Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.3, 2016

The Subject in the Light of Marx’s Logic of Capital

(Abstract)

Yang Haifeng

The subject occupies an important position in Marxist philosophy. Both Western Marxists and scholars in China have made an intensive study of this issue, greatly deepening our comprehension of the question of the subject in Marxist philosophy, but at the same time there remain some issues that merit consideration. To objectively comprehend the question of the subject in Marxist philosophy, we need to go deep into the historical process of the change in Marx’s philosophical thought. After the transformation of his philosophy in 1845, there was a dual logic in Marx’s thought: the logic of production, in the anthropological sense, and the logic of capital in the critique of capitalist society. The theoretical foundation of the discussion between Western Marxists and China’s practical materialists on the question of the subject is the logic of production, the dominant idea from Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology to Economic Manuscripts of 1857-1858. In fact, in Capital, the logic of capital, which controls the logic of production, is the dominant logic in Marx’s philosophy. In the course of the structuring of the logic of capital, the ontology of labor and the subject based thereon disappear; people and things become instruments of value increase, giving rise to a completely different theoretical framework from the emphasis on the creativity of the human subject. In studying the question of the subject in Marxist philosophy, the most important thing is to explore the origins of the new subject, which differs from the traditional subject, from the new perspective of the logic of capital.