Social Civilization

The sum total of the material and intellectual achievements of man in reshaping the world, including the economic, political, cultural life and the state of constant progress of the masses and the higher level achieved, marking the degree of progress, intellectual accumulation and state of civilization of human society.

Civilization is a historical concept, which was first seen in the ancient Chinese literature Yi-Qian-Wen Yan (易-乾-文言literary Chinese) and Shang Shu-Shun Dian (尚书-舜典), and has the meaning of brilliance of literary talent and the splendor of literary virtue. In the Qing Dynasty Li Yu’s Sketches of Idle Pleasure, there is a phrase “to drive away ignorance and reach civilization”, which denotes the degree of progress and civilization of society. After entering the capitalist society, Western scholars used the concept of “civilization” targeting the backward mode of production and cultural development of the colonies and semi-colonies, holding that the passage from “barbarism” to “civilization” marks the development of human society. In Ancient Society, American anthropologist Morgan divided the development of human history into three epochs: savagery, barbarism and civilization. Among them, the epoch of civilization includes three phases: slave society, feudal society and capitalist society. On the basis of absorbing the excellent achievements of mankind, Marxist philosophy has made a scientific explanation of civilization, holding that civilization is the result of the human activity of knowing and reshaping the world, including the two aspects of material and intellectual civilization, and pointed out that civilization arose only after the emergence of classes in human society. In The Condition of England, Engels said: “Civilization is a matter of practice, a social quality”. That is to say, civilization is a product of human productive practice; it is conditioned by the social formation and has a social nature. Civilization is, in the first place, practical; it is the result created by human practical activity, the result of long and arduous labor for existence and development. The emergence and development of a civilization are rooted in people’s actual material practical activity. In the perspective of historical materialism, practical activity is the cornerstone upon which human civilization relies for its existence and development. Therefore, the understanding of the socialist social civilization should be based on a correct analysis of social practice and its fundamental contradictions.

Civilization has a historical nature, and the development of the productive forces of society and the progress of science and culture are the driving forces of the development of social civilization. Civilization has different historical properties in the development of different societies. Mankind in primitive society was in a barbaric state, and with the development of productive forces, material production and intellectual production began to differentiate. At the same time, various concrete sciences such as mathematics, geometry, politics, philosophy, law and morality appeared, and man has since entered the era of civilization. A new civilization emerges from the soil of the original civilization and innovates constantly on the basis of criticizing, transcending as well as inheriting the positive achievements of the original civilization. So far, human civilization has gone through and is going through slavery, feudal, capitalist and socialist civilizations. The prospect for the development of human civilization is the communist civilization, in which labor becomes man’s prime want, and man becomes free man, fully developed man.

The four basic spheres of contemporary human practical activity, i.e., economic, political, cultural and ecological sphere, correspondingly form the basic contents and forms of contemporary socialist civilization, i.e., material civilization, spiritual civilization, political civilization and ecological civilization. The development of social civilization is the process of advancing forward through the interaction of the four elements of material civilization, political civilization, spiritual civilization and ecological civilization, which interact with each other to form an organic system, thus only by grasping the intrinsic organic systemic mechanism of socialist civilization can we better build a socialist civilization. Various civilizations can learn from each other, absorb all the outstanding achievements of mankind, and strengthening cultural exchanges is of great theoretical and practical significance to the building of a socialist civilization.