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p If materialism in the field of general philosophical theory is as old as philosophy itself, this is not so in the field of social phenomena. It is a well-known fact that even the most outstanding materialist philosophers up to Marx, including Ludwig Feuerbach, continued in the main to uphold idealistic positions in the field of social phenomena. ’No one contests the great importance of the means of labour. . . but the means of labour are invented and used by man. . . The efforts of the mind are the cause, the development of the productive forces —the effect. Hence, mind is the prime mover of historical progress, and those are therefore right who assert that opinions rule the world, i.e. that the world is ruled by man’s reason’. This was how G.V. Plekhanov 39 formulated the salient feature of the idealistic conceptions of the development of society, which predominated throughout philosophical and socio-political literature up to the appearance of Marxism (67, c. 611).

p It is not our task here to examine the way in which those prerequisites were formed, which enabled Marx and Engels to bring to a conclusion the revolutionary change in philosophy by creating dialectical materialism and giving a dialectical materialistic explanation of society and of social life. In this connection it is important to underline that the appearance of historical materialism as part of scientific philosophy meant at the same time the creation of a radical turning point in the development of all social sciences, especially of sociology, political economy and history.

p The disciplines of history and political economy had been given their form, though on inconsistent scientific foundations, far before the appearance of Marxism. Dialectical and historical materialism created the solid basis for their definite transformation into consistent sciences which reveal the structure, mechanisms and laws of phenomena in the respective fields of social life. However, this was not the case with sociology.

p The most general theoretical problems of social life and society in the past were dealt with first of all by philosophy, and more particularly by a part of philosophy called philosophy of history. In second place these problems were studied by historical science. General theoretical problems of society had also been treated to a certain extent in works devoted to the political and state structure of society. The French philosopher Auguste Comte (1793-1857), one of the founders of the positivist trend in philosophy, was the first to use the term sociology, and is considered as one of the founders of bourgeois sociology. Credit is due to Comte for having upheld the idea that a separate theoretical science of society was necessary. However, his positivistic philosophical starting point did not allow him to get a firm foothold on solid methodological ground in formulating the new discipline.

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p Comte came forward with a theoretical conception according to which human society in its development had passed through three stages: the theological stage, which was characterized by the fact that people explained all phenomena by the action of supernatural, divine causes; the metaphysical stage, during which people explained processes and phenomena by the action of different ‘essences’ and ‘causes’ and a positive stage, when under the influence of the developing sciences people began to explain social phenomena scientifically. The idea of the three stages of social development was not originally Comte’s, but was borrowed from his teacher, Saint Simon. Essentially, this conception is idealistic. The new stages in the development of society, according to this conception, were brought about by idealistic causes—by changes in the method of thinking and of explaining the various phenomena.

p Even during Comte’s lifetime, the dialectical materialistic and monistic theory of the character of human society, its motive forces and the laws of its development was created by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. As V.I. Lenin points out, Karl Marx ’was the first to place sociology on scientific foundations, by establishing the concept of a socio-economic formation —as a sum total of given production relations, and establishing that the development of such formations is a natural and historical process’ (10, c. 124-125). However, Comte’s sociological theory remained to the end idealistic and metaphysical, and was not in the least influenced by the revolution effected by Marxism in social science.

p Scientific Marxist sociological theory developed for nearly a whole century mainly within the framework of dialectical and historical materialism, and partly within the third component part of Marxism—- scientific communism. The problem of the development of Marxist sociology as a separate theoretical science dealing with the general laws of the functioning and development of human society is closely linked with the question of the place of ethics and aesthetics in the 41 integrated system of Marxism-Leninism. Among Marxist philosophers and sociologists, in Bulgaria in particular, over the last two decades the view has gained ground that sociology can with good reason be separated from dialectical and historical materialism and assume the form of a separate theoretical science dealing with the structure and the most general laws of human society. A pioneer of this view is Todor Pavlov, who, proceeding from general Marxist-Leninist principles in establishing the objects and purposes of the various sciences, defended the view as early as the thirties in the first edition of his major work The Theory of Reflection (65, c. 394-395). Pavlov also defended and developed this view in his later worke. The same view is maintained and supported in the works of Zh. Oshavkov, N. Iribadjakov, V. Dobriyanov and other Bulgarian writers. This is also the view of the author, and we shall be guided by it in our further discussions.

p Irrespective of whether they accept the view of delimiting sociology as a very general separate science concerned with society, distinct from historical materialism, or whether they consider historical materialism and sociology as identical, all MarxistLeninists are unanimous on the point that Marxist philosophical and sociological theory is the only scientific: theory dealing with human society and the laws of its development which has a consistent monistic character. From among the most important features or elements which characterize Marxist-Leninist monistic philosophical and sociological theory, let us point out the following: social consciousness is the result of social life, i.e. the material life of society, whose most salient feature is the mode of production; parallel with the development of society, the reverse impact of social consciousness on social life increases; the role of the implements of labour is decisive in changing socioeconomic formations; another decisive factor is the role of the economic basis with respect to the political, ideological and cultural superstructure, and the growing reverse impact of the superstructure on the economic basis; the various organized subjective 42 factors of social development in class societies, and above all the state and the political parties, are dependent upon the socio-economic system; the fact that the active role of the progressive subjective factors in the development of society is constantly increasing.

p The basic principle of historical materialism, that social life gives rise to social consciousness, is a logical inference from the dialectical-materialistic solution of the fundamental question in philosophy. In the same way, the main thesis of idealism in the social sphere— that ideas are the main motive force in social life, is a logical inference from the idealistic solution to the fundamental question in philosophy, which, moreover, is a inference equally acceptable to both objective and subjective idealists. What is more, the thesis of the determining role of ideas in social life is also fully acceptable to philosophical dualism, in which matter is usually the passive principle and mind the active principle.

p We have seen, however, that idealism as a philosophical weapon of the bourgeoisie is losing its attraction at present, both under the influence of the successes achieved by the world socialist system, and because of the positive impact of certain law-governed processes in capitalist society itself, connected with the development of the scientific and technical revolution. A number of major changes which have set in and are gaining ground first in practice and then also in social theory in the countries of state monopoly capitalism, increasingly undermine any open-hearted defence of the thesis that ’ideas rule the world’. In particular, there is the ever more intensive forecasting, programming and planning in economics and other new fields, and the powerful impact of electronic and cybernetic technology on social life.

p In the states of the imperialist camp, the predominant ideology continues to be idealism in its different variants. Not one of the bourgeois idealistic social theories, however, is in a position to give a reasonable and convincing explanation of the central fact in our epoch: the rapid upswing of communism 43 and the steady decline of capitalism. The practical activity of the leading bodies of the imperialist states, however, is hardly based on idealistic social theories, which have mainly a propaganda value. On the contrary, this activity itself could rather serve to refute the idealistic maxim that ’ideas rule the world’, and it indirectly also proves the Tightness of MarxismLeninism.

p These circumstances lead us to ask ourselves the question: In what way are the pluralistic philosophical teachings which we examined in the preceding paragraph refracted in the field of social philosophy? Or, more precisely, what pluralistic theories of society are put forward by the contemporary bourgeois philosophers and sociologists, which in most cases only formally, in words, oppose the idealistic line in bourgeois philosophical and social thought that is losing influence, and are in effect directed mainly against Marxi sm-Leninism.?

p Idealistic inferences can also be drawn from pluralistic ontological conceptions in the field of social philosophy. This explains why quite a few bourgeois philosophers, who under the pressure of developing natural-scientific thought are pluralists when examining the question of the reciprocal relation between matter and consciousness, very often take up openly idealistic positions as soon as they pass on to social phenomena. This takes place under the impact of the reactionary bourgeois political ideology which is permeated with anti-communism.

p The ideologists of the more liberal and democratic part of the capitalist class in the imperialist countries, towards whom some of the most far-sighted strategists of big state-monopoly capitalism direct themselves, find methodological support in ontological pluralistic philosophical conceptions for the elaboration of pluralistic socio-philosophical theories for counterposing them as an alternative to MarxismLeninism. A further concrete manifestation of these theories is the pluralistic interpretation of modern bourgeois democracy, in an attempt to present it in a new, 44 more humanistic form and as the only possible social structure of society.

p In this connection let us also point out the following. Usually one and the same author does not elaborate the three levels of pluralism: the general philosophical (and above all ontological), the socio-philosophical or sociological and the political, although there is an inner logical link between these levels. However this is mainly an eloquent proof of the fact that bourgeois philosophers, sociologists and political scientists are very seldom consistent in their theoretical conceptions, from the most general philosophical problems to the political structure of society.

p As to pluralism in gnoseology and especially as to its main form, the theory of the plurality of truths and of the replacement of truth by success and usefulness, the latter theory has the widest application in the social field as an argument used to justify the ideological chaos in present-day bourgeois society.

p The main form of pluralism, which is defended by the bourgeois philosophers in connection with social development is the eclectic ’ multi-f actor theory’. At its core is the view that the development of society is the result of many factors, which are independent of one another, not subordinated in any way to one another, and are equal: geographical environment, biological laws, technology, economics, politics, culture, ideology, etc.

p Let us at once point out that in rejecting the pluralistic ‘multi-factor’ theory, Marxist monism can in no case be reduced to a ‘single-factor’ theory. ‘Single-factor’ theories are only the various caricatures of Marxism, such as ’economic materialism’ against which F. Engels fought in his notable work ’Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy,’ or its Russian variant of the single-factor theory— ‘economism’ against which Lenin had to wage a long struggle.

p In this connection we must stress that in the ’many factors’ theory there is a grain of truth. Each one of the factors enumerated above does in fact exercise a certain influence upon social development. Historical 45 materialism and Marxist sociology, however, reveal and explain scientifically that the mode of production is the factor which plays the determining role in the development of society. The influence of all other factors over and above all else, depends upon the mode of production. It is only on this scientific basis that we can understand why, for instance, one and the same geographical environment (climate, natural resources, water resources, etc.) has not played the same role in the development of society in the various historical periods.

p Marxist sociology, taking into account the influence of all the different factors on the life of society, establishes the important law that in the course of the upward development of human society, the role of people’s conscious and purposeful activity and above all the role of the progressive subjective factor, and hence of science, scientific ideas and consciousness, is growing stronger all. the time. Nevertheless, Marxist sociology retains its standpoint of dialecticalmaterialistic monism, because it realizes that the very appearance and development of ideas, before they can exercise a reverse impact on material production and other spheres of life, depends in the final count upon the requirements of the economic basis of society.

p Production relations, for their part, depend upon the degree of development of the productive forces and, above all, upon their most mobile and most revolutionary part—the implements of labour, instruments and machinery. When in a given social system the character of the implements of labour gradually changes, there arises the need to replace the already outdated production relations with new production relations, which correspond to the changed productive forces. The progressive strata of society gradually become aware of this necessity in one ideological form or another, and begin to fight for the respective change. In this way social existence determines social consciousness, and the latter—through the operation of the respective subjective factors—exercises a reverse influence on social existence (4, c. 6,7).

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p The pluralistic theory of the ’many factors’ is to a greater or lesser extent and in one form or another shared by two prominent contemporary representatives of bourgeois philosophical and sociological thought: the British philosopher Karl Popper and the French sociologist Raymond Aron (born in 1905).

The ontological philosophical pluralism of Popper, which we examined in the preceding paragraph, is an entirely new phenomenon in his philosophical development. Here we find ourselves faced with a fundamental feature of the sociological views of Popper, developed as early as the nineteen fifties and expounded in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies (152).

p

p \

p In this book Popper calls his view that social laws, i.e. the laws of social life, differ radically from the natural laws ’critical dualism’. Popper counterposes this view to the view that there is no difference between the natural laws and the laws of society, which view he refers to as ’naive monism’.

p Marxists also maintain that there is a certain qualitative difference between natural laws and social laws. This is expressed mainly in the fact that social laws are laws of social life, in which people take part as conscious beings guided by certain definite goals. However, in their basic character social laws are equal to natural laws, insofar as both the ones and the others are objectively real, manifest themselves regardless of whether people know them or not, and hence exist independent of man’s will.

p Popper, however, denies the existence of objective laws in social life. As social laws, he proclaims the norms of conduct formulated as juridical laws, moral rules, customs, etc. These social laws, according to him, are not objective, because people create them at their own discretion. As distinct from the natural laws, he calls them normative laws.

p The existence of social norms by no means refutes the existence of objective social laws. On the contrary, social norms can be understood only on the basis of a knowledge of social laws. Social norms are a subjective 47 reflection of the requirements of the objective social laws upon the consciousness of society. And since in a class society the economic and social situation of the different classes differs sharply, this finds its expression in the formation among them of different social norms or in a different attitude towards the social norms of the dominating class transformed into juridical laws.

p Proceeding from his anti-scientific, subjectivistic assimilation of social laws with normative laws, Popper also develops a second aspect of his ’critical dualism’ which deals with the nature of social processes. ’Critical dualism’, according to Popper, also manifests itself in the fact that social life is a unity of ‘facts’ and ‘decisions’. ‘Facts’ are, above all, the manifestations of the ’economic factor’ in social life. ‘Decisions’ are manifestations of another factor—the people’s ’free choice’. Decisions, for their part, depend upon the normative laws, which we have mentioned above.

p In his book ’The Poverty of Antihistoricism’, while analyzing the second aspect of Popper’s ’critical dualism’, the Bulgarian author V. Dobriyanov points out this thought of Popper: ’The economic factor has to be taken into consideration as one of the factors of social life, but it must in no case be overestimated. Marx’shistorical materialism must be respected, but need not be taken too seriously, because in such a case it would lead us to a denial or underestimation of our decisions, regarding the role which man plays in the historical process’. (31, c. 70).

p Thus Popper reduces the basic factors in social life to two: ‘facts’, from among which he points out above all the ’economic factor’, and ‘decisions’ which, as we have seen, are determined by and depend upon the normative social laws. And, as Popper specifies, ’norms are human creations in the sense that we can blame no one but ourselves for them, neither nature, nor god. It is our duty to perfect them, as much as we can, if we find that they are inacceptable.’ (The Open Society and its Enemies’, Vol. 1, p. 59; 31, c. 44). According to Popper, therefore, it is not the objective social laws but ’social norms’ that lie at the basis of 48 social life. And the social norms themselves, according to him, are not the objective result of the social situation of the classes. They are simply a conscious creation of the people. It turns out that Popper’s critical dualism is in fact nothing more than a fig leaf, covering the nakedness of the very old monistic thesis of idealism that ideas rule the world!

p Raymond Aron develops his pluralistic views on the factors which bring about the development of society in a direct polemic with the monism of the MarxistLeninist theory of society. He writes: ’The societies referred to as capitalist do not obey either a determinism or a dialectics, in which the contradictions of the economic system are a sufficient cause. A society and an epoch are not a unity which is determined as a whole by one cause or one value. Sociological and historical pluralism is not the acknowledgement of a lack of knowledge, but is an acknowledgement of the structure of the socio-historical world’ (88, p. 54, 55). We shall not dwell here on the unfounded and anti-scientific rejection by Aron of determinism and dialectics in the development of capitalist society, because this is not our task. As to sociological pluralism, about which it is the question, Aron tries to define it by opposing it to the view that every social system, i.e. every society, is called forth by one cause, by one factor. Aron speaks here about the system being called forth by only one factor and thus distorts Marxism. As we have seen, Marxism also recognizes the action of many factors, but.graduates them and examines them in a unified system. We repeat, Marxist monism consists not in a rejection of the presence of many factors which influences social development, but in establishing the determinative role of the mode of production, and more particularly of the economic basis—production relations.

p Methodologically akin to the theory of the ’many factors’ are other pluralistic conceptions in bourgeois ideology—that of social stratification and that of the group structure of society. These are particularly widespread among bourgeois political scientists. Since the 49 pluralistic theories of bourgeois political scientists are entirely based on the conceptions of social stratification and of groups, we shall examine these conceptions in the following chapter.

p The multi-factor theory of the structure and development of society in its different variants from a methodological viewpoint recalls that diversity of ontological pluralism which we have named ’structural pluralism’. We can also discover a similar methodological link between the atomistic diversity of general philosophical pluralism and certain pluralistic conceptions in modern bourgeois sociology.

p The atomistic pluralistic approach to the problems of sociology is manifested in the works of the French positivist sociologist from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, Emil Durkheim (1858- 1917). He thinks that sociology has to investigate ’social facts’ to begin with. ’Social facts’, according to him, are the social collectives and institutions, and what he has in mind in this connection are their actions, laws, moral norms, collective ideals, etc. Durkheim considers ’social facts’ as objectively existing outside the individuals who take part in them or share them.

p Durkheim does not reduce a ’social fact’ to the individual person, because ’the group feels, thinks and acts differently from what its members would to if they were separated from it’ (78, c. 99). On this basis he thinks that collective ideas and other manifestations of consciousness as a social product have a definite coercive force with respect to the individual.

p What is valuable in Durkhein is his understanding that social consciousness is not equal to the simple sum total of the consciousnesses of the individual persons, and that the activity of the social group is not equal to the simple sum total of the activities of its members, taken in isolation from the group. However, in detaching the conscious activity of the collectives (’social facts’) from the material life of these collectives, Durkheim falls into objective idealism and abstract schematism—he fails to see that the basic and determinative feature of ’social facts’ is the sphere 50 of material production, and that in this sphere the fundamental feature is production relations. That is why his theory of social facts is unable to explain the change in the social behaviour of individuals and collectives, or, alongside this, to explain social development in general.

p The founder of sociometry Jacob Moreno (born 1892) in his sociological theory puts forward a conception akin to atomistic pluralism.

p Moreno examines the separate man, the individual, as a ’social atom’, considered not in isolation from the social community, but in conjunction with the complex network of psychological ties of an emotional character which connect him with other men in communities represented in the main by small social groups. In the spirit of Bergson’s ’elan vital’, Moreno considers that ‘spontaneity’, based mainly on an emotional charge, is the main social quality of people, and that the relations which unite people into groups are essentially psychological. It is here that the non-scientific, idealistic and metaphysical nature of Moreno’s whole sociological structure manifests itself. His ‘microsociology’ does not help to explain the social structure and the laws of social development.

p A number of representatives of personalism and behaviourism also have an ‘atomistic’ approach to social life. As T. Sakharova and I. Kravchenko point out, the personalists deny the class structure of society and consider it as an ‘aggregate’, similar to a physical conglomerate, whose basic cell is the person (73, c. 77). The representatives of ’pluralistic behaviourism’ (P. Lazarsfeld, M. Rosenberg, T. Adorno and others) consider the social behaviour of people as a simple sum total of the behaviour of the individual persons (62, c. 153).

p In this brief analysis of philosophical and sociological pluralism and its major varieties and forms, we have proceeded from the viewpoint that the setting up of sociology as a separate theoretical science of society is correct. Sociology, in our opinion, differs from historical materialism above all in its object. Historical 51 materialism has as its object the study of society as a sphere of interaction between material and spiritual components; in other words, the question of the mutual relation between social consciousness and social being holds a central place in it. Marxist sociology, on the other hand, in studying society and its unity from both its aspects, material and spiritual, examines mainly its social structure and its corresponding laws of development. In this connection, a fundamental question in sociology concerns the reciprocal relations between basis and superstructure, in each of which there enter both material and spiritual (ideal) components.

p If we apply the same methodological approach of delimiting philosophy from sociology to the bourgeois pluralistic conceptions of society, we come to the following conclusion. The multi-factor social theory, in which the material and ideal factors of social development are examined as independent from each other and as equal in one or another degree, is a philosophical pluralistic theory, because it solves the question of the reciprocal relations between social being and social consciousness in a pluralistic spirit. Unlike this, the theory of social stratification and the personalistic theory of society as a ’conglomerate of persons’ are pluralistic theories of a sociological character, or on a sociological level.

The heightened pluralistic trends in bourgeois philosophical and sociological thought under statemonopoly capitalism is one of the major manifestations of the deepening crisis in bourgeois ideology. The increased significance of philosophical and sociological pluralism in modern bourgeois social science is a symptom of the weakness of open idealism and to a greater or lesser degree means, although formally and in words, a reatreat from idealism to the standpoint of a ‘third’ line, an intermediate line in philosophy and sociology. At the same time, however, the growth of the pluralistic trend in bourgeois philosophy and sociology is also a manifestation of aggressiveness by contemporary bourgeois ideology, an attempt to defend 52 capitalism with new, more flexible methods under the present-day balance of forces which is unfavourable for imperialism.