Social Relations

General term for the relationship forged by men based on the relations of production in the process of their common social practical activities. Man is a “species-being”, and the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality he is the ensemble of the social relations. Social relations are built on the basis of the practical activity of society, in the practical process of men’s production and life, including material and intellectual life, while they are also the forms of existence of the practical activity of society. Marx pointed out that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into definite social and political relations. Moreover, social relations are based on the relations of production, the economic relations of society.

According to the difference in the scope and level of the subject of practical activity, man can be divided into three forms of existence: class, group and individual. Therefore, among the social relations constructed by man as a subject, there are relations among individuals. The production of life, both of one’s own in labor and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship. By social we understand the co-operation of several individuals. There are also social relations between the individual and the group, and between groups. The scope of groups here ranges from small civil organizations to large political parties, nations and countries. The relationship between individuals, which is the point of departure of all social relations, is the simplest and most fundamental relationship in society; the relationship between individuals and groups, and the relationship between groups and groups, embodies in a more concentrated manner the basic tendency of social relations, which are high-level and wide-ranging social relations. Man always exists and develops in certain social relations. Human existence and development are historically conditioned by his position in these concrete social relations. Moreover, the development of man actually manifests itself as revolutions in concrete social relations. Therefore, the development of the individual is not only a product of nature, but also a product of the history of society, including the constant harmony and perfection of human social relations. Social relations in reality determine the extent to which an individual can develop.

With the constant expansion and deepening of human social practical activity, social relations have a development process from simple to complex, and thus forming complex and diverse social relations. In the long primitive society, the range of human activity was limited to primitive human masses, clans and tribes, and the degree of socialization was very low. After entering class society, with the development of productive forces and the expansion of the scale of production, the degree of socialization of man is bound to increase gradually. In modern society, due to the constant rise in the level of productive forces, the increasing development of science and technology, the scope of people’s intercourse has become wider and wider, and the socialization of man has already reached a fairly high degree, and the field of social relations is also very wide, and at the same time they have new contents, such as economic relations, political relations, juridical relations, ethical and moral relations, religious relations, military relations, and marital and family relations, etc. The various social relations at particular historical phases of society constitute a system of social relations with a certain order and certain laws. Among them, the relations of production forged by men in the process of social production, i.e., economic relations, are the basis of all other social relations. On the basis of economic relations, political, juridical, ethical, cultural, artistic and religious and other relations take place. Marx pointed out that legislation, whether political or civil, never does more than proclaim, express in words, the will of economic relations. Engels also pointed out that all past history was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange—in a word, of the economic conditions of their time. Marx and Engels sometimes directly summed up complex social relations into two basic categories: material relations and intellectual relations. Material relations are necessary connections formed by men in their productive activity and independent from their consciousness and will, i.e., the relations in terms of material production or economic life. Material relations determine the nature of other social relations, and other social relations in turn react upon the material relations. Intellectual relations are relations formed through men’s intellectual consciousness, such as politics, law, morality, culture, religion and so on; they are reflections of material relations. Marx and Engels pointed out that the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.

Since the relations of economic interests are the basis of all social relations and play a determining part, the social relations of mankind in different epochs inevitably have different natures. In the early period of human society, due to the coincidence of economic interests, the social relations were non-antagonistic. In societies in which classes or class struggle exist, where the exploiting class holds sway, numerous social relations manifest themselves as class relations and are imprinted with the stamp of classes, and the nature of the system of social relations is antagonistic, i.e., the interests of the two parties are fundamentally opposite, it is often necessary to rely on force to maintain or resolve the contradictory relation, which usually refers to the relation between the exploiting class and the exploited class. Marx and Engels identified the apparent absurdity of merging all the diverse relationships of people in the one relation of usefulness, this apparently metaphysical abstraction arises from the fact that in modern bourgeois society all relations are subordinated in practice to the one abstract monetary-commercial relation. In the socialist society, the fundamental interests among the people coincide, and the social relations among them are non-antagonistic. It has been incisively dealt with by Mao Zedong in his article On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People. This shows that, with changes in historical conditions, whether individual social relations or systems of social relations, they are all concrete and historical. The Marxist category of social relations has scientifically explained the question concerning the essence of man, and provided people with a scientific method for analyzing the existence and development of mankind as well as the development of the history of human society and its laws.