For a long time, we have been taking a negative attitude towards the pursuit of personal gain, and we have pushed this kind *****of thinking to the extreme. With the re-establishment of the party's ideological line of seeking truth from facts, and with the development of reform, opening up, and the market economy, although people's understanding of problems has undergone great changes. For example, people are encouraged to increase their income and improve their lives through honest work, and strive to realize the link between personal interests and personal labor and contributions to mobilize individual enthusiasm, etc., but it should be pointed out that the scientific treatment of personal self-interest still needs to be urgently resolved.

Understanding the ideas of Marx and Engels on the individual and his interests can help us clarify the problem.

1. "Everything that people struggle for is related to their interests."

Whether people are self-interested or altruistic, and whether people should be self-interested or gain from others, it can be said that this is an issue that has been debated endlessly since ancient times. Marx said: "In 1842-1843, as editor-in-chief of the Rheinische Zeitung, for the first time I was confronted with the difficulty of expressing my opinion on so-called material interests." (The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. XIII) – p. 8). At that time, Marx saw from the controversy over the law of theft of trees how all sides and individuals spared no effort to defend their own interests, and with keen insight, under the cover of the luxuriant and desolate ideology, he discovered a simple fact: "Everything that people struggle for is related to their interests." (The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 1, p. 82) and this discovery had an important impact on Marx's life. As Engels put it: "I have heard Marx say more than once that it was his study of the law of timber theft and the situation of the peasants in the Mosel River region that propelled him from pure politics to the study of economic relations and thus to socialism." (The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, vol. 39, p. 446). Marx and Engels, in their co-authored work called "The German Ideology," which they themselves called the "German Ideology," further pointed out: "We are met with Germans who do not have any premise, so we must first establish the first premise of all human existence, that is, the first premise of all history, and this premise is that in order to be able to make history, people must be able to live." But in order to live, you first need clothing, food, shelter and other things. Thus the first historical activity is the production of the means of satisfying this need, that is, the production of material life itself. At the same time, it is a historical activity that people must carry out every hour of every day (as it is thousands of years ago) just to be able to live, that is, a basic condition of all history. (The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. III, p. 574)

Clothing, food, shelter, etc. are the most basic needs of people's lives, and they are also the most basic personal interests of people, and the activities that meet these needs or interests are the most basic activities of people. Marx and Engels went on to point out: "The second fact is that the first need that has already been satisfied, the activity that satisfies it, and the tools that have been acquired to satisfy it give rise to new needs. (The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. III, p. 32) It is obvious that satisfying, needing, satisfying, and seeking and realizing new needs without satisfaction is the inexhaustible motive force of human progress. If our ancestors had satisfied cave life, we would not have today's civilization anyway.

It can be said that the history of mankind is the history of human beings' insatiable needs and self-interests. On this point, there is certainly no objection to human beings and groups, but can we say the same for each individual? Marx and Engels' answer is precisely that the starting point of individuals is always their individuality. (cf. pages 34, 38, 61, 86, 274, etc., of the Third Volume of the Complete Works of Marx and Engels), "No one can do anything without doing at the same time for some of his own needs and for the sake of the organs of that need." (The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. XII, p. 734)

2. Personal interests and common interests

"The further we trace history, the more the individual, that is, the individual who carries out production, the less independent he becomes, the more subordinate he becomes to a larger whole: first quite naturally in the family and in the family that expands into clans, and later in the various forms of communes that arise from the conflict and integration between clans------。 Man is the most literal 'social animal', not only a gregarious animal, but also an animal that can only be independent in society. It is inconceivable that an isolated individual produces outside of society—a rare thing, and that a civilized man who has already had an intrinsic social force in the wilderness who has accidentally fallen into the wilderness—just as it is inconceivable that many individuals should develop language instead of living together and talking to each other. (The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 12, p. 734)

People are not as ferocious as tigers and leopards, and they can become the masters of this world by the power of the group. Individuals cannot survive without the group, and individual interests cannot exist without the common good. The principle that individual interests necessarily lead to common interests can be recognized. In Marx and Engels' thoughts on the relationship between individual interests and common interests, the following two aspects stand out. First, they pointed out that the root cause of the antagonism and division between individual interests and common interests is the division of labor, and that the only way to eliminate the antagonism between individual interests and common interests and their unity is to eliminate the division of labor. "------ because the division of labour not only makes it possible, but also a reality, that material and spiritual activity, enjoyment and labour, production and consumption are shared among the different human beings. All these contradictions contained in the ------ division of labour are based on the natural division of labour in the family and the division of society into separate and opposing families. This division of labour is accompanied by distribution, and an unequal distribution (both quantitative and qualitative) of labour and its products, and thus of ownership, whose germ and primitive form has emerged in the family, where wives and children are slaves to their husbands. The dual affiliation system in the family (admittedly, it is not very primitive and hidden) is the earliest form of ownership, but even this form of ownership fits perfectly into the definition given by modern economists, that is, ownership is the domination of the labor power of others. In fact, the division of labor and private ownership are two different words, talking about the same thing, one is in terms of the activity, and the other is in terms of the product of the activity.

Secondly, with the development of the division of labour also arises a contradiction between the interests of the individual or the interests of a single family and the common interests of all people with whom they interact It exists in ideas, and above all in reality as the interdependence between individuals who divide their labor, and finally, the division of labour gives us the first example of that as long as people are still in a spontaneously formed society, that is to say, as long as there is a division between the private and public interests, that is, as long as the division of labour is not voluntary, but spontaneous, then man's own activity becomes alien to man. The force that opposes him, this power drives man, not man harnesses it. It turns out that when the division of labor appears, each man has his own certain special sphere of activity, which is imposed on him, and he cannot go beyond it: he is a hunter, fisherman, or shepherd, or a critical critic, and as long as he does not want to lose the means of subsistence, he should always be such a person. (The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 3, pp. 36, 37)

Second, it is precisely because of the individual's dependence on the group that the personal interests are everywhere being cared for by the common interests, and the common interests are also everywhere giving orders to the personal interests, which can easily create an illusion for people, that the big rivers have no water and the small rivers are dry, and the big rivers are full of water and small rivers, and it is the common interests that determine the interests of individuals. Marx and Engels revealed the essence of the problem when they pointed out: "The few communist theorists who have had time to devote themselves to the study of history stand out in the fact that they are the only ones who have discovered the 'common good', which at all times in history is caused by the individual as 'private'." They know that this antagonism is only superficial, because one side of this antagonism, the so-called universal side, is always constantly produced by the other, that is, the side of private interests, and it is by no means opposed to private interests as an independent force with an independent history, so this antagonism always produces and disappears in practice, and when it is eliminated, it arises again. Thus, what we see here is not the 'negation of unity' of the Hegelian opposite, but the annihilation of the material-determined mode of individual existence of the past, which is also destroyed along with its unity. (The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, vol. 3, pp. 275, 276) "But secondly, history is created in such a way that the final result always arises from the conflict of many individual wills, each of which, in turn, becomes what it becomes by virtue of many special conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intertwined forces, an equal quadrilateral of innumerable forces, and thus a general result, that is, historical events, which in turn can be seen as the product of a force acting as a whole, unconsciously and involuntarily. For any one person's desires are hindered by any other, and the end result is something that no one has hoped for. Thus the history of the past has always proceeded like a natural process, and in essence has been subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of each man, each of which desires to obtain his essence and what he desires from the external and ultimately economic circumstances (whether personal or social in general), make him aspire, though they do not attain his own desires, but merge into a total average, a general result, it should never be concluded that these wills are equal to zero. On the contrary, each will contributes to the resultant force and is therefore included in the resultant force. (Selected Works of Marx and Engels, vol. IV, pp. 478, 479).

In the final analysis, the common interest is a collection of individual interests, no matter how important the common interest is to the individual interest, without the personal interest, without the need of the personal interest, the common interest will be a source of water, a tree without roots. We often say that the individual is subordinate to the whole, and the personal interests are subordinate to the common interests, which is not a negation of individual interests, because the whole contains many individuals, and the common interests contain many personal interests and common interests, which are destined to be more important than individual interests. The perception that the way out for safeguarding the whole and the common interests is individual "selflessness" and "selflessness" is actually absurd. On the contrary, the more a person realizes that his personal interests are closely related to the common interest, the more he can actively and consciously defend the common interest.

3. Self-interest and self-sacrifice

Generally speaking, all behaviors that harm the common interests are based on the needs of self-interest, and those behaviors that actively safeguard the common interests often involve a certain degree of sacrifice and self-sacrifice. In the same way, no group and a common good can be sustained without the sacrifice and self-sacrifice of its members. Since the individual is inseparable from the group, and individual interests must be formed into common interests, it is not difficult to understand that people praise self-sacrifice and depreciate self-interested behavior, starting from the need to safeguard common interests. However, Marx and Engels pointed out that this is only the surface of the problem: " But even in the light of the absurd and crude form of the German petty bourgeoisie in which Sancho experienced the contradiction between the individual and the general interest, he should see that the individual always and cannot not proceed from himself, and therefore the two aspects that Sancho pointed out are the two aspects of personal development, which are equally produced by the empirical conditions of the individual's life, and which are but expressions of the same personal development, so that they are only superficially opposed. Whether he represents this or that side of the contradiction more often than not, whether he is more of an egoist or more of a self-sacrificing person is a completely secondary question, and this question can only have any significance if it is raised to a certain individual in a certain historical epoch. Otherwise, the question of this kind of question can only lead to moral hypocrisy and deception. ------ to us, the sages, communism is simply incomprehensible, because communism does not oppose self-sacrifice with egoism, nor against self-sacrifice against egoism, and theoretically comprehends this opposition neither in the form of emotion nor in the form of exaggerated thought, but in revealing the material root of this antagonism, which naturally disappears with the disappearance of the material source. The communists did not preach at all on morality, but Stirner did. Communists do not make moral demands on people, such as that you should love each other, not be egoists, etc., but on the contrary, they are well aware that both egoism and self-sacrifice are necessary forms of individual self-realization under certain conditions. (The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. III, pp. 274, 275)

In many cases, what the common good represents is actually the long-term interest of the individual, and the sacrifice made by the individual for the common good is actually the sacrifice of the immediate interest for the long-term benefit. If the common good cannot provide security for the individual, it will inevitably lose the conditions and meaning of its existence, and if the individual cannot provide the necessary sacrifice for the common good, the common interest will not exist. Self-interest and self-sacrifice are the unity of power and duty here as we are elsewhere.

No one can learn to walk and grow up without the help of others, at some point in life, we all need the help of others, and helping others is also an individual to pay a certain amount of sacrifice, if we can't help others when they need it, we can't get help when we need it. In interpersonal interactions, self-interest and self-sacrifice are also the unity of power and duty.

Those who consciously and actively undertake obligations and make sacrifices when others and the common good need it are noble, and their nobility is not because they are "selfless", but because they stand tall, see far, and look far in the process of seeking personal interests. And if a person cannot consciously assume obligations for the common good, society has the right to force him to do so.

Note: This work was previously published in the Humanities Academic Series