G.Osipov
__TITLE__
SOCIOLOGY---
Problems
of Theory and Method
__TEXTFILE_BORN__ 2007-04-16T18:52:15-0700
__TRANSMARKUP__ "Y. Sverdlov"
PROGRESS PUBLISHERS
MOSCOW
[1]
Translated from the Russian by David Myshne
Edited by Jim Riordan
Designed by Klara Vysotskaya
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Ha OHIAU&CKOM H3btKe
__COPYRIGHT__
First printing 1969
The sum and substance of the modern epoch is the transition of all countries and peoples to socialism which was ushered in by the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia. This epoch is one of struggle between two distinctly different social systems and at the same time a chronicle of socialist and national liberation revolutions. The struggle between the two ideologies---progressive and reactionary--- waged in the modern world is a reflection of the historical process of transition to the new society. Success in the ideological struggle depends greatly on people's political awareness, the intensity of their effort and faith in the justness of their cause and their determination to win.
Today a new situation has arisen. Due both to economic achievements of all the peoples of socialist countries and to the political success of national liberation and democratic movements a new alignment of the class forces in the world has taken place. The more victories are scored by the world socialist system, the more aggravated becomes the class struggle and the subtler and more disguised the types and forms of the struggle of imperialist ideology. In particular, it increases its attempts to discredit communism.
Imperialism uses sociology as one of its most refined means of influencing the masses ideologically. As an independent science, sociology came into being in consequence of the differentiation and integration of the sciences concerned with nature, society and thought. As a result, 5 individual disciplines broke away from philosophy and became sciences in their own right, such as astronomy, physics, biology, psychology, formal and mathematical logic, ethics, aesthetics and semiotics.
It was some time before sociology was recognised as an independent science. Its elevation to independent scientific status resulted from the changes that occurred in the structure of philosophy, namely, increasing interest in the materialist conception of history and empirical studies of man's relationship to society. As sociology developed principles of sociological investigation were elaborated, methodology from other sciences was applied, and specific social studies were made. Similarly, sociologists have discussed the relationship between sociology and philosophy, between sociology and other sciences, and the precise subject matter *nd social functions of sociology.
[6] __NUMERIC_LVL1__ PART I __ALPHA_LVL1__ MARXIST SOCIOLOGY __NUMERIC_LVL2__ Chapter 1 __ALPHA_LVL2__ PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY __ALPHA_LVL3__ § 1. Subject Matter of PhilosophyPhilosophy as a science deals with general laws governing nature, society and human thought. These laws are dialectical-materialist and universal, affecting all phenomena, processes and relationships in the environment. A major contribution of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to philosophy was that while developing philosophical materialism they applied it to the study of human society. The discovery of the materialist conception of history implied not simply an enlargement of the sphere governed by philosophical laws, but the inclusion of human activity, particularly in historical perspective, in the philosophical system. From then on the concepts ``dialectical'' and ``historical'' essentially became identical.
By incorporating human social activity into philosophical science, Marx and Engels created a single integral philosophical system. The distinction between the two disciplines---dialectical materialism (system of general laws governing everything) and sociology (system of social laws, i.e.,-laws governing society only)---within its framework is therefore a formal tribute to past traditions. Recently attempts made in some philosophical works to regard general laws as philosophical laws have often been extended to other sciences like biology. This has damaged both philosophy and specific sciences. The concrete phenomena and 7 processes were studied in general, often dilettantishly, and, instead of the general dialectical-materialist laws, some philosophers ``analysed'' the general laws of concrete spheres of knowledge. Not being specialists in these sciences, these philosophers have erroneously evaluated a number of great achievements in physics, chemistry and biology and disregarded the existence of such sciences as cybernetics and semiotics.
Philosophy does not replace the specific sciences; it rests on a generalisation of the achievements of the natural and social sciences, on human practice and on new universal laws and categories. Similarly, Marxist philosophy has expanded to include such categories as system, structure and function.
Like mathematics, philosophy is neither a natural nor a social science. Today mathematics acts as the language of all sciences. It makes it possible to express things and events in precise quantitative values. Philosophy is similarly a general mode of thought which reflects the historical development of natural and social sciences. Like mathematics, philosophy uses neither microscope nor chemical agents; instead, it employs the power of abstraction.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 2. Philosophical Problems of Specific SciencesPhilosophical studies are not confined to the general laws of the objective world. Today the function of philosophy is to explain and interpret scientifically the principal trends and laws of the specific sciences. Consequently, the various branches of philosophy include the philosophy of history (historical materialism), social philosophy, human philosophy, philosophy of natural science, philosophy of technology, philosophy of psychology and philosophy of logic.
The development of materialist dialectics as the most general mode of thought, on the one hand, and its penetration of the specific (positive) sciences, on the other, signify a change in the, role and place of philosophy in the natural and social sciences. It was precisely this process that Engels referred to when he wrote: ``Only when natural and historical science has become imbued with dialectics will all the philosophical rubbish---Bother than the pure theory of 8 thought---be superfluous, disappearing in positive science" [4; 210). ``For philosophy, which has been expelled from nature and history, there remains the realm of pure thought, the theory of the laws of the thought process itself, logic and dialectics" [2; II, 400--01).
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 3. Philosophy of History, Social Philosophy and SociologySocial life stems from the various spheres of human activity---economic, social, political and spiritual. In contrast to the specific social sciences---economics, sociology and politics---historical materialism (philosophy of history) deals with the common characteristics that link all these spheres of human social activity into a single historical process. Historical materialism is a concept used ``to designate that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another" [2; II, 102].
Whereas the subject matter of sociology is only one sphere of human social activity---civic---the subject matter of historical materialism is society as a whole, the interdependence of its various aspects in historical development. Historical materialism as a science concerns general laws governing the emergence, development and changes of socio-economic formations.
Further, social philosophy cannot be identified with sociology. Its sphere is not sociology, but the dialectics of social development. Its subject matter is the study of the specificity of manifestation of dialectical materialist laws (consciousness and being, transition of quantitative to qualitative changes, etc.) in social life and the discovery of new dialectical aspects in the light of modern social development. The dialectical-materialist analysis of social life enables us to determine scientifically the general direction, the real motive forces and internal laws and various forms of historical development, and general methods of resolving contradictions. That is precisely why materialist philosophy is the essence of Marxism, the ideological 9 weapon of the working class and all progressive forces in their struggle for social progress, for socialism and communism.
Thus, dialectical materialism has enriched philosophy by indicating the main direction of social development, the specific character of bourgeois society in the imperialist epoch, the variety of forms of transition from capitalism to socialism, the laws of transition from socialism to communism, and the character of socialist development as nonantagonistic contradictions arise.
It is important to note that the incorporation of general laws of social development into philosophical laws harms both philosophy and sociology. It causes philosophy to neglect its study of philosophical problems proper, and sociology to deal with general discourses about these laws. From the methodological point of view it is unnecessary to include the law of evolution in philosophical laws, as it concerns the world of biological phenomena. It is just as absurd to ascribe to this system the law of correspondence of the production relations to the level of development of the productive forces, the law of social revolution, the law that determines the role of the material relations in the system of all social relations, the law of class struggle and abolition of class differences, laws which belong to the world of social phenomena.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 4. Methodological Significance of Materialist PhilosophyPhilosophy is socially significant because it gives the investigator in any given science a knowledge of the most general categories of objective reality. Knowledge of these tested categories considerably shortens the process of scientific cognition in all specific sciences and from the very outset provides a general scientific approach to the analysis of things and events. This means that philosophy is primarily of methodological importance to all sciences. The establishment of the materialist conception of history and elaboration of the problems of historical materialism have provided a scientific basis for all the social sciences---- political economy, sociology, social psychology, etc. That is why Lenin called the materialist conception of history ``the synonym of social science" [1; 1,142].
10In sociology, the philosophical method plays so important a part that scientific sociology only became possible when the dialectical materialist method had been extended to social life, with the discovery of historical materialism. Moreover, Marx not only brought the science of society (sociology) into line with the materialist foundation, but also reconstructed it in accordance with this basis. He singled out the economic from the various social spheres by denoting production relations as basic and primary, determining all other social relations. Marx wrote: ``In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or---what is but a legal expression for the same thing---with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the. material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic---in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions 11 of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production. No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve, since looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution exist or are at least in the process of formation" [2; I, 362--63).
Having discovered the materialist conception of history Marx formulated the basic law of human history, namely, ``... the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development, attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas of religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case" [2; II, 167).
Analysis of the production relations indicated the recurrence of aspects of social life and enabled philosophers to regard the systems of different countries as a single basic concept, namely a socio-economic formation.
Marx's theory of socio-economic formations proved of similar importance to sociology as did Charles Darwin's theory of the origin of the species to biology. Lenin wrote: ``Just as Darwin put an end to the view of animal and plant species being unconnected, fortuitous, 'created by God' and immutable, and was the first to put biology on an absolutely scientific basis by establishing the mutuability and the succession of species, so Marx put an end to the view of society being a mechanical aggregation of individuals which allows of all sorts of modification at the will of the authorities (or, if you like, at the will of society and the government) and which emerges and changes 12 casually, and was the first to put sociology on a scientific basis by establishing the concept of the economic formation of society as the sum total of given production relations, by establishing the fact that the development of such formations is a process of natural history" [1; 1, 142).
Just as the theory of the origin of the species is a system of general laws of the biological world, so the theory of socio-economic formations is a system of general laws of the social world. To deny sociology the right to independent existence and to identify it with the philosophy of history simply cuts it off from life, obfuscates our understanding of philosophical laws. Consequently, such philosophical works tend to examine the general laws of social development and ignore the specific forms of their manifestation; yet these are a product of people's subjective activities, the complex mechanism of the action of these laws.
It is equally wrong for sociologists to disregard philosophy. To do so inevitably vulgarises sociology. Philosophy and sociology are organically connected since their fundamental theoretical and methodological principles coincide.
Firstly, the theory of socio-economic formations pertains simultaneously both to philosophical and sociological theories.
Secondly, the basic philosophical concepts and categories, such as consciousness and being, the material and the ideal, are common both to philosophy and sociology.
Thirdly, such social concepts as society and social class, in their historical development are also common to philosophy and sociology.
'
Fourthly, the individual and his activity are the main subjects of both philosophical and sociological studies.
Philosophy provides sociology with a scientific theory of social development, general concepts, a scientific system of dialectical-materialist method and means of analysing empirical data and constructing theoretical models. Sociology furnishes particular material for philosophical generalisations, and sets problems to philosophy which, as we shall see below, sociology by itself is unable to resolve.
13 __NUMERIC_LVL2__ Chapter 2 __ALPHA_LVL2__ GENERAL SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY __ALPHA_LVL3__ § 1. Social InteractionSociety is a historical product of the social interaction of people. The concept of social interaction is the initial concept of the socio-economic formation. Social interaction is a reciprocal process acting through the medium of two or more social factors within the framework of a single process under certain conditions of time and place.
The materialist conception of social interaction specifies a successive system of interaction of the major aspects of social history, with stress ori the economic aspect as the determining one. As Engels wrote: ``The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged" [2; II, 136).
The interaction of the various aspects of social life with the determining importance of the economic factor lends to the development of socio-economic formations the character of a natural historical process. In this connection Marx wrote: ``Assume a particular state of development in the productive faculties of man and you will get a corresponding form of commerce and consumption. Assume particular degrees of development of production, commerce and consumption and you will have a corresponding form of social constitution, a corresponding civil society. Assume a particular civil society and you will get a particular political system, which is only the official expression of civil society" [2; II, 442).
At the same time, every social aspect represents a complex system of interacting elements, which gives them the semblance of independent development and function.
14 __ALPHA_LVL3__ § 2. Economic System of Social InteractionHuman economic relationships basically determine social development, and establish the direction, character and content of the functioning of all other social systems. On this score Engels wrote: ``The economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical institutions, as well as of the religious, philosophical and other ideas of a given historical period" [2; II, 134--35).
By economic relations Marx and Engels meant the mode ``by which human beings of a given society produce their means of subsistence and exchange the products among themselves (in so far as division of labour exists). Thus the entire technique of production and transport is here included. According to our conception, this technique also determines the manner and method of exchange and, further, the distribution of products and with it, after the dissolution of gentile society, also the division into classes, and hence the relations of lordship and servitude and with them the state, politics, law, etc. Further included in economic relations are the geographical basis on which they operate and those remnants of earlier stages of economic development which have actually been transmitted and have survived---often only through tradition or by force of inertia; also, of course, the external environment which surrounds this form of society" [2; II, 503--04).
The law of correspondence between the productive forces and production relations determines changes in the economic structure. ``With the acquisition of the new productive faculties men change their mode of production and with the mode of production they change all the economic relations which have been merely the necessary relations of their particular mode of production" [2; II, 443).
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 3. Civil SocietyCivil society is a system of human social interaction in historically established social forms (or forms of intercourse) mediated by economic interaction. It is the interaction between individuals, individuals and social groups, 15 individuals and social institutions, etc. The relationships that arise from a certain system of social interaction are called social relations. Social relations, then, are relations among people developing under historically established social forms, under specific conditions of time and place. They comprise class, national, group, socio-psychological and individual relations. The aggregate of all these relations within an economic structure is called the social structure of society.
Human relationships are based on aims, values, patterns and norms; their character and substance are influenced by social forms within which people's activities take place in industrial, agricultural, urban, rural, familial, school life, etc.
A change in the social forms of human interaction inev itably causes a change in the aims, values, patterns and norms, which ultimately determine people's social attitudes towards one another. Changes in economic relations determine changes in the social forms.
As Marx points out: ``In order not to forfeit the fruits of civilisation, they are obliged, from the moment when the form of their commerce no longer corresponds to the productive forces acquired, to change all their traditional social forms" [2; II, 443). For example, the privileges, the institution of guilds and corporations, the entire system of medieval regulation were social forms or relations which corresponded to the acquired productive forces and the formerly existing state of society from which these institutions derived. It was under the protection of these forms and their regulation that economic relations developed, and people would have lost the fruits of all this had they not wanted to preserve the social forms under which these economic relations had formed. Thus, in conformity with their productive forces, people establish the social forms in which they produce their means of subsistence, as well as the ideas and concepts which are the abstract idealistic expression of these social forms.
Economic relations form on the basis of the material base while the social forms afford the necessary conditions for shaping the economic relations, which ultimately leads to replacement of the old social forms by new ones.
16The social forms are not only an expression of the economic structure of society, they also essentially influence the course of historical development. Marx made it quite clear that historical development is affected by ``the political forms of the class struggle and its results, including constitutions established by the victorious class, juridical systems, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the minds of the participants, political, legal, philosophical theories, religious views and their enshrinement in religious dogma. They all influence historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. All these elements interact and, amid all the endless host of accidents the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history one chose would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree" [2; II, 488].
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 4. Social Structure and the PersonalityWhile society's economic and social structure determines the character and substance of human social activities, it is itself the result of these activities. ``The productive forces are the result of practical human energy, but this energy is itself circumscribed by the conditions in which men find themselves, by the productive forces acquired, by the social form which exists before them, which they do not create, which is the product of the preceding generation. Because every succeeding generation finds itself in possession of the productive forces which serve it as the raw material for new production, human history develops in a coherent manner; a history of humanity unfolds which is all the more a history of humanity since the productive forces of man and, therefore, his social relations have become more developed. Hence it necessarily follows that the social history of men is never anything but the history of their individual development, whether they are conscious of it or not. Their material relations form the basis of all their relations. These material relations are only the necessary forms in which their material and individual activity is realised" [2; II, 442--43], including the activity of remaking these forms. Marx continues: ``... it is not, as people try here and there conveniently to imagine, that __PRINTERS_P_18_COMMENT__ 2---974 17 the economic condition produces an automatic effect. No. Men make their history themselves, only they do so in a given environment which conditions it and on the basis of actual relations already existing, among which the economic relations, however much they may be influenced by the other---political and ideological---ones, are still ultimately the decisive ones, forming the red thread which runs through them and alone leads to understanding" [2; II, 504--05). Man is the aggregate of social relations, the product of certain social forms. He changes under the influence of the changed social relations. But the social relations, the social forms of social interaction are, in their turn, changed by human actions. That is why society requires for harmonious functioning specific social studies and scientific regulation of the economic, social and personal relations of its members. __ALPHA_LVL3__ § 5. Social Regulation
Conscious social regulation of production is conspicuously absent from capitalist society. Consequently, development of social relations and the relations between society's individual members is not only unco-ordinated with the development of economic relations, but constantly clashes with this development. The social forms of human interaction are created by people acting deliberately or stimulated by certain aims. Here nothing is done without conscious intention, without a desired aim. ``Each person follows his own consciously desired end, and it is precisely the resultant of these many wills operating in different directions and of their manifold effects upon the outer world that constitutes history. The will is determined by passion or deliberation. But the levers which immediately determine passion or deliberation are of very different kinds. Partly they may be external objects, partly ideal motives, ambition, 'enthusiasm for truth and justice', personal hatred or even purely individual whims of all kinds. . .. For here, also on the whole, in spite of the consciously desired aims of all individuals, accident apparently reigns on the surface. That which is willed happens but rarely; in the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the 18 very outset incapable of realisation or the means of attaining them are insufficient. Thus the conflicts of innumerable individual wills and individual actions in the domain of history produce a state of affairs entirely analogous to that prevailing in the realm of unconscious nature" [2; 11,391).
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 6. Socio-Economic ModelsSocialist society exercises conscious, planned regulation of economic relations. But economic regulation will produce an optimum effect only if it is accompanied by scientific regulation of social forms and social relations. This entails comprehensive sociological study of the whole range of social problems connected with human activities, the individual's place in society, his needs and the extent to which these needs are satisfied, and his attitude to the various phenomena and events. Construction of socio-- economic models for the purpose of optimum control of society presupposes extensive empirical sociological studies of the most complex form of human activity---the civil society. Engels wrote of the difficulties of investigating this sphere of human activity: ``The further the particular sphere which we are investigating is removed from the economic sphere and approaches that of pure abstract ideology, the more shall we find it exhibiting accidents in its development, the more will its curve run in a zigzag. But if you plot the average axis of the curve, you will find that the axis of this curve will run more and more nearly parallel to the axis of the curve of economic development the longer the period considered and the wider the field dealt with" [2; II, 505).
The use of mathematical methods and the elaborating of methods and techniques of specific social studies, make it possible to penetrate this sphere of human activity. Yet to disregard the role of chance in social development may greatly harm society. The acceleration or deceleration of historical development largely depends on chance factors, such as people's characters, their level of culture and education, etc.
Control of these chance factors, human beings and their social relations, is about as difficult as the controlling __PRINTERS_P_18_COMMENT__ 2* 19 thermonuclear reactions. Discovery of the laws of thermonuclear reactions proved to be a great revolution in science. No less revolutionary was the discovery and elaboration of forms of rational control of these reactions in the interests of mankind. Similarly, the discovery of the laws governing the development of society produced a revolution in the social sciences. Social laws are laws governing the social activity of people. Hence, specific social studies of various ways to control the action of these laws and, consequently, human activities for the sake of constructing communist society as quickly as possible are enormously important. The most urgent task of sociology is to investigate the social forms which determine human activities. __NUMERIC_LVL2__ Chapter 3 __ALPHA_LVL2__ SOCIETAL THEORY __ALPHA_LVL3__ § 1. Subject Matter of Sociology
Sociological analysis involves not simply investigation of human motivation, but also of institutionalised social relations which determine the character and substance of human behaviour. Only in this way is it possible to understand the mechanism of interaction of the human activites and the social forms mediating these activities.
Further, sociology is concerned with the origin, development and disappearance of various social forms or relations with regard to all the contradictory tendencies which influence these forms. Sociologists analyse the motivation of individuals, social groups and classes and investigate the objective patterns of social relationships.
Thus, sociologists study the social structure of society (interclass and intraclass relationships, the social institutions that regulate these relationships), the development and interaction of the systems and organisations within society.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 2. Prerequisites for Sociological StudiesThe premises on which Marxist sociology bases its analysis ``are . . . real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real 20 individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way" [3; 31).
Analysing the process of formation and development of human consciousness Marx and Engels wrote: ``The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct influx of their material behaviour.. .. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual lifeprocess. .. . We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of their ideological reflexes and echoes of this lifeprocess" [3; 37--38).
The main condition for removing alienation is to do away with the antagonistic division of labour and private ownership of production which arose on its basis. However, abolition of private ownership of the instruments and means of production and the old division of labour do not occur simultaneously. Socialism, which is the first phase of communism, and which still retains the ``birthmarks of capitalism'', long retains elements which prevent it from completely overcoming survivals or consequences of former alienation. To free man from exploitation does not mean restoring to him his social being alienated from him in capitalist conditions. For this society needs:~
sufficiently advanced productive forces to provide abundant material and cultural facilities for all society and, consequently, a substantial reduction in labour time and an increase in leisure time;~
elimination thereby of all survivals of the old division of labour and its consequences, primarily the essential distinctions between mental and physical labour;~
abolition of the element of forced labour and its institutional forms;~
establishment of control over production and consumption by all of society.
Hence the main task of sociologists is to reveal the structural elements of man's social environment, which 21 determine the consciousness and motivation of social behaviour and human activities. ``If the conscious expression of the real relations of these individuals is illusory, if in their imagination they turn reality upside-down, then this in its turn is the result of their limited social relations arising from it" (3; 37].
The only way to arrive at a genetic-causal explanation of social events and phenomena is to study the material environment of individuals in a certain socio-economic formation. These material elements not only constitute the substance of human ideas and conceptions of society in the conditions in which people live, they also act as an external need which shapes people's thinking, motives, actions and social behaviour. People enter into relations with one another as the result of their practical activities; to procure the means of subsistence and to preserve themselves as the human race require a division of labour and exchange of products and services. Consequently, these processes engender certain social relations. Nonetheless, although these relations are a human creation, they become autonomous and are regarded as an external need independent of man. ``This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now" [3; 45].
People's social relations are alienated from them and become opposed to them as a blind and alien force.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 3. Theory of AlienationUnder conditions of alienation the social life of the individual, likewise his working life, proves to be an area of ``non-freedom'' for him. The social relations act not as man's own relations, but as alien forces, as forces of capital which usurp his freedom and deprive him of all independent activity. According to Marx, he does not feel free ``in any but his animal functions---eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal" [6; 73].
22This is not merely a question of man's self-awareness; the alienated social forms of human activity actually lose the human essence of conscious and purposeful activity. Ultimately this disrupts the individual's normal social relations, a process which some Western sociologists regard as a ``natural'' state of affairs, embodied in ultra individualism, as the only possible way man can retain his individuality. This disruption of the individual's social relations, in fact, causes him to lose his true individuality, which may be completely attained only in creative, constructive, socially significant and socially organised labour.
Private property is itself the product, the necessary consequence of alienated labour, the main aspects of which, according to Marx, are:~
alienation from the producer of his labour product which is opposed to the worker as an alien thing, as a force which does not depend on the producer, which dominates and enslaves him;~
alienation from the producer of the very essence of labour as an activity which does not belong to him, alienation from labour of its spiritual potentials, physical and mental exhaustion of the worker. ``The more powerful the labour, the weaker the worker; the more intricate the work he is doing, the greater the mental devastation and the enslavement by nature to which the worker is subjected" [7; 562]. Alienated labour ``... creates beauty, but it also demoralises the worker. It replaces manual labour by a machine, but at the same time hurls one part of the workers back to barbarian labour and transforms the other part into a machine. It develops the mind, but also produces feeble-mindedness, cretinism as the lot of the workers" [7; 562];~
alienation of man from man. ``The direct result of man's alienation from the product of his own labour, from his vital activity, from his tribal essence, is the alienation of man from man" [7; 567]. The alien force dominating man is another man---the consumer of the manufactured product, i.e., primarily the person to whom the labour power and labour product of the producer belong, man the owner, man the exploiter. The act of production in which the alienation of labour takes place is thereby simultaneously the production of the relations of exploitation of 23 man by man, i.e., the relations which this alienation engenders.
The social expressions of the alienation of labour are:~
firstly, domination over production and the product of labour and, consequently, over the direct producers of the forces not directly included in the production process, i.e., the forces of capital;~
secondly, the social division of labour into two antagonistic forms: a) division of the activity among people in the process of social production (mental and physical work) and b) division of the activity of man himself, his transformation into a partial, narrowly specialised individual;~
thirdly, domination over the worker by compulsory and institutionally managed labour.
In conditions of alienation the division of activity among individuals is determined not by the natural abilities and requirements of individuals, but by the spontaneously formed social structure which haphazardly predetermines limits of each individual's activity. The individual's endeavours in a certain social activity consume all his efforts and abilities.
To break these fetters man must obtain an all-round cultural and scientific education so that this control may assume a really universal character in any sphere.
Sociologists must determine the social forms of people's social activity which most fully express the requirements of development of society as a whole and the requirements of individuals. These must be social activities that obviate the need for institutionally-sanctioned social relations. __ALPHA_LVL3__ § 4. Freedom of Society and Freedom of the Individual
The organisation of communist production will require from each individual not only profound knowledge, but also that ``he should make his knowledge, skills and abilities commensurate with the knowledge, skills and abilities of all the other individuals, and that he should be able to organise the range of his knowledge, skills and abilities, relying on the all-round support of his comrades. Then he will not only enter the production process as much more universally trained and educated than the modern individual, but will in this very process also become much 24 more harmoniously developed than the most all-round genius of the past. No genius has ever had such favourable opportunities for creatively assimilating all the wealth accumulated by man; and that is precisely what genius is" [13; 127--28).
The change in labour conditions in a particular branch or between various branches of production is replaced by a change in labour conditions of voluntarily formed associations of creative labour. Associations of creative labour will become the universal form of life in communist society, the universal method of organising the abilities, creative potentialities and knowledge of all members of society in accordance with their needs.
Man's individual freedom is an all-round consolidation of the individual's ties with society, an adjustment of society's social organisation to the individual requirements of the socialised man. The essence of freedom is that ``the associated producers rationally regulate their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control" [5; III, 820].
Creative associations are one of the forms of individual participation in the creative assimilation and development of society's culture as a whole. Such associations will be formed as voluntary unions of individuals and on the basis of scientific principles of organisation (psychological compatibility, occupational specificity, forms of interaction with the external environment, etc.).
Within the creative collective there will be a certain division of labour. But in contrast to the social division of labour with its social attachment of people to certain types of work, the only criterion of this division will be individual ability.
A flexible division of labour will replace the former rigid system; this presupposes changes in the activities of individuals as production changes and as they reveal their abilities and improve the entire creative collective. This system will satisfy the prime vital requirement of the individual, the requirement for creative labour, for free conscious activity, which, according to Marx, constitutes ``man's tribal character''. Thus, the creative collective based on cooperation and transformation of labour is a true communist collective. Flexible creative collectives, as sociological 25 studies in the U.S.S.R. show, are now becoming a common form of organisation at many enterprises.
In the first stage of socialist production, with its priority development of the mechanisation of production, the individual form of transformation of labour and individual flexibility are encouraged due to the need for particular specialists. The social significance of this change in labour is that it develops the flexibility of the worker and raises his cultural and technical level. At this stage the range of the worker's interests substantially increases, which may be defined as his all-round development. But this development of the individual and the satisfaction of all his cultural requirements cannot be attained because still too much working time has to be expended and he is restricted by the narrow specialisation of production cycles.
In the second stage of socialist production, with the transition to automation and the utilisation of computer programming, the transformation of labour assumes a mass character, and whole creative collectives become flexible due to the objective requirements of the modern industrial enterprises and people's new cultural needs. In such collectives the abilities and knowledge of one individual are supplemented by the abilities and knowledge of other individuals. Thus the collective as a whole becomes a form of the voluntary application of all person's talents to the solution of production and social problems.
At this stage the problem of forming an all-round personality, which consciously and in a disciplined manner assimilates all the wealth of human culture, may be resolved.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 5. Marxist Sociological ConceptsAccording to the Marxist sociological concept, the development of society is a natural historical process governed by certain laws. This process is based on the development of economic relations. These relations, including those of production and those between people arising during production, constitute the specific form of man's existence and development. They are the structural elements of historically defined social systems---socio-economic formations.
26In antagonistic formations, or societies, the social relations arising on the basis of the development of production are, like production itself, alienated from man and are opposed to individuals as alien forces which are hostile to them and spontaneously dominate them. The abolition of private property and class antagonisms affords opportunities for removing this alienation thereby enabling people to control their own social relations in accordance with the objective requirements of social progress.
Accordingly, the task of sociologists in socialist society is to study all factors influencing the formation of social relations, determining the specific forms which these relations take, and on this basis completely to overcome the problem of alienation and to achieve an identity of interests between the individual and society.
__NUMERIC_LVL2__ Chapter 4 __ALPHA_LVL2__ THEORETICAL AND APPLIED SOCIOLOGY __ALPHA_LVL3__ § 1. The Functional Theory of SocietyScientific sociology is concerned with society as a living, continuously developing social organism, as an integral functional system developing in accordance with historical laws. The functioning of any social system is bound up with the functioning of society as a whole, while the functioning of society as a whole is determined by the functioning of specific social systems made up of the constituent elements of the social organism. Hence the study of specific social phenomena and events can only be valid if it is linked with the study of the laws governing the functioning of society as a whole. Sociological analysis presupposes simultaneous study of the general and the specific in their functional relationship and interdependence. G. V. Plekfaanov, one of the leaders of the Russian and international socialist movement, once wrote: ``True historical research must begin with a study of the state of the particular country's productive forces and economic relations. Of course, social research must not stop at that: it must show how the dry skeleton of economy becomes covered with the 27 living flesh of social and political forms and then---and this is the most interesting, the most fascinating part of the problem---human ideas, feelings, aspirations and ideals. The researcher starts with what may be called inanimate matter, but must produce an organism brimful of life" [14 a; VII, 233--34].
The Marxist functional approach to the study of social life presupposes the study of two main groups of laws: 1) general laws of the origin, development and disintegration of social organisms (the determining role of the mode of production, the law of correspondence of the production relations to the level of the productive forces, etc.) and general laws of the functioning and development of each particular social organism (under capitalism---the law of classes and the class struggle, the law of social revolution, etc.; under socialism---the abolition of class differences, elimination of the existing distinctions between mental and physical labour, between town and country, etc.); 2) specific laws of the connections between social systems and relations and of the social organism as a whole (for example, the connections between the level of development of the social relations in rural areas and society as a whole). Like any science, therefore, sociology consists of two parts ---theoretical and applied. The first group of social laws is the subject matter of theoretical (general) sociology, the second group---of applied (specific) sociology (or specific social studies).
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 2. Applied SociologyEach social organism, each system of social relations (material production, town, country, primary group, school, etc.) is connected with the social organism as a whole and concerns a particular branch of applied sociology. People in various social activities belong to ``special spheres in the division of labour and appear to themselves to be working in an independent field. And to the extent that they form an independent group within the social division of labour, their productions, including their errors, react back as an influence upon the whole development. But all the same they themselves are again under the dominating influence of economic development" [2; II, 495].
28The correlation of human wills, aims and social activities in various spheres of social activities constitute the substance of applied sociology and its various branches.
Thus the sociology of labour is concerned with the system of labour relations and the social institutions which regulate them. It aims to find social forms of labour organisation which would to the greatest possible extent reflect the requirements of economic development and people's interests. Every industrial enterprise is a complex social system governed, on the one hand, by its own internal laws of development and, on the other, by the laws governing the functioning of society as a whole. That is why the sociology of labour at an industrial enterprise involves analysis of the processes operating at each enterprise in their interdependence with the laws governing the social organism as a whole. It is therefore necessary:~
firstly, to discover the interdependence;~
secondly, to study the action of the general social laws governing modern industrial production, and the factors which affect the speed of this action;~
thirdly, to analyse the manifestation of the general social laws governing the functioning and development of industrial enterprises (as specific social systems);~
fourthly, to discover what new elements have been engendered in the new conditions and to elaborate, by empirical study, scientific measures aimed at eliminating shortcomings and interferences in the functioining of the given social system.
The laws of social development not only influence people's consciousness and social behaviour, they are themselves influenced by people's conscious activities and may, in their outward manifestation, be even the result of these activities.
There is therefore an interdependence between the functioning of a given social system (or social organism as a whole) and people's social activities. Studies of motivation require an analysis of the conditions in which individuals act (an industrial enterprise, for example) and their influence on people, as well as the reciprocal influence of individuals on their conditions and the channels through which this influence is exerted.
Social policy may also serve as the subject of independent 29 social studies. The sociology of policy involves political and social forms and their influence on economic and social development. Economic development will on the whole pave its own way, but it does experience the reciprocal influence of policy. The reciprocal influence of government policy ``upon economic development'', wrote Engels, ``can be of three kinds: it can run in the same direction, and then development is more rapid; it can oppose the line of development, in which case nowadays state power in every great people will go to pieces in the long run; or it can cut off the economic development from certain paths, and prescribe certain others. This case ultimately reduces itself to one of the two previous ones. But it is obvious that in cases two and three the political power can do great damage to the economic development and result in the squandering of great masses of energy and material" [2; 11,493).
The same may be said of legal relations which also form a special branch of the division of labour. ``As soon as the new division of labour which creates professional lawyers becomes necessary, another new and independent sphere is opened up which, for all its general dependence on production and trade, still has also a special capacity for reacting upon these spheres. In a modern state, law must not only correspond to the general economic condition and be its expression, but must also be an internally coherent expression which does not, owing to inner contradictions, reduce itself to nought. And in order to achieve this, the faithful reflection of economic conditions suffers increasingly. All the more so the more rarely it happens that a code of law is the blunt, unmitigated, unadulterated expression of the domination of a class" (2; II, 493].
The interdependence of social relations formed in rural conditions, with the functioning of society as a whole are the subject of rural sociology; urban social relations are the subject of urban sociology; and social relations in industry concern industrial sociology. Similarly, sociology of education, sociology of art, sociology of science, sociology of the family, sociology of religion, have their own subject matter.
The social studies conducted within different branches of applied sociology enable sociologists to elaborate 30 scientific measures aimed at eliminating deficiencies in the functioning of the social organism as a whole and, consequently, of the particular social system under investigation.
One example from Soviet experience is the study of the problem of employment of juveniles and their adaptation to labour (see Quantitative Methods in Sociological Studies, Leningrad State University, 1964). The study revealed that many social problems of the young people (employment in conditions of a growing demand for labour power on the part of society, training in unfancied occupations, etc.) are conditioned by defects in the functioning of the social mechanism as a whole, i.e., the training of young specialists by an outmoded system and the absence of a special agency to regulate the country-wide distribution of labour.
Scientific sociology is not only concerned with particular problems, but with the systems and mechanisms of functioning of social organisms as a whole. Empirical social analysis makes it possible, firstly, to reveal defects in the functioning of social systems and relations, secondly, to establish a connection between the functioning of a social system and the social organism as a whole, thirdly, to eliminate the defects in the functioning of the social mechanism and, fourthly, to contribute to the successful functioning of a social system or (if it has outlived itself) to help to eliminate it. This approach makes it possible to elaborate scientific principles for decision-making when these decisions are of social importance to rational regulation and supervision of various social systems, organisms and relations in strict conformity with the objective laws governing social development.
__NUMERIC_LVL2__ Chapter 5 __ALPHA_LVL2__ OPERATION OF SOCIAL LAWS __ALPHA_LVL3__ § 1. Social FactsKnowledge 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 31 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.
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).
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, 32 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.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 2. Social SituationThe interaction of all aspects of the social mechanism under conditions of time and place creates a specific social situation.
Marx and Engels formulated the theoretical problems concerning the social situation.
Engels wrote: ``We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one" (2; II, 488).
``In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each again has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant---the historical event. This may again __PRINTERS_P_33_COMMENT__ 3---974 33 itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole, unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus past history proceeds in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that individual wills---of which each desired what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general)---do not attain what they want, but are merged into a collective mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that their value is equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this degree involved in it" [2; II ,489).
They go on to affirm that ``Men make their history themselves, but not as yet with a collective will, according to a collective plan or even in a definite, delimited given society. Their aspirations clash, and for that very reason all such societies are governed by necessity, which is complemented by and appears under the forms of accident. The necessity which here asserts itself athwart all accident is again ultimately economic necessity" [2; II, 505].
Sociological studies are intended to reveal the factors determining deviations of the wills and strivings of individuals from their results in a specific social system. This, in turn, combined with a knowledge of the laws of social development, enables us to find the best way to co-ordinate individual aspirations and the progressive development of the social system as a whole. __ALPHA_LVL3__ § 3. Special Circumstances
Special circumstances (level of technological development, labour conditions, social status and origin, etc.) may in one case involve particular and in another case general factors. For example, within the working class there are groups engaged in manual unskilled labour. When a social group is studied this factor acts as a general characteristic, but when the working class as a whole is studied it may be regarded as a special circumstance. If this is ignored, 34 these ``special circumstances" may impede social development and the development of the personality.
In fact, economic conditions and people's social origin limit, for example, freedom to choose an occupation and type of education; they thereby predetermine the unskilled and narrowly-specialised character of their work. As a result, these people are unable to develop their abilities and creative potentialities to the full. Furthermore, the content and character of work also largely determine personality development. According to the character and substance of labour, a person finds himself in objective conditions which may help or hinder the development of his abilities, draw him into or exclude him from creative labour. Thus, the proportion of workers---lathe operators--- participating in the rationalisation amounts to no more than 2.5 per cent of their total number. Among the workers who combine in their work functions of adjustment and control (complication of the character and content of labour) there are 6-7 times more rationalisers. Among fitters and electricians (fairly complex labour) the share of rationalisers amounts to 30 per cent. Under conditions of dismembered conveyor labour the scope of rationalisation directly depends on the type of production served by the conveyor (large-scale, medium-scale or small-scale). The more monotonous the work, the less rationalisation, and vice versa.
One of the most important social problems is that of overcoming the constant contradiction between the technical level of production and the general educational level of the workers. Studies show that the type of workers required for automated workshops has not yet been determined, and the problem of specialisation of workers of automated shops relative to various types of work has not yet been solved. Young people with a good general education are often allocated facile operations, and this causes job dissatisfaction. At the same time the change to up-- todate technology is not always accompanied by satisfactory training and retraining of workers. As a result, new machinery is not utilised effectively enough, time is wasted, machines break down, more money has to be spent and labour productivity drops. That is why it is extremely important for sociologists to create socio-economic models __PRINTERS_P_34_COMMENT__ 3* 35 of an occupational structure in accordance with the different levels of technological development.
Everyday and hygienic conditions also affect the division and transformation of labour. These conditions exert a direct influence on personality development outside production, on the use of the individual's leisure, the rise in his cultural and technical standards, the extent of his participation in running the affairs of society, i.e., they determine the specific forms which the action of the objective social laws will take.
A study of 25,000 time budgets has revealed that working women spend 50--100 per cent more time on domestic chores than do men. This reduces their chances for raising their cultural, technical and spiritual level. This, in turn, affects the children and the family relationships.
Labour conditions and organisation are also salient factors. They create a certain atmosphere at the place of work, affect people's attitude to work and the general mood of the workers.
The individual's physiological and psychological characteristics (age, personality, etc.) also account for the individual's fitness or unfltness for a particular type of job.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 4. Social GroupThe social group to which people belong is an important factor on which the functioning of the social laws depends. Sociology has become a science only since the actions of real personalities within each historical system of social relations, the endlessly diverse actions seemingly incapable of being systematised were ``generalised and reduced to the actions of groups of individuals differing from each other in the part they played in the system of production relations, in the conditions of production, and, consequently, in their conditions of life, and in the interests determined by these conditions" (1; 1, 411).
A social group is a group of people united by a community of aims and interests and common efforts in realising them, it is an element in the social structure of a definite system of social relations.
The forms and methods of organisation of the social structure of workers and engineering personnel at a modern 36 socialist enterprise are largely determined by persisting distinctions between the two basic social groups forming this structure. But we must remember the specific nature of the social groups in socialist society, namely, their friendly character and the gradual elimination of intergroup and intragroup differences. The groups within the working class, distinguished by the character of their labour, exist objectively, but are not of an unchangeable socially exclusive nature. Studies have shown that mechanisation and automation of production render these groups unstable and engender a general tendency to bring highly skilled, creative work within reach of all working people.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 5. Socio-Psychological GroupUnlike the social group, the socio-psychological group is a number of people concertedly interacting for a relatively long time sharing common values and directly influencing one another under specific conditions of time and place. These groups include people of the most diverse social status, their interrelations constituting the unofficial structure of the primary group. These interrelations are not always easily discovered, but they nevertheless play a substantial role in the life of the primary group.
Social investigations into two teams of workers with approximately the same technical and social levels (at the Vladimir Ilyich Factory in Moscow) have shown the teams to differ greatly in labour attitudes and labour productivity. The main reason for the different levels of labour productivity is the different socio-psychological relations among the members of these teams. In one team the official and unofficial structures of intracollective relations actually coincided, while in the other team they sharply differed. Improvements in the official structure of labour and non-labour groups and approximation of their official and unofficial structures help to increase the workers' satisfaction with their work and to raise labour productivity.
The influence of this group on the personality and, consequently, on personality attitudes during work is one aspect of its rule with regard to functioning of the social laws. One example of a socio-psychological group is the co-- operation among workers united by a common socially useful 37 aim. Such a group loses its formal character typical of the rigid division of labour and acts as an organisation where a community of aims is reinforced by a community of conviction, ideals and interests, the power of comradeship and the intensity of creative enthusiasm. The best work teams, technical and scientific groups are already developing these characteristics. __ALPHA_LVL3__ § 6. Personality Traits
Subjective personality traits (material and spiritual interests, requirements, and abilities) greatly influence the action of the objective social laws on the object under consideration. Lenin noted in this connection: ``Of course, there are, and always will be, individual exceptions from group and class types. But social types remain. Here is the case of a social type and not of the qualities possessed by individuals" [1; 29, 541).
To guide personality formation and its social activity, one must know both the general determinant and its individual characteristics, and also all factors determining the immediate social environment of the personality and the functional relationships of these factors to the social system as a whole.
For example, an essential functional relationship exists between a person's psychology and his ability to perform monotonous movements at a certain tempo. Persons with an unbalanced nervous system perform even simple uniform movements under great strain, whereas people with a balanced nervous system perform these operations without any great strain. Workers with a weak nervous system perform uniform movements slowly. This makes the change from one working tempo to another difficult.
People of a sanguine temperament change their rates of movement easily. Those who react slowly take their time in switching from a fast to a slow tempo.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 7. Social ConsciousnessTo understand how the objective social laws operate, one must consider how these laws are expressed in the 38 social consciousness. In socialist society, where the interests of the overwhelming majority of the people coincide with the social process, social consciousness, expressed in ideological and political unity, is a powerful lever for the transformation of society. Not a single previous socio-economic formation had known or could have known such power of social transformation.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 8. PersonalityDuring his material and spiritual activity man creates the conditions of both his own and social life. People's social actions are woven into the fabric of the social system and are both the object and subject of interaction. That is why the study of this system requires an investigation of the different objective and subjective factors and relations of the given social situation, and of the real personalities and the conceptions of their own position and the objective situation as a whole.
Man is not a passive element in a social system, he is an active participator who makes certain decisions which, depending on his role in society and the extent of his responsibility, may be of enormous importance to other people. It is therefore extremely important to study and reveal the influence exerted by different systems of social relationseconomic, legal and family (and the institutional norms regulating them) on the individual's mode of life, his general behaviour and on his labour activities.
A consideration of all these social relations which determine the functioning of the social mechanism largely depends on the subjective factor. Nowadays the importance of this factor in organising the structural elements into a single efficiently functioning social system has immeasurably increased. The nature of reciprocal relations in forming economic and social structures at a modern industrial enterprise is important because the information received and the reaction to it depend on man, on the level of his culture, education and abilities. This equally applies to regulating the relations on a national scale and in particular (departmental, etc.) legal enactments (instructions, orders, rules, etc.).
39 __ALPHA_LVL3__ § 9. Elements of Sociological StudiesIn singling out the elements of social studies we have to do the following:~
analyse the direct and indirect factors which determine the formation of the given social concepts under certain conditions of time and place in man's production and nonproduction activities;~
establish law-governed relations between the action of social conditions and economic factors, on the one hand, and people's consciousness and their behaviour, on the other. Questionnaires, interviews and direct surveys may help to determine the degree of development of consciousness of the groups of people in which the sociologist is interested, the degree of correspondence of their subjective evaluations of practical activities;~
discover the extent of correspondence of the results of the studies to the institutionalised aims of society, to describe deviations from the general aims pursued by society, and to propose changes in these conditions and the optimum utilisation of the economic possibilities contributing to the emergence of new social relations and to the harmonious development of the personality;~
elaborate new theoretical propositions contributing to the development of theoretical sociology and practical measures whose realisation will make it possible to regulate particular social processes in the direction determined by the objective requirements of society.
Thus, sociological research is concerned with human activities in the diversity of their forms and with their conditions of life and forms of education. Sociology performs two basic functions: it arms the people with knowledge of the objective laws governing the social processes and helps to work out recommendations for optimum activities of the social systems in the different spheres of life (labour, everyday life, culture).
[40] __NUMERIC_LVL1__ PART II __ALPHA_LVL1__ MARXIST AND BOURGEOIS SOCIOLOGY TODAY __NUMERIC_LVL2__ Chapter 1 __ALPHA_LVL2__ SOCIOLOGY AND IDEOLOGY __ALPHA_LVL3__ § 1. Sociology and Social LifeWith the onset of the general crisis in world capitalism Western sociology has undergone essential changes in its' structure, functions and social development.
The general tendency of Western sociology was succinctly defined by the American sociologist Daniel Lerner. He wrote that social sciences had developed mainly as a method of observing, evaluating and eliminating the frictions and tensions that arose in the modernising (capitalist--- G. 0.) society as the result of the changes in its institutions and the increased mobility of each person.
A group of French sociologists led by Jean Stoetzel investigated the economic conditions of French workers and their aspirations in changing these conditions. The sharp discrepancies between the economic and psychological factors discovered in a number of industrial enterprises were apparently mitigated and even eliminated by capitalists who made slight improvements in the working conditions and in wages. The result, as Stoetzel asserted, was that not only were possible social conflicts and serious clashes between workers and management obviated, but also that labour productivity increased; this justified all expenses incurred in improving working conditions and raising wages.
Numerous other examples could be cited where the ruling social groups influence the formation of people's consciousness and actually increase after empirical investigations of psychological and socio-psychological factors. The main conclusion is that if empirical research is to be of 41 practical significance, the results must not be utilised by monopoly capital as a means of further oppressing people's consciousness.
Some Western sociologists do not confine themselves to internal political problems. They urge their governments to pay more attention to sociological investigations for application in foreign policy. The American sociologist Arnold W. Green writes: ``If the United States government seeks to establish close economic, political and military affiliations with countries and peoples all over the globe, then we (i.e., sociologists---G.O.) must know more than we do about those countries and their peoples. What are their cultures? What are the prevailing attitudes toward the United States, toward technological development? What beliefs and prejudices of theirs can be enlisted to draw them into our power orbit and what ones will have to be mollified or accepted before this can be done? What are the prevailing social-class structures, the focal points of leadership? Whose co-operation is most crucial before various programmes are launched? After such programmes have been started, continuing answers to all these questions must be carefully gathered and checked" [16; 8].
Further, W. W. Rostow, the American economist, in a speech at a White House reception in honour of the participants in the Fifth World Congress of Sociology ( Washington, 1962) suggested that today the preservation and stability of the capitalist world depended on the paths which the developing countries would take. He went on to propose to the sociologists a programme of action which might help the U.S.A. to carry out its imperialist policy with respect to the peoples of these countries, i.e., a policy of bending them to the influence of the U.S.A.
It should be made quite clear that many Western sociologists, including Americans, are inclined to a more liberal policy. Some are sincerely working for peace, for reforms in living and working conditions. Yet despite their subjective aspirations, the studies they conduct ultimately serve the interests of the monopolistic bourgeoisie and are aimed at patching up capitalism, supporting and preserving the capitalist system.
The ``patching up" and ``repairing'' of capitalism, the socio-economic measures suggested by Western sociologists, 42 may well mitigate social contradictions for a time, and may prevent overt clashes between workers and capitalists. But all these measures serve capital not the people; they help stabilise, consolidate and develop capitalist social relations, i.e., the relations of exploitation, oppression and enslavement.
By disregarding the fundamental processes of social life modern Western sociology becomes captive to pluralism. It has sired innumerable, diverse yet absolutely worthless schools and trends. Nonetheless Western sociologists point to this plurality as the greatest merit of their science. The American sociologist Robert K. Merton once wrote that in the U.S.A. there are 5,000 sociologists and each of them has ``his own sociology''. At the Fifth World Congress of Sociology the American sociologist E. C. Hughes declared that there was no single sociology, but that there were an American, Soviet, Yugoslav, Chinese and other sociologies.
Western sociology is a partisan science at the service of the monopolies. It is true that among bourgeois sociologists and political figures there are some who state that ``the world of science (sociology---G.O.), whatever its attitude to present-day affairs, must have its own continuity and pride to such an extent that it may withdraw and defend itself against the practical world and, if need be, openly disobey it" [17].
Most Western sociologists (including eminent figures like R. Konig. P. F. Lazarsfeld, R. Merton and Talcott Parsons) regard themselves as academic scholars conducting empirical and theoretical research in the interests of ``pure'' science which has no connection with politics. Whether they do or do not admit connection between their research and politics, this work ultimately serves the interests of the ruling social groups of capitalist society. It is to the credit of sociologists like C. Wright Mills, Gunnar Myrdal and Ralf Dahrendorf that they have exposed the close link between sociology and the politics of the classes ruling capitalist society. Myrdal has written that ``the social sciences have all received their impetus much more from the urge to improve society than from simple curiosity about its working. Social policy has been primary, social theory secondary" [18; 9].
43Similarly, C. Wright Mills maintained: ``The social scientist who spends his intellectual force on the details of smallscale milieux is not putting his work outside the political conflicts and forces of his time. He is, at least indirectly and in effect, 'accepting' the framework of his society" [19; 78].
Ralf Dahrendorf asserts that although the American, Parsons-type, sociologists write about their independence from political power, they actually manifest an ``interest in maintaining the status quo" (20).
From these statements it may be concluded that the social evaluation of empirical facts includes an evaluation of the existing social system and that this evaluation is made either covertly or overtly. In their endeavour to keep out of politics Western sociologists, unwittingly or not, act as defenders of the existing social order.
In the 20th century sociology has become an accepted science. It has at its disposal valuable techniques and methods, including mathematical and statistical methods, and is capable of solving many problems connected with the regulation of social events and phenomena, problems of controlling people's social behaviour. But it is the ideology, the world outlook of the society and its leaders that determines how these problems are resolved.
The main aim of Western, particularly American, sociology is the socialisation of man, i.e., to mould him to the way of life prevailing in the West. American society, for example, is good, and its social values are a blessing. All social conflicts can be resolved if only man assimilates these values. Marxist sociologists hold that a society based on exploitation and the society's values, which are an ideological reflection of this environment, are anything but a blessing.
The socialisation theory is reminiscent of the outmoded theories of Taylor-Ford, who advocated the adaptation of man to the rhythm of the machine. Man was to become an appendage of the machine and its rhythm. Modern methods and techniques afford scientific means of influencing man's consciousness, lowering it to a primitive level and adapting man to a society based on exploitation. By serving this purpose Western sociology has embarked on 44 the path of anti-humanism and serves to transform man into an obedient tool of the ruling classes.
Marxists believe that society should be humanised, that the transformation of society is a sine qua non for the transformation of man. The nature and direction of society's transformation can be understood only on the basis of scientific sociological theory. The materialist conception of history is this general sociological theory.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 2. From Descriptive Empiricism to Abstract TheoryThe change in the social functions of modern Western sociology and its more recent concentration on empirical studies have caused a certain crisis. In their preface to Modern Sociological Theory (1957) H. Becker and A. Boskoff write: ``~`We don't know where we are going, but we are on our way' is a sentiment that spoken, or unspoken, describes many of our day-to-day activities.... Even when we extrapolate 'trends', we may go sadly astray, as witness the American population forecasts made in the early 1940s. [21; V]. Pointing out that ahead there is a good deal that is unknown, they state: ``... Since we are demonstrably on our way, we need give no attention to where we seem to be going" [21; V].
Modern Western sociology is irrevocably split between empirical investigations and theory. Some Western sociologists conduct narrow empirical research in which they analyse social behaviour of personalities, and small social groups and collectives. Others invent extremely abstract and scholastic schemes of social development.
At the outset the theory and empiricism of Western sociology were in a certain measure counterposed to one another. Boskoff writes: ``Theory and research were largely strangers to one another simply because sociological problems were, in their first stages, understandably vague, and thus truly sociological data in the present-day sense were not yet available.. .. Furthermore, sociology had not yet matched the empirically varied manifestations of social phenomena with an adequate specialisation of effort, within the discipline of sociology" [21; 30--31).
Subsequently empiricism, as Western sociologists admit, 45 came to dominate. At the Fifth World Congress of Sociology the Mexican sociologist L. Recasens-Siches said: `` Incontestable is the empirical (my italics---G. 0.) nature of sociology as a scientific study of social facts, human intercourse, relations among people and groups from the point of view of their actual reality. Sociology must accomplish its tasks by means of observation, analysis and, although this is possible only to a limited extent, by experiment" [22].
Empiricism of Western sociology has gone through several stages. In the beginning, as the American sociologist B. Barber notes, sociology was conceived as a course of training in adjustment to life. Its chief purpose was to help the students to develop an ability to solve the daily practical social and personal problems. Sociology was invited to take part in courses on such problems as marriage, family, race, etc. [see 23; 17--18].
In the 1920s and 1930s empirical research was conducted into various aspects of social life at the request of industry, army and government institutions. The following books were written on the basis of empirical studies: Technical Tendencies and National Policy (edited by W. F. Ogburn), The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (two volumes) by W. I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki, Middletown in Transition by R. H. and H. M. Lynd, Society on a Street Corner by W. Foot, An American Dilemma by G. Myrdal, The American Soldier (four volumes) edited by S. A. Stouffer, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (edited by A. S. Kinsey et al.) and the Authoritarian Personality (edited by T. W. Adorno).
The range of social studies has since then greatly increased. In defining this range the American sociologists W. Ogburn and M. F. Nimkoff note that sociology deals with specific institutions, conditions and problems which are the concern of economics, political science and education. These problems include the family, local societies, population, crime, poverty, racial relations, sex, alcoholism, mental diseases, etc. There are also special sociological aspects of economic, political, educational and other sciences [see 24; 25--28].
It should be of no surprise, as Stoetzel remarks, that such ``research devoid of theoretical direction has formed without leading to noticeable progress (my italics---G. 0.) in 46 our knowledge. In it the technical means and the fact become their own ends. The difference between that which is strategic in scientific investigation and that which is not disappears" [25; II, 260].
Similarly, Lazarsfeld wrote: ``First, our times are beset by burning social issues, but the American sociological journals are filled with insignificant little studies about the dating patterns of college students or the popularity of radio programmes....
``Now the question could be raised, aren't there urgent social problems in the United States? The answer is, of course, yes. But they are of such complexity that empirical social research as it exists today can hardly cope with them [25; 227).
Robert Merton is concerned about the blind alley into which empiricism has driven sociology. Sociologists seem to be concentrating on trivial problems, while the really significant problems of human society remain uninvestigated. He says, for example, that despite the fact that wars and exploitation, poverty and injustice and uncertainty poison the lives of people and society or threaten their very existence, many sociologists work on problems so far removed from these catastrophic phenomena that they are irresponsibly petty [see 26; 11).
Merton concludes that Western sociology is at the stage which natural science reached in the 17th century. Sociology, he says, ``would not have expected Einstein to follow hard on the heels of Kepler" [27; 6).
Modern empirical sociology operates at two levels:
1) collection of data without corresponding analysis, and
2) collection of data and their empirical generalisation.
By limiting social cognition to the first level, empirical sociology diverts understanding from the real social reasons for the exacerbating contradictions in modern society and reduces all its social conflicts and contradictions to personality conflicts. At the same time numerous data are assiduously gathered which colourfully characterise the ugly reality of modern society.
On the second level sociologists may compare `` anomalous" personality behaviour in different societies and social groups and sometimes draw worthwhile conclusions about social motivation and causality. On the basis of extensive 47 data, the American sociologist S. Weinberg (28; 250) has calculated that from 60 to 75 million Americans over 15 years of age consume alcohol. Of these 17 per cent drink regularly and 48 per cent occasionally; 5,015,000 Americans drink excessively; 772,000 of the latter are women.
However, on an analysis of the facts which characterise the anomalies of American society conclusions are drawn that, for example, the percentage of alcoholism is twice as high in towns of more than 10,000 people as in rural communities, that chronic alcoholism is most commonly encountered in large cities and least of all in rural communities, that the percentage of mental disease is twice as high in urban as in rural communities, etc.
In most cases sociologists go no further than these generalisations. Their aim is to prove that all social problems centre on the personality and that they all deviate from the ``norms'' accepted by the majority of society; they are not normal aspects of capitalist development. Weinberg explains the different percentages of mental diseases in social classes by different types of personality development, different structural preferences whose obviousness is very inadequate [see 28; 320].
Without a scientific analysis all these empirical data and generalisations resemble branches lopped off trees. The Soviet sociologists P. Fedoseyev and G. Frantsev write that ``human society may be likened to a living, growing tree which in the course of its development branches out and grows a thick crown and dense foliage. Every branch and twig, every leaf of this tree of social life may be subjected to sociological description. But for the dense foliage many bourgeois scientists cannot see the tree as a whole organism, the description of the individual twigs (not infrequently one-sided) becomes an end in itself, and sociology as a science vanishes. And yet the life of the branches and twigs depends on the state of the tree as a whole. The tree of social life has its own laws of origin, growth and renewal. There is not, nor can there be any sociology without investigation of the laws of social development, of the new and old, of the tendencies and prospects for development" [29; 97).
Being unable to cope with the numerous minute data, some Western sociologists are coming to recognise the 48 paramount importance of a general sociological theory. Analysing the state of Western sociology the West German sociologist Konig notes: ``Sociology does exist notwithstanding many an open question in theory. It is research that has overflown the 'antichamber' of sociology and has brought us nearer to the core of the problem. Due to the fact that research data of many kinds has accumulated in most of the different fields of sociology, we have no longer to develop our theories in empty space but rather with the help of research results which have been carefully checked" [30; I, 148].
It is precisely such hopes that R. Merton cherishes in his idea of ``the middle range" theories with their relative and transient role. One is reminded of Tennyson's words:
Our little systems have their days;
They have their day and cease to be [27; 10).
Some sociologists query the complete rejection of regularities in social phenomena, the rejection of the possibility of generalising and forecasting. Thus the American sociologist J. G. McKinney writes: ``It is agreed that sociology studies the general, regular, and recurrent aspects of phenomena and hence can generalise and predict within the limits of its substantiated theory. This makes it a nomothetic discipline despite the substitution of empirical generalisation for natural laws" [21; 237].
Some American sociologists share the views of the German philosopher W. Windelband on the classification of sciences. He distinguishes two classes of sciences: those which are concerned with the general and proclaim natural laws (nomothetic) and those which deal with particularities in their historically determined configurations ( idiographic).
So far these views are only shared by certain individuals. McKinney maintains that sociology has accumulated extensive descriptive data on people, places and events. There are random studies of transgressors of the law, surveys of groups, ecological descriptions of towns, observations of strikes, etc. He considers the value of these descriptions to be incontestable since they serve as the focal point from which empirical generalisations issue. But he doubts their value when they remain so specific and are not associated with __PRINTERS_P_60_COMMENT__ 4--974 49 basic theory. A very promising, although modest system of empirical generalisations has been developed in the last few decades and it is natural to suppose, says McKinney, that this process will continue.
McKinney has to admit, however, that ``most theoretically oriented sociologists are seriously concerned with the paucity of generalisation as compared with the mass of particulars. Stated briefly, their concern has its basis in the fact that most sociologists affirm the desirability and necessity of formulating the general and recurrent and then in actual practice settle for the gathering of data and the amassing of descriptive particulars" [21; 204--05].
Empiricism has driven modern sociology into a blind alley and has transformed it into a descriptive discipline which is a collection of unco-ordinated data; it cannot solve any urgent social problems. Before mentioning the practical importance of a particular social process or phenomenon one must understand the objective natural connections or interconnections by which it is conditioned. But to understand this one must analyse specific material conditions and concrete life circumstances which are various forms of manifestation of the general laws of social development; thereby one gains an understanding of these laws. Knowledge of these laws and their consideration in specific sociological studies is the only scientific way of comprehending social reality in all its various connections and interconnections.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 3. Philosophical Principles of Descriptive EmpiricismThe development of Western sociology along the lines of descriptive empiricism and psychologism is also a reflection of the changes in Western philosophy since the end of the 19th century.
Positivism was the prevailing trend in Western philosophy at that time. This philosophical system, firstly, denied the importance of theoretical studies and considered only stable and indubitable facts to be the subject of study; secondly, it considered any philosophical question pseudoscientific because it could not apparently be verified by experiment; thirdly, in describing social phenomena it relied only on the methods of the natural sciences.
50All this was embraced by Western sociology in a onesided interpretation of the concept of ``social fact''. The first to define it was the French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Social facts, he said, are a stage in the behaviour (thinking, feeling, etc.) which is objective to the observer and which has a positive nature [see 31; 8-17].
This definition showed the duality of Durkheim's sociological conceptions. On the one hand, he reduced social facts of consciousness (collective consciousness) and, on the other, he considered them objective and identified them with ``things'', i.e., regarded them as independent of the investigator. He was, not without reason, criticised for his concessions to materialism. In Durkheim's own lifetime, his pupil, the French sociologist M. Mauss, criticised his formula of ``social facts are things" as a ``vulgarisation'' of social life.
Western sociologists speak of experience, but understand it only as a complex of the subject's sensations and therefore limit social studies to the first (empirical) stage of cognition, denying the role of theoretical thought. Accordingly, there are no social facts which do not appear directly before the investigator. One can only speak of what is and what can be verified, but not of what will be.
Marx exposed the inadequacy of this methodological principle: ``The reality of the value of commodities differs in this respect from Dame Quickly, that we don't know 'where to have it'. The value of commodities is the verj opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition. Turn and examine a single commodity, by itself, as we will, yet in so far as it remains an object of value (Wertding), it seems impossible to grasp it''. [5; I, 47].
Positivism also influenced the development of mathematical positivism, the ``natural-science'' school in sociology (G. Lundberg, S. Dodd, N. Roschevski, G. Zipf, F. Chapin et al). Mathematical positivism goes back to the positivism of the 19th century, mainly to that of Auguste Comte. They differ only in methods of investigation. Comte adhered to the historical method, whereas the ``natural-science'' school adheres to the mathematical and statistical method. The ``natural-science'' school has replaced A. Comte's ``moderate realism" by ``extreme nominalism''. The representatives of 51 this school assert that the unity of all sciences is only in their method and not in their material.
The mathematical positivists try to improve bourgeois sociology by using natural-science concepts in the cognition of social processes. Thus the American sociologists S. Dodd and N. Roschevski generally hold that sociology is still in a ``pre-scientific'' state since it has not as yet learned to use the methods of so exact a science as physics. They deny the qualitative peculiarity of social phenomena, the causality and regularity in the development of social science, and recommend that attention should be drawn only to the quantitative aspect of the phenomena.
Thus, a ``double series of axioms" is no longer needed since it is enough to know the laws of nature, thereby also to know the laws of social development. At the Fourth World Congress of Sociology the French sociologist Raymond Aron said:
``Inasmuch as the natural-science method has achieved striking results in all fields, sensible people do not doubt that the use of this method also makes it possible to analyse and explain the social phenomena''. For example, mathematical positivists propose to study such social phenomena as public opinion, love, nationalism, peace or hostility, marriage, democracy, etc., by means of various mathematical formulas.
Dodd, in an attempt to make sociological analysis infinitely mathematical, has suggested that sociologists should limit themselves to four basic quantitative principles of measuring the ``social situation":
1) time (T)---all that is associated with duration (age, length of the working day, the time of moving from one table to another, etc.);
2) space (L)---all that has extension or is associated with displacement (geographical space, the distance from home to place of work, migration, etc.);
3) population (P)---category common to all classes of social phenomena;
4) characteristics (I) of people or of their surroundings. Using these symbols Dodd has derived the following formula for measuring the social situation (S):
S=(T:L:P:I).
This means that any quantitatively recorded social 52 situation can be expressed as a combination of these four elements. Dodd includes in the social situation concept only what requires observation and can be verified.
G. Lundberg, C. Schrag and O. Larsen write: ``The transition to the view that the so-called subjective phenomena of sociology and psychology can be studied as behaviour is undoubtedly the most important development ever to take place in the history of the social sciences. By regarding the mind, thoughts, imaginings, aspirations and culture of man as forms and products of observable behaviour we can use the highly powerful methods of natural science, including especially logic and mathematics, for the study of the social relations of man" [32; 42].
G. Zipf, another representative of the ``natural-science'' school, has tried to apply to the analysis of the social situation the principle of economy of effort, namely: in any situation people choose ``the line of least resistance".
Mathematical positivism is untenable because by using the methods of the exact sciences in studying social phenomena the proponents of this trend ignore the qualitative aspect of these phenomena. Neglect of the quality of social phenomena and failure to delineate between qualitatively different objects distort reality.
The sociologist who applies the concepts of the natural sciences to social phenomena commits a grave error. V. I. Lenin wrote: ``In fact, an enquiry into social phenomena and elucidation of the method of the social sciences cannot be undertaken with the aid of these concepts. Nothing is easier than to tack an 'energeticist' or ' biologosociological' label on to such phenomena as crises, revolutions, the class struggle and so forth; neither is there anything more sterile, more scholastic and lifeless than such an occupation" [1; 14, 328).
To understand human behaviour in social situations, one must consider not only the quantitative aspect, but also the totality of the forces and influences that have exerted pressure on them and impelled them to act as they do. The social situation is a link in the complex chain of the sociohistorical process. In his letter to J. Bloch, Engels emphasises that social development occurs in the form of interaction in which economic movement ultimately penetrates through a great number of chance events, but which is also 53 influenced by the different factors of the superstructure, i.e., the political forms of the class struggle and its results, the legal forms and the reflection of all these real battles in the brains of the participants---political, legal and philosophical theories, religious views, etc. Had it not been for this complex interaction, which is difficult to investigate, ``the application of the theory to any period of history one chose would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree" [2; II, 488].
This social interaction is effected not by itself, but only in people's activities. Engels wrote in this connection: ``The final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each again has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant--- the historical event" [2; II, 489]. Since the will of one person encounters obstacles in the wills of other persons and is of an elementary character, all wills together form a single unconsciously acting force.
The neopositivists generally ignore any conditionality of social behaviour by material factors. They regard social behaviour as a manifestation of energy identified with the concept of ``psychic energy''. They ``dissolve'' matter in ``psychic energy''. The neopositivists thereby are akin to the spiritualists. They mechanistically identify the concepts of substance and force in physics with the concept of matter and consciousness, they eliminate the differences between the higher and lower forms of motion and ignore the specific character of the social form of motion of matter.
The social form of material motion of matter is bound up with consciousness. This does not imply an identity of consciousness and social life. As a function of the brain, consciousness reflects the objective social reality which exists outside of consciousness. This objective reality is the totality of the social relations conditioned by the general level of the productive forces.
Even bourgeois sociologists are coming to realise the barrenness of neopositivism. Thus Pitirim Sorokin expresses his dissatisfaction with the neopositivist sociologists in writing that their ``operational method" is a parody of the 54 ``operational method" of the physical sciences; their experimental and instrumental technique is being transformed (with minor exceptions) into pseudo-experimental and pseudo-instrumental; their ``scientific'' tests are no more scientific than the old guess-work methods or the magic tests of antiquity. Their attempts to take accurate measurements of a multitude of non-scalable qualitative phenomena are also to a large extent fruitless; their efforts in using the method of mathematical models are at best productive of beautiful pictures of a fine sociological palace for the construction of which the necessary material is lacking; their ``quantisation'' of many psycho-social phenomena often leads either to futile ``numerology'' or to replacement of mathematics by half-baked ``stenography''.
In general their borrowing of terms, concepts and formulas from the physical sciences leads to distortion of the meaning they had in physics and to cluttering up sociology with fragments of meaningless, parasitic terms, concepts and assertions [33; 7-8].
By substituting the concepts and laws of the natural sciences for those of the social sciences sociologists fail to come closer to understanding social phenomena.
Many modern Western sociologists are under the influence of neo-Kantianism. Max Weber, W. Windelband and H. Rickert emphasise the role of subjective factors in the historical process. They stress the role of subjective behaviour in the social situation, conceiving this behaviour as a process of mental reproduction of the emotions.
In addition to neo-Kantianism, pragmatism has had an essential influence on sociology. The American sociologist Talcott Parsons writes that the true instrument of sociological investigation is that which facilitates ``the attainment of the goals of scientific investigation" [34; 66]. For the sake of this the concepts of causality and substance are discarded and only the sensations and subjective evaluations of the subject are declared to exist.
The pragmatist sociologists deny the connection between pragmatist sociology and the subjective idealist philosophy of pragmatism. McKinney writes: ``Pragmatism, although it is a philosophical label, stands for an attitude of mind rather than for a system of ideas; hence it appears in many diverse approaches and systems. Pragmatism is represented 55 in the habit of interpreting ideas or events in terms of their consequences. As a result, it is closely allied with the logic of experiment, which is the basis of modern research science. In general, then, pragmatism does not seem to imply any final philosophic conclusions but merely manifests a tendency to accept anything that works in the conduct of research" [21; 209].
Some sociologists deny any connections between pragmatist sociology and pragmatist philosophy in order to prove that this sociology presumably rests on practical and scientific data. McKinney further asserts that pragmatism manifests itself in several different ways, particularly in decreased dogmatism in sociology and the growing tendency not to regard any individual approach, theory or instrument, as final or decisive. The pragmatist trend in sociology identifies itself with the use of scientific methods, since these methods involve a continuous analysis of problematical situations, and the suggestion and consideration of various hypotheses associated with these problems and their verification.
McKinney writes with satisfaction that American methodology is permeated with pragmatic views, which is characteristic of the works not only of recognised empiricists, but also of outstanding theoreticians. By way of example he cites the theory of Parsons who has developed the most ``rationalistic'' and ``deductive'' system of modern sociology.
The section concluding the chapter Pragmatic Development in McKiney's article is of certain interest: ``The primary contributions of the pragmatic point of view to methodology seem to be its emphasis on instrumentalism, experimental design (controlled experience), and modest working theory. Insofar as it has benefited from these contributions of pragmatism, American methodology has rather attained 'hard-headedness' than succumbed to 'headlessness' " [21; 210].
Pragmatism is related to operationalism. The operationalists consider the inexactitudes and ambiguities of language to be the cause of the social vices of modern society. The British sociologist John Madge writes that ''. . . people with fully common aims---that is, with the impulse to co-operate in all projects---and aware of their community, tend 56 gradually to eliminate their language conflicts, retaining only decorative and immaterial distinctions. Convergence in language may in fact be an important indication of intensifying community" [35; 41--42].
The sociologists assert that all attempts at defining concepts verbally are useless. It is therefore necessary to seek definitions which are specific for a given social fact. Thus, they say, before the invention of the thermometer no verbal definition could guarantee an exact temperature reading. Professor Madge writes that the invention of the thermometer ``reduced the latter source of inaccuracy, as it transferred the perceptual process from that of feeling the hot object to that of watching the height of a column of fluid" [35; 48].
Referring to analogous examples Madge, Lundberg and other Western sociologists propose to replace verbal definitions by operational definitions. As the basis for defining social phenomena, operationalism takes not an objective, but a subjective criterion---the opinion of the experimenters. A true definition of a social phenomenon, however, depends not on the experimenter or a measuring instrument, but on how objectively it reflects the properties and relations of the objects and processes of social reality.
Existentialism has also exerted a certain influence on sociology. This philosophy absolutises internal subjective motives of social behaviour and personality existence. Although rejecting neopositivism, the existentialists limit the role of the mind in cognition. They reduce the process of cognition mainly to intuition.
Existentialism limits the process of thinking to the sphere of activity of only the given individual, regarding him as an absolutely independent essence and severing man from the social environment which is depicted as something external and hostile. Man's essence, or existence, as the philosophers assert, is man's internal core which remains unaffected even when man loses all he can possess in this world or when everything turns out to be illusory. Existentialist sociologists split the human essence and oppose feelings and instincts to the intellect.
Some Western sociologists (including Sorokin et al.) are under the influence of E. Husserl's phenomenology. Formulating the basic principles of phenomenology relative to 57 social investigation, A. Vierkandt, a German sociologist and follower of Husserl in sociology, wrote in A Theory of Society: ``This book does not deal with the history of marriage or the origin of the state, does not raise the question of the laws of the history of people's social life or the degree of development of occupations, does not touch upon social policy or the statistics of crime and takes no interest in the problems of race or the influence of natural selection caused by phenomena of culture or war, but makes it a point to discover 'a series of final, a priori, essential states of things', to reduce the endless number of facts to a small number of 'elementary phenomena' arising from the ' essence of the thing' " [see 36; 344].
Following the basic propositions of phenomenology Sorokin, M. Scheler and other sociologists and philosophers have renounced empirical investigation of social facts, and have proclaimed the possibility of understanding the essence of social life outside such investigation, on the basis of ``a priori" truths. As the starting point in the origin of social life they regard innate impulses such as the subordination impulse, the assistance impulse, the struggle impulse, the inclination to emulate one's neighbours, the inclination to sympathy, imitation, etc. The internal connection that arises from these impulses and unites a large number of people is, according to phenomenologists, the very essence of society.
The phenomenological tendency in sociology is a somewhat altered psychologism. According to the phenomenologists, understanding the essence of people's social connections is obtained by an analysis of mental states, not an empirical investigation of existing societies. The social link that unites people arises from their innate impulses. The ultimate cause of social and group life is inborn traits not the external environment.
To understand social phenomena apparently requires neither inductive nor deductive methods; direct perception suffices. Sorokin writes: ``In great scientific discoveries and important achievements in all fields of creativity the initial idea is ordinarily inspired by supra-sensory and supra-- logical intuition or genius as the way of cognition and creativity different from sensory observation or logical reasoning" [30; I, 237].
58Phenomenologist sociologists absolutise the role of intuition in cognition and reduce the role of experiment only to verification of intuitively obtained ideas.
Sociology only appears to be independent of the development of bourgeois philosophy. Modern Western sociology, represented by such schools as the ``natural-science'', `` analytical'', ``functional'', ``institutional'' and others, has proclaimed complete ``autonomy'' from philosophy, but in fact there can be no question of ``autonomy'' since the homily of ``independence'' from philosophy is itself a unique philosophy.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 4. The Subject Matter of Modern Western SociologySociology textbooks quite often refer to the `` interrelations" of people as the subject matter of sociology. For example, the American sociologists R. Schermerhorn and A. Boskoff call sociology ``a science of human interaction in which the attempt is made to discover systematic evidence for determinate relations between classes of social data in order to develop generalisations that are true under specified conditions" [21; 61].
The American sociologist Henry Fairchild defines sociology as ``the scientific study of the phenomena arising out of the group relations of human beings. The study of man and his human environment in their relations to each other" [37; 302].
The French sociologist Jean Haesaert also defines sociology as a science concerned with the ``interrelations among individuals, among individual and the group, among groups of people and between the group and the individual; the people connected by these interrelations constitute the common group which we call society" [38; 6].
But there is an infinite number of forms of relationships among people (relationships between teacher and pupils, the members of a volley-ball team, the salesman and customer, the conductor and musicians, etc.).
Haesaert has no answer to the question of what relationships form the basis of society.
It turns out that sociology has to deal with all forms of human relationships. But no science can do that. Further, the existence of such a sociology would make redundant all 59 other sciences investigating human relationships (history, economics, law, etc.) since all the humanities are concerned with human relationships.
Sometimes the term ``interrelations'' is replaced by the term ``interaction''. The American sociologist C. Loomis writes that ``for an understanding of 'Society' or any of the systems that exist in 'Society' ... attention must be turned to the uniformities of interaction" [39; 4--5]. Parsons defines sociology as the study of human groups, social relations and social institutes or, more academically, as a ``science which aims to work out an analytical theory of the systems of social action to the extent to which these systems may be conceived in generally integrated values" [40; 768]. The American sociologist A. Inkeles considers the task of sociology to be ``the study of the structure and functioning of social systems---that is, relatively enduring systems of action-shared by groups of people, large and small" [41; 250].
Some sociologists would transform sociology into a discipline which would analyse all human interrelations and interactions. Thus A. Green holds that sociology is a synthesising and generalising science of all of man's social relations. Like the other social sciences, sociology differs from the physical sciences in that it takes into consideration the importance of the objects, people and relations to the possibility of making a general study of people in their social relations. Unlike the physical sciences, sociology must also investigate the human wills and the aims which men pursue [see 16; 1].
The shortcoming of these definitions is that they are too broad. An infinite number of interrelations exist among people most diverse in form and content; the relations between children and parents, pupils and teachers, spectators and actors, customers and salesmen, soldiers and officers, etc. In a word, there are so many forms of interrelations that sociology alone cannot study them. Moreover, some forms of interrelations are essential, others are of secondary importance.
Western sociologists devote most of their attention to studying the psychological, ideological interrelations of people. This immediately distorts their understanding of human relations.
60Contrary to Western sociology, historical materialism holds that the essential relations of people are those which are established in the process of production of material wealth. Since Western sociologists represent the interests of the private owners of the means of production they cannot subscribe to this point of view.
But there are also even broader definitions. The WestGerman Philosophical Dictionary defines sociology as ``a teaching on forms of and changes in the common life of people, animals and plants. It is a science about social life, whether it is a general and basic or particular social science; as a system it embraces the social formations and social processes. Thus it investigates the totality of social phenomena, such as people, estate, tribe, unions of men, gens, family, marriage, various types of social formations, their principles, forms, development, origin and disappearance" [42; 548].
If this definition is accepted, sociologists will have to investigate not only social phenomena, but also the life of animals and plants.
The definition of the concept of ``sociology'', which includes all social facts in the subject matter, is also extremely broad. This definition has been borrowed by modern sociologists from Durkheim who considered social facts to be the subject matter of sociology. But all historical, political, economic, demographic, ethnographic and other innumerable phenomena may be regarded as social facts. Sociology alone is incapable of embracing all social facts. This can be done only by all the social sciences taken together.
The most prevalent definition of the concept of `` sociology" in modern Western science, given by the eminent German sociologist Max Weber, is also exceedingly broad. Weber defined sociology as the science of the ``behaviour of individuals".
The American sociologist L. Bernard considers the main task of general sociology to be the summation of all available knowledge of human behaviour and social situations. Another American sociologist, J. Zadrozny, defines sociology, in the Dictionary of Social Science, as ``the objective study of the regularities in the conduct of persons as members of groups and societies. It consists of objectively 61 derived knowledge as well as hypotheses and heuristic knowledge about human conduct" [43; 320].
This definition is also propounded by S. Dodd, G. Zipf, G. Lundberg and O. Neurath who consider the subject matter of sociology, in the broad sense of the word, to be ``human social behaviour, with the emphasis on man's behaviour in relation to other men''. They define sociology as a ``body of related generalisations about human social behaviour arrived at by scientific methods" [32; 6--7].
But behaviour in general embraces so broad a sphere of relations that their investigation is again too much for one science. J. McKinney is forced to admit that `` unfortunately, the promise of radical behaviourism did not 'pay off' in research. Scarcely any contributions really based on the principle emerged, possibly because the very thing it sought to explain did not easily (if at all) respond to the mechanical circulation of stimulus-response. Nothing approaching scientific knowledge in the radical behaviouristic sense has accumulated regarding such phenomena as fashions, fads, crazes, conventions, rumours, public opinion, attitudes, customs, institutions and social systems" [21; 207].
Some sociologists, therefore, consider the aim of sociology to be the study not of human behaviour in general, but behaviour in the group. Thus in the introduction to the book A New Outline of the Principles of Sociology (1951) the American sociologist S. Smith writes that sociology deals with ``group behaviour". Wherever man is in contact with other men he is an interacting member of the social order. The elements, principles and results of group behaviour form the subject matter of sociology.
According to the American sociologists K. Young and R. Mack, sociology is concerned with the ``structure of social life, the way in which groups are put together and the way in which they function" [44; 8].
The American sociologist H. Johnson defines sociology as a science that deals with social groups: their internal forms or methods of organisation, processes which tend to retain or alter these forms of organisation and the relations between groups [see 45; 2].
The American sociologists L. Broom and P. Selznick see in sociology a discipline that ``explores the varieties of 62 group structure and the ways they affect political, psychological and economic relationships" [46; 7].
Sorokin subscribes to this point of view. In his opinion the sociologist studies the likeness of social groups, whether political, religious, school or otherwise. He writes: `` Sociology, in brief, is the body of knowledge about the similarities to be found among various human groups, the patterns of interaction common to different human endeavours" [44; 7].
An analysis of these definitions of sociology shows that the transfer of the investigation from the behaviour of individuals to that of groups alters nothing in principle. In studying the group bourgeois sociologists are interested in secondary attitudes without any relation to the ownership of the means of production, to the role the individual or group plays in material production.
Moreover, the groups themselves are often categorised arbitrarily. Sociologists study groups at random (football teams, chess players, etc.). The study of a football player's behaviour may be of some interest. But the study of such behaviour may at best affect the athletic success of the football team, but it will not help us to understand the laws of development of the historical process.
By reducing the laws of social development to an analysis of social behaviour and its forms, Western sociology has lost its specific identity and has largely merged with social psychology and social anthropology. Modern Western sociologists draw no essential line between sociology, social psychology and social anthropology and reduce their subject matter to collective behaviour in a given social situation.^^1^^
J. Guber writes that ``during very recent years there has arisen an attempt to integrate sociology, psychology and anthropology into one science of human behaviour. While _-_-_
~^^1^^ Thus, Fairchild notes that sociology is ``the scientific study of phenomena arising out of the group relations of human beings" [37; 302]. J. Zadrozny holds that these phenomena are the subject matter of ``social psychology" [43; 315]. Fairchild defines social anthropology as the ``study of the social behaviour of man" [37; 12]. Broom and SeJznick consider that ``social psychology is largely concerned with connections between group experience and the psychology of the individual" [46; 6].
63 we cannot at present be certain that this movement to integrate the three fields will stand the test of time, there are many reasons to applaud the movement as a step in the right direction" [47; 12].The objects studied by these three sciences are really very closely related, but it must not be forgotten that they also have essential differences.
Social psychology is concerned with the laws governing the origin and development of mental acts and actions manifested in social groups under specific conditions.
The subject matter of social anthropology comprises the various cultures and their influence on the formation of the social-psychic traits of the tribe, nation, people and individual. It supplements social psychology. Both these sciences are concerned with the processes of formation of social-psychic traits.
The result of identifying sociology with social psychology and social anthropology was that some sociologists began to study human society from the standpoint of various psychological trends (Freudism, behaviourism and Gestalt psychology), which offers extensive opportunities for mysticism and irrationalism. For example, by explaining the motivation of personalities and social groups by recourse to psychoanalytical theory, sociologists have ultimately come to believe that the social world is of an irrational character; they reduce it to various unconscious, instinctive processes of mental activity of a particular personality.
Sociology is a science not of social-psychic factors, but of various historically formed factors and circumstances which determine the character and content of these socialpsychic factors which, in their turn, are forms of manifestation of general and specific objective laws of social development.
Some Western sociologists have admitted that Western science does not have any general sociological theories. Thus, according to the eminent American sociologist N. Glazer, modern sociology in America is a discipline defined by its specific methods rather than by its inferences or subject of study [see 48; 43]. But by either failing to see or not wishing to see the social causes of this, they explain the poverty of their theoretical thinking by the fact that 64 not enough empirical material has as yet been accumulated. They recommend that a methodology should be elaborated and that theories of ``average importance" must be worked out as working hypotheses.
No wonder, then, that most of the results of empirical social studies carried out by Western sociologists are mere lists which have not been and cannot be subjected to sociological generalisation. Such empirical studies diverge from reality, distort the unity and specific regularity of social life.
American sociologists even consider this a merit of their science. The authors of the book Sociology in the United States of America (1956) evaluate the empirical trend of sociological works as the highest achievement of American sociology. Moreover, they openly admit that the financial support of institutions, government agencies and private organisations and business enterprises has helped empirical studies. The authors emphasise that empirical social investigation in the U.S.A. has now attained a status as a widely recognised and well-paid profession.
In the journal Sociology and Social Studies the American sociologist S. Taylor recently wrote that in his opinion sociology (reference is, of course, made to Western sociology) has in the last 40 years made the following two steps forward: social theory has become less philosophical and historical, while empirical studies have played the leading role in the achievements of sociology.
This cannot be denied. Studies by bourgeois sociologists have grown very shallow. Sociology is dissolving in statistics or is becoming a mere description of various aspects of social life. Scientific studies are being replaced by description of urban and rural life, industrial enterprises, etc.
Every sociologist concentrates on some small, particular range of problems. Some sociologists study problems of labour intensification in industry, others study the life of the rural population, some investigate family relations, others the increase in juvenile delinquency, and others the influence of alcoholism on moral degradation, etc. But in the mass of books and articles on the results of empirical social studies carried out by Western sociologists there are no serious works on the basic problems of capitalist __PRINTERS_P_65_COMMENT__ 5---974 65 reality, such as unemployment and impoverishment of the working class.
The passion of Western sociologists for empirical studies was wittily ridiculed by the American philosopher J. Somerville who, in his pamphlet Umbrellalogy---A New Science? quoted a fictitious letter of some ``scientist'' asserting that he had created a new branch of science--- ``umbrellalogy''. He had presumably made a study of Manhattan, had discovered the number of umbrellas (including their size, colour, etc.) possessed by each family, and was going to make a similar study of the umbrellas in the State of New York, the country and, lastly, the world. With an obvious dig at contemporary sociology he wrote that, like any science, ``umbrellalogy'' had its own laws, for example, the ``law of correspondence of the colour variations with the sex of the owner" (women's umbrellas were of many different colours, whereas those of men were almost all black), and the ``law of a growing tendency to acquire umbrellas in rainy weather". __NUMERIC_LVL2__ Chapter 2 __ALPHA_LVL2__ SOCIETY __ALPHA_LVL3__ § 1. Definition of ``Society''
Western sociology has neither a generally accepted definition of the subject matter of sociology nor a generally accepted definition of the concept of ``society''. Now and again the various schools and sociologists put entirely different meanings into this concept.
Most definitions of this concept are exceedingly broad. Ely Chinoy defines society as the aggregate ``of individuals in their relations to one another and as members of groups" [49; 48].
But this definition may be applied to any group---from a hockey team to a religious sect.
Nor is his second definition acceptable. Accordingly society is ``that group within which man can live a total common life rather than an organisation limited to some specific purpose or purposes. From this point of view society consists not only of individuals related to one another, 66 but also of interconnected and partly overlapping groups" [49; 28].
All we have learned so far is that society consists of groups as well as individuals. But, then, any workshop group consists of ``interconnected and partly overlapping groups" (engineers, technicians, workers, skilled and unskilled, young and old, etc.), although on this basis the shop group cannot be termed a society.
Very little is altered by Chinoy's addition to his definition of ``society''. He says that society as such is often defined as ``the system of institutions which govern behaviour and provide the framework for social life. In this view, society is to be described in terms of its principal institutions---familial, religious, economic, political, educational, and so on" [49; 28].
But what it means ``to be described in terms" and, moreover, in terms of ``principal institutions" is extremely vague.
Green defines ``society'' as the ``largest relatively permanent group who share common interests, common territory, a common mode of life....'' [16; 29].
But this definition covers any aggregation of living organisms which may also be the ``largest group'', may have an organisation and exist under ``conditions of time and place".
The definition of the concept of ``society'' suggested by the American sociologists Rumney and Maier is amorphous and diffuse. They say that in the broadest sense this concept includes ``every kind and degree of relationship entered into by man, whether these relations be organised or unorganised, direct or indirect, conscious or unconscious, co-operative or antagonistic" [50; 74].
Nor is there anything more definite in the definition of the concept of ``society'' given by Young and Mack. They define society as ``the broadest grouping of people who share a common set of habits, ideas and attitudes, live in a definite territory and consider themselves a social unit" [44; 28].
But what if this group does not consider itself a ``social unit'', will it then constitute a society?
Definitions based on the consensus among people on the basis of common interests are still current among __PRINTERS_P_66_COMMENT__ 5* 67 sociologists. Thus in the West German Philosophical Dictionary society is defined as a ``group of people existing as a result of purposeful and reasonably organised common life and work.... Society rests on convention, contract and mutual interests" [42; 417].
Many definitions of the concept of ``society'' found in bourgeois sociological literature are littered with inessential characteristics. Thus in Freedman's Principles of Sociology society is defined as ``a group of people who have become a spatial, functional, cultural unit .. . which occupies a definable geographical areas'', the members of this unit being ``bound together by ties of mutual dependence" and sharing a ``distinctive cultural heritage, uniquely their own" [51; 78].
Most of the elements forming part of the definition of ``society'', except ``culture'', may be ascribed to such a ``group'' as, for example, an ant-hill or a beehive, which comprise everything mentioned in the foregoing definition ---common space, division of functions, ties of mutual dependence, heredity, etc.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 2. Society and the Social Process. Theory of Social InteractionWestern sociologists consider social interaction the basis of social life and its processes.
G. Lundberg writes: ``Interaction, the inclusive group process, is the central factor in all of man's social life. Behaviour systems grow out of interaction" [32; 242--43].
What is, according to the representatives of this conception, the essence of this interaction?
F. Merrill holds that social interaction is a ``continuous and reciprocal series of contacts between two or more socialised human beings" [52; 21].
But this explanation cannot be accepted because it replaces one unknown (interaction) by another (contacts). In fact, every contact is not a social interaction. How many contacts are needed to make a series? How long must the contacts be?
Green writes = __NOTE__ Missing open double-quote in original. about the mutual influences that individuals and groups have upon one another as they attempt to solve individual or collecive problems and as they strive to reach individual or group goals" [16; 49].
68But the words ``mutual influence" are as general as the word ``interaction'', since interaction presupposes mutual influence and mutual influence presupposes interaction. Nor do Merrill's comments introduce any clarity. He defines interaction as a ``two-sided process" of reaction to and influence on the surroundings.
To enhance the significance and role of the term `` interaction'', sociologists verbosely discourse on its nature and relation to other terms. Thus the American sociologist J. Ruesch writes that social interaction consists of expressive actions on the part of one or several persons, realised or unrealised perception of these expressive actions by other persons, and the reciprocal observation that such expressive actions are realised by others [see 53]. These actions, says M. Levy, another American sociologist, may be physical in the sense that each person does something for another; more often they are symbolic in the sense that each person exchanges ideas with another person by means of symbols in the form of language concepts or gestures which have a definite meaning [see 54; 113]. But these commonplace truths that actions may be physical or symbolic, conscious or unconscious, have been known since time immemorial. Bourgeois sociologists have resorted to them apparently to say something about interaction.
In his attempt to define the ``fundamental principle" of social interaction Merrill confines himself to general phrases. It turns out that this principle is transmission and communication. He resorts to Dewey's well-known proposition, according to which ``society not only continues to exist by transmission and communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication" [55; 5], `` communication" being defined by Merrill as ``millions of meaningful exchanges" that ``take place every moment in any large society. ... The nature of these exchanges varies from individual to individual and from one social class to another" [52; 25].
The result is an obvious tautology: interaction is defined through communication and communication is reduced to interaction.
Analogous ideas are expressed by Merrill about ``levels'' of social interaction. Accordingly, interaction is possible, firstly, between individuals and, secondly, between 69 individuals and groups. Moreover, he writes that a group is two or more persons who interact both actually and potentially, at a certain period, their interaction being motivated by a common aim [see 56; 33]. For such a conclusion there is no need to conduct any sociological studies.
Besides these two levels Merrill mentions a third. In answer to the American sociologists Shaw and Ort he considers this level to be the interaction between individuals and culture, implying by culture the common habits, customs, actions and relations between persons and social groups whose interests coincide or conflict.
It turns out that man interacts with his habits, thoughts and actions! Interaction with .. . actions! And in general, it is difficult to imagine interaction between individuals and inter-personal relations.
Chinoy also writes about the interaction between the personality and culture, but limits it to interaction between heredity and culture. The personality actively influences culture and adjusts it to its inner needs. He writes: ``The close dependence of the individual upon his social milieu and the fact that he derives much of his personality from the culture of his group and through the process of interaction with others, then, clearly cannot mean that he is merely the instrument of his society or that his personality is simply a reflection of his culture" [49; 55].
Western sociologists depict the entire process of interaction between the personality and culture as individual interaction. Chinoy asserts that ``the process of socialising individuals and the demands society frequently makes of its members almost inevitably create psychological problems, repressing man's desires and enforcing modes of behaviour which run counter to impulses and drives, both innate and acquired" [49; 57].
According to this point of view, social life is completely dependent on human instincts. The American sociologist R. Linton notes that ``if society is to survive, culture must not only provide techniques for training and repressing the individual, it must also provide him with compensations and outlets. If it thwarts and suppresses him in certain directions, it must help him to expand in others. It must 70 also provide the individual with harmless outlets for his socially repressed desires" [57; 413].
Psychic activity is determined by the same psychic, while the social environment is a derivative of the psychic. The result is a vicious circle: the psychic is explained by the psychic.
Nor is the situation improved by Linton substituting the two words ``work together" for the term ``interaction''. A society is ``any group of people who have lived and worked together long enough to get themselves organised and to think of themselves as a social unit with well-defined limits" [57; 91].
There are so many unknown quantities in this definition that it is impossible to use it as a guide. One might well ask how long they must live and work together (one year? ten years? twenty years?). How must they restrict themselves to be regarded as a social unit? What are the precise limits? Since the definition gives no answers to any of these questions, it is open to subjective and arbitrary interpretation.
Western sociologists regard interaction only as a socialpsychological phenomenon and overlook its objective, material, social nature. They consider social interaction to be a purely spiritual process in which individual or ``group'' minds interact.
This shows the influence of the social-psychology concepts of G. Tarde who believed ``imitation'' to be the basis of social interaction and declared it to be not only interpsychic, but even intrapsychic interaction with indefinite autosuggestion. Tarde regards social interaction as only a social-psychological process characterised by extensive imitation of inventions and by a growth of new inventions which, in turn, become the basis for new imitations. Invention and imitation are, then, the main element of interaction.
Western sociologists regard social life to be a self-- developing spiritual essence. They therefore endeavour to purify sociology of the so-called non-social factors, particularly economic, as irrelevant in determinig social interaction.
What, then, is the substance of social interaction? What is the social force that engenders it?
71That which is invented, that which is imitated, says Tarde, is nothing but an idea or wish, a judgement or intention which in certain measure manifests a belief and desire that essentially constitute the actual soul of any word in the language, any prayer in religion, any measure in a state, any work in industry, any action in art. Belief and desire are apparently essence (substance) and force. Society is organised precisely through agreement and disagreement in beliefs mutually strengthened and mutually limited; this is the essence of its institutions. It is precisely through agreement and disagreement in the wishes and needs of society that the beliefs, mainly religious and moral, but also the legal and political---these plastic forces of society---function.
By proclaiming beliefs and desires to be the essence of social interaction, Tarde distorts the real meaning of social life. Externally social interaction appears as consensus and dissensus which often result in an open struggle between different beliefs, desires, passions. But behind these beliefs, wishes, desires and passions, in the final analysis, stand various material factors. The passions, desires and other factors characterising social interaction are based on people's strivings to satisfy their needs. By investigating the influence of the various methods of satisfying these needs on people's social relations, materialist sociologists provide a scientific explanation of social interaction.
While admitting ``imitation'' in the process of social interaction, Durkheim held that Tarde's great error was his suggestion of imitation as the main factor determining the essence of social interaction [31]. In his opinion the main sign of a social relationship is the ``compulsory'' character of social interaction. He wrote that he did not have to speak French to his countrymen or use an established coin, but he could not help it. He could not possibly escape this necessity even if he tried [see 31). But he regarded the `` compulsion" itself as social-psychic category.
W. Thomas based social interaction or ``social relationship" on ``desire''. Man has four basic desires: ``a desire for a new position'', ``desire for recognition'', ``desire to rule" and ``desire for safety".
By making a fetish of the social-psychic relationships and proclaiming them to be such sui generis, modern 72 Western sociologists tend to interpret the nature 01 social life in a subjective-idealist manner.
The making of a fetish of the spirit, psyche and ideas forces sociologists to an overt or covert recognition of some mystic power. What other sociologists expounded in a disguised form the German sociologist O. Spann dealt with outspokenly. Unlike Durkheim and Thomas, he did not stop half-way and revealed clearly his subjective-idealist conception of the social process.
He wrote: ``To embrace the concept of society as a whole, we must not take the mass of individuals as the point of departure. On the contrary, for this purpose we must turn to the interaction engendered by the human spirit. Since the individual intellectual personality develops not in isolation, but only by interaction with others, from the point of view of the individual personality this manifests definite supra-individnalism. Hence, in addition to individual personalities, there is also some other factor. The creative, life-impelling force that acts between them does not belong to any part of the whole. It rises above them and forms its own substance. The result is a real whole which is more than the sum of its constituent parts and which, because of this, stands before them logically as well. In relation to the whole the separate parts have no concrete individual existence, but are supplements that develop only under the influence of the aforesaid creative force" [58; 122--23].
A. Small considered social interaction to consist of the interaction of various interests which exhibit a `` tendency to ensure gratification of the ungratifled ability''. He reduced social interaction to interests being developed, established and satisfied.
But what are these interests?
Small speaks of the following interests: health (eating, procreating, etc), welfare (being master of things), social intercourse, craving for knowledge and beauty (symmetry, etc.), and an interest in Tightness, which is superior to all other interests. Each group of these interests tends to become absolute [see 599; 201] and to be satisfied at the expense of others. The result is a general conflict of interests, which at the same time reveals their general relations. The bearers of these interests are the social groups and institutions 73 which form around them. The social process therefore appears as a series of relationships between people and social groups whose interests either coincide or conflict.
The social interaction of people naturally manifests itself in a clash or coincidence of passions, desires and interests. What is important, however, is not to recognise or deny these relations, but finally to reduce them to material, intrinsic principles. The social-psychic, ideological and material relations of interaction are connected aspects of social relations. According to the materialist conception of these social relations, social-psychic relations are but a superstructure built on the material relations which form independently of man's will and consciousness.
Erich Fromm, the American social psychologist, endeavours to give the most complete psychological interpretation of social interaction. He regards psychological factors as ``active forces in the social process" and reduces the social process to two basic periods: a) a need for intercourse with other people, and b) a need for freedom and autonomy. In his opinion these needs are rooted not in the social process itself, but in the very essence of human freedom and in reality.
Fromm asserts that human history is characterised by ``conflict and strife" because ``each step in the direction of growing individuation threatens people with new insecurities. Primary bonds once severed cannot be mended. . .. However, if the economic, social or political conditions on which the process of human individuation depends do not offer a basis for the realisation of individuality .. . while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. ... Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world that promises relief from uncertainty even if it deprives the individual of his freedom" [60; 36--37].
Fromm thereby considers man an independent element in the process of social change. True, he does not separate the ``character of the economy and of the political structure from the human needs''. He writes that the psychological forces ``also have a dynamism of their own, that is, they are an expression of human needs which, although they can be moulded, cannot be uprooted''. It is not 74 important, he continues, that the ``economic forces must be understood not as psychological motivations, but as objective conditions . . . dependent on objective factors, such as the natural productive forces, technique, geographical forces....'' [60; 298).
There are two further psychological interpretations of society. One derives social behaviour and social institutions directly from psychological peculiarities. Typical of it is the assertion that man has an aggressive instinct and is bound to make war. The other conception asserts that ``the only 'real' social phenomena or variables are the personalities, the individual psychologies of those who make up any given group" [41; 260].
But, as the history of society has shown, it is not socialpsychic experiences and impressions, but the need to procure the means of subsistence, i.e., it is the production relations that impel man to enter into social interaction with other men. In production, as Marx noted, people affect not only nature, but also one another. They cannot produce without uniting for joint activity and for mutual exchange of their activity. To produce, people enter into certain relations and form bonds, and it is only through these social bonds and relations that they are related to nature and that production takes place.
To understand the nature of people's social interaction, one must begin the study not with the ``psychic'', `` intellectual" factors of their activity, but with the production relations which form the real basis of any society and, in the final analysis, determine the socio-psychic and ideological, i.e., all other social relations.
Western sociologists investigate the various forms of manifestation of man's socio-psychic activity, his various forms of direct social interaction, thereby regarding human history as a product of consciousness. Such a subjective-idealist approach to understanding social life has nothing in common with science. Lenin once wrote that ``it never has been the case, nor is it so now, that the members of society conceive the sum total of the social relations in which they live as something definite, integral, pervaded by some principle; on the contrary, the mass of people adapt themselves to these relations unconsciously, and have so little conception of them as specific historical 75 social relations that, for instance, an explanation of the exchange relations under which people have lived for centuries was found only in very recent times. Materialism removed this contradiction by carrying the analysis deeper, to the origin of man's social ideas themselves; and its conclusion that the course of ideas depends on the course of things is the only one compatible with scientific psychology" [1; 1, 139--40].
Social interaction is a process involving different groups of people pursuing definite aims and interests and striving to satisfy their needs and desires to the fullest possible extent. The productive forces at their disposal condition the whole of their social interaction. The state of the productive forces primarily determines the interaction into which men enter in the social process of production, i.e., the economic interaction. Consequently, the primary task of sociology is to investigate this social environment and the objective laws governing its functioning.
Idealist sociologists do just the opposite. They regard the social environment as a function of man's various psychological peculiarities. On the basis of the social interaction of interests there arise, says L. von Wiese, social structures which may be classified in four basic groups according to extent and degree of abstraction: 1) specific crowds, visible and temporary; 2) abstract crowds of invisible and indefinite extent (for example, a community); 3) groups characterised by personal participation and organisation; 4) abstract collectivity (for example, the state, the church) in which little attention is paid to a particular individuality.
Social interaction is thus turned inside out because the life of society is not a function of social interests, but the social interests are, on the contrary, themselves a function of the social environment. Plekhanov wrote that the development of the productive forces divides society into classes whose interests not only differ, but in many important respects are even diametrically opposed. This opposition of interests engenders hostile clashes between the social classes. The struggle leads to a replacement of the tribal organisation by a state organisation whose task it is to safeguard the dominating interests. Lastly, the social relations conditioned by the given state of the productive forces give rise to habitual morality, i.e., the morality which 76 guides people in their habitual, day-to-day life [see 14; II, 247].
On the other hand, the reduction of social interests to social-psychological interests and the latter to some specific human peculiarities transforms the social environment into a part of nature. In reality, however, all products of social interaction---will, desires, passions, etc.---are, in the final analysis, determined by man's economic relations. Lenin wrote: ``People make their own history, but what determines the motives of people, of the mass of people, i.e., what gives rise to the clash of conflicting ideas and strivings? What is the sum-total of all these clashes in the mass of human societies? What are the objective conditions of production of material life that form the basis of all of man's historical activity? What is the law of development of these conditions? To all these Marx drew attention and indicated the way to a scientific study of history as a single process which, with all its immense variety and contradictoriness, is governed by definite laws" [1; 21, 57].
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 3. Society and Social Institutions.Another popular concept of society is that of the aggregate of social institutions. This point of view is most consistently advocated by the ``Institutional School" of sociology, whose leading proponents are Seymour Lipset, Richard Bendix, Ralf Dahrendorf, Peter Blau, Harrington Moore, Maurice Duverger and D. Goldthorpe.
They consider the subject matter of sociology to be historically formed social structures representing a totality of social institutions. Social relationships which are a product of people's conscious activity become ``alienated'' from the people and transformed into ``external'' reality, which is objective with respect to its creators.
Each institution corresponds to the interests of a particular social group because it serves to satisfy its own interests. It is precisely this that determines the conflicting aims of other groups whose interests are infringed upon by those of the first social group. These sociologists thus seek an explanation for human behaviour in social institutions.
77They hold that the reasons for the emergence of social institutions (political, economic, religious, familial, etc.) are not the conditions of the material life of society, but the emotions, ideas, customs and traditions.
In a certain measure social institutions are, of course, the product of people's conscious activity. But people arrive at the idea of establishing particular social institutions by becoming aware of particular requirements of material life. The character of these institutions is determined by the interests of the class they serve.
Modern Western sociologists assert that social institutions are products of psycho-social interaction. Seeing ideology as a ``creative synthesis" of different points of view, they conclude that the institutions established on its basis also reflect the synthesis of all these points of view and are therefore above classes.
The doctrine of social institutions is based on a distorted conception of the social processes in capitalist society. These sociologists speak of two processes: a ``dynamic'' process, which upsets the social bases of society, and a ``balancing'' process dependent on the social institutions.
The ``dynamic'' process is studied by ``social dynamics" and the institutions (``maintaining'' the social balance) are studied by ``social statics''. By restraining the ``dynamic forces" the ``static forces" ensure ``social order''. In society, says L. Ward, there is a struggle ``not for existence, but for organisation'', this organisation being identified with the organisation of capitalist society.
Ward tends to idealise bourgeois social institutions and regards the struggle for organisation as the basic law of social development. He asserts that since organisation is an indispensable form of existence of human society the nature of this organisation, i.e., of the social institutions, lies in the organic world. As a result, he identifies ``social institutions" or ``social structures" with organic structures. He writes that dynamics are changes in the social structures themselves. The relation between statics and dynamics is the relation between centripetal and centrifugal forces. The social structures are governed by the same laws as organic structures. The concept of imitation is static [see 61;Ch. IX].
Ward is clearly influenced here by Herbert Spencer. But 78 this influence appears in the form of dualism. He considers the interrelation of the ``dynamic'' and ``static'' forces in a mechanical way. Each of these forces acts on laws inherent in it alone. Accordingly he explains the action of the ``dynamic forces" by a psychic, i.e., subjective, factor, and that of the ``static forces" by an objective factor.^^1^^
In substantiating this conception of ``dynamic'' and ``static'' forces, Ward pays tribute to mechanicism and idealist dualism. He thereby moves to the right of Spencer in the direction of Lillienfeld. The latter regards society as a living organism where reason is identified with the action of psychic forces. The physical (social institutions) limits the action of the psychic and develops, being created as a result of this psychic, by virtue of the action of its own organic laws. Ward's theory was mainly intended to substantiate the legality of capitalist society and thereby to show the futility of class battles.
Ward's point of view met with objections from two groups of sociologists, one of which interpreted social institutions in terms of Plato's ``ideas'', and the other in terms of `` divine predetermination".
The noted French jurist M. Ornou is considered the founder of the ``institutional'' school that revives Plato's ideas. In his book The Theory of Institutions and Organisations he asserted that objective ideas existed before the vast world around us and that the social institutions correspond to these ideas.
Ornou distinguished two types of institutions: one, consisting of things corresponding to systems and rules of behaviour and another, uniting personalities in social groups. The institutions, accordnig to Ornou, are formed of three elements: a) the organising idea, b) organised management, and c) interaction of the members of the institutions around the idea. The organising idea is the notion about the aim to be achieved; organised management is the government and the state; interaction around the idea is the motivation to common action.
_-_-_~^^1^^ It should be noted that Ward reduces the subjective factors to human feelings, desires and abilities, and the objective factors to intuition, intelligence and inventiveness.
79Ornou's fundamental error is that he transformed ideas into ``independent entities" or substances.
The sociologists who fail to understand the dialectics of the relationship between social being and social consciousness, abstract themselves from social being, deny the dependence of social consciousness on it and thereby transform social consciousness into a kind of divine substance that creates the material world in the form of social institutions and various ``social structures".
G. Renard, another French jurist, held that social institutions were based on an ``engendering idea" which created a certain degree of solidarity among the persons who supported or would support the social institutions. Once created, however, he maintained, the institutions escaped the influence of the will of their founders.
In fact, once created, the social institutions assume a relative independence. But after this their interrelations are determined by laws governing the relations between the basis and the superstructure. The principal law is that a change in the basis is accompanied by a change in the superstructure, the old ideas, notions and corresponding social institutions are replaced by new ideas and the institutions corresponding to them.
Some Western sociologists hold that ideas are the cause of the emergence and development of social institutions. In this they are in accord with Ornou and Renard. Thus, according to W. G. Sumner, ``an institution consists of a concept (idea, notion, doctrine, interest) and a structure. The structure is a framework, or apparatus, or perhaps only a number of functionaries set to co-operate in prescribed ways at a certain conjuncture. The structure holds the concept and furnishes instrumentalities for bringing it into the world of facts and action in a way to serve the interests of men in society" [62; 53--54].
An institution is, according to Western sociologists, an organisation of several moral norms. Lundberg refers to relatively formal, universal and unified behavioural patterns, which exist in social groups and are transmitted from generation to generation as institutions. These patterns, he says, arise from repeated group interactions as a response to people's conditions. He maintains that ``institutions consist of comparatively permanent habits, attitudes and 80 material facilities which are organised into intricate and standardised systems and complexes" [32, 525].
Each social institution forming part of a social structure has to discharge a basic social function. Lundberg calls a function ``a series of rapidly changing structures" [32; 528]. Modern Western sociologists regard the following functions around which the social institutions are grouped as basic: 1) reproduction of members of society; 2) socialisation, i.e., various forms of transmitting socially important norms and values to the individual; 3) maintenance of courage; 4) production and distribution; 5) maintenance of order.
R. W. O'Brien, C. G. Schrag and W. T. Martin explain the interrelationship of structure and function in the community as follows: ``Perhaps the interrelationship of the various institutions can be likened to a wheel, a unity of interdependence in structure and function. The family, which is at the centre and is the first institution the individual meets, is the hub. The spokes might be education, religion, government and economic institutions. The rim would be the community within which the various institutions operate. Subordinate organisations connect and interconnect within and between the five named institutions" [32; 531].
Modern Western sociologists attach prime importance to ``function'' explained by biological characteristics or society's struggle for survival. Disturbance in function leads to disorder in structure, and disorder in structure causes disorder in the social system.
To be sure, each social institution arises on the basis of the functional requirement of a given society. Thus the modern bourgeois state came into being to protect the existing bourgeois system. To discharge this function, a state structure and state organs (government, the army, judiciary and police) are set up. The state structure is a material force aimed against everything that opposes the bourgeois system.
The state became necessary when society broke up into antagonistic classes. It does not in any way represent forces imposed on society from without. In this connection Engels wrote: ``The state is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society __PRINTERS_P_81_COMMENT__ 6---974 81 has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in sterile struggle, a power seemingly standing above society became necessary for the purpose of moderating the conflict, of keeping it within the bounds of 'order'; and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it, and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state" [2; II, 319].
The emergence and development of the state as an instrument of class domination was accompanied by the establishment of other social institutions (religious, artistic, etc.) which, like the state, bore a class character and were means of material and spiritual suppression of the working people.
The main function engendering the state and its structure was determined not by customs, but by an economic process that resulted in society's break-up into classes. Thus any function, which underlies the formation of a social institution, is ultimately engendered by the material requirements of a particular class. The material requirements of the development of society are reflected in the consciousness of the various classes and realised in institutions discharging functions in the interests of a particular class.
The structure which the function assumes also reflects certain material processes. For example, the bureaucratisation of the capitalist state machinery reflects processes operating in capitalist economics.
The point of view of institutional sociologists concerning the nature of social life is erroneous because:
Firstly, it perverts the nature of social institutions. For example, Green writes that the universality of instituional functioning is based upon two facts: 1) man is one species; his clothes, dwelling, security, division of labour and the family may differ in detail, but they are universal and play a common role; 2) to survive, man must at all times and under all conditions maintain an economy, social control, education and a political organisation [see 16; 81). This means that the functioning and nature of social institutions are ultimately derived from human biological characteristics.
Secondly, the social institutions and their development 82 are considered outside their historical context. Lundberg asserts that the institutions initially arise as a system of informal restrictions and warnings intended to facilitate the attainment of all the main social needs. Formal organisations and institutions appear at a later stage of human development and are most developed in societies chiefly dominated by secondary groups.
Thirdly, the basis of the institutions is seen not in material production, but in psychological peculiarities of particular groups of people; these institutions are regarded as something existing above classes, not as the totality of norms and rules that reflect the interests of the economically dominant class.
Fourthly, this theory ignores the social causes that have led to alienation of the social institutions from their creators---the people---and have transformed them into a force alien to them.
Lastly, the ``institutional'' school interprets the concept of ``function'' from an idealist standpoint, so rejecting an objective criterion of function.
Institutional sociologists, obfuscating Marx's proposition that under capitalism human (social) relations in the form of institutions are alienated from the material bearers of these relations and are opposed to them as an extrinsic and hostile force: a) regard society as consisting of many institutions expressing the interests of most diverse groups acting within various structures, b) admit the historical and transitory character of the social institutions, yet explain the alienation of human relations as something eternal and existing outside of its historical context, c) thus eternalise the existence of social institutions and classes, d) ignore Marx's basic proposition that the existence of social classes or groups and institutions, expressing and defending the interests of given classes, is actually connected with forms of economic life, that a change in this economic life, brought about by development of the mode of production, inevitably leads to a total abolition of the social classes and institutions, with a result that the social relations reunite completely with their material bearers.
The ``institutional'' school seeks the roots of the social system in human nature, in various biological and psychological factors. In actual fact, social institutions are not __PRINTERS_P_84_COMMENT__ 6* 83 determined by human biological and psychological qualities, but are shaped by society's material basis.
Marx's paramount contribution to our understanding of history was, as Lenin pointed out, that ``he gave a scientific explanation of it, reducing that existing system, which differs in the different European and non-European countries, to a common basis---the capitalist social formation, the laws of the functioning and development of which he subjected to an objective analysis (he showed the necessity of exploitation under that system). In just the same way he did not find it possible to content himself with asserting that only the socialist system harmonises with human nature, as was claimed by the great Utopian socialists and by their wretched imitators, the subjective sociologists. By this same objective analysis of the capitalist system, he proved the necessity of its transformation into the socialist system" [1; 1,157--58].
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 4. Society and Culture. ``Cultural'' Theories in SociologyThis school of sociologists maintains that the natural elements (geographical, biological, etc.) and the technical element acquire value through culture. ``Sociology,'' writes the American sociologist Jerome Davis, ``may ... be defined as the science which attempts to describe the origin, growth, structure and functioning of group life by the operation of geographical, biological, psychological and cultural forces" [63; XXII].
Any scientific theory of culture, wrote the American anthropologist Malinowski, must be based on two axioms: 1)every culture must satisfy man's biological needs, and 2) every cultural achievement is an instrumental improvement of human psychology, having a direct or indirect bearing on the satisfaction of bodily needs. Accordingly, the various cultural activities, such as economic, legal, educational, scientific, magical and religious, may be functionally related to biological needs. He terms culture a function of human nature and considers it dependent on man's biological needs.
Another popular theme among Western sociologists is that various inborn qualities of man determine the ``superorganic'' (culture). Talcott Parsons, for example, 84 holds that there are three basic classes of cultural norms which determine human behaviour: 1) systems of ideas and beliefs, 2) systems of expressive symbols (forms of art), and 3) systems of value orientations or ``unifying norms''. Since he reduces all these three classes of cultural norms to man's psychic and irrational activity, it follows that the source of culture is in man's bilological nature.
Many Western sociologists reduce culture to ideas or psychic experiences. The most common definition of culture is that it is a system of values consisting of knowledge, beliefs, art, morality, laws, customs and other abilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
``Modes of thinking'', ``standards'', ``beliefs'', etc., are also included in the concept of culture. Thus Ely Chinoy defines culture as that which ``is learned by individuals as members of society; it is a way of life, modes of thinking, acting and feeling" [49; 20]. The American sociologist G. Murdock refers the concept of culture to ``the standards, beliefs and attitudes in terms of which people act" [49; 20]. R. Freedman calls culture ``a group solution to the varied problems of human existence, patterning the relations of men to one another and to their environment" [51; 108]. The American sociologist L. White reduces culture to symbols. According to him ``culture is ... a symbolic, continuous, cumulative and progressive process" [64; 693]. G. Coon conceives culture as ``the sum total of the ways in which human beings live, transmitted from generation to generation by learning" [65; 5].
Sociological literature also contains definitions which do not directly mention ideas and beliefs, yet reduce everything to them. Thus Ogburg and Nimkoff call culture ``behaviour'' transmitted from generation to generation by learning. Ralph Linton defines culture as ``the sum total of the ideas, conditioned emotional responses, and patterns of habitual behaviour which the members of that society have acquired through instruction or imitation and which they share to a greater or lesser degree" [66; 288].
But ``behaviour'' is a very broad concept, and anything--- from the behaviour of children in nurseries to the behaviour of jobbers and brokers on Wall Street---may be included. This will in some measure also be ``learned behaviour''. But it is not the category of behaviour that should interest the 85 sociologist who seeks the patterns and laws behind the development of human society.
Sometimes Western sociologists speak not of behaviour in general, but of ``learned'' behaviour. Young and Mack are quite explicit in their view that culture is ``learned behaviour" [44; 35]. Lundberg includes words like ``material products" in his definition of the behaviourist conception of culture. Culture thus defined consists of learned behaviour observed among members of society and transmitted from generation to generation through the process of socialisation which includes standards of judgement, beliefs and contacts, and the material products of these behaviouristic systems. In its general significance the concept of culture applies to all socially sanctioned products of human experience including laws, customs, values, social organisations, languages, work tools and technology. Since an object includes behaviour it is a product of general human knowledge and thereby a cultural object [see 32; 755].
But to include the words ``material products" in the definition does not make this definition any more scientific. Firstly, material culture is considered on a par with ``beliefs'', in the company of vague phenomena such as ``standards of judgement" (what are they? who establishes them?). Secondly, the ``material products" are conceived as products of ``behaviouristic systems".
Kroeber and Kluckhohn also speak of behaviour as the basic criterion of culture, but they no longer emphasise the need for ``learning''; they concentrate more on symbols and ideas, regarding culture as something consisting of specific and haphazard behavioural models perceived and transmitted through symbols representing human achievements, including their embodiment in drawings. The essence of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically developing and reflected) ideas and the social value attached to them; the cultural systems may, on the one hand, be regarded as products of action and, on the other hand, as conditions for further actions [see 67; 186].
Some sociologists define ``culture'' from a somewhat different standpoint. Parsons calls culture the sum of all that has been created or modified by social or unsocial activity of two or more individuals, interacting with each 86 other and conditioning each other's behaviour (see 68; 210]. Merrill writes that culture = ``a) is the characteristically human product of social interaction; = b) provides socially acceptable patterns for meeting biological and social needs; c) is cumulative as it is handed down from generation to generation in a given society; d) is meaningful to human beings because of its symbolic quality; e) is learned by each person in the course of his development in a particular society; f) is therefore a basic determinant of personality; and g) depends for its existence upon the continued functioning of the society but is independent of the individual or group" [52; 116].
But the term ``interaction'' is no less sweeping than the term ``behaviour''. Members of a football team or a choir also interact. In a word, there is an infinite number of forms of interaction. Moreover, history has experienced interaction that destroys culture, for war is also a form of interaction.
The remainder of Merrill's definition of ``culture'' hardly differs from other definitions already cited.
Kroeber holds that culture is something ``superorganic'', existing above the individual. Individuals transmit culture, yet its existence is independent of the individual. As the language of society is not dependent on any one of its members, so culture is above the individual members of society and independent of them.
If the definitions of ``culture'' offered by Western sociologists ever do mention material things and processes, they merely remain in the background and their determining role is never emphasised. Green, for example, considers culture a ``socially transmitted system of idealised ways in knowledge, practice and belief along with the artifacts that knowledge and practice produce and maintain... . [16; 75]. But these are only things and not the material mode of production.
Merrill mentions ``material'' in his definition of ``culture'', but this material does not go outside the mental state. He writes that culture ``is primarily an intellectual process, and the material aspects become meaningful only in terms of the mind" [52; 114].
White also refers to ``material'' but as wholly dependent on the symbols used by man. He writes that ``culture is an 87 organisation of phenomena-acts (patterns of behaviour), objects (tools; things made with tools), ideas (belief, knowledge), and sentiments (attitudes, 'values')---that is dependent upon the use of symbols. Culture began when man as an articulate, symbol-using primate, began. Because of its symbolic character . . . culture is easily and readily transmitted from one human organism to another" [64; 693].
Tools and things apparently appear when man has learned to use symbols. How man obtained his food and clothes and built his dwelling, when he was learning to ``produce and use symbols" is not clear. Language and thinking arose in the course of labour, not the other way round.
Many sociologists erroneously hold that the basis of cultural development is consciousness, not material production. Linton writes that the principal basis of culture is in human consciousness, and that physical objects have meaning only in terms of these mental samples. Ideas are the real foundation of culture. Material objects are meaningless without the knowledge of how they should be used [see 57; 36--37].
This attitude to culture also appears in Western axiology, in its theory of social values.
The most popular definition of social values is that given by Henry Fairchild in the Dictionary of Sociology, ``Values are strictly a matter of belief.... Their existence may be discovered by social or psychological research, but neither their validity nor their justifiability can be demonstrated. . They are, at the same time, the final sources of motivation of all conscious rational telic behaviour" [37; 332].
What ``value'' means may be judged at least by the fact that sociologists refer primarily to the irrational. Thus Young and Mack assert that ``values are assumptions, largely unconscious, of what is right and important" [44, 70].
Most commonly sociologists consider values to be products of the mind. For example, Merrill writes that ``a value is a social judgement of what is important to individual and group welfare" [52; 13).
Consequently, whatever members of a social group attach no importance to is of no value. The recognition of particular social and other phenomena as values depends, it would seem, upon the social-psychological 88 peculiarities and social interaction of a particular social group or individuals. This deprives social values of their real content.
In fact, values and their relation to social needs are determined not by people's mental interaction, but by their class interests. The success of the class struggle depends upon the extent to which the social values, for which a particular class is struggling, are the expression of the objective needs of history.
Engels once wrote on this point: ``The growing perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that 'reason has become unreason, and right wrong', is only proof that in the modes of production and exchange changes have silently taken place with which the social order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping. From this it also follows that the means of getting rid of the incongruities that have been brought to light must also be present, in a more or less developed condition, within the changed modes of production themselves. These means are not to be invented, spun out of the head, but discovered with the aid of the head in the existing material facts of production" [8; 367--68].
Values may appear in the form in which they actually exist or as social ideals. For example, capitalism is a free world for the monopolists, for the workers it is not. For the capitalist freedom is a real value, for the worker it is an ideal, because freedom for the capitalist is a denial of freedom for the worker.
Values are the phenomena of nature and society, which are the blessings of life and culture of the people of a society or class and appear either as reality or ideals.
Values in a certain sense determine and regulate the behaviour or social activities of all members of society until the economic requirements of social development clash with these values and inevitably lead to the appearance of a new system of values reflecting the fundamental interests of the victorious advanced class.
The reduction of social values to various forms of socialpsychic life and the latter to people's emotions is an idealist interpretation of the origin and development of social values. It ignores the fact that social values are the idealistic expression of material social processes. Small wonder 89 that the psychological interpretation of the origin of social values cannot explain why a given custom, ritual or tradition is often retained despite the fact that the relations which brought them into existence and other related customs, rituals and traditions have disappeared, and why new social relations replace old customs, rituals and traditions. The only response of the subjective sociologist is to put down these customs, rituals and traditions as ``unknowable'' workings of the mind.
These phonemena are rooted in the peculiarities of social psychology. As Plekhanov once wrote: ``The old customs disappear and the old rites are violated when people enter into new mutual relations. The struggle of the social interests finds expression in the struggle of new customs and rites with the old ones. Not one symbolic rite or custom taken by itself can affect the development of new relations either positively or negatively. If the protectors fervently defend old customs, it is because the idea of the social usages, which are advantageous, dear and habitual to them, is firmly associated in their minds with the idea of these customs. If innovators hate and ridicule these customs, it is because in their minds the idea of these customs is associated with the idea of social relations which are restraining, disadvantageous and unpleasant to them. It follows that it is all a matter of association of ideas. When we see that some custom has outlived not only the relations which engendered it, but also related rites called into existence by the same relations, we must conclude that in the minds of the innovators the idea of it was not so firmly associated with the idea of the odious old times as the idea of other customs. But why not so firmly, then? It is sometimes very easy to answer this question and sometimes absolutely impossible for lack of necessary psychological data. But even when we have to recognise it as insolvable, at least with the aid of our present knowledge, we must remember that it is not a matter of the force of tradition, but of certain associations of ideas produced by certain actual relations of people in society.
The emergence, change and destruction of associations of ideas under the influence of the emergence, change and destruction of certain combinations of social forces in large measure explain the history of ideologies" [14; II, 262--63].
90Material values lie at the basis of culture. Spiritual values may only be used if there is a certain minimum of material values. Spiritual values are those which in the long run are reflections in the mind of the extent of man's knowledge of nature and the economic and political position of classes and various social groups at a given stage of social development. This does not exclude the idea that spiritual culture has its own laws which may be the subject of sociological analysis.
By proclaiming priority of spiritual over material values and by denying the decisive role of economic relations in the origin and development of cultural values, empirical sociologists highlight the role of spiritual culture in social life, especially the various political and juridical institutions, considering them the material basis and ``guardians'' of all culture and cultural values.
They lose sight of the fact that, as bearers and guardians of culture, the social institutions arise as the result of economic needs. Social institutions are the superstructure over the economic basis. Their character and state of development are determined by the state of development of the productive forces.
The attempt to reduce all culture to purely spiritual culture is a common feature of all bourgeois definitions, although it should be obvious that culture embraces material objects as well as knowledge, art, abilities and habits acquired by people and transmitted by tradition.
Culture is the sum total of material and spiritual values created by man in the course of social and historical development. It depicts the level of technical progress, production, education, science, literature and the arts, reached at a given stage of social development.
The various material conditions during the various periods of social development (primitive communal, slaveowning, feudal, capitalist, socialist) determine the different cultures. These cultures are correspondingly the primitive communal, slave-owning, feudal, capitalist and socialist.
The Soviet philosopher D. Chesnokov writes: ``Culture is the historically conditioned sum total of habits, knowledge, ideas and emotions of people, as well as their consolidation and materialisation in the techniques of production and 91 everyday services, in educational levels and the social institutions which regulate social life, in scientific and technological achievements, in works of literature and art" [69; 346].
The mode of production conditions the transition from one social system and its culture to another social system and culture. The development of society's material and spiritual culture is based on the law of development of modes of production, the productive forces and production relations conditioned by them. A new culture comes into existence only when the requisite conditions have matured for it in society's material life.
The material culture reflects the level of society's technical progress at a certain stage of its development, the production and technical skills and people's experience in the production of material wealth; it expresses the degree of man's domination over nature. The material culture is everything in which human labour has materialised in the course of social development.
Marxism-Leninism holds that culture is, in the final analysis, determined by the material conditions of life. But it does not deny the reciprocal influence of culture on social production. A particular level of culture may well be conducive or inconducive to economic development.
Some sociologists absolutise the social-psychological elements and regard spiritual culture as its main factor. They declare it to be the ``main foundation of society''. Failing to understand or, to be exact, not wishing to understand that culture is the end product of material production, they frequently investigate the culture by subordinating all other social relations to it and proclaiming them part of the culture. For example, Linton writes: ``Social systems can only function as parts of a larger whole, the total culture of society" [70; 262].
As a result, the effect becomes the cause and the cause becomes the effect. C. Ellwood writes in a similar vein that to understand the nature and possible direction of development of social life, its origin, direction, development and fate, it is necessary, first of all, to understand the determining (my italics.---G.O.) factor of culture and development of culture, which determines and controls the fate of social life [see 71; 303--04].
92Certainly, knowledge of the culture is a pre-condition for knowledge of social life. Culture is one of the most important factors distinguishing human society from the animal world. But subordinating the social process to these minor elements deprives sociology of its scientific basis and leads to a subjective interpretation of the social process.
Culture, although it assumes a relative independence and exerts an enormous influence on human behaviour, is not the decisive factor in social development because it ultimately depends on the degree of development of human material relations and the social and political structure of society determined by these relations. To understand culture and the sources of its development, as well as its influence on social life, it is necessary to study the laws of economic development and how they are related to culture. The substance of culture changes with every new period in human history. We cannot speak of culture in general because culture always implies a definite epoch, a definite class, people and society.
In exploiting society, such as capitalism, there is no single culture. Lenin once said that in each bourgeois nation there are two nations and, consequently, two national cultures. The dominating culture in an antagonistic society is the culture of the economically and politically dominating class. ``The elements of democratic and socialist culture are present, if only in rudimentary form, in every national culture, since in every nation there are toiling and exploited masses, whose conditions of life inevitably give rise to the ideology of democracy and socialism. But every nation also possesses a bourgeois culture (and most nations a reactionary and clerical culture as well) in the form not merely of 'elements', but of the dominant culture" [1; 20, 24].
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 5. Society and Personality.Western sociologists usually interpret the process of interaction between the individual and society, between the individual and culture from a neo-Freudian standpoint. Lundberg, Young and Mack assert that in the course of 93 social interaction the social environment (social groups and culture) evokes a particular reaction in the perceiving subject, and the latter, in turn and depending on his anatomical, physiological or psychological idiosyncrasies, rejects or integrates the signals, thereby developing or retaining his personality traits, which is expressed in a particular form of social behaviour. As a result, this process of human consciousness is limited only to knowledge which is regarded as activity by which the person ``reorganises'' his behaviour or life.
The American anthropologist Murdock claims that knowledge is limited essentially by the reactions evoked by biological drives (hunger, etc.), stimuli (social interaction), habits (traits that emerge under the influence of repeated action of the same stimuli) and restrictions of possible responses (cultural restrictions of instincts) [72; 128].
Social behaviour and, consequently, the ``knowledge'' on which this behaviour is based are thus reduced to the purely executive activity of the human organism which reacts to particular signals received from the external world or to the biological drives and instincts conditioned by man's biological nature, while the conscious aspect of this behaviour based on knowledge and active interaction with the objective material world is excluded.
This view has found its clearest expression in the most recent works of bourgeois sociologists. In his definition of psychology the American sociologist A. Inkeles writes: ``Psychology I take to be the study of the structure and functioning of the personal system, the system of action which characterises a particular biological organism, notably a human being" [41; 250].
Despite all their talk about the ``social'' essence of man many Western sociologists, regardless of divergences on specific questions, agree on the biological influence of man's psychic activity and, consequently, his social behaviour. Merrill writes: ``Man comes into the world with the genetic potentialities for becoming a human being, and his personality is determined by the persons and groups with which he interacts" [52; 45].
But man does not come into the world as either evil or good, but only with potentialities and abilities for both; 94 these develop in him according to his environment and to the education he receives in the family and society.
Psychic activity is not a result of biological and physical processes caused by mechanical action of the external environment, but an organic unity of internal conditions and external (social) influences. It is primarily the activity of the human brain and at the same time a reflection, cognition of the world as objective reality, i.e., two inseparably connected aspects of one process, aspects depicting the connection between the psychic and the brain and of its activity with a reflection of the objective world. Numerous experiments and studies conducted by Soviet scientists, especially by P. Anokhin, G. Galperin, A. Leontyev, A. Luriya and S. Rubinstein, have confirmed that this psychic activity is nothing but a ``function of the brain and a reflection of the external world because the activity of the brain is itself a reflex conditioned by the action of the external world" [73; 5].
It is the interaction of a higher biological creature (monkey), possessing a biological potential for development, with the external world, its ``life whose needs have led to the development of the brain as the organ of man's psychic activity, and practice---such is the real material basis which reveals the cognitive relation to the world, such is the 'ontological' basis on which the cognitive relation of the subject to objective reality is formed.... The material world is primordially concerned in the very origin of psychic phenomena and their determination" [73; 9].
The materialist conception of nature and social and socio-psychological activity provide the scientific basis which makes it possible to establish the determinants of the formation of the individual as a social being and, consequently, to reveal the objective laws governing this process and to create the requisite conditions for control of this process.
There are sociologists who agree that the personality and society are inseparably connected. Chinoy writes: `` Individuals cannot exist apart from culture and society and the latter takes on reality only in the personalities and behaviour of individuals" [49; 55].
This is indisputable. Marx made this point over a hundred years ago. Man's psychic activity and his consciousness 95 are determined by his individuality and the relationships in which he lives. But man is himself an aggregate of these relations as well as a reflection of social relations. On the one hand, the social relationships of individuals objectively countervail them as subjects, while, on the other, they assume personified form in the personalities of individuals because the latter are their material personification.
It is also axiomatic that ``the family largely determines both the personality and self-development" [16; 117] and that ``if one finds differences in language, dress, voting, eating habits, relations between parents and children .. . the explanations are to be found, in part, in the contrasting norms of the groups to which men belong, or in the varied social experiences which people have" [49; 53].
The basic methodological differences consist in the diametrically opposed views on the nature of forms and means of sqcial interaction of individuals and social groups in the process of socialisation, and on the nature of the latter's mechanism of action.
Sociologists often reduce the relationships between individuals and social groups to ``projection'' of the relationships which the child forms at an early age in contact with his parents and during games with other children; they reduce social interaction to the child's instinctive activity interpreted in a neo-Freudian way. Green writes: ``Culture is thus transmitted to the child in a personalised way. Culture is acquired as an accompaniment of the self which the child laboriously builds up with the help of others. Culture is introjected within and focused upon the self. Culture, in the present context, is fused with a given person's selfconception, with the present roles he plays and those which he projects into the future, and with the goals of achievement he sets himself" [16; 120].
Young and Mack have elaborated an organon of personality integration in primary and secondary groups [44; 121].
__FIX__ Fast way to make tables in Text major-mode? Primary-Group Situations 1. Resistance and hostility toward parental training and authority Secondary-Group Situations Conflict with out-groups, e.g., occupations, classes, races, churches, nations and any others that serve as outlets of hostility. 96 2. Sibling rivalry for status in home. 3. Conflict-competition with playmates, or resistance to adults in reference to play, or in other groups.During the initial stage it would appear that personality integration is marked by opposition and hostility, and during the second stage by love and indentification.
Integration of Personality at Primary-Group Level 1. Love, affection and identification with mother, father. Integration of Personality at Secondary-Group Level 2. Co-operation and affection with reference to siblings. 3. Love and affection for friends and fellow members of same neighbourhood or primary community. Co-operation with in-groups, e.g., occupations, classes, races, churches, nations, and any others that serve as focal points for identification and mutual participation.With this scheme Western sociologists would like to prove that the main qualities of the personality (traits, habits, etc.), and the forms of social interaction under which these qualities are shaped in ``primary'' groups are reproduced on an enlarged scale and appear in ``secondary'' groups.
At the first stage (in the ``primary'' groups) the individual's consciousness and self-consciousness are shaped by his instinctive activity in his relations with parents and other children; at the second stage (in the ``secondary'' groups) consciousness and social consciousness of the personality are a manifestation of the personality's qualities which are formed at the first stage. This is very close to the neoFreudian theory of instincts, combining the irrationalistic interpretation of social interaction with the subjective-- idealist interpretation of the means of communication by which this interaction is effected.
On the basis of J. Baldwin's conclusion that ``it is impossible to isolate his (individual's---Ed.) thought of himself at any time and say that in thinking of himself he is not essentially thinking of the alter also . . . the ego and the alter are to our thoughts one and the same thing" [70; 16, 17], __PRINTERS_P_98_COMMENT__ 7---974 97 C. Cooley conceives relations between the social group and the personality (``the reflected or looking-glass self'') [70; 37).
Man's attitude to his own character from the physical, psychological and social points of view is evidently determined chiefly by the attitude of others. The ``looking-glass self" includes, according to Cooley, three fundamental elements: the effect of somebody's presence on other persons; the effect of their evaluation on this presence; feeling of pride or vexation experienced by the first person [74; 152].
If Cooley is saying that man comes to know himself through other people no one would object. On this point Marx wrote: ``In a sort of way, it is with man as with commodities. Since he comes into the world neither with a looking glass in his hand, nor as a Fichtean philosopher, to whom 'I am I' is sufficient, man first sees and recognises himself in other men. Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first comparing himself with Paul as being of like kind. And thereby Paul, just as he stands in his Pauline personality, becomes to Peter the type of the genus homo" [5; I, 52].
The only objection is not to the indisputable fact that the individual becomes aware of himself as a personality through a looking glass or the eyes of another person, but to Cooley explaining the process wholly by the ``influence of others on the individual''; he ignores the development of man's self-consciousness through interaction with the objective world. The individual becomes conscious of himself through the influence of other people, but this consciousness is necessarily refracted through his consciousness of the objects in his practical activities and, what is particularly important, through the consciousness of the products of his material and spiritual activities, through what he considers his own and in which he has realised his own consciousness---speech, drawing, clothing, etc. [see 75; 185--87).
A vivid picture of the development of self-consciousness, the mind, in the process of man's sensory-practical activities was painted by Karl Marx in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844-. ``It will be seen how the history of industry and the established objective existence of 98 industry are the open book of man's essential powers, the exposure to the senses of human psychology. Hitherto this was not conceived in its inseparable connection with man's essential being, but only in an external relation of utility, because moving in the realm of estrangement, people could only think man's general mode of being---religion or history in its abstract-general character as politics, art, literature, etc.,---to be the reality of man's essential powers and man's species-activity. We have before us the objectified essential powers of man in the form of sensuous, alien, useful objects, in the form of estrangement, displayed in ordinary material industry (which can be conceived as a part of that general movement, just as that movement can be conceived as a particular part of industry, since all human activity hitherto has been labour---that is, industry---activity estranged from itself). A psychology for which this, the part of history most contemporary and accessible to sense remains a closed book, cannot become a genuine, comprehensive and real science. What indeed are we to think of a science which airily abstracts from this large part of human labour and which fails to feel its own incompleteness, while such a wealth of human endeavour unfolded before it means nothing more to it than, perhaps, what can be expressed in one word---need, vulgar needl" [6; 109--10].
Green supplements Cooley's premise with Freud's theory of the role of the unconscious in personality formation. He writes: ``Man is a social being, person and society interpenetrate and fuse; at the same time, there is some irreducible core of the self which resists socialisation" [16; 126].
The single entity of man is thus divided into social and antisocial, the latter fully dominating the former. Western sociologists write that this duality is seen as the tragedy of modern man. People ``do not love themselves'', ``nor does one believe in the good-will of others" [16; 125]. Green writes that ``studies of child behaviour corroborate Freud's arguments ... that the self is at war with its social environment. ... No other animal is so deliberately cruel as man" [16; 124, 126].
The more complex society becomes, the more dreadful the human fate. Referring to Freud Green states that ``the price of progress in civilisation is paid in forfeiting __PRINTERS_P_99_COMMENT__ 7* 99 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1969/SPTM191/20070416/191.tx" __EMAIL__ webmaster@leninist.biz __OCR__ ABBYY 6 Professional (2007.04.13) __WHERE_PAGE_NUMBERS__ bottom __FOOTNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [0-9]+ __ENDNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [0-9]+ happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt" [16; 124]. The reason is that man has opposed nature and created an artificial world.
The human entity really does become divided, but the cause of this duality lies not in the ``world of symbols'', but in the duality of capitalism. Those sociologists who follow Freud absolutise the ``unconscious'' and deprecate the role of consciousness. Science has demonstrated, however, that man's psychic life is a unity of conscious and unconscious elements [see 76; 105].
The essence of mental reflection is that, by orienting man in a situation, it regulates his behaviour. This process simultaneously involves both realised and unrealised elements.
The Soviet psychologist, S. Rubinstein, writes: `` Consciousness is the primary awareness of the objective world; the psychic process as a result of which the object is realised is not thereby also realised. Psychic processes and phenomena are realised mediately, through their correlation with the objective world. The realisation of one's emotion presupposes its correlation with the object which evokes it and at which it is directed. That is why an unrealised feeling is possible. An unrealised feeling is, of course, not a feeling which is generally not experienced; an unrealised feeling is one in which the cause that evokes it and the object, the person at which it is directed, are unrealised. The feeling experienced by man actually exists even if unrealised; the reality of its existence as a psychic fact is in its effectualness, in its actual participation in the regulation of man's behaviour and actions" [73; 277].
Rubinstein rightly observes that it is not a question of unconscious and conscious elements participating in the regulation of human behaviour, but of realised and unrealised elements, even if they are unrealised at a given moment. At the same time realised elements of the psyche play the determining role, while the unrealised elements play a strictly subordinate role. Bourgeois sociologists, however, leave man at the mercy of his instincts by emphasising the dominating role of the ``unconscious'' in psychic activity.
G. Mead has propounded a different theory. An individual's behaviour is determined by his evaluation of his own 100 behaviour from points of view of other people, i.e., he takes on the role of other persons, wondering what he would think of himself under corresponding conditions. ``The individual,'' writes Mead, ``enters his own experience as a self or individual . .. but only (my italics.---G.O.) in so far as he first becomes an object to himself just as other individuals are objects to him or his experience; and he becomes an object to himself only by taking the attitudes of other individuals toward himself within a social environment in which both he and they are involved" [77; 138].
But this, Mead warns, is only the ``first stage" of development of the ``self'' as a social product. The ``second stage" in the development of ``social consciousness" begins when the individual assumes the role of society as a whole. ``If the given human individual is to develop a self in the fullest sense, it is not sufficient for him merely to take the attitudes of other human individuals toward himself and toward one another within the human social process, and to bring that social process as a whole into his individual experience merely in these terms: he must also, in the same way that he takes the attitudes of other individuals toward himself and toward one another, take their attitudes toward the various phases or aspects of the common social activity or set of social undertakings in which, as members of an organised society or social group, they are all engaged; and he must then, by generalising these individual attitudes of that organised society or social group itself, as a whole act toward different social projects which at any given time it is carrying out, or toward the various larger phases of the general social process which constitutes its life and of which these projects are specific manifestations" [78; 54]. This process Mead calls ``putting himself in the place of the generalised other" [77; 162].
It is this process that evidently gives the individual what ``we term his principles, the acknowledged attitudes of all members of the community toward what are the values of that community. He puts himself in the place of the generalised other, which is the organised experience of all members of the group" [77; 162].
Mead's theory of ``the generalised other" is nothing but an interpretation of the development of social consciousness (at various levels) and its relationship to individual 101 consciousness. The actions of any individual inevitably contain social-psychological features common to the majority of members of the same group. But these common features are not the result of subjective evaluations made by the individual, but are the product of the material relations which determine the character of the individual's social group. The unity of individual and social psychology at various levels is shaped by the unity of the material world, which determines the content of the psyche. Differences between them result from the different degrees of reflection of the material world.
Western sociologists overlook the essential factor that determines the mental make-up of a particular group of people---namely, the influence of everyday life and work on their personality. Rubinstein writes: ``When social consciousness---ideas and concepts fixed in language and science---are regarded as products of interactions of individual consciousnesses, the fact that the objective content of language and science is actually determined by social being is overlooked. When individual consciousness is conceived merely as a projection of the ideal content of social consciousness, this concept is again based on severance of the consciousness of the individual from his own material being, from the real process of his life. The individual's life determines his attitude to the social idea engendered by the course of historical development and dominating in the given society. The ideas which man adopts and how he really adopts them will depend on the real content of his life. It is impossible while circumventing being---social and personal---either to derive from individual consciousnesses the social consciousness, the ideology and ideas engendered by social being, or to interpret the individual consciousness, in which the social and personal elements are given in closest interaction, as a mere projection of social consciousness independent of the individual's real life" [79; 330--31].
The subjective idealist conception of the correlation of individual and social psychology is based on Ferdinand Tonnies's hypothesis which identifies the concept of ``social group" with that of primitive family when man had not yet separated himself from the family, had not manifested his ``self'' and constituted a sort of single organic whole with the family. But this identification is unjustified. Engels 102 has pointed out that ``the single individual that must have experience is no longer necessary, its individual experience can be replaced to a certain extent by the results of the experiences of a number of its ancestors" [4; 267].
Man's consciousness has developed over the course of human history. The Soviet philosopher A. Spirkin writes that by determining his attitude to other people man `` thereby determined himself in the system of production and became aware of himself as an independent person. Through the realisation of his attitude to nature and other people man began to acquire an increasingly more conscious attitude to himself and his own activities. Man's gradually formed self-consciousness manifested itself in the ability to project without, to alienate the content of his own reflective activity and analyse it as something else, separate, as it were, from the subject and at the same time realisable as his own, i.e., that which is included in his 'self, as something subjective in the sense that it belongs to the given subject" [75; 199].
The essential feature of formation of the personality is the recognition not simply of the fact that the personality is a product of social relations and education, but that man himself is the force that establishes these relations and various forms of education. In his Theses on Feuerbach Marx considers the main shortcoming of all preceding materialism to be that the object, reality, sensuousness are taken only in the form of the object or the form of contemplation and not as man's sensuous activity. ``The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating. Hence this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, of which one is superior to society (in Robert Owen, for example)" [2; II, 403--04].
Marx maintains that the main problem of the science of society is precisely to explain how the environment may be altered by people who are themselves creatures of their environment. He showed that production relations are shaped by circumstances independent of human will. But the relations may not change in the desired direction. The 103 nature of the ``economic structure" and the direction in which it changes are dependent not on human will, but on the state of the productive forces and on the changes in the production relations in consequence of the further development of these forces. Engels explains this as follows: ``Men make their history themselves, but not as yet with a collective will, according to a collective plan or even in a definite, delimited given society. Their aspirations clash, and for that very reason all such societies are governed by necessity, which is supplemented by and appears under the forms of accident" [2; II, 505].
When they speak of the significance of the economic factor in the formation of the personality, Marxist sociologists do not deny the important role of ideology. Social man creates his own social relations. But, if he creates just these and no other relations, it is because of the state of the productive forces. No person, however responsible his position in society, can force on society relations which no longer correspond, or do not yet correspond, to the state of the productive forces.
Plekhanov wrote: ``Social relations have their own logic: as long as people are in particular mutual relations they are bound to feel, think and act precisely as they do. No public figure can combat this logic: the natural course of events (i.e., the same logic of social relations) would bring all his efforts to naught. But, if I know in what direction the social relations are changing because of changes in the social and economic process of production, then I also know in what direction the social psychology will change; hence I am in a position to influence it. To influence social psychology is to influence historical events. This means that in a certain sense / can still make history and do not have to wait until it 'is made' " [14; II, 332]. __ALPHA_LVL3__ § 6. Society and Economy. Theory of ``Stages of Growth''
Some sociologists have propounded theories which eclectically combine many.factors including technology and economics.
One such theory is Walt Rostow's theory of the stages of growth, expounded by him in his book The Stages of Economic Growth. A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960). 104 According to this theory, the history of human society goes through the following five stages: a) the Traditional Society, b) the Preconditions for Take-Off, c) the Take-Off, d) the Drive to Maturity, e) the Age of High Mass Consumption.
Rostow believes the first stage in the development of society to be the traditional society which is somewhat analogous to the Marxist idea of feudal society, but differs in that it includes a number of features superimposed on it by modern civilisation. The traditional society is based on ancient traditions inherited from preceding generations. Traditionalism simply means that traditions dominate in attempts to resolve social problems. Rostow cites Africa as an example of traditional society.
It is true that Africa contains many regions, tribes and peoples that are in a semi-feudal or feudal stage of development. These societies have extremely primitive techniques. But the low level of social and economic development of the African countries has been due not to their ``blind'' adherence to ``traditions'', as Rostow claims, but to the ruthless imperialist exploitation.
The transitional society is a transitional stage between traditional and maturing society. According to Rostow, the colonies or the countries dependent on foreign capital are an example of this stage. As a bourgeois ideologist he idealises colonialist activities of imperialism and maintains that the ``traditional societies" have entered the age of development only ``under the influence of an outside impetus''. The imperialist powers have presumably changed the thinking, knowledge, institutions and formation of social capital, and consequently impelled the traditional societies to embark on the ``transitional path''. But abundant historical evidence exists to show that the developing countries owe their very low level of development primarily to imperialism. According to UNO data, from 1946 to 1951 American capital invested 1,629 million dollars in Latin American countries yet received from the same countries 3,078 million dollars during the same period.
The main features of the maturing or industrial society are, according to Rostow, as follows: a) it is neither capitalist nor socialist; the former class contradictions have gradually lost significance; b) the place of workers and 105 capitalists has been taken by highly skilled technical specialists and managers; c) the decisive role is played by a state which relies on an enormous apparatus of employees and bureaucrats. This society apparently deals with social problems which neither Marx nor his opponents could have foreseen.
But evidence is adduced to support these propositions. Rostow asserts that ``neither political, not social, nor yet even economic power is directly associated with private ownership" [80; 152].
Under capitalism private ownership has not only failed to lose significance, but, on the contrary, has greatly increased in strength. Today, for example, the Standard Oil Company has assets amounting to $10,000 million, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company $8,000 million. At the turn of the century Rockefeller and Morgan had a capital of $2,500 million, whereas today their joint funds amount to $126,000 million.
Rostow spreads the myth that in ``industrial society" the working class is being ``deproletarianised'', that the proletariat is gradually disappearing together with the social contradictions which caused class nattles. The class struggle, he says, ``ceases to be the moving force of the development of human history''. Moreover, the capitalist class is also disappearing. The cotton, railway, steel and oil magnates are being replaced by professional managers.
It is undeniable that a hierarchy of executives exists under imperialism, but this does not alter the capitalist essence of the monopolies. Ford, Rockefeller, Morgan or Mellon may be philatelists, philominists, art collectors and globetrotters; they do not have to manage either individual enterprises or even the largest syndicates. This is done for them by hired employees.
But by virtue of their legal right to private property the owners of the monopolies supervise the work of the managers. The monopolists, not the technical executives hold economic power. At the summit of American society, 120 people have an annual income of more than one million dollars, 379 persons have an income of more than half a million dollars, and 11,490 persons have an income of more than 100,000 dollars. Sixty-five per cent of these people live on lucrative incomes from inherited private 106 property. The rest of the population of the U.S.A. has less abundant means. Only 7,5 per cent of American families have an income exceeding 7,500 dollars a year. The income of 47 per cent of the families ranges from 3,000 to 7,500 dollars, while 46 per cent of the families, i.e., about half the population, have an income of less than 3,000 dollars a year.
The American publicist F. Lundberg writes: ``The United States is owned and dominated today by a hierarchy of sixty of the richest families, buttressed by no more than ninety families of lesser wealth. ... These families are the living centre of the modern industrial oligarchy which dominates the United States, functioning discreetly under a de jure democratic form of government behind which a de facto government, absolutist and plutocratic in its lineaments, has gradually taken form since the Civil War. This de facto government is actually the government of the United States---informal, invisible, shadowy. It is the government of money in a dollar democracy" [81; 3].
The notorious ``sixty families" are unlimited dictators of American policy. It was at their bidding that the TaftHurtley Act was passed in 1947, thereby greatly reducing the economic rights of American workers, depriving them of their right to strike, preventing them from concluding collective agreements with factory owners. The McCarranWood Act, aimed at suppressing the slightest manifestation of freedom, was passed in 1950. The monopolists own all the means of shaping public opinion in the country: 99.5 per cent of all the press in the U.S.A. is owned or controlled by the monopolies.
Yet Rostow and his adherents consider that the diminishing popular participation in political and social life is typical of industrial society. The British sociologist Prof. Robert McKenzie maintains that participation in political life may do enormous harm to the working class. He claims that workers who vote Conservatives are more active in politics than workers who vote Labourites; workers who vote Labourites are more passive, do not know their leaders and are concerned only with their personal affairs, whereas workers who vote Conservatives are concerned about foreign policy and the public interest.
Raymond Aron supports the idea of isolating workers 107 from political life. At the Fifth World Congress of Sociology he stated: ``We are discussing the problem of popular participation in political life. We proceed from the thesis that popular participation is progressive. It seems to me that we cannot draw such a conclusion because, when general elections were held in France, the most reactionary government was elected. Rationally, it is therefore absurd to talk of the need for popular participation in political life.''
Rostow terms the ultimate stage of development of modern society as the society of high mass consumption in which the values of the market and the demands associated with the mastery of new techniques lose their exclusive power over the minds of men [see 80]. This society, he says, does not as yet exist. Its aim is to create the welfare state, improve social security, redistribute income and mitigate social conditions. It will expand consumption levels and provide better food, shelter and clothing, increase mass consumption of durable consumer goods and services. The society will increase leisure, cushion the hardships of the trade cycle and shorten the working day [see 80; 73, 74].
These aims are utterly Utopian. They are at variance with the facts of modern capitalist reality. The ``expansion of consumption levels" and the other tasks mentioned by Rostow are incompatible with the operation of the objective economic laws of modern capitalism.
Rostow distorts Marx by asserting that whereas Marx's sociological theory is a ``set of logical deductions from the notion of profit maximisation'', his (Rostow's) ``stages-- of-growth" theory views man as a more complex unit, also seeking power, leisure, adventure, continuity of experience and security, displaying concern for his family, the familiar values of his regional and national culture, and beyond these diverse homely attachments also being capable of being moved by a sense of connection with human beings everywhere. Human behaviour is seen not as an act of maximisation, but as an act of balancing alternative and often conflicting human objectives. From this more complex idea Rostow draws the conclusion not of a series of rigid and inevitable stages of history, but of patterns of choice permitted by the changing setting of society [see 80; 149).
But Marx never said that ``profit maximisation" is characteristic of all men.
108In an attempt to prove his propositions at all costs W. Rostow often resorts to sophisms. Thus he deliberately refers diametrically opposed social and economic structures to one and the same stage of social development, and societies of the same type---to different stages. He tries to prove that in the development of modern capitalist society property ownership has lost its former significance. Its development is presumably determined by leading branches of the economy ``whose highest rates of development have brought the economy to maturity" and `` concrete methods of distributing the income chosen by each society that has reached the stage of a high level of national distribution".
Rostow highlights the role of the technical factor in history, making the development of society dependent on the productivity of labour and wholly conditioning the latter by the level of technological development. At the same time, however, he interprets the processes of social development idealistically, maintaining that each society has the right, independent of the material factors, to choose the economic system and ``methods of distributing the income" it may deem necessary. Rostow recognises the significance of the economic factor in history, but defines it as a result of free choice. By examining the general outlines of each stage of development, he says, we study not only the structure of the changing branches of the economy, but the whole chain of strategic decisions taken by whole societies [see 80].
Rostow formulated the social aims of his theory at the banquet given in honour of the participants of the Fifth World Congress of Sociology. By striving to concentrate your attention on the underdeveloped countries, he said, we are also strengthening the forces within their society, which are the most capable of retaining a minimum of unity and integrity during the period of inevitable stress and strife issuing from the dynamics of the very process of modernisation. . .. By concentrating our policy around the conception of independence in its ultimate connection with modernisation we feel that we not only reflect the permanent interests of the U.S.A., but also make a certain contribution to the maintenance of a minimum of stability at the time of the inevitable revolutionary process [see 17].
He sees the modern epoch not in terms of the transition 109 of all countries and peoples to socialism and communism, but of a ``single stream" of transition of all countries and peoples to ``modern (modernised or industrial) society".
This theory of a ``single stream" or ``single social development" attests to a certain change in the forms of bourgeois ideological propaganda. In the recent past bourgeois sociologists opposed the people of the West to Afro-Asia. Today they speak of the ``unity'' of historical fates of the capitalist West and the Afro-Asian countries which have obtained political independence.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 7. Marxist View of Social HistoryMarxist philosophy first made a scientific approach to the study of society. Marxists rejected the idea of studying society in general and concentrated on specific social studies in a given socio-economic formation. As Lenin aptly wrote: ``The distinction between the important and the unimportant was replaced by the distinction between the economic structure of society, as the content, and the political and ideological form. The very concept of the economic structure was exactly explained by refuting the views of the earlier economists, who saw laws of nature where there is room only for the laws of a specific, historically defined system of relations of production. The subjectivists' arguments about 'society' in general, meaningless arguments that did not go beyond petty-bourgeois Utopias (because even the possibility of generalising the most varied social systems into special types of social organisms was not ascertained), were replaced by an investigation of definite forms of the structure of society. Secondly, the actions of 'living individuals' within the bounds of each such socio-economic formation, actions infinitely varied and apparently not lending themselves to any systematisation, were generalised and reduced to the actions of groups of individuals differing from each other in the part they played in the system of production relations, in the conditions of production, and, consequently, in their conditions of life, and in the interests determined by these conditions---in a word, to the actions of classes, the struggle between which determined the development of society. This refuted the childishly naive and purely mechanical view of history held 110 by the subjectivists, who contented themselves with the meaningless thesis that history is made by living individuals, and who refused to examine what social conditions determine their actions, and exactly in what way. Subjectivism was replaced by the view that the social process is a process of natural history---a view without which, of course, there could be no social science" [1; 1, 411].
A scientific definition of ``society'' is possible only from the standpoint of dialectical materialism. Society is a relatively stable system of social connections and relations of large groups of people, backed by force of law, custom, traditions, etc., formed in historical development, based on a certain mode of production and appearing as a stage in the progressive development of man.
To understand society in toto, as well as its different elements, one must first examine its basis---the mode oi production, which is an organic unity of the productive forces and production relations. The mode of production serves as a specific historical form of production. It is characterised both by the implements people use to produce the material wealth they need, and by the ownership of the means of production required to produce this wealth.
Bourgeois sociology considers human consciousness to be an absolute and isolated force, and the only basis of history. Western sociologists sometimes criticise Marxist sociologists for ignoring the role of man and his consciousness in social development and for seeing only the movement of impersonal categories. The criticism is misplaced. Marxist sociology has shown that men are simultaneously authors and actors. Production of material wealth and the elaboration of new technology and implements require the maximum participation of man's consciousness and will. But production relations cannot be established or changed by human choice because they are determined by objective material factors, primarily the productive forces.
The forces of production express man's relationship to nature and represent the degree of his domination over it. They include all active ingredients in the labour process, the labour implements and people with appropriate knowledge and production skills, by virtue of which they carry on production. Human beings are the principal and decisive production force; as producers of material wealth they 111 are the creators of history. Without men technology is a dead force, as Marx made abundantly clear: ``A machine which does not serve the purposes of labour is useless. In addition, it falls prey to the destructive influence of natural forces. Iron rusts and wood rots. Yarn with which we neither weave nor knit is cotton waste. Living labour must seize upon these things and rouse them from their deathsleep, change them from mere possible use-values into real and effective ones" [5; I, 183].
The relations of production form among members of society as they influence and are influenced by nature, because men cannot produce without somehow collaborating in joint activity and mutual exchange.
Since these relations are formed directly in material production, are determined by its material element---the means of labour---and exist independently of man's consciousness and will, they are material relations. Their character depends on the ownership of the means of produc tion, i.e., the method by which labour power is combined with the means of production, and, further, by the resultant relations of mutual exchange, relations of distribution of the produced material wealth, production and personal consumption.
As they represent the most decisive aspect of material production, the relations of production may be of a varied and even mutually exclusive form. Production relations based on capitalist ownership of the means of production, on exploitation of hired propertyless labour and forced thereby to sell their labour power, are called capitalist production relations. Relations based on social ownership of the means of production, co-operation and mutual assistance among workers free from exploitation, are called socialist production relations.
Further development of the socialist production relations results in communism---``a classless social system with one form of public ownership of the means of production and full social equality of all members of society; under it, the all-round development of people will be accompanied by the growth of the productive forces through continuous progress in science and technology; all sources of public wealth will gush forth abundantly, and the great principle 112 `From each according to his ability, to each according Lo /H'.S needs' will be implemented" [12; 51].
The main feature of the mode of production is its spontaneous development or self-motion. A change in the mode of production always begins with a change in the productive forces. By participating in production and improving an implement of production, human beings themselves change as a productive force. The result of interaction between the means of labour, technology and the people who set them in motion, is a process of continuous quantitative accumulations within the productive forces, a process leading to their qualitative change. The production relations of men change in accordance with the changes in the productive forces and depend on them.
Thus, the transition from stone tools to bronze and iron tools, from primitive hunting economy to livestock breeding and agriculture became a prerequisite for a higher productivity of labour. A higher productivity of labour within the family community and the tribe made it possible to produce a surplus product which was accumulated in the hands of a few hereditary aristocrats.
The basis of production relations in slave-owning society was the slave-owner's ownership of the means of production and the slave whom the slave-owner could sell, buy and even kill. The new production relations corresponded to a higher level of productive forces than those of the primitive communal system. Agriculture, livestock breeding, handicrafts and the use of metal tools were relatively widespread.
The slave-owning mode of production, unlike that of the primitive community, signified an increase in the producers of material wealth. It is known, for example, that in the ancient Greek polis the ratio of free men to slaves was 1:10. Moreover, slavery developed an immeasurably more complex division of labour (both between the polis and the provinces, and within the latifundium or shop) than did the confined family community. Water and wind began to be used to supplement human labour power. In the ancient world technical progress led to considerable technical achievements in building, the treatment and storage of grain, manufacture of leather and cloth, etc.
Slavery was a progressive stage in the history of human __PRINTERS_P_114_COMMENT__ 8---974 113 society. The productive forces, science and culture developed more rapidly on the basis of slavery, but, having reached a certain level, they could make no further headway within the production relations of slave-owning society.
The transition to feudalism was not a conscious act by members of society who ``suddenly'' became aware of the abnormality of slavery. It was a spontaneous process spanning a long period of history, although it was much shorter than the emergence of slavery. To live and develop, society required a type of producer different from the slave, more interested in his work and creating more material wealth. The serf proved to be such a producer.
The productive forces of feudalism were superior to those of slave-owning society. The methods of smelting and processing iron improved. Iron ploughs and other iron tools began to be used on a large scale. Man began to exploit water power.
The direct producer, the peasant, was partly liberated. He could still be bought and sold, but no longer killed. The serf now had some interest in his work. This gave him some initiative in work which the slave did not have.
With the rise of manufacturing the ever-growing contradiction between the new character of the productive forces and the old feudal production relations began to increase. The capitalist entrepreneur united individual producers and by dividing the production process into partial operations, he achieved much higher labour productivity than had the guilds. But this mode of production also required a worker different from the serf. Firstly, he had to be free from feudal or guild dependence so that he might be hired and used by any owner of capital. Secondly, he had to be absolutely free from the means of production, i.e., he had to have no land, draught animals and tools, so that fear of starvation might drive him to work in the factory. This worker had to be a proletarian. The young bourgeoisie drove him into servitude by ``bloody legislation'', by the enclosures and other measures of the period of primary capitalist accumulation.
In the long run the scientific and technical revolution led to the invention of the steam engine and large-scale industrial production---the first industrial revolution. The power of steam and then electricity made it possible to 114 vastly increase society's productive forces, to replace the petty economy of the town and countryside by large-scale machine production, and to penetrate to the remotest corners of the earth.
But, after playing a revolutionary role in history, the bourgeoisie shared the fate of its predecessors: it became an outmoded, reactionary force and began to impede social development. The bourgeoisie lent production a social character, yet retained private appropriation. The product of social labour is appropriated by an individual capitalist or a group of capitalists---a monopoly. This basic contradiction in capitalism engenders anarchy of production, cyclical production crises and chronic unemployment, and bitter competition between the capitalist syndicates, which leads to local and world wars.
The Programme of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union sums this up in the following words: ``All in all, capitalism is increasingly impeding the development of the contemporary productive forces. Mankind is entering the period of a great scientific and technical revolution bound up with the conquest of nuclear energy, space exploration, the development of chemistry, automation and other major achievements of science and engineering.... Imperialism is using technical progress chiefly for military purposes. It is turning the achievements of human genius against humanity" [12; 20].
The conflict between the productive forces and the production relations of modern capitalism shows that the production relations do not automatically follow in the wake of the productive forces. The production relations, as the main motive power in the development of the productive forces may, upon the appearance of a new mode of production, become the main hindrance to the further development of these productive forces. The dependence of the production relations on a specific stage in the development of the productive forces, the dialectics of development of the productive forces and the production relation';, is a universal sociological law.
This law also operates under socialism and during the transition to communism. But under socialism the lag of the production relations behind the level of development of the productive forces does not lead to conflict. Socialism creates __PRINTERS_P_115_COMMENT__ 8* 115 conditions which make it possible to notice the new objective requirements of economic development and to make changes in the socialist production relations corresponding to the developing productive forces. Under socialism the working people are themselves vitally interested in developing production, and there are no classes which for mercenary interests want to retain the old production relations. At the same time, in expressing the will of the working people, the state, far from counteracting the progressive changes in the production relations in the interests of the working people, on the contrary, does its utmost to bring them about.
Nor does the higher phase of communist society escape this universal sociological law. The very principle of communism---from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs---implies endless motion not stagnation. Under communism each new epoch will also mean a higher level of development of people's abilities selflessly given to society, and greater satisfaction of people's material and cultural needs. Communism offers a vast scope for real social progress leading to unprecedented heights in science, culture and human happiness. Communism means a great development of society where social evolutions will cease to become political revolutions.
On the basis of society rises a corresponding superstructure---views, ideas, theories, ideological relations and social institutions. These heterogeneous elements have a number of common features, the most important of which is that they all arise on a certain economic basis and are organically connected with it.
The superstructure actively influences the basis, its institutions (the state with its army, police, prisons, etc., political parties, church, etc.) exercising not only ideological, but also great material power. The economically dominant class uses its power to consolidate the economic relations favouring its interests. By virtue of this there are cases in the history of society when the productive forces have already outgrown the production relations, but the latter are for a certain period retained by the power of the superstructure.
The monism of the materialist theory of social development is that it establishes connections of all phenomena 116 with production. The material relations are the decisive relations independent of human aims, ideas and conceptions; the material relations condition them. It is social being that determines social consciousness.
The proposition that the laws of social development are not only independent of man's consciousness, but themselves play a decisive role in the development of consciousness is an axiom of historical materialism. Marx wrote: ``Even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement---and it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society---it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development" [5; I, 10].
Marxism regards society as a living organism where not fortuitous factors, but functionally dependent elements of a single whole, subordinate to the action of objective laws governing social development, interact. On the basis of this, sociological analysis of the phenomena of social life reveals the social nature of each of them, its place in the system of social relations and its role (function) in historical development.
Marx applied the materialist principle to the cognition of all social phenomena and thereby created a single scientific theory of social development. He regarded society as the indissoluble unity of the two aspects of social relations---material and ideological---but attached paramount importance to the material, production relations. Proceeding from the materialist principle he gave the only scientific definition of society: ``The relations of production in their totality constitute what are called the social relations, society, and, specifically, a society at a definite stage of historical development, a society with a peculiar, distinctive character" [5; 1,90].
The ancient, feudal, bourgeois and communist societies are such aggregates of production relations; each at the same time marks a special stage in the progressive process of human development. Marx writes: ``From my standpoint the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history" [5; I, 10].
Unlike bourgeois sociology, which denies the objective 117 and regular character of distribution, scientific sociology has established the concept of socio-economic formation and has for the first time in the history of social science provided a criterion which makes it possible to distinguish significant and insignificant phenomena in the complex network of social phenomena. Lenin once wrote that in sociology materialism ``provided an absolutely objective criterion by singling out 'production relations' as the structure of society, and by making it possible to apply to these relations that general scientific criterion of recurrence whose applicability to sociology the subjectivists denied. So long as they confined themselves to ideological social relations (i.e., such as, before taking shape, pass through man's consciousness) they could not observe recurrence and regularity in the social phenomena of the various countries, and their science was at best only a description of those phenomena, a collection of raw material. The analysis of material social relations (i.e., of those that take shape without passing through man's consciousness: when exchanging products men enter into production relations without even realising that there is a social relation of production here)---the analysis of material social relations at once made it possible to observe recurrence and regularity and to generalise the systems of the various countries in the single fundamental concept: social formation. It was this generalisation alone that made it possible to proceed from the description of social phenomena (and their evaluation from the standpoint of an ideal) to their strictly scientific analysis, which isolates, let us say by way of example, that which distinguishes one capitalist country from another and investigates that which is common to all of them" [1; 1, 140].
Scientific Marxism does not assert that economic forces are the only cause of social action and the remainder is but passive effect. Social life is the result of complex interaction of various and unequally significant social forces. The basis of this interaction, however, is the mode of production. Production determines the unity and integrity of history, while its many manifestations are the result of interaction of all aspects of social life.
Economic relations combine nature, technology and culture in a single social organism. Western sociologists 118 fail to understand this and dismantle these conditions in the life of society into separate elements which they oppose to one another in a metaphysical manner.
Only the materialist conception of society has cleared the way for a comprehensive study of the social process as a process of emergence and development of socio-economic formations. It examines the total of all contradictory tendencies, reducing them to determinable conditions of life and production of the various social classes. It eliminates subjectivism and arbitrariness in the choice of various ``predominant'' social ideas, norms or values, and relates them to the state of the material productive forces.
Lenin criticised the subjective-idealist approach to the social process when he wrote: ``The materialist is more consistent than the objectivist, and gives profounder and fuller effect to his objectivism. He does not limit himself to speaking of the necessity of a process, but ascertains exactly what social-economic formation gives the process its content, exactly what class determines this necessity. In the present case, for example, the materialist would not content himself with stating the 'insurmountable historical tendencies', but would point to the existence of certain classes, which determine the content of the given system and preclude the possibility of any solution except by the action of the producers themselves. On the other hand, materialism includes partisanship, so to speak, and enjoys the direct and open adoption of the standpoint of a definite social group in the assessment of events" [1; 1, 401].
The materialist approach to history and the consistent application of materialism to social phenomena have eliminated the main deficiencies of pre-Marxist sociology.
Firstly, from investigating the ideological motives of history Marxist sociologists turned to analysing their social causes, i.e., the objective laws of social relations rooted in economic development, particularly the material productive forces.
Secondly, from studying the ideological motives of the actions of individuals they turned to investigating the socialpsychological actions of the people, revealing the roots of these actions in the conditions of their material life.
Thirdly, from individual facts they turned to an allinclusive study of society as an integral social unit.
119Fourthly, i'rom discussing society in general they turned to concrete studies of a given society, a given socio-economic formation as a link in the historical development of human society.
__NUMERIC_LVL2__ Chapter 3 __ALPHA_LVL2__ SOCIAL GROUPS AND CLASSES __ALPHA_LVL3__ § 1. Definition of Social Group. Theories of ``SocialA number of sociologists assert that in the 20th century class relations and the class division of society on the basis of class relationship to the means of production and to social production, have lost their former significance, and that intraclass relations have come to the foreground and have become the determining and decisive factor of social life. They regard society as being composed of an infinite number of most diverse social groups, including various associations of people on ethnic, racial, criminal, familial, etc., lines.
It is natural that sociologists should not agree on what is a standard social group. The American sociologist A. Eister writes that ``certain difficulties are encountered in any attempt to determine the scope and direction of the smallgroup research movement" and that ``perhaps the most serious of the difficulties is the vagueness surrounding the concept of the small group itself" [21; 306]. In his opinion many sociologists and social psychologists are inclined to avoid a precise definition of the size of the group. Eister himself cites the results of an investigation of 9,129 groups conducted by American sociologists. These groups largely consist of two or three people and very rarely of more than 4-7 persons.
The argument is that it is easier to integrate a small group than a large one. The more relationships there are in a group, the more difficult it is to regulate them and the greater the possibilities for social friction. This is demonstrated by the example of a large family. The following table is compiled to list relations between members of the family, depending on its size:
A has relations with B ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ---2 relations
120A has relations with B and C ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ---6 relations
A has relations with B, C and D ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ---12 relations, etc.
To prove the correctness and universal nature of this table, the results of the American sociologist F. Thrasher's studies of criminal gangs are cited. He discovered that 859 gangs exist in Chicago; only ten gangs had a membership between 200 and 2,000, the rest had 20 or less. The reason was apparently because gangs require ``intimacy'' of contact; they therefore tend to be small.
R. Bales defines the small social group as a number of people who interact with one another in direct personal contact or a series of contacts, in which each member receives a certain impression or perception of the other members, clear enough for him to react to each of them as an individual ``person'' [see 56; 33].
Yet these sociologists themselves admit that the division of society into such small groups causes confusion. Eister writes: ``There has been a proliferation of different words for essentially the same or similar phenomena and a growing variety of disparate and unrelated theoretic orientations. Borrowings of concepts and procedures have occurred and are hard to trace, particularly where ideas and techniques borrowed from one source are recast in different phrases and set in quite different theoretical contexts. Within a given discipline, moreover, whole areas of research have frequently not been seen as related by a common frame of reference. In sociology, for example, it is probably safe to say that comparatively little of the large volume of research on interpersonal relations in courtship, marriage, and the family has been dealt with explicitly in small-group term's" [21; 353].
Merrill defines a social group as ``two or more persons who interact over an appreciable period and share a common purpose" [52; 46].
This definition also covers the family, the basketball team and the criminal gang.
Green's definition slightly differs from that of Merrill: ``A group is an aggregate of individuals which persists in time, which has one or more interests and activities in common, and which is organised---that is, some members lead, others follow, and rules and statutes control the social relationships within it" [16; 43].
121Other sociologists make even vaguer definitions. For example, Freedman, Hawley and Landecker depict a social group as ``an organisation of two or more individuals united both by ties of mutual dependence and by a system of shared behavioral standards'', ``a human aggregate, the members of which possess some common identifying social characteristic, but who lack either the ties of mutual dependence or the shared behavioral standard which are the marks of a group" [51; 70].
Chinoy adds the terms ``values'' and ``similar values" to a definition of the social group. In his view a social group is ``a number of persons whose relationships are based upon a set of interrelated roles and statuses, who share certain beliefs and values, and who are sufficiently aware of their shared or similar values and their relations to one another to be able to differentiate themselves from others. The Social group then is identified by three attributes: patterned interactions, shared or similar beliefs and values, and, to use Franklin R. Giddings' phrase, consciousness of kind" [49; 82]. Yet ``value'' is interpreted variously, so that the group too takes on an arbitrary definition.
Many Western sociologists hold that the group originates in childhood. For example, Linton asserts that the tendency to form group issues from the child's early dependence on other persons plus his intimate group relations during his formative period [see 66; 30]. This is because the child is completely dependent on others for food, warmth and love. During this period, the child develops a sense of comfort and security in the presence of other persons---his parents, brothers and sisters. It is this feeling of security in the presence of others that Linton considers the only and most important factor in the tendency to form groups [see 66; 30]. The need for co-operation and subordination to others in groups, he concludes, is the subsequent product of childhood, from birth to adolescence.
Ogburn and Nimkoff declare the essence of group life to be internal stimulation, responsibility or communication consisting of a number of commonly understandable symbols, such as facial expression, gestures and words.
In defining the social group many sociologists list as many elements as they can imagine. Freedman writes: ``both common interests and goals and geographical proximity are 122 powerful forces contributing to the formation of new social groups'', ``both biological and sociological factors have influenced their lives significantly" [51; 81, 82].
During what particular processes, then, have ``social groups" formed?
Western sociologists regard the integration of people in groups as something eternal and differing only quantitatively. Yet the ``division of labour" in the family, for example, has not always existed. It arose as a result of the first division of society. In the primitive community, under the maternal right, men and women performed economic functions on an equal basis. The diversification of economic functions (development of cattle-breeding) led to the overthrow of the matriarchate, which, as Engels notes, was one of the most radical revolutions experienced by mankind and led to domination over the female sex all over the world. ``The man seized the reins in the house also, the woman was degraded, enthralled, the slave of the man's lust, a mere instrument for breeding children" [2; II, 217].
But what decides the formation of the group according to Western sociologists? 1) Personal attraction: individuals unite because they love one another and want to be together; 2) group prestige: individuals unite in a group because it is an honour to belong to a given group; 3) fear that people cannot resolve a particular problem and achieve their goal without the aid of others involved in the common activity.
To bind the groups together once they have been formed, the sociologists have to find various group-binding forces. Merrill believes communication to be such a force. He writes: ``The efficiency of the group depends upon the efficiency of communication" [52; 56]. Each small-group member is a unit of communication. Attraction is another force which retains people in the group.
In their attempt to prove the eternal nature of the capitalist system, some Western sociologists appeal for ``social integration" which they picture as the basis for the forces acting on the members and impelling them to stay in the group [see 82; 163].
Herbert Spencer first introduced the concepts ``social integration" and ``social differentiation" into sociology. He devised them by analogy with the integration and 123 differentiation of cells in a living organism. In his work The Social Organism he draws an analogy between organic and social development. Simple organisms (for example, polyps) have two layers of cells: an outer layer which serves the purpose of catching food and fighting enemies, and an internal layer ---for digesting food. In precisely the same manner, the primitive society had a class of warriors in contact with the external environment, defended the community against the enemies or itself made raids, and a class of slaves who processed the natural wealth and provided food for the tribe.
Cell differentiation in the more complex biological organisms leads to the formation of three interdependent systems: digestive, circulatory (distributing the substances through the organism) and nervous (regulating the work of the internal and external organs). A developed social organism must, according to Spencer, also have three classes: the lower class (feeding itself and others), middle class (exchange and distribution) and higher class (regulation, administration).
The rigid division of labour between these classes, he claimed, was the result of individual biological differences. The most capable and gifted people became differentiated from the ``dull mass'', and rose to the top of the social ladder, to the helm of power and became the ``brain'' of the social organism. As a biological organism cannot normally function without interaction, exchange and co-ordination of the digestive, circulatory and nervous systems, so the social organism, Spencer concluded, cannot exist without integration or co-operation of groups of people, without the co-operation and harmony of classes.
But this ``biological'' theory of the social process perverts the character of social life. Differentiation and integration of social groups are caused by the social division of labour, not by biological processes. In the Marxist view, only a study of the aims of all members of society or a social group in their entirety can scientifically determine the result of these aims. The source of the antagonistic aims is the difference in the social position and living conditions of the classes into which each society breaks up.
In the final analysis, many sociologists reduce all the components of social integration to human psychology. They derive even the division of labour from ``established 124 concepts''; group integration is conditioned by consciousness, emotions and even irrational motives. The group is stable if individual consciousness harmonises with group consciousness; it disintegrates if it comes into conflict with it.
In explaining the causes of social integration these sociologists do not go any deeper than the 19th-century economists did in explaining private property. Marx said at the time that the only fly-wheel the economists use is self-interest and war between self-interested people, rereferred to as competition.
The process of groups integration inevitably results from the social division of labour. Capitalism effects the distribution of labour among people through exchange, i.e., by the most spontaneous and least regulative form. In slave-- owning and feudal societies ``integration'' occurred on the basis of personal dependence, whereas under capitalism it is effected by starvation.
All historical forms of ``integration'' in antagonistic societies were of a compulsory nature. Only socialism creates the social conditions for truly voluntary, constructive and free association of people on rational and sociallyuseful principles.
The doctrine of social integration is subjectivist. It disregards objective laws and processes.
The theory of the need for social integration has undergone three stages.
The mechanical or atomistic conception was advanced in the 18th century. The individual was regarded as a social atom acting on selfish interests and needs. Individual integration was pictured as an act of intelligence and will. The state rose as a supreme will above the people and alienated their rights and directed their activities.
Pre-Marxian theories, wrote Lenin, made society ``a mechanical aggregation of individuals which allows of all sorts of modification at the will of the authorities (or, if you like, at the will of society and the government) and which emerges and changes casually...'' [1; 1, 142].
The biological conception came into existence in the second half of the last century. It explained the emergence of groups by ``natural principles" (racial struggle, division of labour, biological inequality, etc.).
125In this century bourgeois sociologists have developed the psychological conception, whereby group consciousness is the basis of social ties. Social differentiation is regarded as the second aspect of social interaction, as an antagonistic process, but interdependent with social integration. Differentiation is seen as the process of class formation, but in no way leading to an irreconcilable struggle. This concept is subjectivistic. The social division of labour is apparently a result of the various abilities, talents, i.e., psychological differences among people.
There are sociologists who do their utmost to prove that contact between groups is harmful, maintaining that a change from one group to another or a transition of an entire group to another ``cultural environment" presumably disturbs the homogeneity and stability and thereby the integration. Integration allegedly presupposes the individual's constant attachment to the group.
Some of them admit the possibility of disorganisation in the group. Disorganisation means, says Merrill, ``that the network of relationships joining the members together breaks down" [52; 64]. But what is it that can break this network down?
Merrill answers: ``In this process at least three factors may be typically present: a) the needs that the members thought would be satisfied in the group have diminished; b) the needs are still there, but the members no longer believe that they can be satisfied in a particular group; c) the needs continue to exist but many persons have ceased to believe that their needs can be satisfied in any group" [52, 65].
To prevent this, Western sociologists are seeking ways and means to preclude disorganisation. G. Homans writes that society may be weakened through underestimation of the importance of interaction within the small social groups. Continued failure to support the small group as the central unit may threaten the existence of society. If the individual leaves the group which surrounds him and which esteems him, and if he does not find a new group which he can enter, this will inevitably give rise to disordered thoughts, feelings and behaviour [see 83; 457].
The theories of bourgeois sociology about small groups as exclusive social-psychological and cultural complexes sometimes reproduce the old sacerdotal sermon of ``love thy 126 neighbour''. They serve as a theoretical basis for a number of social measures directly aimed at ``patching up" the flagrant contradictions of modern capitalism.
At the very inception of the capitalist mode of production some sociologists hoped that its development would prove compatible with petty bourgeois economics. Some subjective idealists such as N. K. Mikhailovsky, S. N. Krivenko, G. A. Lavrov who preached the stability of the Russian peasantry and the innumerable small enterprises both in agriculture and industry, rejected the possibility of capitalist development in Russia and thereby a sharp increase in class differentiation of Russian society.
But history dismissed these Utopian theories. The development of capitalist relations led to the division of capitalist society into two antagonistic and hostile classes---the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Today, some schools of Western sociology being unable to resist the material processes leading to heightened class differentiation, try to hamper the growing class consciousness of the working class. This is the purpose of the subjective-idealist theory of small groups, as factors ``intensifying'' integration.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 2. Primary and Secondary Social GroupsSocial groups are often divided into two categories--- primary and secondary. Primary groups, says Green, are small and personal, while secondary groups are large and impersonal. A group is primary if it has established relations of direct sympathy. Cooley asserts that the primary group is of enormous social importance in the process of formation of human ideals. Normative and social-psychological (moral) integration operates more vigorously in primary groups, mechanical (division of labour) integration in secondary groups.
According to this idea, workers at an industrial enterprise are integrated on the basis of the division of labour into the secondary group. In this group, Western sociologists say, integration is formal because social contacts are weak. Inasmuch as modern society largely consists of such impersonal social relations, it becomes weak. People must feel that they belong to somebody, that somebody is concerned about them and that they are not alone. The primary group 127 gives a feeling of confidence and security. In a factory the primary group may consist of small groups of workers engaged in a common operation or getting together during the lunch hour.
Some Western sociologists therefore recommend organisation of homogeneous groups. Thus, they say, in Sweden, where the national composition is homogeneous, there are 14.8 divorces per 100 marriages, whereas in the U.S.A., where national and religious differences are quite ap preciable, there are 23.1 divorces per 100 marriages. The American sociologist P. Bugjell asserts that group homogeneity contributes to the community of interests and goals, while heterogeneity makes for a conflict of interests.
The primary group may be the family, a group of children, etc., i.e., a unit where the ``individual feels he is himself''. According to R. Paris, it is the basic form of social interaction, while A. Hollingshead regards the primary army group, the clique and the unformed group of a minimum twenty persons also as primary groups. Merrill includes in this category also gangs whose activities are often of an antisocial nature [see 52; 77--78]. The primary group includes only persons whose interaction is intimate and is often based on family relationship.
The members of the secondary group regard one another not as ends, but as means to an end. Green writes that ``secondary groups are usually dispersed in space and so large that the membership cannot maintain close contact" [16; 46]. These aggregates of individuals may be associations, leagues, classes, parties, races, crowds, etc.
This approach to the definition of a social group has frequently led researchers to insignificant conclusions. Thus the American book Modern Sociological Theory reports the following results of an investigation of groups conducted by the American sociologist L. Festinger. ``It was found, in this case, that although proximity of residence within the project and such factors as the arrangements of sidewalks, mailboxes, and stairways were important in determining the persons with whom one made friends, the attractiveness of whatever groups were formed depended on how well these groups met the needs of their participants. In another instance, basing his report on research among participants in the National Training Laboratory for Group 128 Development at Bethel, Maine, French found that friendship choices were made 'mostly on the basis of similarity of occupation, personality characteristics, and the extent of actual and expected reciprocation of the choice'. He noted also that such choices were being made shortly after the entire population assembled" [21; 324].
The level of research conducted by small-group theorists is evident from the results of surveys carried out by the American sociologist T. M. Mills. Modern Sociological Theory has the following to say about it: ``T. M. Mills in his study of power relationships in three-person laboratory discussion groups, found that when what he called the strong members of a trio formed a mutually supportive pair, the third person was firmly excluded and a stable social structure occurred; but when the strong members were in conflict, no stable structure developed and they competed for the favour of the third member" [21; 327].
In investigating the social group sociology requires an analysis of each socio-economic formation within which the given social group exists and develops. One may speak of social groups of feudal or slave-owning or socialist society, but the social laws traced in one society cannot be applied to all other societies. Within each socio-economic formation the multifarious activities of individuals, seemingly subject to no systematisation, are explained by Marxist sociologists by the role people play in the system of production relations, the conditions of production and, consequently, the conditions of life, the interests determined by these conditions, in a word, by the activities of the classes whose struggle determines social development.
Variable functions (according to which individuals belong to one group or another) are primarily the functions of individuals in a historically determined system of social production, their relation to the means of production, their role in the social organisation of labour and, consequently, the way they obtain their share of the social wealth, the size of this share, and certain other derived characteristics.
All social groups possess certain common features, the most important of which are:
a) the social group exists within a single historical system of social relations as one of the elements performing strictly __PRINTERS_P_129_COMMENT__ 8---974 129 definde functions. The group cannot exist outside the single social organism;
b) the social group exists objectively, independent of the will of the individuals of which it consists. Each individual naturally has a consciousness and a will and has the right to act as he pleases, but if his acts do not meet the objective social requirements of the group, he will be excluded from it by force of circumstances. The group does not cease to exist when one or several of its members are replaced by others;
c) the members of the social group may associate with one another or be unacquainted, or be on unfriendly or even hostile terms. This is unimportant. In their social functions the group members act alike. The group whose social qualities are determined by the material conditions of its existence in turn determines the social behaviour of its members;
d) the social group is a single whole in relation to other groups. In itself the group is no less a reality than each of its individuals;
e) each social group has specific social-psychological traits, an ideology which most fully reflects its group interests.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 3. ``Social Stratification'' TheoryBesides denying the division of society into social classes on the basis of relationship to the means of production, some sociologists have introduced the concept of ``stratum'' in addition to the concept of ``social group''. This concept implies the ``existence of social ranks in society''. Thus Sorokin defines social stratification as ``differentiation of the given population into hierarchically arranged classes. It means the existence of higher and lower strata. Its basis and true essence consist in an unequal distribution of rights and privileges, duty and responsibility, social riches and scantiness, social power and influence among the members of society" [84; 570].
Ogburn and Nimkoff also call social stratification ``regulated inequality'', in which people are arranged higher and lower, in accordance with their social roles and activities.
130They write: ``The process by which individuals and groups are ranked in a more or less enduring hierarchy of status is known as stratification, probably because of the figurative resemblance of social hierarchies to the sedimentary rocks in layers in the earth's crust. But there is considerably less permanence in the social hierarchies than in the geologic strata" [24; 157].
Lundberg calls stratified society a ``society of unequals" where there are differences between superior and inferior people. As all phenomena of organic and inorganic nature are divided into definite classes, so society is inevitably divided into classes or strata. ``In every society'', writes Chinoy, ``some men are identified as superior and others as inferior ... some rule and others obey, although the latter may possess varying degrees of influence or control over the rulers. These contrasts between higher and lower, rich and poor, powerful and powerless---constitute the substance of social stratification" [49; 131].
Merrill defines social stratification as something `` superimposed by tradition without the will or even the conscious knowledge of the great majority of the members. Social stratification involves a system of differential privileges, which means that some groups receive more of the goods, services, power and emotional gratification of the society than others" [52; 259].
These sociologists admit that social stratification is thus ``a system of institutionalised social inequality that perpetuates privilege from generation to generation" [52; 259].
Advocates of the social stratification theory thus note two of its characteristics: first, the inevitability of social inequality and hierarchy in any society independent of its economic basis, and, second, its perpetuation. The perpetuation of social stratification is stressed in order to mitigate the initial thesis of inevitable social inequality and show the system of social stratification as a certain harmony of the classes in which the social differences increase so gradually and unnoticeably that it leaves no room for class antagonisms.
Sorokin refers to the system of social inequality and hierarchy as ``social feudalism''. He says that all the revolutions that occurred in history only mitigated some social contrasts and altered the forms of stratification, but did not 131 succeed in destroying the stratification itself. The regularity with which these efforts failed only proves the ``natural'' character of stratification [see 84; 1, 573).
Sorokin sees social stratification as a constant characteristic of any organised society. The difference is only in form. He notes that feudalism and oligarchy continue to exist in science and art, politics and management, gangs of criminals, democracies, among advocates of equality--- everywhere.
These arguments are based on the principle of applying the laws of capitalism to all other societies and the hierarchy of antagonistic society even to the vegetable and animal kingdoms (as it was at one time done by Malthus). On the basis of these premises they draw conclusions about the ``natural'' character of stratification, its universality for all societies, past, present and future, and thereby the `` fundamental" impossibility of a classless (unstratified) society.
Division of society into ``strata'' is usually based on such factors as occupation, type of dwelling, place of residence, size of income, etc.
Thus L. Ebersole names as these factors the prestige factors of income, occupation, power, birth and personal qualities [see 85; 274--75]. W. Goldschmidt defines stratum by financial, occupational, military or educational factors. Stratum may be based on power, prestige, wealth or a combination of these factors.
The factors on the basis of which a particular individual is regarded as belonging to a definite stratum is called status. ``Status,'' writes Merrill, ``is the position a person occupies in society by virtue of his age, sex, birth, occupation, marriage or achievement" [52; 179]. According to Lundberg, ``the degree of importance attached to each role is called status" [32; 476].
It is clear that the concept of ``stratus'' is so broad and vague that it includes the most diverse criteria. This is very convenient for an eclectic and mechanical approach to the division of society into social strata.
Merrill reveals the philosophical purport of the theory of ``social stratification" when he admits that social status is the position established by the group for playing the social role or a series of roles. Status is thus created by the 132 opinion of others. These others act as judges of our roles and behaviour [see 52; 190--91].
Western sociologists distinguish inborn and achieved statuses. Merrill notes that ``society places various limits upon the achievement of status... . Race and ethnic backgrounds are important limitations with the most spectacular such restriction applied to the Negro. Until recently, he has been largely limited to mental jobs. Even today they cannot achieve a high elective post. Sex is another limitation to status in various spheres of our society" [52; 182]. He emphasises that ``high family status is thus an important (perhaps the most important) factor in business success today. Boys whose fathers are leaders of business and industry have a considerable initial advantage over those whose fathers are white-collar workers, farmers, or labourers" [52; 188].
Western sociologists agree that there is a struggle in all societies among people with different statuses; it is not a struggle of classes for social privileges, but a struggle of individuals for the best ``social role" when there are few higher roles and statuses and the demand for them is greater than the supply [see 52; 183--84].
What then is social role?
``A role is the 'function of a status'~" [44; 158], ``the manner in which status is fulfilled" [16; 37], ``a pattern of expected behaviour associated with a certain position in a society" [52; 183--84].
Differences in roles are explained by ``effective social invention" [52; 183--84] not by an objective process historically rooted in the social division of labour.
Thus, the sociologists write about strata formed by arbitrarily chosen factors, not about the real social classes ---the proletariat, petty, middle and big (monopoly) bourgeoisie. The result is not an investigation of a class structure, but a description of various social groups. Consequently, they arrive at the conclusion that ``as we have seen, there are no specific, discrete classes in the United States; rather, there is a stratification hierarchy, the dividing lines in which are dependent upon the criteria of class status utilised by the researcher" [44; 186].
To highlight social stratification, division into strata is made a universal law governing nature and society. Sorokin 133 writes: ``Any organised social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is 'flat', and in which all members are equal. Unstratified society, with real equality of its members, is a myth which has never been realised in the history of mankind" [86; I, 571].
Moreover, Sorokin represents stratification as a universal law governing not only society, but also the vegetable and animal kingdoms (here also, he says, there are parasitism and exploitation, suppression and domination, different ``economic'' standards of living---the amount of air, sunlight, moisture and soil ingredients consumed---and so on; the existence of different and sharply divided classes in the communities of bees, ants and other insects; the existence of leaders among gregarious mammals). He finds the law of stratification in primitive society (sex and age groups, privileged-and influential groups of tribal leaders, chieftains or headmen, inter- and intratribal division of labour).
But, in his opinion, the law of stratification operates most widely in civilised society: ``The modern democracies also do not present any exception to the rule. Though in their constitutions it is said that 'all men are equal', only a quite naive person may infer from this a non-existence of social stratification within these societies" [86; I, 572].
By ``social stratification" Western sociologists depict a pyramid of social inequality in capitalist society, without considering the very base of the pyramid---sacrosanct private property. By this concept they fix the attention on the semblance of development---motion and ``struggle'' of various occupational, religious, ethnic and other groups--- without referring to the fundamental changes occurring in the large social groups, i.e., classes, without mentioning the increasingly intense class struggle in capitalist society.
Lenin once observed that in the 20th century everyb'ody acknowledges the principle of development, yet differs on how development takes place. Western sociologists regard development as simple evolution, as decrease and increase, as a repetitive cycle. That is why they conceive social stratification as a dismal and monotonous process in which the form changes, but the content does not, and the constant product is social inequality.
134Materialists regard development as a revolutionary process, as a struggle of opposites with the emergence of a new quality, as a continuous discarding of outdated forms and transformation of the content. They view class development not as simple mechanical evolution, but as a process that leads to intense irreconcilable class struggle, to destruction of antagonistic class society which is but the prehistory of mankind, a prologue to the highest phase of development--- classless communist society.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 4. Social Classes.At the beginning of the 19th century British bourgeois economists sought economic reasons for society's disintegration into social classes. They failed because they saw the reason for class division in distribution and not in the mode of production. These economists distinguished three major classes of capitalist society according to sources of income such as wages, profit and rent. They thought that the class division of society was natural and lasting.
About the same time French bourgeois historians were writing about revolutions as a manifestation of the struggle of the new class against the conservative, obsolete class. One must understand the political history of society to understand the economic conditions of existence of the different classes and the property relations of people.
But they, too, were unable to determine the essence of the class division of society. They considered the cause of the rise of classes to lie in the subjugation of some people by others. Limited by their bourgeois world outlook, the historians of the epoch of restoration saw the class struggle only in the epoch of feudalism, but were blind to the struggle of the working class against the capitalist exploiters.
Western sociology started to tackle the problem of social classes at the turn of the 20th century. The theories of Spencer, Gumplowicz and Ward explained the appearance of social classes by biological, racial or psychological ``monism'', and proved unconvincing in the face of the class division of bourgeois society and the increasing class struggle between labour and capital.
135Conferences of sociological societies and institutions were held in Paris, Brussels and London between 1903 and 1906; some of the most prominent sociologists of the time--- A. Bauer, G. Tarde, R. Worms, P. Lafargue and M. Kovalevsky---addressed these conferences.
Bauer defined social classes as groups of individuals who had received an equal education, developed in a similar environment and engaged in the same occupation. He categorised seven ruling and seven subordinate classes.
Tarde criticised Bauer for confusing classes and occupations. Social progress reduces the number of classes and continuously increases the number of occupations. But Tarde himself had a psychological conception of class. The concept of class, he said, satisfies our need instinctively to believe in a social hierarchy; people are imbued with a belief in inequality and as long as they live they make it their object to climb the imaginary social ladder of this inequality. This belief in a social ladder and the need for social climbing are not inborn, but are a result of the slow age-old evolution of the mind, which came into being at the inception of civilisation. The main thing in the relations of the social classes is, according to Tarde, co-operation, not struggle. The rule of normal life of each nation, he wrote, is peaceful co-operation, peaceful concord; the class struggle is a violation of the rule, an abnormality, and is a hazard to social life leading to crisis.
The ideological purport of Tarde's views of the class problem is evident from his advice to the ``lower'' class to imitate the ``higher'' class. This idea is readily supported by many bourgeois sociologists today. The West German Philosophical Dictionary contains the following on the character of class relations: ``By its mode of life and general standing the higher class is an ideal for the lower class even during the periods when the changed correlation of the class forces has already strongly shaken the internal power of the higher class" [42; 317].
Worms defined class as a group of persons standing on the same social level corresponding to a definite social rank. He made a horizontal division according to occupations which are located side by side, and a vertical division into classes which lie in strata above one another. Each occupation is divided into different ranks with various social 136 levels. These ranks underlie the division into social classes. Social ranks, Worms wrote, are determined by different principles depending on birth, education, honour, power and, particularly, wealth.
H. L\'evy-Ullmann considered a ``striving to dominate over others" to underlie the class division of society. The division of capitalist society into two classes of rich and poor is not therefore basic. Differences in property and wealth are of secondary importance and are therefore only the effect and not the cause. The basic classes are the ruling and the ruled.
If several people were stranded on a secluded island, Levy-Ullmann maintained, some would bound to try to dominate the others. This would be achieved either by the strongest, the cleverest or the most cunning. He perceived a division into rulers and ruled in all spheres of society, at all stages of civilisation, in all times. This was the embryo of the ``elite'' theory which appeared somewhat later.
American sociology has adopted the subjectivist concept of class as a social psychological phenomenon. Class consciousness is considered the main and decisive factor. Thus Cooley holds that the relations between the class of employers and the class of manual labour are primarily a matter of individual point of view [see 74; 98].
W. L. Warner implies by class a phenomenon conditioned by numerous factors with the exception of ``economic determinism'', i.e., the objective position of classes in the system of social production.
The social and social-psychological division of society into a vast number of heterogeneous groups has become the subject of numerous empirical studies. But bourgeois sociologists study the subjective opinions class members have, not the classes for what they actually are, nor their objective economic basis, nor their social nature.
The American sociologist R. Centers considers ``class consciousness" to be the most important factor in the concept of class. He therefore includes in the concept not only membership of a given social stratum, but also interests and ideology. A social class, he says, ``can well be regarded as a psychological phenomenon in the fullest sense of the term" [87; 27].
137Small wonder that Centers regards as all-important what individuals themselves think of their class membership: ``If you are asked to use one of these terms---middle class, lower class, working class and upper class---which would you use to indicate your class membership?" Of the total number of persons questioned, 3 per cent identified themselves with the upper class, 43 per cent---with the middle class, 51 per cent---with the working class, and 1 per cent--- with the lower class.
But such an approach cannot furnish the investigator with objective material. The British sociologist F. Martin is right when he says that people's opinion of their own class status and their objective class standing most commonly fail to coincide. He cites a case where one-third of the questioned persons who should be considered members of the middle class identified themselves with the working class, while a quarter of the persons engaged in manual labour considered themselves members of the middle class [see 88; 68].
Martin constructs the following table:
Occupation (named by themselves) Classes with which the persons questioned by the sociologist identified themselves (per cent) Upper class Middle class Working class Lower class No answer given Big business ....... 26 16 3 4 1 1 67 72 61 52 25 19 15 10 6 8 34 40 69 66 74 68 2 2 2 4 12 7 14 1 2 2 1 3 3 8 Specialists ..... Small business ....... White-collar workers . . Skilled manual labour ...... Service personnel ........ Semi-skilled workers ..... Unskilled workers ........The table shows that the majority of big businessmen (67 per cent) identify themselves with the middle class and some (6 per cent) even with the working class, while small businessmen aspire to upper class membership.
Warner, however, takes into account not the relationship of the individual to the means of production, but his 138 relationship to everyday and cultural values, household goods, i.e., to secondary and derived phenomena. The income (without any analysis of its source) is evaluated on the basis of points similarly given for parquet floor and expensive carpet. The true nature of class thereby fails to be revealed.
Warner's methods have come under fire. Merrill has justly observed that Warner minimised ``the economic and political elements of social control that characterise particular segments of the society" [52; 304]. R. Mills has pointed out that Warner gave a hierarchy of prestige based on selfevaluation and thereby equated the concept of ``class'' with the concept of ``knowledge about class''. Merton noted the unhistorical nature of Warner's scheme since it ignored the dynamics of classes and class changes.
But the criticism of Warner's methods and conclusions touches only upon some vulnerable aspects without revealing its very basis. Warner divides the population into social groups on the basis of subjective characteristics, such as snobbishness, prestige, etc. He regards, for example, ``hereditary high family status and aristocratic etiquette" (plus, of course, wealth) as the distinguishing features of the upper class.
According to Warner's scheme, there are three upper classes in society. The upper-middle and middle class differ from the upper class in that they have no old family prestige. In addition to the upper and middle classes Warner distinguishes three lower classes. They differ from the upper and middle classes in that their members are as yet only striving for respectability, while some are generally unrespectable people. But the characteristic striving for respectability cannot be assumed as a basis for a scientific classification.
Scientific sociologists regard classes as large groups of people distinguished by their position in the historically determined system of social production, by their relationship to the means of production, their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, the methods by which they receive their share of social wealth and the amount of this wealth they possess.
Class is a historical category. It is connected with a certain stage in the development of production, with a certain type of production relations. The transition of 139 production to a new stage of development, the transformation of production relations, condition a change in the entire social system and the class structure of the society. People are not free in their choice of production relations and the class structure of society---both are objective phenomena engendered by historical development and independent of people's will.
Class has its objective features. It is characterised not by what its members think of themselves or what members of other classes think of it, not subjective factors like status, prestige, etc., but primarily by their relationship to the means of production. ``Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the labourer, free or not free, must add to the working time necessary for his own maintenance an extra working-time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owners of the means of production, whether this proprietor be the Athenian xaXo; xafadi; (aristocrat---Ed.), Etruscan theocrat, civis Romanus, Norman baron, American slave-owner, Wallachian Boyard, modern landlord or capitalist" [5; I, 235].
Relationship to the means of production is, in turn, conditioned by another factor---the dominating or subordinate position of the class in the system of social production. The distinction between classes in their place in production determines their different roles in the social organisation of labour. The leading role of a class is not the initial, but a derived characteristic consequent upon the given system of production relations. Only the total of all the characteristics of a class taken in their interdependence makes it possible to separate large social groups---classes---in the tangle of social relations. According to Lenin's definition: ``Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy" [1; 29, 421].
The existence of classes and the class struggle was known before the appearance of Marxism. But it was Marx and Engels who applied the materialist conception to the study of history and elaborated the scientific theory of classes and the class struggle. In his letter addressed to J. Weydemeyer in March 5, 1852, Marx wrote: ``What I did that was new was to prove: = 1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of 140 production; 2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society...'' [2; II, 452].
In capitalist society the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, the aim of which is to abolish classes and build a classless society.
Bourgeois sociologists wrote about the class struggle at the inception of their class, but then, too, they confined themselves only to a general acknowledgement of it. Lenin said that ``the theory of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and, generally speaking, it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognise only the class struggle are not yet Marxists; they may be found to be still within the bounds of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics.... A Marxist is solely someone who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat" [1; 25, 411--12].
Marx revealed the antagonistic character of the basis on which classes develop: owners only of labour power, owners of capital and owners of land, in other words, hired workers, capitalists and landowners form three large classes of the society resting on the capitalist mode of production. Marx said that ``the very moment civilisation begins, production begins to be founded on the antagonisms of orders, estates, classes, and finally on the antagonism of accumulated labour and actual labour. No antagonism, no progress. This is the law that civilisation has followed up to our days" [9; 53].
He also noted, however, that even in so classical a capitalist country as England class relationships do not appear in pure form. ``In England, modern society is indisputably most highly and classically developed in economic structure. Nevertheless, even here the stratification of classes does not appear in its pure form. Middle and intermediate strata even here obliterate lines of demarcation everywhere (although incomparably less in rural districts than in the cities)" [5; III, 885].
But these ``middle and transitional stages" cannot conceal the law of development of the capitalist mode of production, by which the means of production are increasingly 141 separated from labour and concentrated in the hands of increasingly fewer owners, labour becomes hired labour, and the means of production become capital. Engels wrote: ``Since the exploitation of one class by another is the basis of civilisation, its whole development moves in a continuous contradiction. Every advance in production is at the same time a retrogression in the condition of the oppressed class, that is, of the great majority. What is a boon for the one is necessarily a bane for the other; each new emancipation of one class always means a new oppression of another class" [2; II, 325].
Accordingly, capitalist society becomes polarised into the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. All other social strata gravitate either toward hired labour or capital and are arranged between these two basic classes.
The economic structure of society is the determining factor in this objective process. A. Labriola wrote that ``on the basis of the development of labour and the means of production corresponding to it the economic structure of society, i.e., the mode of production of the articles of general consumption, firstly, directly conditions in this artificial environment all the rest of the practical activity of the members of society and the development of the various forms of this activity in the process which we call history. And this means the formation, clash, struggle and destruction of classes, the corresponding development of the regulatory relations (my italics---G.O.) both in law and in morality, as well as the causes and forms of subordination of some people to others through the use of force and power, i.e., all that in the final analysis underlies the state and constitutes its essence. Secondly, the economic structure determines the direction and---in large measure indirectly--- the objects of imagination and thought in art, religion and science.
``The products of the first and second degrees, by virtue of the fact that they give rise to specific interests, engender certain habits and unite people, determining their intentions and inclinations, tend to become consolidated and isolated as self-sufficient phenomena; hence the origin of the empirical view that various independent factors possessing their own effective force and their own rhythm of motion 142 foster the historical process and the successively resultant forms of social organisation.
``The real and positive factors of history, if we may use the word 'factors', from the disappearance of primitive communism to the present time, have always been the social classes since they are based on difference of interests which find their expression in certain manifestations and forms of counteraction (hence the clashes, movements, process of development and prgoress'') [15; 159--60].
Some Western sociologists accuse Marxism of `` over-simplified monism''. B. Barber, for example, writes that Marxism recognises economic factors only. Yet Marxists have never maintained that the economic factor is the only factor shaping social life. While they regard the production relations as decisive, they set the pattern for all other spheres of life, for the whole of the social structure. Marxists do not belittle the significance of ideological, political, ethical and other spheres.
While branding Marxism as too narrow a philosophy, Barber counterposes to it Weber's dualistic scheme, where economic and social life run parallel yet independently, and social class movement depends on ideological not material factors.
Barber's argument is unscientific. He maintains that the position in the production relations is not an independent variable on which all other social variables depend. Human values, ideologies, income and power are not, as Marx holds, eternally dependent on their place in the production relations. In every society these other social structuies or variables largely coincide or correlate with the various positions in economic production. But this coincidence is not complete: certain independent variables exist [see 89; 20].
In his opinion ideology and power are variables which do not depend upon material life; they play as decisive a role as position in social production.
Marxists have never denied the relative independence of political and other ideas. In his letter to Bloch Engels wrote: ``According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. . . . The economic situation is the 143 basis, but the various elements of the superstructure: political forms of the class struggle ... juridical forms, and then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas, also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents ... the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history one chose would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree" [2; II, 488].
A simplified approach to the problem of classes is alien to Marxism. The works of Marx and Engels offer an analysis of the entire social structure of the leading 19th-century capitalist countries, their ruling classes, intermediate groups, and, especially, the working class.
Lenin provided a similar analysis for the epoch of imperialism.
Marxists did not stop at analysing the role of class consciousness and self-consciousness; they do not judge class by its ideology or by what the class thinks of itself. To remain exclusively in the sphere of political and other ideas is to repeat the mistakes of early sociology. Marxists appreciate that individual deviations are possible, that the consciousness and wills of individual members of a class may not coincide with the objective standing of that class or with their overall social ideas and aspirations. But in the final analysis the economic basis plays a decisive and determining role. __ALPHA_LVL3__ § 5. Intermediate Groups and Their Place in Social Development
In their class studies some sociologists talk of capitalist society as a society of ``middle and transitional classes''. At the Third World Congress of Sociology J. Bernard in his report Class Organisation in an Era of Abundance: A New Principle of Class Organisation maintained that in the U.S.A. and other highly developed capitalist countries classes are disappearing and that the middle class is absorbing both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Talcott Parsons 144 claims that in modern capitalist society the rigid class ``dichotomy'' between the lower classes of town and country is also disappearing. The rural population is rapidly declining and becoming ``urbanised'', not in the sense of its proletarianisation but in the sense of the industrialisation of its labour. The proportion of the population engaged in industrial labour is diminishing, while the ``tertiary'' sector of the economy and employment in service trades are rapidly developing. The low level of skill which was typical of industrial workers in the past is rising through mechanisation and education. The educational system has become the main channel of social mobility.
This is Parsons's picture of modern bourgeois society. Hence his conclusion that in modern industrial society, perhaps for the first time in the history of complex societies, a situation arises that makes it impossible to have a simple polarisation of the social structure in concepts of opposed interests between upper and lower groups. The latest version of the theory of irreconcilable conflict between the two classes is supposed to apply precisely when the social structure begins to develop, to which this theory is absolutely inapplicable. Modern Western ``capitalism'' cannot be painted in Marxist colours as a two-class society, just as Soviet society cannot be termed a one-class society.... Theories like hierarchic polarisation and separation of the ``masses'' from the ``ruling \'elites" and from the owners of capital, are not fit for analysis [see 34; 98).
But as far back as the end of the last century Engels had written to F. Sorge explaining that in England the bourgeoisie did its utmost to conceal the economic relations of domination and subordination. ``The most repulsive thing here is the bourgeois 'respectability', which has grown deep into the bones of the workers. The division of society into innumerable strata, each recognised without question, each with its own pride, but also with its inborn respect for its 'betters' and 'superiors', is so old and firmly established that the bourgeois still find it fairly easy to get their bait accepted" [10; 408].
Parsons supports his rebuttal of class polarisation in modern capitalist society, firstly, by the ``theory of \'elite pluralism''; secondly, by the ``theory of middle classes''. His initial proposition is based on the claim of the absolute and __PRINTERS_P_145_COMMENT__ 10---974 145 relative growth of the middle class, the decrease in the working class and the resultant depolarisation of capitalist society.
The trick is that by the working class many Western sociologists mean manual labourers only. Since technical progress reduces manual labour and increases mental work, they draw the conclusion that technology diminishes the working class and increases the engineering and technical personnel, specialists, office and other mental workers who constitute the ``new middle class".
This ignores the economic basis of the capitalist mode of production. Although manual and mental labour are separate, this, as Marx emphasises, ``however, does not prevent the material product from being the common product of these persons ... on the other hand, it does not prevent or in any way alter the relation of each one of these persons to capital ... in this pre-eminent sense being that of a productive labourer. All these persons are not only directly engaged in the production of material wealth . .. but they . . . directly reproduce ... a surplus-value for the capitalist. Their labour consists of paid labour plus unpaid surplus-labour" [11; I, 399].
Capital appropriates the surplus labour both of the worker and the technician, labour in the sphere of production and in the sphere of circulation. It thereby objectively puts engineers, technicians, office workers and other employees in the position of hired workers, part of whose labour is unremunerated and expropriated by capital. These groups do, in fact, form a special part of the working class, they constitute its top layer and have their own specific features; their psychology and ideology differ from those of the proletariat. But objectively the engineer and technician gradually move closer to workers in their place in social production, and their mental work is exploited by capital.
The journal Problems of Peace and Socialism aptly commented that ``bourgeois statisticians and sociologists place the engineers, technicians, office and commercial workers in a special category and call them a 'new middle class', whereas the development of modern capitalism increasingly transforms these strata into a component part of the working class" (No. 9, 1951).
146If the working class is defined as hired mental and manual labour, the unremunerated part of whose labour is expropriated by capital, the absolute total and proportion of the working class in the population increases rather than decreases.
Capital impoverishes the peasants, small farmers, smallscale proprietors, artisans and shopkeepers who cannot compete with large-scale capitalist production. But capital cannot grow without increasing the proletariat.
Modernisation of the technical base of large-scale production requires a greater proportion of mental work than manual. This alters the structure of the contemporary working class and increasingly adds various categories of mental workers to it. But it does not change the overall social structure of capitalist society. The words of the Communist Manifesto ring as true today as they were a century ago: ``Entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence.. .. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product" [2; I, 42--43].
This process does not imply that society is mechanically dividing into bourgeoisie and proletariat, with all other groups absorbed by them. In capitalist society, between the two basic classes of bourgeoisie and proletariat, there exist intermediate, less essential groups. But these groups ( farmers and professional groups, for example), only enjoy a relative independence from capital by virtue of the fact that large-scale capital cannot absorb and expropriate their labour at once. It is a gradual process.
In the end, however, the ruined farmer becomes a farmhand, and the physician, lawyer and architect, deprived of their own laboratory or office facilities, become employees of a large concern.
They are thereby objectively put in the position of proletarians doing manual or mental work and swell the ranks of the working class. These categories may still retain as personal property such ``material evidence" of luxury as a private house, a car, industrial shares, etc. But they no longer use their property as a means of exploitation of labour.
__PRINTERS_P_148_COMMENT__ 10* 147 __ALPHA_LVL3__ § 6. The ``\'Elite'' TheoryWestern sociologists are apt to refer to the top of the social pyramid as the ``elite''. They believe that each social stratum has its own elite. All elites together form a governing and a non-governing elite in society, which determines the entire course of history.
These bourgeois sociologists try to prove that the instrument of domination by the elite is neither wealth nor private property, but political power. The chief proponents of this theory---G. Mosca, R. Michels and V. Pareto---- maintain that every society has politically dominating groups, a ruling minority and a subordinate mass, a politically dependent majority; the ``iron law of oligarchy" operates and leads to the formation of a small upper stratum and to its domination over society.
In his book The Mind and Society Pareto refers to the ``\'elite'' as follows: ``So let us make a class of the people who have the highest indices in their branch of activity, and to that class give the name \'elite" [90; III, 1423]. Pareto proposes to distinguish a governing and a non-governing elite, and to divide all society into an upper stratum of the rulers, and a lower stratum or ``non-elite'' of the ruled.
Elites may circulate, which means that individuals or families from the lower strata may rise to the upper stratum, while the hereditary aristocracy may mix with them and filter downwards. Pareto writes: ``The governing elite is always in a state of slow and continuous transformation. It flows on like a river, never being today what it was yesterday. From time to time sudden and violent disturbances occur. There is a flood---the river overflows its banks. Afterwards, the new governing elite again resumes its slow transformation. The flood has subsided, the river is again flowing normally in its wonted bed" [90; III, 1431].
Within the elite Pareto distinguishes a type of speculatorfox (specialist in deceit, a political schemer) and a rentierlion (a specialist in the use of power, an extreme conservative in politics). An ``instinct of scheming" predominates in the former, and an ``instinct of preserving the group" in the latter. Each \'elite is a combination of the two types, and acts on its power and manipulation, by coercion and agreement.
148A transformation in the governing elites (replacement of ``lions'' by ``foxes'' and vice versa) occurs as a result of a change in social circumstances. According to Pareto, this continuous cycle of leadership change takes place because each type possesses certain attributes which cease to satisfy the eternal leadership requirements.
Several variants of the ``elite'' theory exist: 1) mysticirrationalistic, deriving the elite from unknowable and supernatural principles, 2) technological, regarding the elite as a natural product of technical development, and lastly 3) biopsychological, explaining the origin of the elite by people's biological and psychic inequality.
E. Lederer, American sociologist and one of the members of the mystic-irrationalistic school asserts in his book The State of the Masses that social division was established by divine providence. The crowd, he says, can act as a single whole only emotionally, but not consciously; it is passive by nature. A crowd is made active by a leader; only a man endowed with ``charismus''^^1^^ may be a leader. He acts on god's will. Relations between the masses and the leader are like those between the people and the founder of a religion. Bourgeois sociologists call this power ``magic of the leader''. The British sociologist Morris Ginsberg writes that irrational impulses underly the actions of the ``crowd'', people sub consciously yearn for a leader, people have a gregarious consciousness.
The technological elitists explain the existence of an elite in terms of modern technical development. In common with the first school they recognise the inevitability of a social dichotomy between an elite and the masses; but they recognise the transient character of elites. Talcott Parsons, for example, writes that whereas the dominating elite formerly based its power on family property, today it is a ramified ``professional \'elite" connected with group property or entirely deprived of it, yet gaining promotion by special talents.
The biopsychological elitists also scorn the creativeness of the masses. Basing themselves on Plato's idealist views, they endow the ruling classes with special talents and see _-_-_
~^^1^^ ``Charismus'' or ``divine grace" is a theological concept, by which a person endowed with ``charismus'' is god's prophet through whom god's will is expressed and realised.
149 the cause of subjugation of the masses in their ``biological inferiority''. Thus some Western sociologists and scientists hold that the genes of heroes, prophets and inventors have of late acquired ``particular importance".Schumpeter applies the concept of ``natural selection" to society. Just as biological species survive and adapt themselves to a new environment, so the governing elite displays an ability to survive and govern under new conditions. Schumpeter considers ``extraordinary physical and nervous energy" to be a virtue of all businessmen who wish to prevail in competition.
This type of reasoning illustrates the view of bourgeois thought that political power and administrative functions are the basis of economic relations. Marx criticised this view: ``It is not because he is a leader of industry that a man is a capitalist, on the contrary, he is a leader of industry because he is a capitalist. The leadership of industry is an attribute of capital, just as in feudal times the functions of general and judge were attributes of landed property" [5; I, 332].
According to Schumpeter, an ``elite'' forms as a result of a transgression of the class barriers. An individual, a family or a social group may by special ability rise to the top in their own class and even aspire to a higher class. The bourgeoisie is considered the most able class for executing the functions of economic administration and therefore gradually forms capitalist society's superior class. In Schumpeter's opinion, the ruling class is formed from the most capable and gifted people.
The ``\'elite'' theory absolutises the natural differences existing between people and promotes them to some ``eternal law of nature" by which the ruling classes are destined by dint of their ``intellectual superiority" to govern the masses and lead society. In his criticism of Thomas Carlyle's similar views Engels wrote: ``The historically determined class distinctions are thus reduced to natural differences which have to be recognised as part of the eternal law of nature and which must be respected with a bow to the noble and the wise by birth: in a word---a cult of the genius" [see 12a].
People are certainly not equally endowed by nature, but this endowment does not play a decisive role in class 150 formation. The place each class and each of its members occupy in social production is determined not by intellectual ability, but by social production relationships forming independently of people's will and consciousness. The difference in people's natural endowments, Marx wrote, is not so much the cause as the effect of the division of labour and largely a product of long historical development.
The ``\'elite'' theory ignores the friction between manual and mental labour existing in an antagonistic society. The working people are deprived of decent living conditions and of the opportunity to develop their talents and abilities to the full. The great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore once wrote: ``Throughout the ages, civilised communities have contained groups of nameless people. They are the majority---the beasts of burden, who have no time to become men. They grow up on the leavings of society's wealth, with the least food, least clothes and least education, and they serve the rest. They toil most, yet theirs is the largest measure of indignity. . . . They are like a lampstand bearing the lamp of civilisation on their heads: people above receive light while they are smeared with the trickling oil. ..'' [91; 1].
The ``\'elite'' is a product of the world of private property. It exists not by virtue of the brilliance of its members but by the objective economic laws of capitalism which concentrates production and capital in the hands of a few. It is these few that bourgeois theoreticians extol as the ``\'elite''.
Engels wrote: ``So long as the really working population were so much occupied with their necessary labour that they had no time left for looking after the common affairs of society---the direction of labour, affairs of state, legal matters, art, science, etc.---so long was it necessary that there should constantly exist a special class, freed from actual labour, to manage these affairs; and this class never failed, for its own advantage, to impose a greater and greater burden of labour on the working masses" [8; 251].
But the rapid growth of the productive forces makes it objectively possible to shorten the working hours of each worker and provide him with enough free time to participate in public affairs. Accelerated production and the bourgeois class, which greatly hampers access of the working people to education, culture and politics, prevent the realisation 151 of this objective possibility. But the course of history cannot be stemmed. Engels wrote that, as a result of the development of large-scale capitalist industry, ``every ruling and exploiting class has become superfluous and indeed a hindrance to social development, and it is only now, too, that it will be inexorably abolished, however much it may be in possession of 'direct force' " [8, 251].
The ``\'elite'' theorists make a fetish of political power. In the manner of Diihring they derive the social structure of society and its changes from ``direct violence".
H. Lasswell, American lawyer and one of the leading advocates of this theory, asserts that society resembles an orchestra which needs a conductor, and everything depends upon his conducting [92; 3]. At the very outset he rejects all possibility of existence of a society without rulers and the oppressed, without ``tops'' and ``bottoms''. He cannot even conceive of true democracy and popular government. In his opinion ``political analysis is the study of changes in the shape and composition of the value patterns of society. Representative values are safety, income, and defence. Since a few members of any community at a given time have the most of each value, a diagram of the pattern of distribution of any value resembles a pyramid. The few who get the most of any value are the elite; the rest are the rank and file. An elite preserves its ascendancy by manipulating symbols, controlling supplies, and applying violence" [92; 3].
Some Western sociologists, in the shadow of Plato's Utopias, propose a three-way division of society: 1) a majority to be given limited education and that in the spirit of obedience and loyalty to the prevailing system; 2) a chosen elite to govern society and to be equipped with knowledge of the fundamentals of politics; 3) a philosophical ``super-elite''. The American philosopher A. Horowitz correctly observes that, according to this theory, the mass of people are disfranchised and deprived of political influence; the right to govern is granted only to the ruling class. 3ince the great thinkers must also be the great industrialists, Horowitz calls the ``elite'' theory an exaggerated justification of the status quo. By their attack on the very principles of democracy, the ``elitists'' have become open apologists for the financial oligarchy.
The ``\'elite'' theory is the ideological backing for 152 unbridled domination by the monopoly bourgeoisie. Yet these sociologists seem not to understand this; they spread the myth that power is equally distributed in capitalist countries among five elites: political, economic, administrative, military and ideological; these offset one another and prevent any one group from gaining the ascendancy.
But the true ``equilibrium of \'elites" may be judged by the results of a study conducted by the American sociologist F. Hunter [see 93]. In a city of half a million people, which he chose to call Regional City, 40 persons in the top levels of power were selected from 175 names; the largest number were found directing and administering major portions of the activities of large commercial enterprises. There were 11 such men, 7 bankers, 5 lawyers, 5 industrialists, 1 dentist, 4 members of the governmental personnel, 2 labour leaders and 5 social or civic organisation leaders. More than half of all these leaders represented big business---they were mainly presidents of companies or board members. They were all members of the same clubs and represented related directorates and companies. The leaders of Regional City used the governmental machine and other organisations to implement their decisions.
Citing these data, Ogburn and Nimkoff write: ``The picture of Regional City shows that the power is mainly in the hands of upper-class businessmen, although there is some distribution of power by social class over the social classes, since four government officials are influential in decision-making, and two labour leaders, as well as one dentist" [24; 175].
In The Lonely Crowd David Riesman, one of the most prominent advocates of the ``power dispersal" theory, writes that, judging by the way things are today, many observers incline to the conception of amorphous distribution of power in America. The social scientists entangled in sophistry pin their hopes or fears on a particular elite, thereby resembling dogs who sense where their master is. In America power depends on the situation, and a mobile situation at that; it cannot be localised any more than, according to Heisenberg's principles, it is impossible simultaneously to determine the position and speed of a particle [see 94; 196].
Applying Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy to sociology, Riesman asserts that in the U.S.A. economic and 153 political power is distributed and dispersed among numerous competing groups. The Wall Street magnates fear the industrial barons of the Middle West, the business leaders are afraid of the trade union leaders, the army leadership is apprehensive of civilian politicians, small shopkeepers of racketeers. Each group influences social life and makes it impossible for power to be concentrated in the hands of a few. Riesman maintains that ``wealth'' is no longer of decisive importance.
Wright Mills terms the theories of equilibrium of elites and power distribution ``romantic pluralism''. In The Power Elite he analyses the process of amalgamation of the big corporations, the politicians and the military elite in the United States. Wright Mills defines the ``power \'elite" as the political, economic and military echelons which through a network of interrelated cliques make joint decisions of at least nation-wide importance. These echelons represent a single ``corporation of wealth" within American society.
Although Wright Mills fails to discern the deeper process of state monopoly capitalism and militarism, he exposes the U.S. ``power \'elite" and demolishes the arguments of bourgeois sociologists about the elite. He writes that the higher echelons of power do not represent the nation, that their high standing is not earned by their moral virtues, that their success is unconnected with any laudable talents and that they have acquired this power only because of the American system of organised irresponsibility.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 7. ``Social Mobility'' TheoryThe ``\'elite'' theory is sometimes supplemented by the ``social mobility" theory, in which the individual can move from one social ``stratum'' to another rather than remain in his own stratum for life.
Social mobility may be vertical or horizontal. ``Vertical mobility signifies movement up or down the class scale" [52; 323]. ``Horizontal mobility refers to all other types of movement inassociated with social-class change, such as going from place to place or accepting a job elsewhere with no change in salary or status" [16; 195], for example, a skilled textile worker going to work at another factory or at a garage as a mechanic.
154Horizontal mobility is not at all rare, but vertical mobility, which should in theory enable a worker to move up the class scale and become a businessman and a millionaire, is utterly Utopian and designed to disguise the aggravation of the class contradictions of capitalism. Even some bourgeois sociologists admit this. Merrill, for example, writes that certain factors such as ``concentration of corporate control" have appeared which hinder movement up the social ladder. Possession of shares is not equivalent to control over the corporations, the control actually being exercised by a minority. Warner and Abegglen make it clear that the members of the groups controlling the corporations form a ``new and powerful \'elite".
Social mobility is decreasing, says Merrill, also because the vocational hierarchy is failing. He notes that ``in many of mass-production industries, the rudimentary skills needed to operate a machine can be learned in two or three weeks. The skill of the mechanic and artisan has in many cases been replaced by the skill built into the machine. The worker becomes an adjunct to the machine under these conditions. He is an easily replaced part in a process that, although it is dependent upon a mass of anonymous individuals needs his individual skill less and less" [52; 327].
As a result the apprentice cannot become a mechanic, a foreman or a proprietor. R. Bendix writes that the modern worker, when growing older, often fails to improve his skill and loses his viability and productivity. Of course, many skilled workers remain, but most of them continue as semiskilled workers [see 95].
Warner and Low agree that workers cannot force their way into the ``elite''. Workers are becoming less mobile and are forming their own class with their own social machine and hierarchy in which the ambitious rise to positions of leadership and power [see 52; 328].
A study of the composition of the working class in the U.S.A. has shown, for example, that from 1910 to 1950 the percentage of skilled workers remained about the same, while that of unskilled workers decreased from 15 to 10 per cent and of semi-skilled workers---increased from 15 to 20 per cent. The American sociologists admit that this change does not in any way imply social mobility as such, i.e., a change from blue-collar to white-collar status [see 96; 183].
155The decrease in social mobility is sometimes blamed on the machine. But it is not the machine, it is the capitalistic use of the machine, the capitalistic working conditions that are to blame. Marx wrote: ``...The machine does not free the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest.... The special skill of each individual insignificant factory operative vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity before the science, the gigantic physical forces, and the mass of labour that are embodied in the factory mechanism and, together with that mechanism, constitute the power of the 'master' " [5; I, 423].
Faith in upward social mobility in capitalist countries is weakening as time passes. In 1961 the American population under 20 years of age increased from 46 million to 70 million. By 1970 some 26 million young workers will enter the labour market, yet employment is decreasing because of capitalist economic crises. These two locomotives, Business Week writes, must inevitably collide, and their collision will bring alarming consequences for the country's economy and politics. Furthermore, the opportunities for working people to educate their children are diminishing with every year. More than one-third of young people in the U.S.A. do not complete their school course.
The American sociologists North and Hatt have compiled the following table:
Occupations of sons (per cent in each category) Specialists Business White collar Skilled Semiskilled Services Farmers Farm labourers Occupations of fathers Professionals 23 4 9 3 2 4 2 3 Businessmen 24 31 23 7 11 6 2 12 White-collar workers . . 10 9 15 4 6 3 2 0 Skilled workers .... 13 18 21 30 19 20 3 9 Semi-skilled workers . . 5 8 10 14 19 12 4 17 156This table shows that as a rule the children of the bourgeoisie, the intellectuals and skilled workers take on mental and privileged occupations, while the children of manual workers tend to gravitate towards their fathers' occupational group.
Sorokin, in his book Social and Cultural Mobility explicitly stated that despite the varied mobility most children follow the occupations of their fathers or work in related fields; most children remain on the same occupational level as their fathers. Consequently, there is much greater mobility between occupations on the same social level than between different social levels [see 97; 138].
The illusory nature of workers' aspirations in climbing the social ladder is attested to by Wright Mills in The Power Elite. He exploded the American myth in his analysis of the origins of leaders of big business in the last three generations (1900, 1925, 1950). His study showed that in 1900 some 30 per cent of the businessmen came from the big bourgeoisie, 22 per cent from what he terms the middle strata and 39 per cent from the lower strata. Then the picture gradually changed. In 1925 some 56 per cent of the businessmen came from the big bourgeoisie, 32 per cent from the middle strata and 12 per cent from the lower. In 1950 some 68 per cent of the businessmen came from the big bourgeoisie, 23 per cent from the middle strata and 9 per cent from the lower (he apparently implies small proprietors).
According to M. Newcomer, author of Big Business Executive, the chances of the sons of corporative executives to fill high posts are 139 times as high as those of the sons of others. Whatever our national ideals, write Warner and Abegglen, ``the business leaders of America are a select group, drawn for the most part from the upper ranks. Only to a limited extent may it be said that every man's chances are as good as the next man's" [98; 2].
Yet some sociologists assert that work, education and political activity are the channels of ``vertical mobility''. How real these ``equal opportunities" are for the proletarian is rarely explained. Under capitalism technical progress intensifies labour and increases expenditure of the worker's muscular and mental energy per unit of time. As a result, the worker's active work span is shorter. The 157 accelerated work rates exhaust the worker sooner so that he has little time or energy for his own cultural development. When the worker is 40--50 years of age the capitalist has no further use for him.
In his article ``The Machine, the Worker and the Engineer" Merton arrives at the conclusion, on the basis of the study of Lynd and Smith, that the opportunities for social mobility in American industry are diminishing. He writes: ``As the complexities of the new technology make technical education a prerequisite for the operating executive, the prospect of workers rising through the ranks becomes progressively dimmed. To the extent that opportunities for higher education are socially stratified, managers come increasingly to be drawn from social strata remote from those of workers" [27; 565--66].
Automated capitalist production splits the working class into two disproportionate parts---a skilled part ( technicians and machine tool adjusters) and an enormous army of semi-skilled workers. With the conveyor system it takes a negligible amount of time to learn a single operation. Confined to a single operation the worker remains an appendage of the machine.
While the working class ensures the progress of technology and culture, it receives little in return. Nearly 6 million people are illiterate in the U.S.A. A large part of the poor people's children are deprived of chances for schooling. Only children of well-to-do parents are in a position to get a full secondary education. Deficient housing, slums (according to the official press more than 15 million people in the U.S.A. live under distressing conditions), malnutrition, social diseases (dystrophy, tuberculosis, etc.) and social evils, (alcoholism, prostitution) are constant companions of the working class in capitalist society.
Ogburn and Nimkoff admit that in the U.S.A. child mortality is twice as high among the lower as among the upper classes, while expenditure on food, material and cultural things and educational opportunities are directly proportional to social status.
In an attempt to solve the problem of ``vertical mobility" sociologists have, in recent decades, studied \'elite groups and changes in them.
Pareto's theory of a continuous cycle of changes in the 158 qualities of the leaders is quite inadequate as an explanation of the causes of ``vertical mobility'', as was shown earlier. It does not explain why a member of a lower social group must rise to a higher social level. Furthermore, classification of ``leaders'' of the bourgeoisie in terms of ``foxes and lions" is quite unacademic. When it comes to explaining the reasons for a change in the ``qualities'' of the leaders, Pareto, as an ideologist of the bourgeoisie, does not hide his concern for ``maintaining social equilibrium" in capitalist society. His whole theory is subordinated to this motivating force.
__NUMERIC_LVL2__ Chapter 4 __ALPHA_LVL2__ SOCIAL CHANGE AND SOCIAL PROGRESS __ALPHA_LVL3__ § 1. Social Evolution and Theory of Social ChangesIn recent years many Western sociologists have begun to display an interest in social change and social evolution. But they generally regard social evolution as a continuous process of social change which they identify with quantitative changes not leading to any qualitative, fundamental social changes. When they do acknowledge qualitative changes, they do not regard them as a necessary stage in social evolution which signifies a transition to another quality.
In this Western sociologists are true to the old traditions of Tarde, Ross and other sociologists of the older generation. Tarde once explained social evolution as an ``endless repetition''. Ross regarded changes not as fundamental social changes, but as mere changes in social institutions and their various forms, i.e., the parts and elements of society. In Changing America he puts forward the following classification of social changes: 1) development of democracy, 2) emancipation of women, 3) increase in the number of divorces, 4) increased immigration, etc.
McClung Lee writes that social changes are not essential changes in social life, they alter not the essence of social life, but its forms and the functions and structures of various social institutions or social systems. Social change is the process in which we can discern an essential 159 change in the structure and function of social systems (see 99; 263).
The theory of social change is thus concerned not with objective social laws which are the essence of the social process, but its different forms or rather the functions and structures of these forms. It completely ignores any investigation of internal causes and laws of social changes, which in turn evoke changes in the structure and functioning of social institutions.
The theory of evolution, according to which there are no leaps either in nature or in history, and all changes in the world occur gradually, was long ago demolished by Hegel. In the first volume of his Logic he wrote that, when we want to understand the emergence or disappearance of something, we usually imagine that we gain an insight into the matter through the concept of the gradualness of such emergence or disappearance. Changes in being, however, occur not only through transition from one quantity to another, but also through transition from quantitative to qualitative changes and vice versa, the transition which interrupts the gradualness and replaces one phenomenon by another [see 100; 313--14).
But even the vulgar interpretation of the social evolution concept does not satisfy some sociologists.
They replace it by a category of ``social change" which, as B. Grushin correctly observes, is ``the most abstract, the most general category reflecting the objective processes operating in the world. It effaces the eternal conception of the real diversity of the forms of processes; moreover, the question of the structure of the process entirely disappears in it. The category of 'change' pinpoints only the most obvious, the most general, characteristic of any process, namely, the existence of differences in the selfsame object (or its part) taken at two points differing in time" [101; 61].
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 2. Theory of ``Social Deviation''E. Ross is the proponent of this theory. He divides social changes into ``progressive'' and ``regressive''; among the latter he considers those which ``aggravate class conflict".
160His appeal for ``class collaboration" simply ignores the class struggle as an objective law of development of exploiting societies. Progressive changes are to smooth out the ``differences between the rich and the poor''. He sees the basis of these changes in changes in culture which, in his opinion, is growing increasingly more complex and cosmopolitan.
In his book The Social Sinner Ross derides the forms of social change which are of a ``negative'' or ``destructive'' character. Such changes he refers to as ``social sinning''. As a champion of capitalist interests he warns of the danger of social revolution and outlines a series of ``practical measures" which would prevent the growth of large social groups and subject small groups to the influence of the bourgeoisie.
From this starting point some sociologists then elaborate all manner of ``theories of social behaviour" which they divide into ``normal'' and ``abnormal''. Behaviour which does not encroach upon the essence of the ``social standards" and ``cultural patterns" prevailing in society is considered normal, otherwise it is declared ``abnormal'' and caused by various pathologic factors.
``Society,'' writes Merrill, ``thus singles out certain general patterns for its members from all the possible forms of behaviour. In this way, it sets the standards for normal and abnormal conduct; these standards vary between periods and between societies. Behaviour defined as 'normal' in one society is 'abnormal' in another" [52; 205--06].
Merrill then considers that ``the normal person is the one who plays the roles that his group considers appropriate for him. He does what is expected of him and his conduct can therefore be relied upon.. .. The deviant is the person who departs from group norms and whose behaviour cannot be adequately predicted" [52; 206--07].
Abnormality is said to arise from ``low cohesion" in society. ``The American nation,'' writes J. Moreno, ``suffers as a society from a social sickness which I have called 'low cohesion'" [102; IV].
Reducing the social conflicts to psychopathology some Western sociologists declare abnormal or pathological any __PRINTERS_P_161_COMMENT__ 11---974 161 social behaviour of a person if it conflicts with ``standards'' prevailing in a given society.
By ignoring the fact that ``group norms" are ultimately determined by economic factors, they fail to understand and explain why some people observe these norms yet ohters violate them. In their opinion the reason for violation of the norms of capitalist society is the process which operates in society and is diametrically opposed to `` socialisation'', the process being caused not by social, but by biological, pathological and physiological factors (mental disorders, drug-taking, syphilis, alcoholism, etc.). Mental disorders and various diseases are regarded by some bourgeois sociologists as the source of all the social ills in capitalist society. ``Social psychopathology" therefore becomes a constituent element in bourgeois sociology. Nonetheless, the remedy is not so much to combat the pathologic diseases as to stifle the growing political awareness of the working people in capitalist society.
The American sociologist Don Martindale approves of E. Lemert's ``specific proposals" to these social theories: deviant behaviour arises from cultural conflict; sociopathic behaviour is effectively disavowed; a deviant person is one who has been basically influenced by deviant behaviour and its consequences; deviants differ with respect to their susceptibility to influence by the social reaction [see 21,-362].
Martindale is particularly appreciative of the disavowal of sociopathic behaviour. He writes: ``The most important ---and the most hazardous---idea is that contained in point (4), that sociopathic behaviour is behaviour that is effectively disavowed. The danger is that in practice this tends to mean that behaviour is a problem only when it is no longer a problem, or that the status quo exhausts what is legitimately to be considered good" [21; 362].
By ``sociopathic behaviour" these sociologists mean any popular action against the ``normal'' pattern of capitalist behaviour. This explains Martindale's praise of Lemert's disavowal of ``sociopathic behaviour''. Martindale goes further. He declares the status quo in bourgeois society to be ``good ... legitimately".
In Lemert's opinion, behavioural deviations are caused by cultural conflicts, not by antagonistic contradictions in 162 the capitalist mode of production and distribution. A deviant is one who has been basically influenced by deviant behaviour; ``normal behaviour" is that which does not deviate from capitalist patterns. Anybody who opposes these patterns is therefore susceptible to ``social reaction".
According to A. Boskoff, the behaviour changes occur under ``conditions of strain and maladjustment''. Here again is an attempt to obscure the real causes of social problems and conflicts of modern capitalism. The term ``strain'' is extremely vague. So is the term `` maladjustment''. As to who is ``maladjusted'' and what are the criteria for ``adjustment'' and ``maladjustment'', the author has nothing to say.
What he does admit is that ``the crucial question of power and force is explicitly confronted as a reality (good or bad) in matters of social change" [21; 280].
On further examination of this problem, Boskoff arrives at the conclusion that ``practically speaking, social change presents itself to the sociologist as collective deviations from established patterns". The main object of the analysis of social change therefore is to discover the sources of deviation as opposed to the striving of 19th-century sociologists to find the prime causes obscured by speculation and defying verification. A number of sociologists, says Boskoff, have tried to explain basic social deviations by migrations, invasion, social clashes and accessibility to external influence for a long period of time. The external sources of deviation, however, offer inadequate explanation and it is necessary to seek ``internal'' situations which engender deviations!
Boskoff goes on to say that during the past few decades a good deal of material has been accumulated by a careful analysis of ``strains, tensions, dissatisfactions and discrepancies traceable to specific parts of concrete societies or communities" (who experiences strains, who is dissatisfied, what specific parts of society are involved---are deliberately left unanswered). Boskoff concludes that `` deviation is a variably concious response to personal and group difficulties experienced in the process of enacting accepted social roles and occupying assigned status positions" [21; 291].
Again an abstraction: what are these difficulties, social __PRINTERS_P_163_COMMENT__ 11* 163 roles and status positions? Of this the reader can only guess. The author, however, asserts that this definition gives rise to conceptual points for modern sociology.
The first salient point is that deviation is caused by a ``sudden'' conflict of roles, engendered by the ``normally'' acting social system. How this conflict arises and what its character is, also goes unexplained.
The second salient point is the admission that deviation is a result of incomplete satisfaction of biologically and socially acquired needs.
What lengths these American sociologists will go to so as to disguise the social contrasts and contradictions of capitalist society, which they call social disorganisation] The American sociologist G. Hinkle writes: ``Social disorganisation is today ordinarily regarded as the theoretical basis of the great variety of social problems that sociologists have investigated for nearly five decades" [21; 597].
Although Hinkle points out that American sociologists do not accept one integrated theoretical framework and their theoretical formulations are often insufficiently related to actual discussions of social problems (as recent textbooks clearly show), Hinkle notes that they usually agree on certain assumptions about the nature and causes of social disorganisation. But it turns out that ``these presuppositions have been inherited from the social psychiatry movement of the thirties" [21; 598].
In short, some American sociologists are today fighting the Marxist theory of social revolution with ``arguments'' that have been known for a long time.
The roots of social disorganisation must evidently be sought in personal psychological disorganisation, fear and disappointment. Hinkle writes: ``Personal and social disorganisation are presented as interdependent, since the former is the individual, behavioural manifestation of conflicts within the culture. The discordant elements in society are generally regarded as corollaries of social change and cultural lag. Current world crises, contradictions in institutional structures and behaviour, and especially conflicts in values and ideas are said to make the modern man fearful, tense, frustrated, insecure and anxietyridden. The modern child, growing up in a schizoid culture, is thus ulikely to develop a stable, integrated personality" [21; 598].
164This is palpably a Freudian scheme. The individual ``lags'' behind culture, and this evokes fear and apprehension for the present and future. He fears everybody and everything. Under these conditions no stable, integrated personality can develop. The result is personal disorganisation. Hinkle writes that ``since poorly organised personalities find adjustment to the complexities of modern life difficult, they often engage in crime, alcoholism, sex offences, and other undesirable behaviour. In extreme cases they become neurotic or phychopathic" [21; 598].
By Freudian analysis the American sociologist C. Parker advised, according to Hinkle, that the reason for workers' strikes should be sought not in the antagonistic relations between the owners of capitalist enterprises and hired workers, but in ungratified instincts. Hinkle claims that Parker always regarded strikes as inimical to social progress and criticised classical economists for their failure to anticipate or settle labour problems. ``Parker had become aware of the irrational forces operative in labour unrest through his early descriptions of riots and strikes and had, consequently, emphatically denied the economists' assumption of the rational man" [21; 582].
The same purpose, namely, to descredit the actions of progressives in capitalist society, is served by H. Becker's theory, according to which all human societies are divided into two groups---sacred and secular.
A sacred society is one that exhibits a reluctance to change the existing patterns. Becker writes: ``Any society or part thereof that imparts to or elicits from its members evaluations that can be altered, if at all, only in the face of definite emotionalised reluctance is a sacred society---a shorthand term for a society bearing a cultural system making for the reluctance indicated" [21; 142].
Any behaviour, he says, can be regarded as dependent on sacred considerations when it is accompanied by a characteristic reluctance to change the values or the requirements associated with them. In other words, a sacred evaluation is a reluctance or inability, or both (associated with suffering or similar signs of strain), to alter any aspect of the way of life.
A secular society is one where its members strive to change the established patterns. Becker writes: ``Any 165 society or part thereof that imparts to or elicits from its members evaluations leading to well-marked readiness to change is a secular society in a similar shorthand sense" [21; 142].
Ogburn, Hinkle and Boskoff go as far as to say that ``all social evils are to be blamed on human nature''. ``Moreover, human nature seems to be basically self-- seeking. Given half a chance, it creates an 'inequality in the distribution of wealth'! This, in turn, is a factor in 'poverty, disease, taxation, labour, government, war, and many other problems'" [21; 352].
Consequently, the cause of all industrial conflicts and of workers' dissatisfaction with their work is not capitalist exploitation, but the failure of the workers to understand that the satisfaction of their interests depends on the success of the enterprise and that their interests are identical with those of the company. Any discord between the administration and the workers is usually due to a misunderstanding, etc.
Hence, these sociologists regard ``social disorganisation" as an accidental deviation from common sense caused by pathologic factors. The worker himself is to blame for becoming unemployed since he has not come to know sufficiently the metapsychology of his soul. Similarly, persons injured at work have only themselves to blame. Sociologists explain this by a person's instinctive desire to punish himself and by intolerance of family, social and other restrictions. They regard strikes only as a manifestation of the worker's aggressive instinct against the capitalist. All this, Herbert Marcuse asserts, is psychoneurosis, a general social misfortune, an impassable barrier between the diseased and normal state of man (see 103).
To eliminate pathological phenomena, one has to prescribe treatment for the individual. According to H. Odum, sociologists must ``find the answer to certain questions and situations occurring throughout the field of social relationships in whatever periods or areas. The ameliorative or social problem focuses upon a specific situation here and now in which maladjustment or pathology has occurred, and seeks to improve the situation and to 'solve' the problem in the sense of eliminating the objectionable features and providing for adjustment" [104; 283--84].
166Some Western sociologists explain social vices by personal vices. They replace sociology by social pathology and social medicine.
To cure social vices, maladjustments and pathological phenomena, they advice the use of the ``psychodramatic'' and other introspective, methods, advocated by J. Moreno and his followers.
The American social psychologist G. Murphy writes: ``It is sufficient to point out that schools, hospitals, welfare and penal institutions, old settled communities and new resettlement groups, have all offered useful fields for the application of the sociometric technique, and that behind it all, recognition has constantly grown that therapy ultimately depends on breaking the shell of hardened habits, finding within each individual what is really capable of growth" [102; 11].
A number of sociologists ignore the fact that the material conditions under which a person lives stifle his creativity. People have a multitude of inclinations, but they cannot develop them under capitalism because they must devote so much time to earning a living.
Social progress is the progress of society not that of an isolated schizophrenic individual.
Th'e social process is motivated by people who pursue preset aims. As Marx once wrote: ``A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operand! and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that during the whole operation, the workman will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention" [5; I, 178].
The social process is the expedient will and activity of all people, not of one person. Any social phenomenon and 167 all of social life, are shaped by numerous diverse individual wills, feelings and other social-psychological elements. These elements are not free outpourings, as so many sociologists assert, but are subordinate at a given moment to certain social relations prevailing in society. In capitalist society the social relations cannot and do not express the popular will, but are opposed to it. In communist society the social relations express the will of the people and correspond to it so that people become conscious builders of this society.
Social forces, wrote Engels, are like natural forces, and they act blindly, forcibly and destructively so long as we do not understand and reckon with them. But when once we understand them, when once we grasp their action, their direction and their effects it is up to us to subject them more and more to our own will and by means of them to reach our own ends. ``And this holds quite especially of the mighty productive forces of today so long as we obstinately refuse to understand the nature and the character of these productive forces---and this understanding goes against the grain of the capitalist mode of production and its defenders---so long as these forces are at work in spite of us, in opposition to us, so long they master us.... But once their nature is understood, they can, in the hands of the producers working together, be transformed from master demons into willing servants. The difference is that between the destructive force of electricity in the lightning of the storm, and electricity under command in the telegraph and the voltaic arc, the difference between a conflagration and fire making in the service of man. With this recognition, at last, of the real nature of the productive forces of today the social anarchy of production gives place to a social regulation of production upon a definite plan, according to the needs of the community and of each individual. Then the capitalist mode of appropriation, in which the product enslaves first the producer and then the appropriator, is replaced by the mode of appropriation of the products that is based upon the nature of the modern means of production; upon the one hand, direct social appropriation, as means of the maintenance and extension of production---on the other, direct individual appropriation, as means of subsistence and of enjoyment" [8; 383--84].
168 __ALPHA_LVL3__ § 3. Theory of ``Imitation''Social change is still interpreted by many sociologists by Tarde's law of ``imitation'': the lower imitates the higher. It is thought that there are three types of imitation: 1) ``imitation of customs and patterns'', 2) ``mutual imitation" and 3) ``deliberate imitation".
The first type of imitation is encountered in Conservative and Liberal parties. Imitation is counteracted by either war, competition or discussion. The logical consequence of opposition is invention which develops by diffusion, accumulation and selection.
Diffusion is a mixing of different elements of local cultures; accumulation is a process of choice or accumulation of elements of culture; selection is improvement of the existing or the production of new inventions. Diffusion is most important. American culture is evidently rooted in many sources which have intermingled. Most of what the ordinary American uses (bedding, clothes, dishes, food, language, household utensils, customs, etc.) originated in non-American societies and cultures. It therefore follows that the most important role in human development is played by influences, borrowings and conquests, as well as by persons who have made discoveries or inventions or subjugated peoples.
It is wrong to maintain that all the great discoveries and inventions were made but once and were only then transmitted to other peoples by diffusion. By making a fetish of various psycho-social forms of inventions and innovations Western sociologists sever them from the historical process. At the same time, the whole history of human society goes to prove that inventions and discoveries are not the result of mere human desires, not fortuitous creations of single persons, but products of historical development of production.
Marx long ago exploded the myth ascribing the invention of the steam engine to Watt's observation of a boiling kettle. The power of steam was known to Greeks probably more than 2,000 years ago, but they used it only for mechanical toys. On the other hand, the invention of the steam engine was the result of conscious and strenuous mental activity based on the whole of the preceding human 169 experience. Only when industry had created the technical prerequisites necessary for its existence did it become possible to make use of a steam engine, which was largely determined by the availability of a sufficiently large number of skilful workers. The introduction of the steam engine became possible only when the needs awakened an interest in new motive power. And this came with the invention of a working machine.
Having come into existence, inventions actively influence the social evolution. England, as is well known, is the cradle of the industrial revolution. The first branch of the economy to which the revolution applied and in which the conscious effort to replace manual labour by machine labour succeeded was the textile industry. At that time it was the leading branch of the country's industry. The revolution had to begin precisely there. Textiles were the main commodities in England's international trade. With the expansion of the world market the demand for them increased. But how was their production to be increased? Manufacture and manual labour were limited. The capitalist could not get very much from the spinner who worked with only one spindle. At that juncture inventions began to make their appearance and on their basis modern largescale machine production developed.
The process of revolution that had begun in the mode of production extended to new labour processes and branches of the economy. The machines which had begun to be used in the textile industry soon found application, with certain modifications, in other, related branches of industry (production of silks, woolens and linens). Moreover, the mechanisation of spinning and weaving was followed by a revolution in dyeing, bleaching and patterning of fabrics.
Further improvement of the machinery, however, required a change in the motive power itself. As Marx wrote: ``Not till the invention of Watt's second and so-called double-acting steam-engine, was a prime mover found, that begot its own force by the consumption of coal and water, whose power was entirely under man's control, that was mobile and a means of locomotion, that was urban and not, like the water-wheel, rural, that permitted production to be concentrated in towns instead of, like the waterwheels, being scattered up and down the country, that was 170 of universal technical application, and, relatively speaking, little affected in its choice of residence by local circumstances. The greatness of Watt's genius showed itself in the specification of the patent that he took out in April 1784. In that specification his steam-engine is described, not as an invention for a specific purpose, but as an agent universally applicable in Mechanical Industry" [5; I, 377--78].
Gradually the industrial revolution spread to all parts of the economy. The means of communication and transport also had to be adapted to the developing large-scale industry. Although somewhat developed in line with manufacture and increased commodity circulation, the old means of transportation no longer kept pace with development. Like large-scale industry, they had to be set on a new base. Marx wrote that the means of transportation and communication inherited from the manufacture period soon became unbearable fetters on large-scale industry with its feverish growth rate and mass character of production, with its constant transfer of masses of capital and workers from one sphere of production to another, and with the world market relations it developed.
Communications and transport, including the construction of sailing ships, were gradually adapted to the mode of production of large-scale industry by means of merchant ships, railways, ocean steamships and the telegraph.
Certain sociologists, by reducing social changes to the logic of thought, people's desires and laws of imitation, ignore the fact that inventions and their significance are determined by the requirements of material life and not the desires of the inventors. Thus Ogburn reduces social changes to the four following processes: 1) invention, 2) accumulation, 3) diffusion (spread of inventions) and 4) adjustment of one part of society to another, for example, the economy to the family, the family to education, etc.
But this definition itself consists of several unknown elements. What is meant by ``accumulation''? What does ``adjustment'' of one part of society to another mean and how does this ``adjustment'' manifest itself?
These sociologists combine the vulgar concept of social change with an unscientific interpretation of the motive forces which evoke these changes. They seek these forces 171 in such factors as culture, social psychology, etc., anywhere but in the changes in the mode of production. For example, C. Ellwood writes that the social (cultural) evolution developed through inventions which, whether physical or social, are impossible without the creation of mental images or conceptions (see 105; 73]. E. Ross adheres to a similar point of view. In his opinion, the genesis of social change is dependent upon changes in social psychology.
Different people have, of course, different mental endowments. W. Keller has even managed to find considerable differences in the mental development of the few chimpanzees he observed on Tenerife Island. Differences in the mind, knowledge, etc., increase still more through differences in social conditions. These differences can never mean that an individual creates something new from himself while another does not, but simply mean that some people see elements of the new in the surrounding world before others. These differences also mean that these people sooner realise the full import of the new requirements and new problems that arise from new conditions and sooner discover in their surroundings the new means that can be used in resolving the new problems.
But they can never, by virtue of their mental characteristics, arbitrarily prescribe ways of social development. The results at which they arrive are already indicated in the surrounding world. If they deviate, they simply fail to foster progress in lasting new construction. Meanwhile, the new theories which emerge from really profound studies of the new elements in environment, only indicate the state of affairs to which society must eventually come.
Karl Kautsky was one of the first to note that when we definitely know how a particular theory or invention has come into existence, when its origin is not obscured by myths, we can always see that not one but many persons are working in the same direction in quest of the new form, although they may not all work alike.
At any rate, people will inevitably arrive at the new forms for which there are the necessary prerequisites; the only question is when and how they will arrive at it.
Inventors are also as little able arbitrarily to determine the course of historical development as military leaders, kings and statesmen in general. But they can undoubtedly 172 shorten the long and arduous way and help to lead mankind, with less suffering and fewer victims, in the direction which is indicated by external conditions.
Thus, before investigating the process of interaction of social and individual psychology and the influence of this interaction on inventions and discoveries one must take into consideration the various incentives which motivate large numbers of people (nations, classes, etc.) of which the particular social groups are constituent elements.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ § 4. Cultural Lag and ``Social Disorganisation'' TheoriesSome sociologists see the causes of ``social disorganisation" in the social changes themselves not in the objective material conditions that determine social change. Social disorganisation is supposed to be a result of the lag of cultural changes behind all other changes, especially technical ones.
Ogburn was the first to advance this conception at the end of the 1930s. He saw the cause of social disorganisation in the lag of morality and consciousness and not in the antagonistic contradiction of class interests in capitalist society. He wrote that human nature, which is characterised by impulses of fear, sex, curiosity, new experience, adventure, pugnacity, rage, flight, gregariousness, sociability and altruism, had changed but little since prehistoric times. Civilisation had changed, and modern urban life suppresses some basic human drives and motives and offers inadequate satisfaction for others. That is why human nature and society must adapt themselves to each other anew [see 106; 287].
Ogburn is considered the originator of the ``cultural lag" theory. Unemployment, depressions, poverty, diseases, crime, family disorganisation, etc., all, in his opinion, stem from, the cultural lag.
The theory is in some measure a tribute to `` technological determinism" because it sees the final causes of social disorganisation mostly in technology. In fact, in capitalist society a contradiction between man and technology is, as was already noted, continuously engendered and developed. The level of people's consciousness (including customs, traditions, etc.) lags behind changes in the material culture 173 conditioned by technical progress. Ogburn has justly ob served certain objective contradictions arising in the development of the productive forces of modern capitalism, but he has stopped half-way and has ignored the fact that the direction and character of these contradictions are determined mainly by the social, and especially, people's economic relations. __ALPHA_LVL3__ § 5. Scientific Sociology and Social Mythology
In their numerous scientific investigations Marx, Engels and Lenin have shown that social unity, social solidarity, social integration of society, etc., are based not on desires and actions, rational or irrational, of a particular individual or a group of people, but objective laws of social development, of which economic factors are the determining ones.
The 1917 Russian Socialist Revolution and the subsequent socialist revolutions in Central and South-East Europe, South-East Asia and South America have fully confirmed the proposition of Marxist sociologists that social unity, social integration, social solidarity, etc., become necessary and objective forms of social development only where the economic, class roots of social contradictions have been destroyed and exploitation of man by man has been abolished.
The ultimate causes of all social change and political revolution are to be sought not in something irrational, ``not in men's brains, not in men's better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch" [2; II, 136].
While emphasising the decisive importance of the economy, Marxist sociology does not underestimate the role of people, classes, ideas, political systems, etc. Engels observed that ``according to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The 174 economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure: political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas, also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents ... the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary" [2; II, 488].
The motivation for particular social changes, the social need for these changes is, in the final analysis, conditioned by material processes of social life. The social need is embodied in people's activities no later and no sooner than the material conditions have matured for them. That is why, says Marx, ``mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve .. . the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation" [2; I, 363].
Dialectical materialism removes the veil of mystery with which bourgeois sociologists obscure history.
The motivation behind social evolution is struggle and interpenetration of opposing elements. The resolution of the social contradictions signifies a break in the gradualness, a transition to a qualitatively new stage of social development, i.e., a social revolution. Each new stage of social development is conditioned by the material needs of social development and marks a new step up the ladder of social progress.
The history of man is not a conglomeration of fortuitous events. It cannot be reduced to a mass of ``social changes" occurring in different directions. Social history is a process of progressive development. Each new stage negates the preceding stage; but it does not discard everything positive in that stage, it makes use of the positive features and facilitates their further advancement. In such manner progress occurs in economic life, in social relations and in culture. Social evolution is a natural historical process of development of the socio-economic formations.
175The special feature of social mythology of modern Western sociology is not simply that it has largely become a form of social consciousness, a type of religious doctrine, but that all empirical research is confined to a particular situation in an urban or rural location and the observed behaviour is made to fit into a preconceived pattern of social myths and ideals.
The sociologists parade these myths and ideals as sociological theories. At the same tune their empirical research is designed to produce measures that influence the social consciousness and behaviour of a given group of people and thereby to exercise constant restraint over this behaviour for the purpose of preserving and consolidating bourgeois society. To achieve this sociologists have to determine the factors evincing social change under specific conditions and to establish, on the basis of real knowledge of these factors, proper social control over these changes. This control is necessary in order to eliminate disorganisation and disintegration in social life and to ensure social order, i.e., something the bourgeoisie has been dreaming of ever since it attained political ascendancy.
The rise of positivist sociology and its subsequent transition to empiricism have changed its original social function: formerly sociology was confined to general theoretical interpretation of social processes. This has now been superseded by applied sociology which proposes measures aimed at shaping man's consciousness in the image of bourgeois values.
In his critical analysis of the subjective-idealist views of the so-called ``friends of the people" Lenin emphasised that their ideas were nothing but a theoretical substantiation of the political programme of the Russian bourgeois liberals. He wrote: ``Examine this programme and you will find that these gentlemen wholly and completely adopt the position of modern society (i.e., that of the capitalist system, without realising it), and want to settle matters by mending and patching it up, failing to understand that all their progressive measures---cheap credit, improved machinery, banks, and so on---can only serve to strengthen and develop the bourgeoisie" [1; 1, 238].
This criticism applies equally to many contemporary Western sociologists.
176 __ALPHA_LVL1__ CONCLUSIONMarxist sociology, created by Marx and Engels, provides a scientific analysis of social development. Marx and Engels led sociological thought out of the labyrinth of idealism, empiricism and scholasticism and proclaimed the basic principle of scientific sociology to be the study of material life of society, of social relations and social classes. In The German Ideology they wrote: ``Where speculation ends---in real life---there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men" [3; 38].
The kernel of Marxist sociology is the study of the actual life and activities of the social classes in each particular epoch. Marx, Engels and Lenin traced the history of the emergence and development of all socio-economic formations, all the main and secondary classes of modern society.
Between 1840 and 1890 Marx and Engels made a thorough investigation of the social processes and changes in England and Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, India and China. Lenin and his followers continued this work in the 20th century.
General and specific features of socio-economic formations were revealed and the basic laws of the social process were discovered through a comprehensive study of factual material. Lenin wrote: ``Taking as its starting point a fact that is fundamental to all human society, namely, the mode of procuring the means of subsistence, it connected up with this the relations between people formed under the influence of the given modes of procuring the means of subsistence, and showed that this system of relations ('relations of production', to use Marx's terminology) is the basis of society, which clothes itself in political and legal forms and in definite trends of social thought. __PRINTERS_P_177_COMMENT__ 12---874 177 According to Marx's theory, each system of production relations is a specific social organism, whose inception, functioning, and transition to a higher form, conversion into another social organism, are governed by specific laws" [1; 1,410].
All these discoveries led to the creation of a scientific theory of social development, namely, historical materialism.
Marxist sociology rests on a solid factual foundation, a veritable Rock of Gibraltar. But it is not a mere accumulation of raw and chaotic material, but a scientifically elaborated system of facts and conclusions, which in their entirety form the materialist conception of history.
The development of society is based on material forces. Society changes in accordance with objective laws. Like any natural process, social development makes its way through a chaos of fortuitous events. The social process is a struggle of forces, conflicts and co-operation between classes, various forms of human activity. As a reflection of the natural development of material life man's consciousness actively participates in this process, influencing the form, character and rate of its development.
History is, however, subject to objective laws and in this sense is independent of man's will and consciousness. Lenin wrote of the ideas of Marx and Engels: ``When they described their world outlook they called it simply materialism. Their basic idea ... was that social relations are divided into material and ideological. The latter merely constitute a superstructure on the former, which take shape independent of the will and consciousness of man as (the result) the form of man's activity to maintain his existence. The explanation of political and legal forms ... must be sought in the material conditions of life" [1; 1, 151]. Consequently, as Plekhanov wrote, ``sociology becomes a science only to the extent to which it succeeds in understanding the origin of aims of social man (social 'teleology') as the necessary effect of the social process conditioned, in the end, by the course of economic development" [14; III; 193].
Historical materialism, which reveals the effect of objective laws at certain stages of social development is an analogue of this historical process. It is a theory of 178 social development revealing the true principles and motive forces behind historical events and the objective laws governing them. Historical materialism, is at the same time a methodology for understanding social phenomena and processes because it discloses the real connections between the material and ideal, the objective and subjective aspects of social life, and makes it possible to discover the meaning of events, their necessity, their laws and the main direction of their development. Engels wrote in this connection: ``Not only for economics, but for all historical sciences (and all sciences which are not natural sciences are historical) a revolutionising discovery was made with this proposition, that 'the mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general'; that all the social and political relations, all religious and legal systems, all the theoretical outlooks which emerge in history, are to be comprehended only when the material conditions of life of the respectively corresponding epochs are understood and the former are derived from these material conditions" [2; I, 368]. That is why historical materialism forms the theoretical basis and the very kernel of sociology.
By this method scientific sociology analyses the real process of life and activities of individuals in each epoch and, in this process, discovers new characteristics, properties and laws.
As a science Marxist sociology arose as a natural result of specific and systematic studies of reality. It is not enough to formulate general laws governing social development, it is not enough simply to be aware of them. Knowledge of these laws is not the same as understanding their dynamic force, the way they interact, their manifestation, the concrete form in which they are realised, and the mechanism of their action. That is precisely why Marx, Engels and Lenin always based themselves on specific social research and used the results as an instrument for understanding reality. Their statistical analysis encompassed the world, individual nations, and small groups ( including family budgets of peasants and workers); they used questionnaires (Marx made out a programme of statistical studies of the working class in all countries), official sources, documents and their own observations.
__PRINTERS_P_179_COMMENT__ 12* 179Without specific social research Marxist sociology could neither have emerged nor continuously developed. Engels resolutely opposed any attempts to sever the materialist conception of history from specific social research, from attempts to transform it into a ready-made scheme of inflexible dogma. He wrote: ``Our conception of history is above all a guide to study, not a lever for construction after the manner of the Hegelian... . The conditions of existence on the different formations of society must be examined individually before the attempt is made to deduce from them the political, civil-law, aesthetic, philosophic, religious, etc., views corresponding to them" [10; 416].
Marxist sociology has three irreconcilable antagonists--- dogmatism, scholasticism and empiricism. Dogmatism and scholasticism are divorced from reality and consist of theoretical deductions, of attempts to make new facts and phenomena fit preset schemes and constructions. Dogmatists and scholasticists avoid any specific analysis of real phenomena and fail to take into consideration the continuous change of history, social progress and manifestation of new social factors and forces.
Dogmatism is the theoretical base of Left-wing opportunists and, in a certain measure, revisionists. According to Lenin, the methodological basis of these ``leftist'' mistakes, the root of their dogmatism, is their absolutisation of relative truths, their failure to understand that the various Marxist propositions and formulas apply to specific historical conditions. He wrote: ``Any truth, if 'overdone' (as Dietzgen Senior put it), if exaggerated, or if carried beyond the limits of its actual applicability, can be reduced to an absurdity, and is even bound to become an absurdity under these conditions" [1; 31, 62].
Dogmatism bars the way to creative development of Marxist sociology and transforms it into a collection of meaningless formulas. This, in fact, amounts to a revision of the very essence of Marxist doctrine. Dogmatism is a reiteration of general truths without connecting them with real life. Lenin warned that ``general truths are inflated in such a way that they become untrue and are turned into declamation" [1; 27,49].
Unlike dogmatism and scholasticism, Marxism and Marxist sociology rest on studies of specific situations. 180 Lenin emphasised that ``Marxist dialectics call for a concrete analysis of each specific historical situation" [1; 22, 316].
Sociological studies must also avoid the danger of empiricism. It is, of course, necessary to study facts, but it is absurd to expect the facts themselves to ``suggest'' or give rise to a theory. The correlation between empirical and theoretical knowledge is not so schematic and simple as it appears to the empiricists who subordinate and adapt the inductively collected empirical facts to general laws, by-passing the intermediate links and multistage transitions from the concrete to the abstract. In vulgar empiricism Marx saw the absurd side of dogmatism and scholasticism. He wrote: ``Cross empiricism turns into false metaphysics, scholasticism, which toils painfully to deduce undeniable empirical phenomena by simple formal abstraction directly from the general law, or to show by cunning argument that they are in accordance with that law" [11; I, 87].
Empiricism ignores theoretical thought and scientific abstraction in the process of social cognition. And yet the questions of the correlation between empirical and theoretical knowledge, the principal and particular methods of investigation, are connected with an understanding of the methodological fundamentals of sociology. Much empirical research shows that, however perfect the methods, the results are futile and of no scientific significance, precisely because they disregard the general theory of social development.
Objectives of Marxist sociology are not limited to disclosing the general laws governing the development of society. One of its most important social functions is that it provides a' scientific theory of society overall, as well as its various processes and phenomena; it fosters scientific, purposeful changes in social life in line with the objective requirements of social development.
To direct the development of society scientifically, its processes and phenomena, it is not enough simply to know the major laws of the social process, the forms in which these laws appear. This knowledge makes it possible to determine the chief direction and aim of the social process. A scientific direction of social development requires, however, concrete knowledge of the mechanism of the 181 general laws of social development in given conditions. This mechanism is only revealed by specific social research undertaken by sociologists and their colleagues in other social sciences.
Engels always stressed the need to consider facts very seriously, especially when they led to significant conclusions, when facts aspire to basic principles and when they involve the interrelations of whole classes rather than the status of various small groups.
The importance of concrete facts was repeatedly emphasised by Lenin. We remain dialecticians when we struggle against sophisms not by denying the possibility of any transformations in general, but by concretely analysing a particular situation in its development. Lenin emphasised that true dialectics investigate inevitable turns, proving their inevitability on the basis of detailed studies of development in all its concreteness. He held the basic proposition of dialectics to be the fact that there is no abstract truth, that truth is always concrete.
Marx, Engels and Lenin conducted by the dialecticalmaterialist method extensive studies of the social relations in the society of their time. K. Marx's Capital, F. Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England and V. I. Lenin's Who Are the Friends of the People and How They Fight the Social Democrats?, Development of Capitalism in Russia, and A Great Beginning offer examples of how the development of general theory must be combined with concrete social investigations of a large number of most diverse social processes.
The founders of Marxism conducted concrete social investigations which were always imbued with a Party spirit, with a spirit of the class struggle. Thus in the Prospectus Gesellschaftsspiegel (Society's Mirror) F. Engels wrote: ``To find and use measures aimed at a fundamental and final elimination of the different evils of our social life, it is, first of all, necessary to study these evils. The Gesellschaftsspiegel will therefore subject to its judgement all the ills of the social organism, will print general descriptions, monographs, statistical notes and descriptions of individual characteristic cases which will be able correctly to elucidate the social relations of all classes and to help the unions emerging for the purpose of eliminating the 182 social evils; it will base itself entirely on facts, print only facts and judgements which are based on facts, the conclusions from which are again obvious facts.''
Noting the decisive importance of studying the condition of the working class in establishing the essential features and regularities of capitalist society F. Engels wrote: ``We shall consider the spiritual, mental and moral, as well as the physical condition of the workers. The most purposeful for the Gesellschaftsspiegel in this respect are:
``1) Large cities which cannot exist without a numerous poor class congested in a small space. In addition to the usual general consequences of poverty we shall deal with the influence exerted by this centralisation of the population on the physical, mental and moral life of the labouring classes. We should therefore like to have descriptions, statistical, medical and other information, as well as various facts which throw light on the usually concealed bad quarters of our large and small cities.
``2) Industrial and manufacturing districts whose existence also presupposes a numerous poor class. Here, in addition to other points, we want to draw the attention of our contributors to the following points:
``a) The character of labour in itself; the different forms of labour which by their nature or excessively long hours are harmful to health; children's and women's labour in factories and its results; careless treatment of the working and non-working children and wives of proletarians, breakup of the family, supplanting of the labour of adult men by women's and children's labour, accidents caused by machines, etc.
``b) Dependence of workers on their employer. As regards this point we shall deem it our particular duty to protect the interests of the defenceless working class against the authorities and in particular, regrettably, against the too frequent abuses of capitalists. We shall relentlessly subject to social censure every individual case of oppression of workers and shall be very grateful to our correspondents for the most accurate information on this point, including the name, place and date. ...''
Then Engels enumerated the various possible forms of abuses on the part of the manufacturers and the different systems of exploitation and forms of oppression. He wrote: 183 ``We shall make public, to the smallest detail, every violation of the laws intended to protect the poor from the rich.''
Lastly, concerning the third group of questions in which the journal was interested Engels pointed out: c) ``General neglect of workers by society when the former are left without any means of subsistence owing to competition or introduction of improved machinery, employment of women and children or fluctuations in the course of trade or foreign competition, or as a result of disease, mutilation or old age of the no longer ablebodied, as well as any deterioration in the condition of workers due to a drop in wages.
``We shall describe the internal and external conditions of both the poor and the propertied classes. We shall show proofs that free competition of private proprietors without an organisation of labour and trade leads to impoverishment of the middle class by concentrating property in the hands of a few and thus indirectly restoring monopoly, and that the break-up of large-scale landownership ruins the small landholder and indirectly restores large-scale landownership and that the competitive struggle in which we become increasingly involved undermines the foundations of society and by its gross selfishness demoralises all of society".
While collecting material for his book Development of Capitalism in Russia, Lenin studied the state, regional and district statistics as well as the budgets of individual peasant households. He analysed the zemstvo statistics of Novorossiisk, Samara, Perm, Orel, Voronezh, Nizhny Novgorod and several other regions. He supplemented the second edition of the book, published in 1907, with data on the horse population, crop statistics, 1897 All-Russia census, new factory statistics, etc. On the basis of these data he drew a conclusion on the character and motive forces of the First Russian Revolution.
He wrote: ``A concrete analysis of the status and the interests of the different classes must serve as a means of defining the precise significance of this truth when applied to this or that problem. The opposite mode of reasoning frequently met with among the Right-wing Social-- Democrats headed by Plekhanov, i.e., the endeavour to look for 184 answers to concrete questions in the simple logical development of the general truth about the basic character of our revolution, is a vulgarisation of Marxism and downright mockery of dialectical materialism" [1; 3, 32].
The question of concrete social investigations is a question of closer relations with life and the practical struggle for transformation of society on new, communist principles. This feature is the essence of Marxist-Leninist sociology which developed and is developing on the basis of a generalisation of man's social labour activities and a concrete solution of the theoretical problems of communist construction.
To conduct concrete social investigations, is to study--- with the aid of the Marxist-Leninist theory and methodology and by using a special technique and methods of concrete sociological analysis---documents and archival materials, regional and factory statistics, systematically to observe social phenomena'', and talk with workers, peasants and the intelligentsia in order to gain a deep insight into life and effect a generalisation on the basis of scientifically collected and scientifically systematised primary material.
Application of the Marxist theory of social development to cognition of concrete social processes in all the multiformity of their manifestation under the concrete conditions of a given socio-economic formation must apparently form the basis of these investigations.
Concrete social study is theoretical work aimed at a practical solution of most important social problems. Noting this factor in relation to capitalist society Lenin wrote that under capitalism theoretical work must be directed toward ``the concrete study of all forms of economic antagonism in Russia, the study of their connections and successive development; it must reveal this antagonism wherever it has been concealed by political history, by the peculiarities of the legal systems or by established theoretica] prejudice. It must present an integral picture of our realities as a definite system of production relations, show that the exploitation and expropriation of the working people are essential under this system, and show the way out of this system that is indicated by economic development" [1; 1,296].
185Enumerating the main propositions by which the People's Commissariat of Education was to guide itself in drawing up a draft decree of the Council of People's Commissars ``On the Socialist Academy of Social Sciences" Lenin wrote down in May 1918: ``a series of social investigations to be made one of the primary tasks" [1; 27,404]. In 1920, during the discussions on trade unions Lenin proposed to conduct a number of inquiries and examinations, compare them with the objective statistical data and on that basis work out practical, businesslike proposals for the future.
The characteristic features of concrete social studies are that they: a) are conducted comprehensively, i.e., the problem in question is investigated thoroughly, in all its connections and relations, b) are conducted under concrete conditions of an industrial enterprise, a collective farm, etc., and rest on scientificially gleaned and systematised facts and data, c) result in new theoretical inferences and practical proposals.
The scientific conception of communism is indissolubly connected with the living, practical activities of the masses of the people in the revolutionary transformation of society. Scientific communism differs from bookish-- dogmatic communism and high-flown phraseology in that it attaches decisive importance to a more perfect organisation of production, workers' and peasants' working conditions, increased output of goods required to raise the living standards of the people, and formation of communist relations among the people in life and work.
To conduct concrete social investigations is to study social facts or phenomena under concrete conditions of life; examine and analyse all the constituent elements of the given social situation; reveal the most important factors of the given social situation, generalise the results obtained and work out concrete theoretical and practical solutions of the problems concerned.
Society is an aggregate of social phenomena and social mechanisms. The social mechanism as a whole can be controlled only on the basis of the control of concrete social mechanisms and systems of these mechanisms. The social mechanisms form a most complex network of structurally and functionally interdependent factors. The 186 task of sociology as a science of governing social life consists, in the given case, in disclosing, on the basis of a concrete analysis, the content and character of interaction of the various aspects of the social phenomenon (or group of interdependent phenomena) concerned and the structural and functional interrelations determining the operation of the mechanism of this phenomenon, and in correlating the functional consequences (actual or possible) with the general objective aims conditioned by the objective process of development of the given society.
A concrete study of the structural and functional interdependences makes it possible to reveal definite deviations of the functional consequences of the given social phenomenon from the general aims of social development and on this basis to elaborate practical recommendations for the purpose of setting up the necessary conditions favouring effectuation of such structural changes as will result in functional consequences coinciding to the utmost with the general aims of social development.
The materialist conception of human history forms the general theoretical basis for consciously regulating the operation of the social mechanism as a whole and the different subsystems of the social mechanisms. Man and the social relations, in the system of which both the production and non-production activities are carried out, are products of concrete conditions and circumstances, of the operation of a mass of various social factors. In conducting concrete sociological investigations on the basis of this initial materialist prerequisite it is necessary to remember that, firstly, these circumstances and factors (i.e., all social phenomena and their mechanisms) are concrete forms of manifestation of the regularities of social development; secondly, these conditions, circumstances and factors are, in turn, concrete products of human activity under the given conditions and more or less reflect the requirements of the general regularities of social development; thirdly, owing to this they impede or hasten the formation of new, more progressive social relations, etc.
V. I. Lenin wrote: ``By examining the totality of opposing tendencies, by reducing them to precisely definable conditions of life and production of the various classes of society, by discarding subjectivism and arbitrariness in the 187 choice of a particular 'dominant' idea or in its interpretation, and by revealing that, without exception, all ideas and all the various tendencies stem from the condition of the material forces of production, Marxism indicated the way to an all-embracing and comprehensive study of the process of the rise, development and decline of socio-- economic systems. People make their own history, but what determines the motives of people, of the mass of people, i.e., what gives rise to the clash of conflicting ideas and strivings? What is the sum total of all these clashes in the mass of human societies? What are the objective conditions of production of material life that form the basis of all of man's historical activity? What is the law of development of these conditions? To all these Marx drew attention and indicated the way to a scientific study of history as a single process which, with all its immense variety and contradictoriness, is governed by definite laws" [1; 21,57].
The most important task confronting sociology is the study of the multifarious human activities in connection with life's concrete circumstances and forms of education.
By studying life the scientist does not shun theory. Only in close connection with life, on the basis of concrete social investigations can the scientist achieve scientific success.
An internal and indissoluble unity of concrete and theoretical sociological investigations is the prime basis for the fruitful development of Marxist sociology. This is to say that in the course of investigations not only the general regularities of social development but also the concrete forms and life's circumstances, under which these regularities manifest themselves, must be studied.
It is the duty of sociologists to help the Communist Party in elaborating the scientific principles of all its multifarious activities and in the scientific solution of concrete national economic, organisational and ideological problems. It is the task of sociologists to investigate not only the general, but also the particular regularities of communist construction, and, what is the most important, to work out ways and means of putting them into practice.
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