Marx’s Theory of World History

Marx’s theory of the world becoming an organic and unified whole as a result of the development of production and intercourse.

After the 15th century, along with the great geographical discoveries and the development of the capitalist relations of production, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, with the rapid development of the productive forces of society, the increasing scale of the socialization of production, and the strengthening of the universal intercourse and interdependence between the various regions of the world and the separate nationalities, history is being transformed from the history of nationalities and countries to the history of the world. Many thinkers preceding Marx, such as Voltaire, Herder, Kant and Hegel, were concerned with this course of human history and put forth their own conception of world history. These thoughts, especially Hegel’s conception of world history, were the immediate ideological sources of Marx’s theory of world history. According to Hegel, world history is the process of self-manifestation of the Absolute Spirit, and historical events are the alienation of the absolute spirit; world history evolved from the lower Oriental history to the higher European history, ending in Prussian Germany. Although it is an idealist conception of history and also has an obvious metaphysical nature and Eurocentric political tendency, Hegel, for the first time, profoundly reflected the process, the laws, the nature and the driving forces of historical development in a reasonable manner. Hegel examined history by connecting the various regions, nations, and countries of the whole world together, holding that history is not a fragmented and haphazard pile of accidental events, but has its own intrinsic logic of development; that the essence of the spirit is freedom, and that world history is also the realization of freedom, like the rise of the sun in the East and its setting in the West. Marx has assimilated the reasonable thought in Hegel’s philosophy of history and changed it by standing on the proletarian position and grounded in historical materialism. Marx pointed out that “this transformation of history into world history is by no means a mere abstract act on the part of ‘self-consciousness’, the world spirit, or of any other metaphysical specter, but a quite material, empirically verifiable act, an act the proof of which every individual furnishes as he comes and goes, eats, drinks and clothes himself.” Marx and Engels first put forth the theory of world history in The German Ideology, written in 1845-1846, and then further elaborated it in The Communist Manifesto, Capital, and other works, and the exploration of the subject did not cease until the later years of their life.

The so-called world history refers to the process by which, with the development of productive forces, the expansion of the division of labor and the universalization of intercourse, separate nationalities, countries and regions have broken the original isolation and crossed the spatial barriers to form a worldwide interdependence of all nations and move towards unity. “The further the separate spheres, which act on one another, extend in the course of this development and the more the original isolation of the separate nationalities is destroyed by the advanced mode of production, by intercourse and by the natural division of labor) between various nations arising as a result, the more history becomes world history.” The development of the productive forces, division of labor and intercourse is the material basis and root cause of the emergence and development of world history. In the epoch of the natural economy, due to the low productive forces, human productive capacity took place only in a narrow range and an isolated place, leading to the self-sufficiency and seclusion of nations and countries. With the invention and widespread use of steam engine and other technologies, the Industrial Revolution has promoted the rapid development of the productive forces. Driven by the productive forces, the social division of labor expanded, and the further expansion of the division of labor manifested itself in the separation of trade and production. “The separation between production and intercourse soon calls forth a new division of production between the individual towns, each of which is soon exploiting a predominant branch of industry. The local restrictions of earlier times begin gradually to be broken down.” As a direct consequence of the division of labor between different towns, manufacture arose. With the emergence of manufacture, competition between nations began and commercial struggles were waged. The expansion of trade and manufacture accelerated the accumulation of working capital and gave rise to the big bourgeoisie. Large-scale industry universalized competition, established means of communication and the modern world market. Large-scale industry created everywhere the same relations between the classes of society, and thus destroyed the peculiar features of the various nationalities. In short, with the development of the division of labor and the formation of the world market, the relations between people became increasingly universal, and in place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. From then on, the world has increasingly become a whole, and history has transformed into world history.

Communism is an inevitable trend in the development of world history. Capitalism has created world history, but the future of world history is communism. The capitalist mode of production has furthered an unprecedented development of the productive forces and created huge material wealth. However, due to the private property in the means of production, the capitalist mode of production inevitably fails to accommodate the ever-developing socialized productive forces and intensifies the antagonism between labor and capital. As a result, on the one hand, the development of human production are becoming increasingly globalized and informatized, and the social relations of men are becoming increasingly universal and networked; on the other hand, under the capitalist private ownership, greed and gaining without labor are forever the core value outlook of capital, which leads to a one-sided development of man and a society in a state of disunity. The development of human history will definitely surpass capitalism. Communism is the inevitable trend of world history.

Marx’s theory of world history is abundant in content and profound in thought. Although Marx did not put forth the concept of globalization at that time, Marx’s theory of world history is actually a theoretical explanation and generalization of the emergence and development of globalization. Therefore, it has provided us with a scientific methodology to understand, recognize and analyze contemporary economic globalization, and is a theoretical key for us to unravel the problems of globalization today.