Research On Marx’s Thought Of Capacity And Its Contemporary Significance

Although Marx did not leave a special work on the thought of capacity,he did pay attention to the exercise and development of human capacity.Marx explored the individual capacity and its realization conditions in many levels and dimensions,and created rich materials for the thought of capacity.His thought on human capacity directly serves and is subordinate to the criticism of capitalist society and the construction of human emancipation.In this sense,the thought of capacity is an important supporting background of Marx’s theory and plays an irreplaceable role in it.Starting from the classical text,this paper sorts out Marx’s discussions on the issue of capacity,and highlights the capacity dimension of Marx’s thought,which can further enrich Marx’s logic of narrative and ideological framework.Marx’s thought of capacity was more or less influenced by the dimension of subject’s capacity in German Philosophy,the theory of labor capacity in classical political economy,as well as the utopian socialism’s assumption of the free development of individual capacity,and fundamentally surpassed them.Young Marx regarded the free,conscious labor capacity,communication capacity and need capacity as the constituent elements of human’s essential power,and criticized the estrangement of human’s species-capacity and the loss of dignity in the capitalist society.Communism,which sublates private property,aims to realize the comprehensive possession of one’s own capacities,and the real human emancipation.In the process of establishing historical materialism,Marx and Engels interpreted the issues of productivity,division of labor,community,and distribution from the perspective of individual capacity and development.They sought the realistic road of human emancipation from the material production.The most important thing is that they regarded personal capacity as the inner dimension of productivity,so that history becomes the development history of personal power.From the perspective of the development of human society,as an "illusory community",the capitalist society evaluates individual capacity by money,and uses differences in individual capacity as the main criterion for distribution;the "real community" aims at the overall development of individual capacities,and advocates that differences in individual capacities should not cause the difference in possession and consumption.In Capital and its manuscripts,the problem of labor capacity and its realization is an important target of the critique of Marx’s political economy.Marx found that the buying and selling of labor capacity is a key medium in capital proliferation,which fundamentally exposes the falseness of freedom and equality of bourgeois ideologists.Standing at the height of historical materialism,Marx dialectically analyzed the historical significance of capitalist production.On the one hand,from simple collaboration to large-scale machine industry,it has caused the abnormal development of personal capacities,and led to capital proliferation in opposition to the absolute poverty of people;on the other hand,capitalist production brings about the universality and comprehensiveness of personal relationships and capacities.After the capital sublates itself,the communist society aims at the free and comprehensive development of everyone’s capacities.Marx’s capacity thought has profoundly influenced the construction and debate of contemporary Western political philosophy.Rawls regarded the sale and realization of the labor capacity of workers as the axis of Marx’s critique on capitalism,and equated"from each according to his ability,to each according to his needs" to everyone having equal rights to self-realization.It can provide fair and equal opportunities for the development of everyone’s capacities,and can prevent the differences in individual capacities from leading to an unequal and just society in reality.However,Rawls’s concreteization of Marx’s capacity thought from the perspective of political philosophy has fundamentally lost Marx’s historical materialism,which can only make justice remain at the level of moral utopia.Cohen paid close attention to Marx’s discussion on the realization and difference of individual capacity.But Cohen separated the normative and factual nature of Marx’s capacity thought,and ignored the objective necessity inherent in historical materialism.Sen and Nussbaum even proceeded from Marx’s methodology and directly put forward a theory of justice based on capability,that is,the capability approach of justice.It is true that the capability approach focuses on the concrete people in the society,but it breaks away from the class,social and historical nature of people,and thus remains an abstract person.Theoretical research should face reality.Marx’s capacity thought plays an important theoretical guiding role in the cause of the socialism with Chinese characteristics.If it is said that in the early stage of Reform and Opening,the academic community’s attention to human capacities,subjectivity,and value was a theoretical response to social practice centered on economic construction;then,in the new era,meeting people’s needs for a better life requires both external wealth and the growth of people’s internal capacities.Only in this way can we overcome the materialized logic of the external material forces enslaving and domination of people,and create a good social environment for each human body to work in an all-round way,and to achieve common happiness.