Peng Qifu and Yan Shuang: The Concrete Path of Marx's Development of the Historical Materialist Conception of History
The creation of historical materialism revealed the universal essence of human society and the general laws of social development, laying a solid philosophical foundation for the birth of Marxism as a whole. However, as a theorist and a revolutionary, Marx never approached his own theory with a dogmatic attitude. Following the creation of historical materialism, Marx—in the practice of guiding the workers' movement and the proletarian revolution—continually engaged in profound theoretical reflection. He opened three concrete paths for developing historical materialism, demonstrating the dialectical interaction between universal theory and specific practice.
Analyzing Specific Political Events in France
In texts such as The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850 and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx applied historical materialism to analyze specific political events. By grasping the situation of class struggle and political conflict in France during a particular period, he provided concrete strategic guidance for the proletarian revolution.
The European revolutions of 1848 intensified class contradictions and class struggle within French society. Louis Bonaparte seized the opportunity to successfully restore the monarchy, performing a farcical imitation of the Empire [1]. In response, Marx pierced through the veneer of ideology and traditional concepts to provide an explanation centered on the dimension of class struggle as determined by the economic base. Initially, spurred by the ideology of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," the proletariat and the bourgeoisie briefly united to launch the February Revolution, overthrowing the July Monarchy and establishing a bourgeois republic. The new regime, however, protected only the interests of the bourgeoisie, ignoring the legitimate demands of the proletariat for social reform. The proletariat was forced to launch the June Uprising, which was met with bloody suppression by the bourgeoisie. Finally, deluded by "Napoleonic ideas," the small-holding peasantry—who constituted the majority of the French population—supported Louis Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon, as the new emperor.
Marx noted that "Napoleonic ideas," as "ideas generated by an underdeveloped, youthful small allotment of land," were in essence the concrete reflection of French small-peasant economic relations at the ideological level. Although lagging behind bourgeois ideology, these ideas still dominated the political choices of the most numerous class—the peasantry—in a France where the capitalist mode of production had already reached a considerable state of development. The historical event of the Bonapartist restoration precisely demonstrated that ideology possesses a relative independence, capable of reacting back upon social existence to accelerate or delay the development of history.
Marx argued that while the February Revolution was a democratic revolution in which the bourgeoisie united with the proletariat to overthrow feudal fetters, the June Uprising was a proletarian revolution directly triggered by the bourgeois republic's betrayal of proletarian class expectations. Had the June Uprising succeeded, France might have moved toward a socialist revolution; however, its failure showed that for a revolution to develop along an upward trajectory, it requires the awakening of proletarian consciousness and the construction of a worker-farmer alliance. The proletariat must not only form a clear class consciousness and political goals to fully exert its role as the subject of revolution, but also lead the peasantry in jointly clearing away the remnants of the old system and its ideology. Through permanent revolution, the bourgeois-democratic revolution would develop into a socialist revolution, establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat and gradually transitioning to communal society.
Through this concrete analysis of the vivid historical events of the French class struggle in 1848, Marx deepened and developed historical materialism. He not only emphasized the decisive role of economic relations but also revealed the complex, multi-dimensional interactions among class struggle, ideology, and the historical process. Consequently, the theoretical content within historical materialism regarding revolutionary strategy, state power, and the critique of ideology became more concrete and enriched.
Elucidating the Laws of the Capitalist Mode of Production
The economic and philosophical studies Marx began in 1843 paved the way for the creation of historical materialism, while his critique of political economy after 1848 became a model for the concrete development of the theory. The research and writing of Capital directly led to the birth of the theory of surplus value.
Capital reveals that the commodity, as the economic "cell" of capitalism, possesses the two attributes of use-value and value. Within capitalist relations of production, labor power becomes a special commodity; its use-value is the source of value, capable of creating a new value during the consumption process that is greater than the value of the labor power itself. This new value is composed of the value of labor power and surplus value. Laborers are forced to sell their labor power on the market, and capitalists, following the principle of so-called "equivalent exchange," purchase the commodity of labor power and combine it with the means of production, thereby forming a wage-labor relationship. Beneath the cloak of equivalent exchange lies the exploitative and unequal essence of the wage-labor relationship.
The antagonism between capital and labor is the manifestation of the inherent contradictions of the mode of production within capitalist society, the root cause of which is the capitalist's pursuit of surplus value. The wage labor of the worker can be divided into two parts: necessary labor, which reproduces the value of the worker's own labor power, and surplus labor, which creates the surplus value appropriated by the capitalist without compensation. To extract more surplus value, capitalists generally employ two methods: first, by lengthening the working day or increasing labor intensity while keeping necessary labor time constant to extract absolute surplus value; second, by increasing productivity to shorten necessary labor time while keeping the length of the working day constant to extract relative surplus value. Capitalist exploitation causes the worker to fall into a "dual predicament of material shortage and spiritual poverty," prompting the worker to transform from a "class-in-itself" to a "class-for-itself," becoming the subjective force for the transformation of capitalist society.
In his systematic critique of the capitalist economic structure, Marx not only elucidated the essence of the capitalist system and the historical mission of the proletariat but also proposed practical directions, including the shortening of the working day, the abolition of the old division of labor, and the reconstruction of individual ownership. By applying historical materialism to the concrete analysis of the capitalist production process, he founded the doctrine of surplus value, providing the scientific theoretical weapon and guide to action for proletarian liberation, and achieving the unity of universal laws and specific practice.
Searching for the Concrete Path to the "Caudine Forks"
Marx shifted his investigative gaze from the developed capitalist countries of Europe to the relatively backward societies of the East. By examining the "Asiatic mode of production" and the Russian rural commune, he explored the question of the diversity of social-form development, continuously deepening and developing his theory of historical materialism.
In texts such as the Ethnological Notebooks, his "Letter to the Editorial Board of Otechestvennye Zapiski" [2], and his "Letter to Vera Zasulich," Marx integrated the universal logic of the inherent contradictions of the mode of production into the unique forms of communal labor and its internal contradictions. By analyzing the existential contradictions of the Russian rural commune, he provided a new path for Eastern societies in the pre-capitalist stage of development to choose a social development path and realize the free and comprehensive development of the individual in accordance with their own national conditions.
The rural commune was the basic organizational form of traditional Russian society, and its evolution presented three major characteristics: first, in terms of composition, the blood ties of the primitive commune gradually dissolved, replaced by social organizations composed of non-kinship freemen; second, regarding housing property rights, communal ownership of houses gradually disintegrated, and houses along with their attached garden plots became the private property of peasants; third, regarding the distribution of arable land, although the land redistributed periodically retained its communal nature, the products of labor belonged to private individuals.
Under the influence of Western European capitalist expansion and the concept of private property, contradictions between private and public ownership emerged within the rural commune. The interaction of these two opposing factors influenced the historical fate of the Russian rural commune and the developmental path of Russia. The 1861 Emancipation Reform in Russia not only failed to thoroughly break feudal shackles but also created conditions for capitalist exploitation to penetrate the countryside. The dual pressure of Tsarist feudal rule and capitalist forces further intensified the antagonism between the tradition of communal land ownership and the trend toward privatization, leaving the rural commune under "abnormal economic conditions."
Marx was convinced that the Russian rural commune was the fulcrum for the regeneration of Russian society, but for this fulcrum to exert its strength, it was necessary to eliminate the destructive influences attacking it from all sides and ensure it possessed the normal conditions for natural development. That is to say, if the Russian rural commune—existing simultaneously with Western European capitalism—could exclude the encroachment of European capitalist private property through social revolution while retaining communal land ownership and fully absorbing the positive achievements of capitalism, it would be possible for it to bypass the "Caudine Forks" [3] of the capitalist system and open up a brand-new developmental path toward a socialist society.