p Knowledge of the general and specific laws governing society’s functioning and development, and the forms of their manifestation makes it possible to determine the major direction of social progress. For a scientific guide to social development it is primarily necessary to know how 32 social laws that manifest themselves in the material and spiritual relations of the people function. The material and spiritual relationships, which are forms of manifestation of the social laws, are both products of people’s social interaction and relations actively influencing people’s consciousness and, consequently, determining their social behaviour and activities. It follows that, as a functioning being, man is himself one of the factors which produce the circumstances both of his own and of social life as a whole. Human actions are woven into the functioning of the social organism and are both an object and subject of social interaction. Between the functioning of the social organism, or organisms, and people’s social actions there is a reciprocal action. When individuals act wrongly this leads to disturbances in the functioning of the social systems and organisms, which in turn adversely affects the social actions of other individuals.

p Studies of the individual’s social activity are a necessary element of social analysis. The “abstraction” of individuals from practice, characteristic of some people at a certain period in Soviet history, made it impossible to form an objective picture of the life of the whole social organism, and inevitably led to dogmatism in certain formulas reflecting general social laws. Consequently, it prevented a scientific supervision of social development based on knowledge of these laws and an ability to use them in specific conditions. The social actions of individuals, i.e., the social facts, are the nucleus of any sociological analysis. “The materialist sociologist, taking the definite social relations of people as the object of his inquiry, by that very fact also studies the real individuals from whose actions these relations are formed" [1; 1,406).

p Sociology regards the ideological motives of the people’s social activities as an expression of the requirements of the objective laws governing the development of the system of social relations. Further, it reveals the roots of these relations in the extent of material development. Using the indisputable fact of the mode of procuring the means of subsistence as the point of departure, sociology has linked it with personal relationships, which form under the influence of this mode of procuring the means of subsistence. In the system of these relations, i.e., production relations, 33 it has shown the basis of society, which determines the content and character of all the other social relations— class, political, national, legal, labour, family and ideological. “The distinction between the important and unimportant was replaced by the distinction between the economic structure of society, as the content, and the political and ideological form" [1; 1, 411]. This idea enables us to apply to the analysis of various social mechanisms the general scientific criterion of recurrence, as it is used in natural science.

The social mechanism is an aggregate of functionally connected social organisms forming an integral, relatively stable system of social relations which determine the forms of social interaction and human behaviour in specific conditions of time and place. Every social action is determined not merely by the objective conditions of the situation, but also by individual ideas about this situation and about oneself. That is why the study of a particular social mechanism entails a study of the individual in a social setting and a study of real personalities and their ideas about themselves and the situation as a whole.