The Emancipation of Mankind

Also known as the “emancipation of all mankind”. It is the ideal goal of man and human society and the fundamental task of communism as revealed by Marx. It refers to the emancipation of mankind from the various constraints of social production and life and the achievement of freedom, the most fundamental of which is the emancipation of the exploited classes in class society from the exploitation and oppression of exploiting classes, thus achievement the leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

Before the emergence of Marxism, Saint-Simon’s On Industrial System (1821) and Fourier’s Harmony in the Whole World (1803), made some descriptions of the future society and proposed some ideal goals of the human emancipation, but none of them understood the social conditions necessary for the human emancipation and did not understood the connection between the emancipation of mankind and the emancipation of the proletariat, and therefore confined themselves to utopias. Based on the scientific materialist conception of history, Marx and Engels identified human emancipation as the ultimate goal of communism and the highest task of the proletarian revolution, and the inevitable result of the development of human society from lower to higher level. “The only liberation of Germany which is practically possible is liberation from the point of view of that theory which declares man to be the supreme being for man… The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization of philosophy.”

Marx first put forth “human emancipation” in On the Jewish Question in 1843. After studying the place and condition of man in the modern state, i.e. capitalist society, he put forth that human emancipation was distinguished from political emancipation, pointing out that political emancipation was the disintegration of feudal society, on which absolute power depended, and that it was a major advance on the path to human emancipation, but that political emancipation itself was not yet human emancipation. Political emancipation meant that the State abolished the religious privileges and declared everyone to be an equal citizen, but the material life of the whole society was still based on civil society. “Life in civil society, in which he acts as a private individual, regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers,” is, in fact, still slavery and inhuman. Human emancipation is the emancipation from the yoke of private property, from the fetters of the old division of labor and the realization of all-round development of man. In some later works, Marx deepened this basic concept in various aspects, put forth that human emancipation is the emancipation from the yoke of private property, and connected human emancipation with the emancipation of the proletariat. In The German Ideology, Marx further resolved the realization of human emancipation into social emancipation, connected the prospect of human emancipation to the revolutionary movement of the proletariat for the communist transformation of society, and pointed out that human emancipation is not only the emancipation from the chains of private property, but also from the fetters of the old division of labor and the realization of the all-round development of mankind. The Communist Manifesto is the scientific programme for the communist revolution and the realization of human emancipation.

Achieving human emancipation of mankind is an important historical mission on the shoulders of the proletariat. “When the proletariat proclaims the dissolution of the previous world-order it does no more than reveal the secret of its own existence.” The proletariat assumes the role of liberator in achieving the complete emancipation of mankind, and the positive possibility of the emancipation of mankind is “in the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right.” “A sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.”

There is an inner connection between the emancipation of the proletariat and the emancipation of mankind, and for the proletariat to emancipate itself it must first accomplish the class emancipation of mankind. “The exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) 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 by emancipating all mankind can the proletariat ultimately emancipate itself. And for the proletariat to realize the emancipation of its own class throughout the world, it must carry out proletarian revolution and abolish all private property. “The proletarian liberates himself by abolishing competition, private property, and all class differences.”

Human emancipation is a long process of historical development. Historically, mankind has experienced the emancipation of slaves, the emancipation of serfs and peasants, the emancipation of the proletariat, which includes political, economic and ideological and cultural emancipation, and so on. These different periods, classes and contents of emancipation reflect the extent of human emancipation and the process of social progress. For every major advance in historical development, for every change in the old and new forms of society, mankind has striven for a certain degree of freedom and emancipation. “Every cultural progress is a step towards freedom.” However, the possibility of human emancipation and its extent are conditioned by the state of social development and concrete historical conditions. Only through the overthrow of capitalist property based on wage-labor on a world-wide scale and through a socialist society and then a transition to a communist society can the complete emancipation of all mankind and the all-round development of mankind be realized. “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”