Shared Future: Building a Community of Shared Future For Mankind as A New Innovator of Enriching Historical Materialism

Liu Tongfang, Professor of the School of Marxism at Zhejiang University

Abstract: The building of a community of human destiny is a great conception of Xi Jinping’s thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era that has a strategic height and a sense of realistic urgency, and fully demonstrates the ideal pursuit and intellectual spirit of contemporary Chinese communists. As the Chinese wisdom and Chinese programme for solving global governance problems, building a community of human destiny is an original contribution to the theoretical development of historical materialism in the 21st century. In the theoretical vision of historical materialism, the community of human destiny is the process and picture of different social forms in the development path of human society to jointly promote the development of globalisation based on the basic orientation and value of mutual benefit and win-win situation, which is based on the philosophical standpoint of “human society”, and promotes the real “universal interaction” of human beings to form a “community of human beings” with the potential to achieve the goal of “universal interaction”. It is based on the philosophical position of “human society”, promotes “universal interaction” among human beings in order to form human interests with a higher level of “commonality”, and pushes forward the balanced development of global productive forces on the basis of the change of the global governance system, laying a solid material and spiritual foundation for the realisation of a better world image for human society. The Chinese wisdom of building a community of human destiny has brought unprecedented theoretical effects to the development of historical materialism, created a new path for interpreting the theory of historical materialism, and given it a new ideological form; at the same time, through the constructive interpretation of the community of human destiny, the theory of historical materialism has achieved its own theoretical goals and value pursuits, and will surely become a constructive worldview in the era of globalisation.

Keywords: community of human destiny, historical materialism, global governance system, universal interaction, common value

The building of a community of human destiny is a theoretical proposition and great conception of Xi Jinping’s thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era that has a high strategic level and a sense of urgency in reality, and which aims to critically reshape the contemporary global governance system, fully manifesting the idealistic pursuits and intellectual spirit of the Communist Party of China of the present generation. The first and foremost task we must face and undertake in our attempt to understand and grasp this great idea is to comprehensively and deeply review the world order and its global governance system constructed by capitalist globalisation under the theoretical vision of historical materialism. Historical materialism is by no means the only theoretical approach that insists on reexamining and rethinking the existing capitalist world order, but its theoretical vision undoubtedly has the most thorough critical orientation. A comprehensive and in-depth review, reflection and critique of the capitalist world order in the theoretical elaboration of historical materialism is an essential prerequisite for building a community of human destiny. If human beings want to transcend the world order constructed by capitalist globalisation and get rid of its ideological blinders and constraints, they cannot uncritically accept and share the presuppositions of the global capitalist system, but should constantly force themselves to meet the challenge of a certain theoretical conception, which is based on a completely new way of thinking and form of practice. The world order constructed by capitalist globalisation and its global governance system have completely departed from the path of “community” development, which has been pursued by mankind since the Age of Enlightenment, and which is based on the human being as the main body. Under the domination of the logic of global capitalism, the picture of a free and equal, just and reasonable world, which some great thinkers and statesmen have painstakingly conceived and pursued, has gradually dimmed and even quietly faded away. Under the indoctrination and blinding of capitalist ideology, the current era has gradually developed a daily consciousness of the eternalisation of capitalism, to the extent of rejecting the idea of exploring a world order and a global governance system that is more in line with the development of mankind. Precisely because of the stagnation in the mental state of the eternalisation of capitalism, the imagination of the world picture and the exploration of the path of development in our times were once in a spiritual crisis and intellectual decay. In the world of illusion created by the process of capitalist production, people are increasingly blinded, bound and enslaved by the ideologies produced by the global capitalist system, but it is difficult for them to consciously break through them, which are wrapped in “self-evident legitimacy” and try to make people “reasonably” abandon certain world images and development paths. These ideologies are wrapped in “self-evident legitimacy” and seek to “rationalise” the abandonment of certain visions and explorations of the world and development paths. However, these visions and explorations have contributed to the construction of a world order that is more in line with human beings themselves, and their inherent spirit is still noble and attractive in the present age. From the perspective of the theory of historical materialism, these ideas and explorations, which have been obliterated by “reason”, are precisely the most important issues in human life, and in a deeper sense they truly reveal and clarify the problems of the human situation in the era of globalisation. The historic emergence of China’s idea of building a community of human destiny is ostensibly a concept of international diplomacy put forward by China, but in essence, it is a contribution of China’s wisdom and a Chinese programme for solving the problems of global governance. This Chinese programme, with its critical stance towards the global capitalist system, which addresses not only the contemporary international political and economic order but also the contemporary intellectual and spiritual landscape, is an original contribution to the development of historical materialism in the twenty-first century.

I. Perspective difference between “civil society” and “human society”: the philosophical position of the community of human destiny

In Article 10 of the These on Feuerbach, Marx states, “The old materialism is based on civil society, while the new materialism is based on human society or social humanity.”[1]

 Marx distinguished the difference between the old and new materialism from the point of view of “footing”. The so-called “point of reference” is the position, the standpoint, and the field of view adopted in observing or judging things. According to Marx, the “old materialism” represented by Feuerbach was a kind of “intuitive materialism”, because “materialism which does not understand sensibility as a practical activity can at best only reach the intuition of individual man and civil society”. The intuition of the individual and the civil society”,[2]

Therefore, Feuerbach’s base is the “civil society”. On the other hand, Marx’s “new materialism” understands “object, reality, and sensibility” from the aspect of the subject, treating them all as sensible human activities, and thus is able to go beyond “intuitive materialism” and take social relations as the basis for its understanding of “objects, reality, and sensibility”. Thus, it is able to transcend “intuitive materialism” and understand the reality of human nature from the perspective of social relations, showing its theoretical quality of taking “human society or social human beings” as the starting point. In Marx’s view, the distinction between the old and the new materialism lies in the very different “starting point” between them, that is, the difference in perspective between “civil society” and “human society”, which profoundly reveals the difference in perspective between “civil society” and “human society”, and the difference in perspective between “civil society” and “human society”. This difference in perspective profoundly reveals the fundamental difference in philosophical position between capitalist economic globalisation and the community of human destiny.

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