This monograph undertakes a systematic theoretical demystification of the three value categories enshrined in modern society—fairness, democracy, and justice—grounded in the methodology of historical materialism. Departing from Marx and Engels’s thesis that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,” the author reveals that these concepts are not transhistorical, universal values, but rather an “inverse narrative” deliberately fabricated by the ruling class in class societies to conceal the structural oppression and exploitation that they are inherently incapable of resolving. The central argument of the book is that the substantive function of fairness, democracy, and justice lies in substituting recognition for abolition and piecemeal reform for radical eradication, thereby obscuring the fundamental goal that the subjugated classes should truly pursue—liberation.
The book is organised into four chapters. Chapter One systematically establishes the theoretical basis for treating fairness, democracy, and justice as an “illegitimate narrative,” arguing that they are essentially a illusory mirror-image generated by the incurable maladies of class society. Chapter Two redefines the nature of liberation from a dialectical perspective, demonstrating that liberation is not a negative narrative but rather the most momentous affirmative construction in human history. Chapter Three carries out a “double sublation” of both bourgeois democracy and proletarian democracy, contending that democracy in any form is merely a transitional instrument rather than an ultimate end. Chapter Four establishes “liberation” as the sole criterion and red line for the institutional design of socialism and communism, and elaborates how “consciousness as labour-power” can ultimately supersede the category of democracy in practice.
The book makes several original theoretical contributions. First, through the critical method of political economy, it divests fairness, justice, and democracy of their juridical guise as eternal truths, restoring them to their actual status as ideological projections of specific relations of production. Second, it proposes the analytical framework of the “inversion of affirmative and negative narratives,” revealing how the ruling class packages false fairness and justice as “affirmative constructs” while stigmatising genuine liberation as “negative destruction.” Third, it offers a novel conceptualisation of democracy as a “means rather than a stage of existence,” thereby deepening the classical Marxist tradition of the self-sublation of proletarian democracy. This work is recommended for scholars and postgraduate students in political philosophy, Marxist theory, and scientific socialism.
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