The historical consciousness and class consciousness of Marx’s criticism of capital and political economy are clearly reflected in the investigation of the form of value and the money form in the chapter Commodities of Capital, Volume l. Marx’s historical investigation on the form of value, the money form , and the fetishism of commodities clarifies the historical differences between the social forms of economics in pre-modernity and modernity; it reveals that the social relations of labor taking the form of a relation between things is an inevitable outcome and fundamental characteristic of the mode of production in modern capitalist society;and it criticizes the ahistorical conception and class nature of bourgeois political economy, which regards the form of value and the money form as the eternal form and order of nature; it also anticipates and outlines the historical trend and schema of the evolution of social form from the materialised commodity form of human to the community of free individuals. Marx’s exploration into the historical consciousness and class consciousness of value forms implies the historical sequence of the evolution of social and economic forms, leading from pre-modern society to modern capitalist society to communist society.

　　Editor: Zhong Yao  Liu Tingting

　　From:Studies on Marxist Theory.2024.No.6.