Universal Values: Spread in China and the Essence
theory of human nature and humanism are the philosophical and theoretical basis of "universal values" ideology. On the one hand, advocators of "universal values" believe that, in the study of human nature, people should put aside the social and class nature of humanity to understand and consider the universal nature of humanity, which, undoubtedly, denies and castrates the class and social properties of humanity, and sees human nature as something out of touch with the times. On the other hand, some people tend to exaggerate the common interests of mankind, and advocate the socalled "human interests above everything". They refer to the core philosophy and the system mode of the West as" humane", while label different values and social systems as "inhuman", which, indeed, serves the neo-colonial expansion of developed capitalist countries. Marx pointed out:" the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations." In the sixth Thesis on Feuerbach (1845), Marx criticizes the traditional conception of "human nature" as "species" which incarnates itself in each individual, on behalf of a conception of human nature as formed by the totality of "social relations". Thus, the whole of human nature is not understood, as in classical idealist philosophy, as permanent and universal: the species-being is always determined in a specific social and historical formation. No doubt, “universal values" such as "democracy", "freedom", "rationality" and "fraternity" can't stand reasoning. Deng Xiaoping once pointed out," I am amazed to find that some of our Party comrades are preaching humanism, the value of the human beings and so forth in abstract terms. They don't understand that neither in capitalist society nor in socialist society can there be an abstract value of the human being or abstract humanism, because even in our society there are still bad people, dregs of both the old and new societies......Discussion of human beings apart from these specific conditions and tasks is discussion not of real human beings but of abstractions; this is not Marxist approach, and it will lead young people astray." In this regard, we could only understand the essence of "universal values" ideology by adhering to the Marxist view of class and class analysis approach. Class analysis is research in sociology, politics and economics from the point of view of the stratification of the society into dynamic classes. It implies that there is no universal or uniform social outlook, rather that there are fundamental conflicts that exist inherent in society. That we corrected our mistakes in taking class struggle as the central task is quite right, but that does not mean that the class struggle no longer exists. As long as the class struggle still exists in a certain range, we cannot discard Marxist class analysis and class viewpoint. What we need to do is to employ the Marxist class viewpoint and class analysis approach to identify and analyze the hypocritical and deceptive nature of "universal values" ideology.