Abstract:This paper contends that the emancipation of the proletariat and human subjects is the ideological theme and practical goal of Marx’s ideological criticism. Based on an investigation of the relationship between material production activities and the spiritual interaction of “real people”, Marx discovered that there is a most oppressed and revolutionary class in civil society, that is, the proletariat, which has suffered widespread sufferings but has given birth to the most thorough revolutionary passion. It is precisely because the proletariat has the essential prescriptiveness that it represents the general interests of human subjects that it can become a revolutionary subject with the mission of human liberation. The proletariat can only liberate itself and thus ultimately all mankind by raising the consciousness of individual resistance to the consciousness of the entire class, and by eliminating alienated social relations and false ideas attached to them with certain class actions. It can be seen that the emancipation of the proletariat is completely consistent with the emancipation of human subjects, and this process of emancipation also highlights the inherent logical relationship and dialectical tension between the criticism of false ideology and the formation of revolutionary subjects and the construction of revolutionary ideologies.After returning from abstract self-consciousness to the real world of life, Marx not only exposed the illusory nature of Hegel’s limited realm of pure speculation and regarded the intermediary element of particularity as the connection between civil society and the state, but also pointed out the inverted logic of the bourgeois political economics that inverted the relationship between people to the relationship between things. This critical process is not the rational arbitrariness of the subject’s empty field, and it is in this process that the theoretical image of the proletariat and the status of the revolutionary subject have been transformed from emerging to taking shape. Correspondingly, Marx’s critique of Hegel’s philosophy of law and bourgeois political economics “inverted image” based on the objective dilemma of the proletariat losing the means of production and engaging in wage labor has also become the rationale for the social illusion of the proletariat transformation of ideas and reality, the reversal of the subject and object of labor and capital, and its “superstructure of ideas”. However, the actual conditions for the proletariat to be “put in complete chains” do not necessarily prompt it to launch a class struggle to abolish the old relations of production. Only by realizing that there is a fundamental class difference between itself and the bourgeoisie that insists on the supremacy of individual interests and that it is necessary to overthrow the root cause of private ownership that causes its misfortune, can the historical inevitability of the revolutionary ideology that was aimed at realizing the all-round development of human freedom be manifested, and can the revolutionary subject status of the proletariat from “man in the grave” to “gravedigger” be shaped.In the digital age when artificial intelligence is increasingly replacing the main labor. the proletariat is not only trapped in the dilemma of being excluded into isolated naked lives in terms of living conditions but also faces the ideological banter such as “class extinction theory” and “useless class theory” that challenge its revolutionary subject status. In this context, the proletariat, only by awakening its consciousness of self-reliance that dares to struggle, adhering to the ideological leadership of the proletarian party, and exploring the possibility of collective coexistence based on the unity of class unity and community construction, can it tear down all kinds of ideological labyrinthine and restore and eliminate the exploitative facts concealed by it.
杨晓彤, 包大为. 识别革命主体:马克思意识形态批判的内在旨趣及其当代价值[J]. 浙江大学学报(人文社会科学版), 2023, 53(8): 18-29.
Yang Xiaotong, Bao Dawei. Identifying the Revolutionary Subject: The Intrinsic Purpose of Marx’s Ideological Critique and Its Contemporary Value. JOURNAL OF ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY, 2023, 53(8): 18-29.