WANG Xingfu
Journal of Renmin University of China.
According to the mainstream of Marxism, the distribution of wealth in precommunist society istotally determined by the structure of property and social forces, thus justice came too early.In communist society, resources are so abundant that the principle of justice is not necessary, so justice come too late, thus there is no relationship between Communism and justice. However, the problem is not so simple. Indeed, communism is a society that transcends justice according to Rawls definition of “circumstances of justice”. However, Rawls believes that the disappearance of justice in the communist society is neither feasible nor desirable. Buchanan also argues that communism transcends the restrictionof circumstances of distributive justice, but does not transcend the scarcity of resource and the conflictof valuesrelated to nondistributive Justice. In order to solve the problem, it is necessary to distinguish circumstances of justice in anarrow sense and a broad sense, the former refers to one defined by Rawls, namely the circumstances with characteristic with moderate scarcity of objective resource and moderate selfish in subjective attitude. The latter refers to those which haveeliminated the limitations of circumstances of justice in narrow sense, but havenot eliminated the scarcity and conflict that without concerning selfinterest yet. Communism transcends the former, but does not transcend the latter. In this sense, justice is constructive to communism. The “circumstances of justice in a broad sense” is a significant concept, which does not only resolve the puzzle of the relationship between communism and justice, but also can be helpful to understandsome problems of justice in our current situation.