Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No. 8, 2022

Historical Materialism: A Shift from the Perspective of the Material Production Process to That of the Labor Process

(Abstract)

Zhang Yibing

In bourgeois economics, material production as the active activity of man vis-à-vis nature can be an objective material process driven and produced by capital, while the “realistic person” who changes natural objects and social life can also be capitalists, overseers or scientists who dominate and direct the processes of production and reproduction. It was precisely with the objective process of material production and reproduction that David Ricardo completely obliterated the role of workers in machine production. Marx, who started the study of economics in the 1850s, realized that the most crucial internal driving factor and the real source of creativity of material production and reproduction were not the abstract “general production,” but labor. In the scientific theory of political economy, the “realistic person” can only be workers with labor capacity. Workers are the main body of the material production and reproduction of people’s direct means of life. The real creative basis of production, which as an “active activity” for people to actively transform the external natural objects, can only be the shaping and ordering of labor’s objectification. Therefore, when entering his own economic research, Marx not only started from the perspective of the material production process, but at the same time penetrated through the material production process and converted to start from the perspective of the labor process. In this way, the discourse of production in the context of historical materialism in the broad sense is once again embodied to a deeper level of the discourse of labor.