Speech upon Receiving the Marxian Economics Award (II)

Abstract

May 26, 2012The forum of WAPE is truly grand celebration. It is great pleasure to have so many distinguished friends and scholars meeting here.My name is Zhang Xunhua, and I am 91 years old. Although due to my age I cannot attend the forum myself, I still look forward to I would like to ask the organizing committee of the forum to convey my gratitude for the prize awarded to me. I have experienced various social changes in China, and during the pursuit of my studies, I sailed through the endless sea of learning by hard work. I studied civil engineering in Suzhou Polytechnic School when I was in senior high school. I entered Fudan College of Agriculture in 1940, and then transferred to the Department of Economics in 1942.When I read Capital during my study in the Department of Economics, I noticed two lessons in Marx. One is that his literature is an artistic whole, and only by using his methods this can be achieved. other is that he pointed out that the ultimate purpose of Capital was to reveal the laws of economic movement of modern society. This combines the purpose and the method into unity. Specifically speaking, he transformed Hegel's idealistic dialectics into materialistic dialectics, and revealed the economic laws of capitalism. It has long been pointed out by Lenin that without delving into and understanding the entirety of Hegel's Logic, one cannot fully understand Marx's Capital. Hegel moved from the absolute spirit to the concrete, i.e., in an idealistic dialectics, while Marx, absorbing Hegel's dialectics, reversed the process and ascended from the concrete to the abstract, forming materialistic dialectics.Hegel held the view that the development of logical ideas begins from pure determinations, while the truth is always richer and more concrete. Because the result includes its beginning, and the process of beginning enriches the result by new determinations...making itself richer and thicker. He also compared this type of development to set of concentric circles, saying The whole of philosophical science appears as circle of circles. Idea appears in each single circle, but, at the same time, the whole Idea is constituted by the totality of these peculiar phases, and each is necessary member of its organization. However, Hegel did not draw the full circle, neither did Marx. By the end of the 1970s, I tried to draw the circle according to the mechanism that seemed most relevant to me, which made me feel suddenly enlightened.The object of economic research is the mode of production; the purpose is to reveal the underlying rules (economic laws) of the object; while the method is materialistic dialectics, i.e. proceeding from the material content of the mode of production (productive forces), to its social form (relations of production), and extending to the form of this form (the superstructure). In the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx pointed out that a certain mode of production and relations of production corresponding to it, i.e., the economic structure of society, has legal and political superstructure on top of it, which is the real basis of social life, with certain social ideology corresponding to it. This can be illustrated, as in Figure 1.The inner circle is the content, and the outer circle is the form. Their dialectic relation is that the content determines the form, and the form reacts to the content.Since the 1990s, the problem of the source of productive forces (environment, resources, population) has become more prominent, involving the question of whether the whole circle can develop on sustainable basis; with respect to the relations of production, the question of combining socialism with the market has been stressed. To keep up with the times, I further divide the above three circles into six levels with each circle containing two levels (Figure 2).The source is rooted in the three circles of ecological environment (Figure 3). …