How Marxism Understands "Justice"

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　　Fairness and justice are the eternal and unremitting values pursued by mankind. However, due to the complexity and multifaceted nature of the connotation of fairness and justice, people have discussed fairness and justice in a variety of ways since ancient times, and it has not been possible to form a unified and comprehensive discourse. In the classical concept of justice, fairness and justice are mainly regarded as social ethical concepts related to the goodness of the community, so social justice refers more to the unity of individual virtue and community virtue.

　　In modern times, with the rise of civil society and the development of commodity economy, individuals have begun to be liberated from feudal blood patriarchal relations, their independence and autonomy have been continuously enhanced, and the free space of society has been increasing. Under the dual arguments of liberal political philosophy and liberal political economy, a liberal concept of justice has been formed, which takes rights as the core and is based on the "principle of free sale", "equal exchange" and "labor ownership". In particular, as capital has become the basic structure of modern society, the liberal concept of justice has become more deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and has increasingly become the dominant concept of modern justice and a strong barrier to modern politics.

　　Hegel inherited the basic tradition of modern liberal political philosophy and classical political economy, and recognized the central position and constructive significance of private property rights in modern economic and political life. However, what is more profound than modern liberalism is that Hegel, while seeing the importance of property rights, also discovered the defects of modern civil society based on private property rights, so he launched a sharp critique of private property rights, and opened an ideological approach to criticize and transcend the modern liberal concept of justice from the perspective of state philosophy.

　　Marx cut into the critique of Hegel's philosophy of law and the overall critique of the classical and modern liberal conceptions of justice. In Marx's view, most of the concepts of justice from ancient Greece to modern times are preset with an ideal of justice and principles of justice, and they either entrust the realization of justice to the practical concern of a certain divine entity that exists independently of man, or they pin the realization of justice on some pre-existing human nature and its continuous improvement, and then use this principle of justice and the ideal of justice to explain and criticize the real world, so it is essentially a speculative and just view that transcends reality and only pursues to explain the world.

After arduous theoretical exploration, Marx finally established the historical materialist methodology for the study of social justice in the German Ideology, which marked the birth of the materialist view of history, that is, "not to look for a certain category in each era, but to always stand on the basis of real history, and to explain various conceptual forms not from the conceptual point of view, but from the material practice" This means that Marx did not understand social justice from the perspective of metaphysical value suspension, but firmly based the study of social justice on the basis of real material production and economic relations, thus completely drawing a clear line from the previous philosophy of understanding justice from the perspective of ethics or legal rights, and achieving a fundamental change in methodology.

　　However, due to the lag of economic research during the period of the German Ideology, it was impossible for Marx to go deep into the inner workings of the capitalist economic structure. In Capital and its manuscripts, guided by the basic principles of historical materialism, Marx revealed the "paradox of social justice" under the guidance of the logic of capital, including the paradox of freedom, the paradox of equality, the paradox of ownership, and the paradox of utilitarianism, through the critique of the overall political economy of the capitalist mode of production That is, capitalism retains the concept of justice that is compatible with the individual private ownership of laborers and simple commodity production at the level of commodity exchange, but it pushes this justice to its own opposite at the level of commodity production, thus forming a paradoxical concept of social justice that is compatible with capitalist private ownership and capitalist commodity production.

Thus, Marx profoundly revealed the dialectical relationship between the mutual coupling and mutual negation of the justice of modernity and the logic of capital, and pointed out that modern freedom and equality are nothing but the conceptual embodiment of the freedom of contract and freedom of will of the two parties in equivalent exchange under the conditions of commodity economy, which serve and obscure the social essence of capital domination. However, unlike Hegel, Marx did not appeal to the state of ethical entities to carry the ideal of justice for the development of human society, but based the realization of social justice on the transformation of the mode of production and the form of labor. Through the transformation of the mode of production and the form of labor, the united laborers can regain possession of the means of production and directly meet their own needs in society through socialized labor, and in the process, these "intermediaries" of the state, class, ideology, etc., which maintain the mode of production on which they depend, will inevitably be finally abandoned by history.

　　From this point of view, the critique of justice and the construction of justice based on the mode of production are the normative characteristics of Marx's concept of justice. In Capital and its manuscripts, Marx sees through the analysis of the duality of the capitalist mode of production that it is both simple commodity production and capital production, and then reveals the historical limit of capitalist justice—the reality of "injustice" in the name of "justice". But at the same time, Marx's revelation and critique of the capitalist form of justice does not mean that there is a lack of normative dimensions such as rights, freedom, equality, and justice in the perspective of historical materialism, but that Marx has left liberalism to take justice as a theoretical basis for remedial value, and explains his unique concept of social justice from a new theoretical perspective and a higher theoretical level, which is based on the self-realization of people in the association of free people.

This means that the essence of social justice is not only the distribution of material wealth and means of subsistence, nor is it only the realization of individual rights in civil society, but the ultimate goal of self-realization of each person based on the principle of difference. This ultimate goal establishes the standard of social justice based on the ontology of freedom, but it is by no means some kind of abstract and speculative justice, but places freedom in the historical field of real material production and economic relations, and takes freedom and its actualization as the value basis of social justice. Taking human self-realization as the value paradigm, Marx expounded the self-negation and internal renunciation of the principle of rights, the principle of contribution, and the principle of need, thus forming a historical and holistic sequence of social justice based on the mode of production. It can be seen that in Marx, the existence of justice, as a normative dimension, does not negate the scientific nature of historical materialism based on the analysis of the mode of production, but on the contrary, it is supported by the factual dimension. In this sense, Marx's concept of social justice is the unity of fact and normativity based on historical materialism.

　　The historical materialist basis of Marx's concept of justice is more clearly and distinctly presented in the context of the criticism of the liberal concept of justice and the vulgar socialist concept of justice. In Capital and its manuscripts, Marx made an in-depth critique of the human foundation, institutional basis, theme of justice, and speculative principles of the liberal concept of justice, as well as the speculative and ahistorical methodology of the vulgar socialist concept of justice, the theoretical misunderstandings and practical traps of "distributive justice". The profound revelation of the theoretical purpose of the restoration of small private ownership has made Marx's thinking path of criticizing and constructing his concept of social justice based on the historical foundation clear, so that the scientific and revolutionary nature of Marx's concept of social justice has been demonstrated.

For Marx, the nature of social justice is no longer a moral problem derived from natural law and abstract human nature, but a historical norm rooted in economic relations and real life; the subject of social justice is no longer the issue of the distribution of rights and obligations, but the question of the rationalization of the economic structure and class structure; the way to realize social justice is no longer the process of self-movement of self-consciousness or some speculative concept, but the revolutionary practice of transforming reality.

　　In the search for the solution of the problem of social justice in contemporary China, we should dispel the ideological myth of Western theory of justice, always adhere to Marx's historical materialist method of examining the problem of social justice, take the Marxist concept of social justice as the guide, and constantly promote the solution of the problem of social justice in the practice of socialism with Chinese characteristics, so as to enrich and expand the breadth and depth of the Marxist concept of social justice. First, with the unity of idealism and reality as the basic principle, we should combine Marx's ideal of justice with the reality of the initial stage of socialism with Chinese characteristics and seek a way to solve the problem of reality and justice. The second is to take the main contradiction in society as the problem and grasp the unique connotation of the problem of real justice. The third is to take common prosperity as the basic orientation and regard the people as the main body for the realization of social justice. Fourth, we should take comprehensively deepening reform as the fundamental driving force to continuously meet the people's needs for a better life.

　　(Source: Study Times, April 1, 2024, page 2; author: Tong Ping; photo source: China Daily)