Theory of the Emancipation of the Proletariat and the Mankind

The theory according to which the proletariat liberates all people from economic exploitation, political oppression and ideological enslavement by revolutionizing capitalism and abolishing classes, realizes communism, and thereby realizes its own fundamental emancipation.

Marx’s thought on the emancipation of the proletariat and man has gone through a process of continuous deepening from abstract to concrete. In the early 1840s, when Marx talked about the question of the emancipation of the proletariat and the mankind in On the Jewish Question and Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s of Philosophy of Right, he said that political emancipation was not the ultimate form of human emancipation. Although political emancipation against feudal absolutism is of great progressive significance, it is only the emancipation of the civil society, and only the bourgeoisie really benefits from it, while the proletariat and the masses of working people and oppressed nations are far from being emancipated. He pointed out that the proletariat is the social force for human emancipation. Thus, human emancipation was connected with the emancipation of the proletariat, and the abstract nature of the utopian socialist thought about human emancipation was eliminated. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx put forth the theory of estranged labor. By analyzing the capitalist economic system, he found the reasons for the emergence of private property and the inner connection between private property and estranged labor. He put forth that “communism is the positive sublation of private property as human self-estrangement”, “the sublation of private property is the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities”, and found the actual basis for the revolutionary movement of the emancipation of the proletariat and the mankind. In The German Ideology, as the most important principle, “the world-historical role of the proletariat” has been given a more exhaustive scientific proof. Marx and Engels elaborated the premise of the proletarian revolution, pointed out the fundamental difference between proletarian revolution and all previous revolutions, which is to abolish all exploitation, abolish the rule of any class, and abolish the classes themselves, thus connected the prospect for the emancipation of mankind with the revolutionary movement of the world proletariat. Later, in Capital, Anti-Dühring and other works, Marx and Engels further concretized the emancipation of the proletariat and mankind into a movement for revolutionizing capitalism and achieving communism, making this thought a scientific theory.

There is an inner coincidence between the emancipation of the proletariat and the emancipation of mankind. The emancipation of mankind means the abolition of classes by the mankind, and the entry of all its members into a communist society, free from the shackles of the forces of nature and the old ideas of old social relations. Its contents include: the emancipation of all men and the full development of man, and a high degree of social development. The degree of the emancipation of mankind is conditioned by the development of the productive forces of society and concrete social and historical conditions, is a historical activity and a historical process. Every change of old and new social forms and every major progress in history has been a certain degree of freedom and emancipation that mankind has fought for. However, in the past class society, this was only a change in the form of exploitation and oppression and had great limitations. As the last exploited class in human history, the proletariat is the representative of all the oppressed and exploited classes, the most gravely exploited and oppressed. It “can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression, class struggles”. Only when the proletariat emancipates all mankind can one speak of its own emancipation. Unlike the slaves and the peasants, the proletariat is the representative of the advanced productive forces. The more advanced modern large-scale industry and science and technology are, the higher the level of its consciousness and organization, the stronger the determination and capacity to overthrow the old world and create a new one. The communist world revolution led by the proletariat is to realize the two “radical ruptures”, eliminate any economic exploitation, political oppression and ideological enslavement on earth, enable everyone to attain full and free development, and become masters of their social association, masters of the nature and masters of themselves. In this way, the centuries-old debate over the relationship between individual emancipation, collective (class) emancipation and social (human) emancipation, and which of them comes first, has been materialistically and dialectically unified with the abolition of classes and the establishment of an association of free men. This is a leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. The history of mankind is a history of continuous development from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

The theory of the emancipation of the proletariat and the mankind has rich connotations and has fundamental guiding significance for the cause of revolution and construction led by the proletariat and for the development of world history.