资本与现代性的生成

Capital and the Generation of Modernity

传统社会将全部剩余劳动投入等级制社会结构再生产,使社会物质生产系统处于维持生存的状态,导致社会发展的停滞徘徊。资本力量使剩余劳动投入到物质生产体系中,不断增殖扩张而诞生现代社会。资本扩张过程推进的生活世界货币化,是资本带给人类社会的最根本变革,其充满矛盾的过程是现代性生成过程的深层主线。在这一过程中,形成了作为资本增殖机器的社会经济结构,塑造了现代人际关系、心理结构与行为方式,产生了理性、自由、平等、博爱等现代性特质,并且展示为都市生活、品牌崇拜等现代生活方式,从而创造出充满悖论的现代性。中国现代化进程应当运用各种力量与手段,对西方式现代性扬其善抑其恶,以建设社会主义和谐社会。

In traditional societies, all surplus labor was invested in the reproduction of the hierarchic social structure, resulting in a subsistence-level social material production system and stagnancy in social development. When surplus labor was directed to a material production system by capital, its multiplication gave rise to modern society. The monetarization of daily life promoted by the expansion of capital was the most fundamental change capital brought to society. This process, full of contradictions, serves as the deepest driver of modernity. It is this process that shaped social economic structure as the reproduction machine of capital; molded modern personal relations, psychological structure and behavioral modes; and brought about modern traits such as rationality, liberty, equality and universal love. These developed into modern life styles, manifested in metropolitan life and brand worship, and produced paradoxical modernity. In its modernization process, China should by all means pick and choose from Western modernity to construct a harmonious socialist society.