，“思维具体”作为在认识中发生综合的结果，也不代表认识对象是意识的内在性之物。对马克思而言，唯物史观始终把感性世界及其对象性本质的揭示作为“真正的实证科学”的起点，而当它经由认识论的完整规定，就逻辑化、系统化为“真正的知识”。

From the mature exposition of *Capital*, Marx’s critique of bourgeois social relations from the perspective of totality breaks the empirical thinking dominated by reified consciousness. It no longer regards “economic facts” as quantifiable givens, but as an existence that is always in a process of structuration and totalization centered on the reproduction of capital. Here, all previous epistemological assumptions of the “dualism” of thought and being, subject and object, disappear. On the surface, Marx seems to move further away from philosophy, but the deeper meaning lies in reducing all elements—thought, knowledge, politics, class, etc.—to the internal “process” that produces the “totality of bourgeois society.” As Althusser pointed out, the “totality of bourgeois society,” as a complex social form fully developed in depth and breadth, a “very developed totality,” cannot be reduced to any single cause. On the contrary, it is constituted by “plural” elements such as thought, knowledge, and politics. At the same time, as far as the goal of Marx’s social epistemology is concerned, its objective analysis of the “totality of bourgeois society” itself also implies promoting the transformation of social structure through active participation in the social “process.”

从《资本论》的成熟表述来看，马克思从总体性视角对资产阶级社会关系的批判，打破了受物化意识主宰的实证思维，它不再把“经济实事”视为可量化的既定存在，而是视为一个始终处于以资本再生产为中心的结构化和总体化的存在。在此，以往关于思维和存在、主体与客体“二元论”的认识论拟设全部消失了，表面上看马克思似乎更加远离了哲学，但其深意则在于把思想、知识、政治、阶级等要素全部还原为产生着“资产阶级社会总体”的内在“进程”。正如阿尔都塞指出的，“资产阶级社会总体”作为在深度和广度上充分发展的复杂的社会形式、一个“十分发达的总体”，是不能够被还原为任意一个单一原因的。相反，它是由思想、知识、政治这些“多元”要素所组建的。而与此同时，就马克思社会认识论的目标而言，它对“资产阶级社会总体”的客观分析，本身也意味着通过对社会“进程”的主动参与推动社会结构的变革。

The Path of Social Epistemology

社会认识论的路径

As a path for specifying historical materialism, social epistemology turns the gaze of philosophy from transcendent being to the real existence of the “totality of bourgeois society,” with the aim of “revolutionizing the existing world” and moving toward scientific socialism. For Marx, if the road to scientific socialism lies within bourgeois society, then correctly understanding and actively sublating the universality of capitalism is extremely necessary, because it is the core that links the construction of a new civilization of socialism.

作为历史唯物主义具体化的路径，社会认识论把哲学的目光从超验存在转向“资产阶级社会总体”这一现实存在上，其宗旨在于“使现存世界革命化”，走向科学社会主义。对于马克思而言，如果说通往科学社会主义的道路存在于资产阶级社会内部，那么，正确认识和积极扬弃资本主义的普遍性就十分必要，因为它是关联着构建社会主义的新文明的内核。

So, what is the universality of capitalism? On this question, historical materialism presents two cognitive perspectives: the object dimension and the subject dimension. In the object dimension of cognition, the universality of capitalism lies in its being the most developed stage of human productive forces to date, creating vast material wealth that surpasses any previous historical stage of production. It is precisely in the sense of developing productive forces that capitalism moves toward an “excess of civilization”—while creating immense material wealth, it also creates a large class of impoverished proletarians, triggering periodic economic crises. This shows that the relations of production of bourgeois society have become too narrow to contain the wealth it itself produces. Marx believed that only by transcending capitalist private ownership of the means of production, “on the basis of the achievements of the capitalist era, that is, on the basis of cooperation and the common possession of the land and of the means of production produced by labor itself, to re-establish individual property,” can the direction of a new socialist civilization be realized. If this dialectical formulation is too abstract, Marx, in Volume 3 of *Capital*, when discussing joint-stock companies and cooperative factories, clearly indicated a possibility of worker governance: in workers’ cooperative factories, the opposition between capital and wage labor is sublated, and workers, as an association, use the means of production to valorize their own labor. From a historical perspective, this kind of workers’ cooperative, as a new mode of production, arises naturally from the capitalist mode of production; “without the factory system arising from the capitalist mode of production, cooperative factories could not have developed.” The root of the emergence of socialism lies in realizing the universality of capitalism in a broader sense.

那么，什么是资本主义的普遍性呢？对于这个问题，历史唯物主义呈现了客体向度和主体向度两种认识视角。在认识的客体向度上，资本主义的普遍性，在于它是迄今为止人类生产力的最发达阶段，其创造的大量物质财富超越了以往的任何一个生产的历史阶段。正是在发展生产力的意义上，资本主义走向了“文明过度”——它在创造庞大的物质财富的同时，也创造了大量贫困的无产者阶级，引发周期性的经济危机。这说明资产阶级社会的生产关系已经太过狭隘，无法再容纳下它本身所生产的财富了。马克思认为，只有超越了资本主义生产资料私有制，“在资本主义时代的成就的基础上，也就是说，在协作和对土地及靠劳动本身生产的生产资料的共同占有的基础上，重新建立个人所有制”，才是实现社会主义新文明的方向。如果说这种具有辩证法色彩的表述还太过于虚幻，马克思在《资本论》第3卷论述股份公司与合作工厂中又明确地表示了一种工人治理的可能性：在工人的合作工厂中，资本和雇佣劳动对立被扬弃，工人作为联合体利用生产资料使他们自己的劳动增殖。从历史性的观点来看，这种工人合作社作为一种新的生产方式是自然而然地从资产阶级生产方式中产生的，“没有从资本主义生产方式中产生的工厂制度，合作工厂就不可能发展起来”。社会主义生发的根源就在于，使资本主义的普遍性在更广泛的意义上实现出来。

In the subject dimension of cognition, the understanding of the “totality of bourgeois society” also simultaneously points to the self-understanding of the working class. Lukács argued that Marx, precisely in his critique of reification, saw a new form of consciousness—class consciousness. Class consciousness is a totalizing force that overcomes the dualistic relationship between consciousness and reality, thought and being, in previous philosophy. It no longer concerns itself with whether thought objectively “reflects” reality, but directly implies a “realization”: once the working class achieves “knowledge” of the true relations of its own position, it can no longer be reified as a “commodity of labor power,” but is transformed into an agent of action that changes the world. In this sense, social epistemology is not a contemplative observation of the world, but a theory of revolutionary practice. Or, the basic goal of social epistemology is, through the cognition of the objective forces and class subject in capitalist production, to construct a knowledge of the social totality that is contradictory and in dialectical development (the theory of scientific socialism). Within the horizon of historical materialism, this objective knowledge is both generated from the “totality of bourgeois society” and, as a “concrete in thought,” participates in the construction of the social totality, because, starting from the “theoretical standpoint of the revolutionary class,” it unites theory and practice to liberate human beings from the alienated world imposed upon them. As the saying goes, “without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary practice.”

在认识的主体向度上，对“资产阶级社会总体”的认识还同时指向工人阶级的自我认识。卢卡奇认为，马克思正是在物化批判中看到了意识的一种新形式——阶级意识。阶级意识是一种总体化的力量，它克服了以往哲学中意识和现实、思维和存在二元关系，不再关心思维是否客观地“反映”了现实，而直接就意味着一种“实现”：其中，一旦工人阶级达到对自身所处地位的真实关系的“认识”，他就能够不再被物化为“劳动力商品”，而是转化为改造世界的行动主体。从这个意义上来讲，社会认识论不是对世界的静观和省思，而是革命实践的理论。或者说，社会认识论的基本目标，就是通过对资本主义生产中的客体性力量和阶级主体的认识，构建一种矛盾且处于辩证发展中的社会总体的知识（科学社会主义理论）。在唯物史观的视域中，这种客观知识既是从“资产阶级社会总体”中所生成的，并且也作为“思想具体”参与对社会总体的建构，因为它从“革命阶级的理论立场”出发，以理论与实践的统一，把人从强加给他的异化世界中解放了出来。正所谓“没有革命的理论，就没有革命的实践”。

Online Editor: Paul

网络编辑：保罗