| Misery is a theme of human history,a lingering nightmare of modern Chinese history,and a description of the existential situation of the vast masses of people represented by the proletariat.The main work of this paper is the philosophical and theoretical construction of Marx and Engels’ concept of Misery.The full text consists of five parts.Introduction.First,the question of the legitimacy of Misery is argued.Through textual evidences,the substitutability of the term Misery for poverty or pauperization in terms of content,lexical frequency and comprehensiveness are pointed out.Next,the paper’s sense of the problem is outlined: what phenomena Misery manifests itself as,whether Misery is a prerequisite for emancipation and how it can be alleviated in practice.Finally,the relevant results of domestic and international studies of Misery are presented.The first chapter studies on Marx’s and Engels’ philosophical definition of Misery.It shows first that the opposition between the political economies’ views of Misery and Marx’s and Engels’,and secondly points out the fitness between the original meaning of Misery and Marx’s philosophy in terms of etymology.Then,by explicating the three myths of Sisyphus,Moses,and Christ,the theological overtones embedded in the concept of Misery and the connection between Marx’s Misery and the Western theological tradition are argued.Finally,through textual evidence,the three basic dimensions of Marx’s Misery,the phenomenological dimension of Engels’ concept of Misery,and the two basic aspects of Misery,negative and positive,which are expressed in both texts simultaneously,are explained.The chapter also briefly discusses the complex relationship between the textual usage of misery and poverty of Marx and Engels.Finally,Marx’s and Engels’ basic prescription of Misery is given: Misery is the great struggle of human resistance to history（prehistory）.The second chapter revolves around the central issue of the genres of Misery.First,several basic ideas of the genres of Misery are presented according to its negative and positive orientations,and the classification of Misery adopted by Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England is also briefly elaborated.Subsequently,the chapter selects seven most representative types of Misery,namely war,exploitation and oppression,poverty,disease and natural disasters,revolution and its costs,international exploitation,and global crisis,and analyzes them to constitute the basic content of the study of the concept of Misery in Marxism.The third chapter deals with the relationship between Misery and emancipation.Following the basic logic of relationalism,this chapter first explains the meaning of emancipatory forces,then distinguishes positive,negative,and uncorrelated relations between suffering and emancipation,and revisits the types of Misery involved in these three relations.The core of this chapter is to sort out the basic elements of Theory of Necessary Presuppositions and to add to and revise them.A complete Theory of Necessary Preconditions should include the following arguments: Misery is a necessary precondition for emancipation.No specific genre of Misery is a necessary precondition for emancipation.The emancipation of pre-capitalist society does not have the misery of capitalist society as a necessary precondition.The emancipation of the proletariat and human society does not presuppose the full historical experience of misery as necessary.Chapter four explores the practical problem of how to circumvent Misery and analyzes the problem of circumventing Misery in both socialist construction with Chinese characteristics and the international communist movement by applying the Marxist perspective of Misery.In the question of the feasibility of circumventing Misery,the paper argues from both theoretical and data perspectives that the socialist path is indeed unparalleled in its superiority to the capitalist path in circumventing Misery.Finally,based on the conclusions drawn in the previous chapters,the application of the Misery narrative to the construction of a socialist modern power and the international communist movement is briefly stated. |
