Liu Zhenying and Ma Yongjun: Marx and Engels on the Scientific Nature of Marxism—Commemorating the 130th Anniversary of Engels' Death

On August 5, 1895, Engels passed away. In the autumn of the same year, Lenin wrote the article "Frederick Engels" to commemorate him, beginning with a quote from the famous poet Nekrasov: "What a torch of reason ceased to burn, / What a heart has ceased to beat!" ^[1] Lenin pointed out: "After his friend Karl Marx (who died in 1883), Engels was the most noteworthy scholar and teacher of the modern proletariat in the whole civilized world. Ever since fortune brought Karl Marx and Frederick Engels together, the life-work of the two friends became their common cause. To understand what Frederick Engels has done for the proletariat, one must have a clear idea of the significance of Marx’s teaching and work for the development of the contemporary working-class movement." He believed that while Marx and Engels were both mentors to the modern proletariat and jointly founded Marxism, Marx was to be ranked before Engels, as Marx had been the most preeminent scholar in the civilized world. This assessment is consistent with Engels’s own self-evaluation. In his later years, Engels consciously placed himself behind Marx, opposing the contemporary practice of ranking him alongside Marx as an equal founder of Marxist theory. He emphasized: "Marx and I had worked together for forty years; before and during this time I had a certain independent share in laying the foundations of the theory, and more particularly in its elaboration. But the greater part of its leading basic principles, especially in the realm of economics and history, and, above all, their final clear formulation, belong to Marx. What I contributed — at any rate with the exception of my work in a few special fields — Marx could very well have done without me. What Marx accomplished I would not have achieved. Marx stood higher, transmitted further, and took a wider and quicker view than all the rest of us. Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented. Without him the theory would not be by far what it is today. It therefore rightly bears his name." Marxism is a living theory that takes living practice as its object of cognition; it is a historical science with a distinct character of the times. Self-criticism is an inherent attribute of Marxism, and it is precisely this point that makes it a new science with a clearly demarcated boundary from other ideologies. This self-criticism is for the purpose of accurately grasping one's own era. Seen from this perspective, Engels’s view of Marxism still possesses immensely important practical significance for our correct understanding of Marxism in the present New Era.

I. Practice or Actual History as the Criteria for Demarcating New and Old Science

Marx and Engels regarded their theory as a scientific one. Engels explicitly referred to his and Marx’s communist theory as "scientific socialism." In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, he pointed out: "These two great discoveries, the materialist conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries socialism became a science. The next thing was to work out all its details and relations." Marx and Engels's understanding of science differed not only from their contemporaries but also from future generations. Based on the power of modern natural science, people attempted to use the paradigm of natural science to transform all theories, creating "historical sciences," "cultural sciences," "sciences of the spirit" (mental sciences), and "human sciences" ^[2] according to their respective objects of study. Marx and Engels proposed: "We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist." Although natural science, which takes the history of nature as its object, is distinct from the various "sciences of man" or various humanities and social sciences that take the history of humanity as their object, it was still categorized by Marx and Engels within a broad "science of history" (that is, the new science that takes as its object human practice or actual history formed by the mutual conditioning of the history of nature and human history). This differs from traditional views. They pointed out that the antagonism between man and nature, as well as the antagonism between the old "science of man" and the old natural science, was caused by private property. Upon entering communist society, with the abolition of private property, this antagonism will also disappear. "Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science." This science is the science of history in the broad sense. "History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations." Whether it is natural science or the science of man, both possess a historical and epochal character.

The views of Marx and Engels differ both from those that conflate human history with natural history and from those that set the two in absolute opposition. In his early years, Engels pointed out: "History is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims." This means that for Marx and Engels, actual history and human practice are the same thing. In the sense that actual history stands in opposition to non-actual history (i.e., the history of nature prior to the emergence of humanity), the humanities are the science of history in the narrow sense, as they concern the actual history of humanity and are thus different from natural science. Particularly under the conditions of private property, the antagonism between individuals creates an antagonism between man and nature (manifested in the capitalist era as the contradiction between labor and capital), which in turn creates the antagonism between natural science and the humanities. Under these circumstances, it is necessary to divide the science of history into the science of history in the narrow sense (referring to the humanities) and the science of history in the broad sense (including both natural and human sciences). When Engels stated that "all sciences which are not natural sciences are historical sciences," he was referring to the science of history in the narrow sense. On the other hand, however, Marx and Engels explicitly opposed the naturalist conception of history. Nature, as the object of natural scientific research, can only be the actual nature in which humans live—nature transformed by human labor—rather than a nature existing before humanity or a nature independent of humans. In other words, actual nature can only be nature as a product of human practical activity, and cannot be nature as a "thing-in-itself." Not only is the nature studied by natural science a product of human practice, possessing a historical and epochal character, but the scientist as the subject of natural scientific research is also the same. "Feuerbach speaks in particular of the perception of natural science; he mentions secrets which are disclosed only to the eye of the physicist and chemist; but where would natural science be without industry and commerce? Even this 'pure' natural science is provided with an aim, as with its material, only through commerce and industry, through the sensuous activity of men." Science arises and develops along with human practical activity and is therefore linked to the history of actual people.

Marx and Engels consistently emphasized that the object of study for the science of history is the actual nature and actual human society created by human practical activity. When discussing the second aspect of the fundamental question of philosophy—the question of the identity of thinking and being—Engels explicitly opposed the reflectionist view that treats the "thing-in-itself" as the object of cognition and discusses objectivity in isolation from practice. Engels explained that the so-called question of the identity of thinking and being refers to: "What relation do our thoughts about the world surrounding us sustain to this world itself? Is our thinking capable of the cognition of the real world? Are we able in our ideas and notions of the real world to produce a correct reflection of reality?" The so-called surrounding world, real world, or the world in which humans live, is nothing other than the product of human practical activity; human thinking itself is also a product of practical activity. Therefore, thinking is certainly capable of knowing the real world through "ideas and notions of the real world." As for the statement that our surrounding world is a material world, Engels emphasized that "matter" here refers to "various existing, material things"—that is, specific matter as an object, reality, and sensuousness at a specific historical stage—rather than so-called "matter as such." "Matter as such is a pure creation of thought and an abstraction. We leave out of consideration the qualitative differences of things in lumping them together as corporeally existing things under the concept matter. Hence matter as such, as distinct from definite and existing pieces of matter, is not anything sensuously existing." Our object of cognition is nature as "object, reality, and sensuousness," not nature as a "thing-in-itself." Nature as "object, reality, and sensuousness" has already been transformed into "thing-for-us" through human practical activity.

For Marx and Engels, the identity of thinking and being is not the conformity of human cognition to the "thing-in-itself"; it is not a matter of separating and opposing the subjective and objective and then requiring the subjective to conform to the objective. Since "beyond our field of vision, being is indeed an absolutely open question," an objective reality divorced from the subjective cannot, of course, be brought into comparison with the subjective. The scientific truth spoken of by Marx and Engels is not in the sense of the subjective conforming to the objective or whether thinking conforms to a being divorced from thinking, but in the sense of whether thinking possesses "objectivity" [Gegenständlichkeit]—that is, in the sense of the reality and sensuous nature of thinking. According to Lenin's view, the second of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach speaks of the question of whether human thinking possesses "objective truth" [gegenständliche Wahrheit], which is the question of whether thinking possesses reality or a sensuous character. Therefore, from the requirement that "object, reality, and sensuousness" must be understood as practice, the question of truth in the sense of the objectivity of thinking is a practical question. Lenin always linked objectivity with "object, reality, and sensuousness," opposing any understanding of objectivity divorced from practice. In his view, the question of objectivity in the epistemological sense can only be based on the viewpoint of life and practice: "The standpoint of life, of practice, should be first and fundamental in the theory of knowledge."

Since actual history is the history of human practical activity, then the history of nature prior to humanity, nature independent of humans, and the history of nature divorced from humans are, of course, non-actual; they are merely histories inferred and imagined based on the actual world surrounding people. Because private property causes the antagonism between man and nature, people easily conclude that nature outside the scope of human activity—including nature before humanity, nature independent of humans, and nature divorced from humans—is unknowable. Such a conclusion is reached precisely because people fail to realize the impact of private property on human practice and cognitive activity. Private property divides nature among different subjects, creating "your land" and "my house," which further leads to the separation of labor from the means of production and the antagonism between man and nature; in philosophy, this manifests as the separation and antagonism between subject and object. In fact, man himself is nature, an "intrinsic nature," just as nature is man's body, an "extrinsic body." Through practice, humanity continuously achieves the unity of intrinsic nature and extrinsic nature, the intrinsic organic body and the extrinsic inorganic body. This being the case, the science applicable to actual nature and actual people can, of course, also be used to analyze and study nature and people in history. In this sense, although nature and people in history are not perceptible, they can be known in the sense of rational thinking. Private property, the separation and antagonism of labor and the means of production, and the division of labor have created the antagonism between humanity and nature; this antagonism at the level of actual existence has in turn created the antagonism at the levels of cognition and thinking. This is both the historical root of philosophical agnosticism and the historical root of the antagonism between the humanities/social sciences and the natural sciences. The clarification of historical and epochal character provided by the materialist conception of history offers an epistemological proof for eliminating these historical roots and provides a theoretical basis for the criteria of scientific demarcation.

II. The Materialist Conception of History and the Science of History

Engels not only explicitly pointed out that the materialist conception of history and the theory of surplus value transformed socialism from a utopia into a science, but also clearly proposed that philosophy has come to an end and that modern materialism...

"...is no longer a philosophy at all, but simply a world outlook," and "this world outlook is not to be proven and manifested in some special 'Science of Sciences' ^[3], but in the various real sciences." Since the historical materialist outlook is not a philosophy but "simply a world outlook," its relationship with specific sciences is no longer that of philosophy to science, but rather the relationship between a world outlook or methodology and its specific application. Marx and Engels dissolved the boundary between a "special Science of Sciences" (i.e., philosophy) and "various real sciences" (i.e., specific sciences), transforming them into a relationship between a "world outlook" and the "various real sciences." Before Marx and Engels, scientific methodology derived from a philosophical world outlook; after them, scientific methodology derived from the new world outlook of historical materialism. Taking dialectics as an example, Hegel's idealistic dialectics was a philosophical method, whereas the materialist dialectics of Marx and Engels is a scientific method.

The "special Science of Sciences" Engels refers to here specifically denotes the philosophy of Hegel and the Young Hegelians, which treated philosophy as a unique science—the "Philosophical Science." At that time, it was believed that the method of philosophical science was speculation, which distinguished it from the empirical methods of the positive sciences. In his early years, Marx employed speculative methods to address real-world problems. For instance, his doctoral dissertation attempted to use the relationship between "material cause" and "formal cause," which Hegel inherited from Aristotle, to argue for the "freedom of self-consciousness" through speculative methodology. In the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx clearly pointed out that "philosophy as philosophy" had come to an end, and what needed to be established was a "philosophy in the service of history." This was still clearly viewing issues through a philosophical lens, though at this point Marx regarded "philosophy in the service of history" as a kind of "non-philosophical" philosophy. In this sense, Marx noted: "As philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapon in philosophy." Up until the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx's argumentation for communism was still based on philosophy—specifically, the negation of the negation of private property as capital. The turning point where the philosophical world outlook was transformed into the world outlook of historical science appeared in the Theses on Feuerbach. Marx noted: "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." From then on, Marx no longer considered himself a philosopher, but a scientist. The new world outlook was no longer a world outlook of interpretation or a philosophical world outlook, but a world outlook of transformation—a historical or realistic world outlook. Consequently, materialist dialectics became the method of positive science. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels referred to "real positive science" as historical science and contrasted it with philosophy. From this period onward, their materialism was no longer a philosophical materialism or a materialism for interpreting the world, but a materialism in the sense of a world outlook for changing the world. Materialism in the sense of a historical world outlook no longer focuses on the relationship between matter and consciousness, but on the relationship between life and consciousness—that is, the relationship between human social being and social consciousness. "Being is their real life-process"; ^[4] human consciousness cannot originate from an objective reality unrelated to humanity, but only from the existence of real individuals.

Starting from the principle that "life determines consciousness," Marx and Engels pointed out: "Where speculation ends—in real life—there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which are derived from the observation of the historical development of men." The issue here is not whether people's subjective consciousness corresponds to an objective reality unrelated to man, but whether "real positive science" describes people's practical activities and actual processes of development. The "real positive science" spoken of by Marx and Engels is not an empirical verification of sensory experience, but a verification of "people's practical activities and actual development processes." The world cannot satisfy man; man is determined to change the world. Change is not merely the shifting of objective facts into subjective sensations or thoughts, but the negation of established objective facts and their transformation into different facts to satisfy human needs. To analyze whether the subjective corresponds to the objective in isolation from practice cannot avoid the so-called "problem of the interiority of consciousness"—that is, the "objective" that can be compared with the "subjective" can only be an objective that has entered the subjective world, not an objective unrelated to it. Thus, objective facts that correspond to the subjective can only be objective facts as they appear to man, not objective facts as "things-in-themselves." Consciousness cannot transcend itself to reflect a "thing-in-itself" unrelated to man. To this, Engels's answer was: the "thing-in-itself" is an object imagined for the sake of constructing a philosophical epistemology; it is an object of philosophy, not an object of real cognition or an object of life. What humanity needs to cognize is not the "thing-in-itself," but the process by which the imaginary "thing-in-itself" is transformed through practice into a "thing-for-us." "If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable 'thing-in-itself'." Engels cited the examples of "chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals" and the "coloring matter of madder," stating that "as soon as they are produced, the 'thing-in-itself' becomes a 'thing-for-us'." Practical testing does not verify whether consciousness corresponds to matter as a "thing-in-itself," but whether people's thought processes correspond to their life-activity processes.

Marx and Engels critiqued abstract empiricists for separating themselves from human life-activity and treating history as a "collection of dead facts"; they critiqued idealists for separating themselves from human cognitive activity and treating history as the "imaginary activity of imaginary subjects." The real object of cognition can only be living facts—namely "objectivity, reality, sensuousness" ^[5] as the product of the practical activity of real people—rather than the sensations, impressions, and representations that served as the starting point for early modern British empiricists, or the collection of "atomic facts" in the sense of contemporary philosophy of science. Similarly, the subject of cognition can only be real people generated within practical activity, rather than some spirit existing outside of real people and real nature, as advocated by German Idealism. The "reality" of which Marx and Engels speak is different from the fragmented facts of British empiricism and the facts grasped through "imaginary connections" asserted by German Idealism; it is "a grasp of facts from their own connections rather than from imaginary connections." Whether it is the object of cognition or the subject of cognition, they are historical and real only when placed within a totality of connection and development. Engels noted: "The world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes." Modern natural science advocated that "things must be studied before processes can be studied," which belongs to the old metaphysical mode of thought; contemporary natural science is "the science of processes, of the origin and development of these things and of the interconnection which binds all these natural processes into one great whole," which belongs to the dialectical mode of thought. The relationship between the various natural sciences and the dialectics of nature later elaborated by Engels reflects exactly the relationship between the "description of reality" and the "summing-up of the most general results abstracted from such description" spoken of by Marx and Engels in their early years.

Since the object of historical science is reality and process rather than facts and things, scientific truth cannot be the correspondence of subjective thought with an objective reality, fact, or thing unrelated to man; it can only be the correspondence with reality (i.e., "facts grasped from their own connections rather than from imaginary connections") and process. In Engels’s words: "The most essential and closest basis of human thought is precisely the change of nature caused by man, and not nature as such." He termed the view that "first reduces society to nature, and then reduces nature to matter itself" as a naturalist conception of history, arguing that the view claiming "natural science can only cognize specific matter, not matter itself" is rooted precisely in this naturalist conception of history. He critiqued the naturalist conception of history as one-sided: "It considers only that nature acts on man, and that natural conditions everywhere determine man's historical development; it forgets that man also reacts on nature, changing it and creating new conditions of existence for himself." Just as the "science of man" is the cognition of the human world—the state and society—rather than the cognition of atomized individuals unrelated to the state and society, natural science is the cognition of the conditions of human existence and their transformations, rather than the cognition of an objective material world unrelated to man.

Accordingly, the method of the new science—historical science—is no longer traditional induction or deduction, nor is it dialectics in the Aristotelian or Hegelian sense; it has become the historical dialectics and materialist dialectics of Marx and Engels. Aristotle’s dialectics of thought was reductio ad absurdum or indirect proof within the process of inference, and was thus a negative method of thought. Hegel’s idealistic dialectics was not only a dialectics of thought but also the method by which the Absolute Spirit generates itself, "the core of which is negativity as the moving and creating principle." If one replaces "Absolute Spirit" with "Man," one can see the materialist essence of Hegelian idealistic dialectics: labor. Hegel "grasps the essence of labor and comprehends objective man—true, because real man—as the outcome of his own labor." Labor creates man himself and simultaneously changes the surrounding world; in this sense, labor is the dialectical negation of the surrounding world and man himself. Since "change" implies "negation," scientific cognition includes not only a moment of verification but also a moment of falsification. Engels thus noted: "As far as natural science uses thought, its form of development is the hypothesis." A hypothesis is not directly verified; rather, it is placed within a theoretical system, from which specific conclusions are deducted. These conclusions may be confirmed or overturned, but true science must undergo the double verification of confirmation and falsification. Here, "falsification" does not refer to the "falsifiability" of contemporary Western philosophers of science (such as Karl Popper), but rather to facing a specific refutation that appears after many confirmations and identifying the cause of that refutation.

The reason Engels emphasized that the materialist conception of history and the theory of surplus value transformed socialism from utopia into science lies precisely in the unique scientific demarcation criteria of Marx and Engels. If historical materialism, as a new world outlook, provided this demarcation criterion, then the theory of surplus value was the first successful instance of applying this new world outlook.

III. The Theory of Surplus Value and Economic Science

Engels pointed out: "The ultimate causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch." The first sentence indicates that the new world outlook of historical materialism is not an ethics concerning people's social consciousness, but a practical science concerning people's social being; the latter sentence indicates that truth, justice, and modes of production and exchange all possess a character specific to their epoch. Therefore, "the working class has no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant." The socialist and communist theories of Marx and Engels are fundamentally different from utopias; the former "is not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself," but a scientific program for solving real problems. The core of this program is to replace capitalist economic principles with socialist or communist economic principles.

The economic principle of socialism is the social—that is, the association and solidarity of human beings—whereas the economic principle of capitalism is capital—that is, self-valorizing value. On the surface, the principle of the former is the person, while the principle of the latter is the thing. In reality, however, human beings are not atomized individuals existing in isolation from things and economic relations; they are always humans within specific economic relations. If private ownership means "what is yours is yours and not mine, and what is mine is mine and not yours"—thereby forming a chasm or a wall that divides and opposes person to person—then public ownership means "what is mine is yours and what is yours is mine," acting like a bond that connects and coheres humanity. Superficially, capital is a thing, and capitalism is the rule of things over people; but in fact, capital is nothing but accumulated labor and is thus a relation of production. This is so because: first, the prerequisite of this relation of production is the separation of the laborer from the means of production, such that if laborers cannot re-actualize their union with the means of production, they cannot sustain themselves through labor. Second, to achieve this union, the laborer must sell their labor power to the capitalist, as the union of labor and the means of production can only be realized through the capitalist’s capital. Third, only when this labor can bring surplus value or profit to the capitalist can the laborer be employed; otherwise, they face starvation. Thus, labor is subordinated to capital, and the person is subordinated to the thing.

Viewed from a historical and epochal perspective, the capitalist mode of production has not existed forever, nor will it exist eternally. Volume I of Capital explicates the conditions for the emergence of the capitalist mode of production—namely, labor power becoming a commodity. Volume II explicates the inherent contradiction between the circulation process of capital and its production process: the production process requires depressing the price of labor power to lower wages and increase surplus value, while the circulation process requires raising wages to realize demand-pull and allow the surplus value embodied in products to be realized. Volume III explicates the results led by capital’s own contradictory movement—namely, the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall—demonstrating the inevitability of the demise of the capitalist mode of production. The basic contradiction of capitalism explained in Volumes I and II is concentrated in the economic phenomenon of "surplus." A capitalist enterprise must sell products at a specific price so that the recovered money can compensate for the value of consumed means of production, pay workers' wages, and obtain surplus value. When everything produced can be sold, the contradiction between production and circulation is not prominent; however, once a surplus of commodities or overcapacity occurs, it manifests as a surplus of capital. Money can no longer realize self-valorization in the form of capital and reverts back to being mere money. The capitalist mode of production thus encounters its own historical and epochal limits.

Capitalist production aims for the extraction of profit; capitalism is essentially "profit-maximalism." Only if capitalists can obtain profit may workers be employed; otherwise, they cannot find work. The worker is a tool for the capitalist’s profit-making, not a "human being" equal to the capitalist. Under the capitalist system, it is meaningless to speak of human rights from the perspective of eternal truth and justice. Only the living have human rights; the dead have no use for them—and if a worker cannot find a job, they can only become a dead person. To find work, the worker must sell their labor power to the capitalist. Therefore, both worker and capitalist can only treat the worker as a commodity. Profit or surplus value is the limit of the capitalist mode of production. When a capitalist finds that selling commodities produced by combining means of production and labor power satisfies consumer needs, compensates for the value of consumed means of production, and pays workers' wages, but yields no profit, he will cease production. Consequently, corresponding consumer needs go unmet, upstream enterprises providing means of production go bankrupt, and workers starve. This forms a domino effect, or what Keynes later called the "multiplier effect." Because one enterprise stops production due to lack of profit, it causes numerous upstream enterprises that were originally profitable to go bankrupt, creating a widespread or even society-wide economic crisis. Marx called this the "limit of capitalist production."

To solve this type of capital surplus problem—that is, the overall economic crisis caused by certain enterprises stopping production because they are not profitable—the solution is simple: merely bring these enterprises into state ownership. To satisfy market needs, ensure workers remain employed, and guarantee the smooth production of upstream enterprises, state-owned enterprises can operate without profit because their purpose is not profit, but the satisfaction of social needs. As the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall takes effect, while other enterprises still obtain profit or even see their profit rates rise, more and more enterprises will see their profit rates fall to zero and thus be brought into state ownership. As for the source of funds to acquire these enterprises, based on the principle of the "multiplier effect," they can be drawn from the profits of upstream enterprises driven by the state-owned enterprise's production. These upstream firms would otherwise have collapsed but are now able to continue existing due to the socialization of production. Since their profits stem from the "safety net" provided by state-owned enterprises, it becomes their bounden duty to ensure the existence of the latter. Through this, the capitalist mode of production gradually moves toward self-negation.

The foundational assumption of economics is "scarcity" or "shortage," and the solution is to obtain maximum output with minimum input. The arrival of the era of the "surplus economy" has rendered obsolete not only traditional economics but also the property relations established to solve the problem of shortage. Distinct from the traditional worldview built on private ownership and traditional economics aimed at solving shortage, the new worldview of Marx and Engels and the new economics founded by Marx are the worldview and economic theory for solving the problem of surplus. The theory of communism based on this is also distinct from utopian communism; it has become a scientific program for solving various social problems brought about by overcapacity and capital surplus.

However, scientific understanding alone is insufficient to solve the problem. "In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the material it deals with summons into the field of battle against it the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest." The distortion, slander, and attacks suffered by Marxism have caused its scientific truth to be continuously obscured in developed countries, while the reality of the shortage economies in backward countries has transformed Marxism from a scientific program for solving real problems into a distant ideal. This indicates that to overthrow the entire capitalist system built on the capitalist mode of production, scientific understanding is not enough; more important is the revolutionary practice of the proletariat to overthrow the bourgeoisie.

IV. The Epochal Character of Scientific Socialism and the Scientific Nature of 21st-Century Marxism

The real world includes the real world of nature and the real world of humans. Humanity lives not only in nature but also in the state and society. "Man is the world of man, the state, society." The state and society are both generated through human labor and possess historicity. Under the capitalist system, the alienation of labor leads to a universal alienation of value. All value must be measured by money and capital; whatever cannot be so measured is regarded as having no value. Money is the "universal and self-sufficient value of all things"; "it has, therefore, deprived the whole world—both the human world and nature—of its own specific value." "Money is the alienated essence of man's labor and life, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it." Under capitalism, the value of nature is measured by money, manifesting as constant capital; the value of a person is also measured by money—this is the person's "worth." Under the capitalist system, as the personification of capital, the capitalist's worth is the value of his capital, while the proletarian's worth is the value of his labor power. The entire value system of capitalism is built on the values of money and capital characterized by the atomized individual. The entire world is shackled by money and capital. Therefore, Marx and Engels opposed confounding human liberation with political liberation and opposed separating the liberation of humans from the liberation of nature. The separation and opposition of man and nature, of the political state and civil society, and of person and person, are all results of the development of private ownership. Capitalist private ownership pushes this separation and opposition to the extreme, developing it into a dualistic opposition between subject and object—the opposition of labor and capital. When private property develops into capital and labor develops into alienated labor, the contradictory relationship between subject and object is reduced once again to an objective relationship between the subject and the object. "The supersession of self-alienation follows the same path as self-alienation." The supersession of capital first manifests as the "universalization and completion of the relationship of private property"; second, as the supersession of the state and civil society as negative forms of the private property relationship; and third, as the "positive supersession of private property as human self-alienation," ultimately reaching the liberation of labor, the liberation of society, and the liberation of humanity, achieving the comprehensive and free development of the person.

Engels pointed out: "To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, and to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to perform, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism." Considering that just as the proletarian is but the personification of wage labor, the capitalist is but the personification of capital—both bourgeoisie and proletariat are similarly shackled by capital—then the liberation of the whole world includes not only the liberation of the proletariat but also the liberation of the bourgeoisie from the limitations of capital. The problem is that, although both classes are limited by capital under the capitalist system, the bourgeoisie does not feel shackled. "The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The latter feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence... Within this antithesis the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, the proletarian the destructive side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the action of annihilating it." In this situation, discussing the identity of proletarian liberation and human liberation, or suggesting that eliminating the capitalist system liberates the bourgeoisie as well as the proletariat, is not only too abstract in theory but also too much like wishful thinking in practice. In his later years, Engels reflected that he had earlier "placed great stress on the point" that "communism is not a mere party doctrine of the working class, but a theory compassing the emancipation of society at large, including the capitalist class, from its present narrow conditions. This is true enough in the abstract, but absolutely useless, and sometimes worse, in practice. So long as the propertied classes not only feel no want of any emancipation, but strenuously oppose the self-emancipation of the working class, so long the social revolution will have to be prepared and fought out by the working class alone." To liberate all humanity, the proletariat must first liberate itself and liberate labor. The epochal character of scientific socialism lies not only in the objective conditions of capital’s self-supersession but also in the subjective conditions of the proletariat's maturity. Utopian socialism was not scientific because, on the one hand, the capitalist mode of production had not yet become an obstacle to the development of productive forces (thus lacking objective conditions); and on the other hand, the opposition between proletariat and bourgeoisie had not yet developed into a "developed contradictory relationship" (thus lacking subjective conditions). In short, because both objective and subjective conditions were absent, socialism could not yet become a reality, which determined the utopian nature of early visions.

Whether it is the reality of nature or real human history, both are grounded in human activity. The reason Marx and Engels called the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human self-change...

"Revolutionary practice" ^[10] serves as the reason why one cannot understand nature and human society in isolation from human activity. Otherwise, what one obtains is not a picture of reality in nature and society, but rather an imaginary one. The reality of nature and human society within history lies in its epochal character. "All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice." In this regard, the theoretical "two inevitabilities" (the inevitable demise of capitalism and the inevitable victory of socialism) and the practical "two inevitabilities" (the fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable) ^[11] cannot be treated as the same proposition. The former belongs to theoretical necessity, which can be derived through the demonstration of the theory of surplus value; the latter belongs to practical necessity, which can only be realized through the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Regarding the historical and epochal nature of the theory of scientific socialism, we must re-examine it from the perspective of the historical subject.

In this sense, the Sinicization and modernization of Marxism is not only the Sinicization and modernization of historical materialism and the theory of surplus value, but even more so of the theory of scientific socialism. The end of the first chapter of the Manifesto of the Communist Party states, on the one hand, that the existence of the bourgeoisie is "no longer compatible with society," and on the other hand, that the proletariat can only overthrow the capitalist system by replacing their "isolation, produced by competition" with "revolutionary combination, due to association." The second chapter demonstrates that the fundamental difference between the Communist Party and other proletarian parties lies in its nature as a vanguard. The Communist Party does not represent only the proletarians of a specific nation or a specific group (such as white-collar or blue-collar workers); rather, in terms of space, it "points out and brings to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality," and in terms of time, "in the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole."

The primary reason why capitalism did not perish in the 20th century and socialism did not achieve final victory is that the two subjective conditions of communism—namely, the international association of the proletariat and the scientific program of communism—were abandoned by the workers' parties in developed countries. During the lifetimes of Marx and Engels, the largest Marxist party in the world was the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Upon Engels' death, the right wing of the SPD openly declared that the final goal was of little consequence, and that the movement was everything ^[12]. Here, the "final goal" refers to revolutionary communism, while the "movement" refers to reformist socialism. This proposition actually severed communism from socialism, thereby discarding the fundamental principles of communism. Having lost their communist direction and being reorganized into atomized individuals, the proletarians became like a "sheet of loose sand" ^[13]. Following the outbreak of the First World War, the right wing of the SPD openly called upon German workers to "defend the fatherland," thereby discarding the fundamental principle of internationalism. Bourgeois nationalism gained the upper hand, dividing the world's proletariat into mutually hostile national camps, allowing them to be defeated one by one by the bourgeoisie. Lenin not only emphasized and upheld communist principles—renaming the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)—but also emphasized and upheld the principle of internationalism. On one hand, he utilized the crisis caused by the war to overthrow Tsarist rule and the bourgeois government to establish a socialist system; on the other hand, he founded the Communist International (Comintern) to unite and solidify Marxists and Communists worldwide. Marx and Engels found the path to communism for developed countries. However, because the level of productive forces in pre-October Revolution Russia lagged significantly behind that of developed countries, Russia could not mechanically copy this path. It had to combine the basic tenets of Marxism with Russian reality to explore a path of transition to socialism through the democratic power of workers and peasants and the New Economic Policy. Similarly, the path of Sinicized Marxism can neither mechanically copy the theories of Marx and Engels, nor those of Lenin and Stalin; it must combine Marxism-Leninism with Chinese reality.

Since the 18th National Congress of the CPC, Chinese Communists, with Comrade Xi Jinping as their chief representative, have persisted in combining the basic tenets of Marxism with China’s specific realities and with China’s fine traditional culture ^[14]. Deeply summarizing and fully utilizing the historical experience since the founding of the Party, and proceeding from new realities, they have established Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. This represents the latest achievement in the Sinicization and modernization of Marxism; it is contemporary Chinese Marxism and 21st-century Marxism, providing an action guide and theoretical weapon for solving new problems and contradictions. In the New Era, the principal contradiction in society has changed ^[15], and this new contradiction can only be resolved by applying the Marxist worldview and methodology. Xi Jinping has pointed out: "The Manifesto of the Communist Party describes a new worldview, namely historical materialism, in penetrating and vivid language, providing people with a scientific ideological weapon to understand nature and human society."

The report to the 20th National Congress of the CPC requires us to "grasp the worldview and methodology of the Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, and adhere to and apply the stances, viewpoints, and methods that permeate it." It states that "the Communist Party of China is a party that seeks happiness for the Chinese people and rejuvenation for the Chinese nation; it is also a party that seeks progress for humanity and the Great Harmony for the world." ^[16] The minimum standard for the comprehensive building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects was targeted poverty alleviation, requiring the realization of the "two non-worries" (not worrying about food or clothing) and "three guarantees" (guaranteed access to basic housing, medical insurance, and compulsory education). This has already reached the standards governing periods of "orderly rule" and "flourishing ages" in Chinese history ^[17]. Since modern China no longer faces the problem of a shortage of daily necessities, and since the principal contradiction in Chinese society has changed, the three indicators proposed at the end of the 20th century to be achieved by the mid-21st century—namely, reaching a per capita GDP of $4,000, building a relatively affluent moderately prosperous society, and basically achieving modernization—had to be adjusted accordingly. In fact, the goal of reaching a per capita GDP of $4,000 was achieved in 2010, forty years ahead of schedule; the goal of building a relatively affluent moderately prosperous society was achieved in 2020, thirty years ahead of schedule; and the goal of basically achieving modernization is in the process of being realized, with the report to the 20th National Congress of the CPC bringing the realization date forward to 2035. To adapt to the new situation, the 20th National Congress changed the Party's second centenary goal from "basically achieving modernization" (as proposed in the report to the 13th National Congress) to "comprehensively building a great modern socialist country" and "advancing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation through Chinese-path modernization." If the "wealth" mentioned at the beginning of Reform and Opening-up—referring to allowing some people to get rich first to drive those who follow—primarily meant material wealth, then the common prosperity to be achieved by the mid-21st century as determined in the New Era is the common prosperity of both material and spiritual life. This is the inherent meaning of a "better life." The transition from "seeking happiness for the Chinese people and rejuvenation for the Chinese nation" to "seeking progress for humanity and the Great Harmony for the world" reflects the unity of the common ideal of socialism with Chinese characteristics and the lofty ideal of communism.