The disputes among Chinese scholars'on Karl Marx's theory of social formation are largely due to differences in understanding of the core concepts of social formation,economic social formation and social form.It is therefore necessary to carefully examine these core concepts.Marx understood society as a product of human activities and as a social organism.The social organism is composed of a variety of factors which are interlinked organically,among which the economy is in the fundamental position,and is always in a state of change.Social change presents obvious phase characteristics.In order to highlight the these phase characteristics as stages in the evolution of human societies,Marx coined the concept of dieGesellschaftsformation based on the concept of geological formation. Productive forces,relations of production(the economic foundation)and superstructure are all components of society and all have phase,or stagecharacteristics,so they should be included in the concept of the social formation.Some scholars have a narrower understanding of social formation which excludes productive forces or superstructure from social formation.Perhaps these scholars confuse the main signs that distinguish various social formations with social formation itself. The scope of the form itself is two different issues. Economic social formation(die ökonomische Gesellschaftsformation)in Marx's works can be used in two ways,(1)it is the social formation from the economic perspective,(2)it is the formation of social economy or the economic formation,namely the economic part of the social formation,therefore,it belongs to the same sequence as the economic foundation,the economic structure,but it highlights the diachronic evolution rather than the synchronic structure of the economy.Some scholars interpret economy as the characteristics of the social formation,and argue that there are both the economic social formations and the non-economic social formations.Such understanding is in conflict with some of Marx's classical statements. Marx's theory of social formation contains historical consciousness,which is related to his distinction between obj ects and specific social forms(die Gesellschaftsform).In addition to social formation,Marx also used social form to refer to a certain stage of social development.The connotations of social form and social formation are both similar and different:they can both be used in the sense of staged social development,and social form can also be used in the sense of die gesellschaftliche Formbestimmtheit(the social determination of form).The essential similarity between social form and social formation lies in the fact that the certainty of social form obtained by obj ects and human labor in certain social relations is the symbol of different stages of economicdevelopment(economic formation)and then the stages of social development(social formation).