The logical hierarchy of Marx's category of world history

In Marx and Engels's view, only when the individual who exists regionally is integrated into the world pattern of universal exchanges can he establish rich connections directly with world history as individuals of world historical existence.

Today's world is an "integrated world" in universal exchanges. With the continuous deepening of human interaction, Marx's scientific prediction that "history becomes the history of the world" has been confirmed by today's "integrated world". The idea of scientific "world history", which is the basic principle of Marxism, has also moved from the hidden behind the scenes to the prominent front, and has become an important theoretical issue that has attracted much attention. The category of "world history" has multiple connotations in the context of Marx and Engels texts, and we need to clarify their logical levels and their internal relationships in order to more accurately grasp the theoretical essence and practical significance of Marx's "world history" category as a form of thought.

Compared with the "regional significance" of the "world historical significance". The founders of Marxism used the category of "world history" in relation to local, regional, or national dimensions. In The State of England, Engels argues that the peoples of the European continent are facing poverty and social oppression, but they have not had a positive impact on the development of the nation, while "the poverty and poverty of the modern British working class is of national significance, even of world historical significance." In Engels's view, unlike the hierarchical poverty in history, the poverty of the British workers was caused by the modern large-scale industrial production by which the bourgeoisie ruled the world, and it can be said that the poverty of the working class to some extent achieved the myth of the "sun never sets" in the British Empire.

In German Ideology, Marx and Engels expounded that Hegel's philosophical system faced the fate of disintegration in Germany, and that those who "took philosophy as their profession" and "operated the absolute spirit for a living" competed fiercely with each other for philosophical discourse, and this struggle "was boasted and conceived as a change of world historical significance, a factor of great results and achievements". The German intellectual circles of the time "carried to the skies" these useless and trivial matters, and they "wanted to make discoveries of world historical significance with such insignificant explanations." In fact, the disintegration of Hegel's philosophical system will only produce very little doubt or apprehension among the German nation, and this "has only a regional significance for Germany." Marx and Engels used the "world historical significance" at the level corresponding to the "regional meaning" or "national significance", so that they could make an objective evaluation of the widely popular ideological criticism or philosophical criticism in Germany at that time and its significance, and in fact completely liquidate their past idealistic conception that "the philosophicalization of the world is also the cosmopolitanization of philosophy".

The "history of the world" born in human labor. Marx and Engels once used the concept of "world history" in the sense of the historical philosophy of "universal history", and the connotation is equivalent to "all history", "whole world" and "human history". How did the entire history of mankind come into being? This is an important question that many philosophers have long asked and tried to answer. In Hegel, "whole history" and "world history" are synonymous, and they are only the processes by which the "universal spirit" realizes itself in contradictory movements. As he came to disintegrate, Feuerbach held high the banner of materialism and swore that German classical philosophy would come to the end of history. In his 1844 Manuscript on the Philosophy of Economics, Marx argued that "history itself is a realistic part of natural history, i.e., a realistic part of the process by which nature is created into man." Thus, Marx further pointed out that "the whole so-called history of the world is nothing more than the process by which man is born through human labor, the process by which nature is generated for man." The scientific assertion that mankind created the entire "history of the world" through labor shows that Marx has transcended Feuerbach's "perceptual intuitive" way of thinking and is moving towards the scientific practice concept of "perceptual activity". Marx's scientific assertion that "labor creates the history of the world" has in fact surpassed Feuerbach's "perceptual intuitive" materialism, because Marx has regarded the form of labor itself as a process of development of historical evolution. The regional manual labor of the pre-capitalist era created a "discrete world history", the large-scale production of capitalist socialized machines created a "alienated world history", and the "autonomous activity" of communism could create a truly "universally free world history". Marx's examination of "world history" as the process of the generation of all human history from the perspective of combining naturalism and labor history is a key part of Marx's move towards the materialist view of world history.

The "history of the world" as a universal exchange of ideas. The category of "world history" as a form of thought mainly refers to the process of transformation from national history to world history, that is, the transformation process from primitive closed regional interaction to open and linked world interaction, and the discrete world is gradually connected into an organically linked whole. Marx clearly pointed out that "the more the scope of activity of the various interactions expands in this process of development, the more thoroughly the primitive closed state of nations is eliminated by the increasingly perfect mode of production, the intercourse and the division of labor between the different nations which naturally arise as a result of the interaction, the more history becomes the history of the world." Marx's classic expression of "history as world history" is a scientific conclusion drawn on the basis of a thoroughly materialist standpoint and a scientific outlook on practice.

In Marx's view, only large-scale machine industry can quickly eliminate the "state of isolation that has naturally formed in the past in all countries", and can make the satisfaction of the needs of each civilized country depend on the whole world, and in this sense large-scale industry "created the history of the world for the first time". This indicates that the concrete meaning of Marx's concept of "world history" has shifted from abstract human "universal history", "whole history", "whole history" or "whole world" to "world interaction" or "universal exchange" with the characteristics of the capitalist era. In Marx and Engels's view, only when the individual who exists regionally is integrated into the world pattern of universal exchanges can he establish rich connections directly with world history as individuals of world historical existence. Marx and Engels also pointed out that "the preservation of the productive forces created can be guaranteed only when the relations become world relations and are based on large-scale industry, only when all nations are drawn into the struggle for competition." It can be seen that in their view, "history becomes the history of the world" and "exchange becomes the interaction of the world" are actually synonymous, they express the same content in essence, and they both take the development of large-scale industry as the premise of reality.

We need to see that although Marx's "world history" category as a form of thought is not "world history" in the sense of compilation, nor is it "universal history" in the sense of general history philosophy, the two undoubtedly participate in the elaboration and sublimation process of the category of "world history" as a form of thought. If Marx and Engels had not possessed a large number of "world history" materials compiled from national histories, especially the rich "social history" data of Britain, they would not have been able to establish scientific principles explaining the actual historical process "from the standpoint outside Germany", and the process of argumentation between "the transformation of history into world history" and "exchanges into world exchanges" would lack sufficient "empirical facts" as empirical support, and Marx's "world history" would not have been supported by sufficient empirical evidence. It is impossible for thought to sublimate from the philosophical level of history and the level of empirical science to the level of historical science.

Marx's "world history" category, as a form of thought, mainly refers to the fact that capitalist modern large-scale industry has promoted mankind from closed and scattered regional exchanges to open and linked universal exchanges, which has inevitably undergone major changes in the living conditions, class structure, development path, and temporal and spatial order of various nationalities. Marx once said, "World history does not always exist in the past" and "history as world history is the result." It can be seen that Marx's idea of "world history" is the idea of "historical facts" and "development processes" about the closed history of nations or the transformation of discrete regional history into universal exchange of world history. In the "process of development" of this "historical fact", the mode of production controlled by the logic of capital gradually connects the relatively closed and scattered peoples of the world into an organically linked whole, and the activities of "real people" and their communities are expanded into world-historical activities, which are more and more dominated by the order of exchanges in the capitalist world market. On this basis, Marx and Engels exploratorily answered major issues of the times, such as "where should mankind go", "what kind of beautiful world should mankind build", "how should mankind build a beautiful world" and so on. The universal world exchanges established by the bourgeoisie in the course of free competition are a great revolution, or that "history becomes the history of the world" and "exchanges become the world exchanges" are a great revolution of epoch-making significance, but this great revolution is also an "unfinished business", the bourgeoisie is only an "unconscious tool of history" to promote this great revolution, and only the modern proletariat can undertake the historical mission of rebuilding the order of world exchanges.

It should be pointed out that the theoretical connotation of Marx's "world history" category is not logically linear evolution, they are mixed and used in many works of Marx and Engels, which requires us to read in depth according to the specific text context, in order to deeply understand the rich connotation and internal relationship of Marx's "world history" category as a form of thought, and strive to achieve the internal unity of academic interpretation and text logic.

(Author Affilications:School of Marxism, Chinese Min University, Xi Jinping Institute of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, Chinese Min University)

Editor: Huang Zhen