According to the understanding of Marxism, the essence of social development is human development. The ultimate goal of human development is the all-round development of individuals. How to realize people's all-round development? That depends first on human nature. Marx believes that human nature is the sum of all social relations in his reality. In other words, man is determined by his social relations. To realize or develop human beings, the key problem is to improve the social relations that people live in and establish social relations that are compatible with their free and all-round development. This social relationship has many contents, the central relationship is the production relationship, and there are a series of other relationships. Talking about revolution or reform is mainly from this angle.
The social relations on which people live, especially the economic relations in society, are determined by a certain historical stage of the development of social material production. Therefore, to reform or improve the social relations on which people live, we must first reform or improve the social production relations, and to reform or improve the social production relations, we must also link it with the social material production situation.
As a process, material production has two main results: one is material achievements, and the other is social relations of production. These two achievements are closely related: material achievements cannot be divorced from social production relations, otherwise they cannot be transformed into material means of subsistence; On the other hand, if there is no material achievement, the relations of production cannot exist. The key to this problem is that we must organically unify the development of material production and the reform of social relations of production.
The purpose of developing material production is to lay a material foundation for human development. When we talk about production and labor, do we understand that it is better for people to ask for material means of life from nature or to exchange material energy between people and nature? In other words, production and labor should be understood from economics or philosophy. Experience tells us that the understanding of production and labor in traditional philosophy is actually subject to the understanding of economics. People are driven and restricted by immediate interests and trapped by the way of thinking and understanding of economics. Especially with the development, intensification and gradual intensification of international competition, this short-sighted way of understanding economics has been strengthened. In my opinion, to truly and correctly understand the scientific connotation of productive labor, we should understand it from a philosophical height. Understanding production and labor from a philosophical point of view, production and labor mainly refer to the process of exchanging materials, energy and information between man and nature. The purpose of exchange, fundamentally speaking, is for the survival and development of mankind. Of course, since human survival and development are long-term and sustainable, and this exchange is mutual, we must fully consider the sustainability of this "mutual exchange relationship". In other words, to understand labor from a philosophical point of view, we must pay full attention to the factors hidden in this "mutual exchange process" that are not conducive to the sustainable survival and development of mankind, such as a series of related problems such as resources and environment, and we must not ask for trouble, that is, we must pay full attention to those problems or constraints put forward by the current theory of sustainable development.
The problem now is that the natural environment is destroyed and resources are exhausted, and other problems seriously threaten the survival and development of mankind; Ignoring social interests and their conflicts not only seriously threatens the survival and development of mankind, but also deeply affects the sustainable survival and development of mankind in the future.
In order to survive and develop human society, the fundamental contradiction is the contradiction between man and nature, while the main contradiction at present is the contradiction and struggle between different social interest groups. It can be said that the contradictory struggle between man and different interest groups is not only the fundamental reason why the relationship between man and nature is difficult to coordinate, but also the fundamental reason why various interest relations and contradictions within human society are difficult to coordinate. Some people say that for today's mankind, the issue of peace and development only reflects an ideal and pursuit of contemporary mankind, not that peace and development have been achieved now. It is unrealistic to think that today's era is an era of peace and development, and human society has entered a state of peace and development, which is also inconsistent with Comrade Deng Xiaoping's relevant exposition. This is because, with the end of the 20th century and the arrival of 2 1 century, especially in order to occupy an advantage and favorable position in the development of 2 1 century, the world powers are adjusting and re-formulating new development strategies. That is to say, the interests contradictions and struggles of internationalization are intensifying, regional conflicts and various unstable factors are one after another, and none of the problems of "East, West, North and South" have been effectively solved. So far, there is no realistic way out, and various dangerous factors are still growing. Therefore, mankind still has a long way to go to pursue and achieve the goal of peace and development.
It is also full of contradictions and twists and turns to reflect on the choice of China's social development path. Specifically, the road we choose is a mixture full of contradictions. On the one hand, the social development we are talking about now has two specific purposes: one is to meet the immediate needs of our people's survival and development, and the other is to meet our country's needs in coping with the international struggle we are facing. As a developing country with backward economy and science and technology, China has to rely on food to survive and development to become strong under the great pressure of international struggle. In the process of globalization in the 2 1 century, it will strive for a favorable position suitable for the development of China, so as to be able to cope with the new difficulties and challenges that have been predicted and not yet predicted. Although we take promoting the all-round development and progress of society as the goal of building a Socialism with Chinese characteristics, we must actually take economic construction as the most urgent center, give priority to developing social productive forces, improve comprehensive national strength and improve people's living standards. Therefore, it can be said that the development strategy chosen by China is the first choice to cope with various contradictions at home and abroad. Under the guidance of such strategic objectives, we should expect such deviations and problems as "one hand is hard and one hand is soft". For example, in the process of grasping the construction of two civilizations, the construction of material civilization is hard and the construction of spiritual civilization is soft, resulting in a serious impact on the main position of the "main theme" of cultural construction; For another example, in the work of grasping economic construction and resource and environmental protection, it is hard to grasp economic construction and soft to grasp resource and environmental protection, resulting in serious waste of resources and environmental damage; For another example, the system construction of grasping the economy and the legal system is very hard, and it is very soft to solve various bad phenomena since the reform and opening up, leading to prostitution, sexually transmitted diseases, drug abuse and economic crimes. For another example, in terms of efficiency and fairness, we are hard on the work of "giving priority to efficiency" and soft on the work of "giving consideration to fairness", resulting in interpersonal conflicts of interest characterized by the excessive gap between the rich and the poor. The appearance, spread and difficulty in solving these problems have caused a series of social contradictions to a great extent, damaged the normal interpersonal relationship in socialist society, encouraged people's abnormal psychology of grabbing money and seeking wealth, and distorted people's values and outlook on life. In a word, these contradictions and problems have caused more and more disorderly interest disputes among the people and intensified more and more complicated interest conflicts among the people. The disorderly interest contradictions and disputes within society not only destroy the harmonious interpersonal relationship in society, but also greatly stimulate people's greed and ambition for predatory development of nature, thus greatly destroying the harmonious relationship between man and the natural world. In this way, through the continuous emergence and intensification of conflicts of interests and conflicts between man and nature in interpersonal relationships, not only the two originally unified goals of social development and social progress that we expect have been contradicted, but also the natural resources and natural environment foundation for realizing social development and social progress have been seriously damaged at a deep level, which has fundamentally caused difficulties for human survival. Even the survival is threatened, what about development? In this case, it is meaningless to talk about realizing the sustainable survival and all-round development of society and people.
These problems, from the perspective of people's subjective consciousness and behavior, especially from the perspective of people's way of thinking, are rooted in people's excessive greed for wealth and unrestrained predatory development of nature. What is reflected here is the greed, slavery, alienation and loss of human nature. This pursuit of "sustainable development" can barely be said to be the "sustainable growth" of material wealth, not the original "sustainable development", not to mention the sustainable survival and development of "people". It can be said that the "development" understood in this way is a kind of development of "seeing things but not people"; This "development" is a terrible and dangerous word; In this case, the concept of "efficiency first" is a very terrible concept. Because it will encourage people's greed in a more powerful way, push people to plunder and destroy the nature on which human beings depend in a more cruel way, and aggravate the survival crisis that human beings have already faced.
If human beings really want to put their own survival and development in their proper position and really pursue their own all-round development, they must return to people-oriented, people-oriented and harmonious social interpersonal relations on the fundamental guiding ideology, restore the foundation of people's all-round development, and lay the foundation for coordinated exchanges and exchanges between people and nature. To achieve this, the most critical factor is to unify the clear understanding of this issue by all mankind on a global scale, strive to eliminate various interest disputes in human society, transcend the survival competition between people and different interest groups, turn struggle into cooperation, and make human society a real capitalized "person" who lives in harmony with nature. In this sense, Comrade Deng Xiaoping's viewpoint that we should correctly handle the issue of "East, West, North and South" and realize the peace and development of all mankind as soon as possible must become the knowledge of all mankind from now on and become the concerted action of all mankind.