A Realist Guide to Sociology | Mahmut Boyuneğmez

 

ABSTRACT

Matter’s levels of organization or stages of development constitute basic layers of reality. Social layer is an emergence with new relations and many structures. Society is an open system, i.e. a totality with the relations it contains. Social relations have political, economic, governmental, legal, ideological and cultural dimensions.  The organization and functioning of economic structure is not isolated and in isolation, but interacts with other dimensions of social relations. Structures are the forms of organization and functioning of relations between subjects/actors. The practices of subjects take place under the conditioning of structures of a certain organization and functioning. The organization and functioning of structures change through the activities of subjects. The structure-subject (agent) dichotomy in social science is actually the product of a kind of lack of understanding/abstraction. In capitalist society, the power of the capitalist class is formed and reproduced on a social scale. The social power of the capitalist class is not achieved through state organization alone. There are also economic, ideological (educational, communicative), cultural (literary, artistic, sportive), civil society organizational (unions, associations, foundations, etc.) dimensions of social domination/power. We call the organizations that participate in the formation of the social power of the capitalist class in all these dimensions and reproduce this power every day the hegemony structures of social power. The capitalist state is an organization of domination-subordination, in other words, of power relations between the capitalist class on the one hand and the proletariat and intermediate layers on the other. Legal structures are among the power organizations of the capitalist class, the ruling class. In the communist society of future, the disappearance of the state as an organization of political power, domination and oppression will take place and the state will be identified with organized society.

Keywords: Dialectical-historical materialism, realism, sociology, structure-agent dichotomy, superstructures, hegemony, social power relations, communism

Introduction

Matter has levels of organization or stages of development. We call these the basic layers of reality. These layers are the atomic and subatomic particles (microcosm) layer, the chemistry layer, which includes the interactions of atoms and molecules, the macrocosm layer/physical layer, which includes the laws of motion of objects and energy, the biological layer, which includes the structure of organisms and their interactions with their environment, the mind/consciousness layer, and the social layer, which includes changes and development in society. The basic layers of reality exist within and rise above each other without forming a hierarchy. One layer forms the ground for the other layer that covers it. It is the structure of this more advanced level of organization, i.e. its functioning and the interaction of its elements, that determines the essence of the processes and events that take place in a more advanced layer that contains sub-layers. For example, although the biological layer is a necessary basis for the existence of the social layer, the “organization and functioning” (structure) of the social layer cannot be explained by the laws of the biological layer. We call the new qualities of the basic layers, which were not present in the previous layers, “emergent”.

Society is an emergence with new relations and many structures (organization and functioning of relations) compared to those in nature. Social relations are based on a biological foundation, although they have different laws from those of nature or the biological level of organization of matter. In explaining social phenomena, one must look at the laws and relations that have emerged in the social layer of reality.

In our view, society is an open system. What is produced by labour applied to nature constitutes the basic inputs of the social system. The processes of production are the indispensable, constitutive and central component of social relations. The productive people, means of production and land, know-how and forms of organization that make up the productive forces have or are in certain relations of production. The relations of production possessed by the productive forces, i.e. relations between the classes in economy, constitute the economic basis or structure of society. The organization and functioning of this economic structure is not isolated and in isolation, but interacts with other dimensions of social relations. The economic structure of society does not have a separate and independent organization and functioning from the legal, governmental, ideological/cultural and artistic dimensions of social relations that contain superstructures. Relations in production processes are directly and indirectly influenced by other social processes and relations that appear to be outside of production. The mode of production, which is the economic structure, conditions the legal, governmental, ideological/cultural and artistic dimensions of social relations to varying degrees and limits the forms they can take. The fact that society is a system means that it is a totality with the relations it contains.

Class relations and antagonism in the economic structure of society find their reflections and echoes in ideological and organizational forms in other dimensions of social relations. We call these organizations superstructures. This is what characterizes superstructures.

The state, everyday politics, political parties, dominant and official ideology, legal regulations, cultural activities and organizations, etc., none of these have a “positioning” that is external to the structure of production relations, in other words, to economic relations between classes. These elements of the capitalist social system interact with the base (i.e. economic structure) as organizations, structures and practices in different dimensions of social relations. The capitalist base cannot survive and develop without their mediation. The relations between the base and superstructures should not be explained by spatial constructions. In our view, social relations have political, economic, governmental, legal, ideological and cultural dimensions. These dimensions do not constitute a separate sphere, independent of the economic dimension of social relations.

What is realism?

Scientific research, which involves intellectual and practical activities, leads to knowledge of objective reality. To the extent that scientific theories, laws and knowledge accurately comprehend reality, they offer humanity the capacity to change and control it. Scientific ideas that coincide with the tendency of reality to change or that lead us to establish control over various sections of reality are realist. There are different types of realism: philosophical, scientific, political and in the ideas developed to solve problems in daily life. Materialism is philosophical realism because it recognizes that objective reality exists outside thoughts and can be abstracted with intellectual accuracy. So materialism is realist because it says that reality can be understood and controlled. Communism recognizes that the historical flow has not a goal but a direction. It envisages the forms that trends from the past to the present can take in the future. Since there is an intellectual overlap with historical trends of change, communist ideas are realist in character. The solution to the problems encountered in daily life can only be achieved by remaining consistent with past knowledge and producing the realist ideas necessary for the solution.

The realist/scientific examination of a problem/topic only emerges when the potential for establishing a practical control/dominance over the reality being examined begins to emerge. If it is possible to establish at least some control over the reality, process, phenomenon, object, etc. under scrutiny, a realist/scientific abstraction can be made in this respect. This is, in fact, the elimination of alienation.

In their intellectual dimension, natural and social sciences, Marxism, historical materialism and communism are realist theories and ideologies. Today, in general, realism in the natural sciences is more advanced than realism in the social sciences. Marxism is an important theoretical step towards the establishment of control over social processes, which realistically grasps the basic logic of the functioning of social reality in change, which is verified in the process of revolutionary transformation in social reality. The realist comprehension of social phenomena/processes by all people, at least at the level of common sense, will be realized in the communist period of history. This is possible only through a collective organization that will embrace society/societies with all its members, through the equation of the state with social organization, and through planned social engineering activities that will ensure collective control and domination over social organization and functioning (structures). Historical-dialectical materialism is a realist philosophy, first, because it is compatible with scientific knowledge (natural and social sciences) and abstracted from the sciences, and second, because it opens up to communism. This characterization does not imply that the intellectual content of materialism is realizable, but that as a philosophical attitude it adopts the realism of scientific ideas and realism in general.

Structures and agents

Structures are the forms of organization and functioning of relations between subjects/actors. The organization and functioning within economic and political organizations (e.g. an economic enterprise, party, state, family, etc.) formed by subjects should also be seen as structures. In other words, structures do not refer to state institutions, classes as static groups of people, written legal regulations, or ideological doctrines. Let us take a closer look at what is meant by structures...

The state as the organization and active functioning of the social power relations between the proletariat and the capitalist class (these relations have economic, political, ideological, legal and cultural dimensions) within a specific political organization is a superstructure.

Classes are structures as the formation of relations and interactions between people belonging to the main classes, including relations between their substrata.

The organization and functioning of social relations in the economic dimension constitutes the economic structure.

Another superstructure refers to the legal dimension of the organization and functioning of relations between classes and people.

The regulatory mechanisms and relations (such as the family, the organization of education, the culture industry) in the formation and re-formation of people's attitudes, patterns of behaviour, feelings and thoughts about reality are structures that also have an ideological dimension.

The structure and the subject/agent are not distinct “elements” and there are no external relations between them. Structures should be understood as the pattern or form of organization and functioning of the relations/interactions that subjects/agents and their organizations have.

The structure-subject (agent) dichotomy in social science is actually the product of a kind of lack of understanding/abstraction. If it is known that a perspectival abstraction is made, with a “two-way” abstraction perspective, it will be seen that there is no essential difference, separation and chronology between structures and subjects. When this is not done, as a result of the inadequacy and unidirectionality of abstraction/conceptualization processes, subjects are reduced to structures, as in structuralism, and structures to the activities of subjects, as in methodological singularism. However, structures are the social forms that the relations of subjects take, and subjects are the human activities that produce, reproduce or change these forms.

In Marxist classical works, and even in different parts of a single work, there are different shifts of emphasis towards human action/activities/practices or structures as a result of perspectival abstraction. For example, capitalist production, which is examined critically in Capital, is considered in terms of structure as the organization and functioning of relations of production at different points of abstraction, as well as the activity of capital and working class agents.

Structures such as relations of production, classes, state, law, etc. should not be used as static concepts. To take an example from Turkey, in the transition from the pre-1980s to the post-1980s, the relations of production and class structure in different capital accumulation processes have had a dynamic structure as superstructures, real, effective relations, and the form of organization and functioning of these relations.

The practices of subjects take place under the conditions of structures of a certain organization and functioning. At the same time, the organization and functioning of structures change through the activities of subjects, which are conspicuously evident in certain historical episodes. These are the times when reforms are implemented, when social revolutionary moves are made.

Politics and the state

Politics, as a dimension of social relations, must be seen to include certain practices/actions and structures (the state, political parties, etc.) within its scope, and to exist through interactions within the totality of social relations.

Political practices are both voluntarist practices and are conditioned by structural elements such as the state, parties, mechanisms such as elections, trade unions, workers' associations and cultural organizations, which are organizations of struggle but have moved away from it, and the structuring of inter-class relations. Political practices are realized in interaction with the structures of different dimensions of social relations, changing them, but within the limits and constraints set by them. All political activities of subjects with their differences, these subjective activities, are in fact components of objective processes.

The capitalist state can be an organization with a pronounced economic organization in the form of a welfare state, or on the contrary, it can be a neo-liberal authoritarian security state with a much reduced organization. But it is always an organization that affects all other social relations, including economic relations. The struggles between the capitalist class and the proletariat are reflected in the structure of the capitalist state. Moreover, this state is an organization in which the struggle between classes takes place, with politicians and bureaucracy with ideological commitments to the capitalist class and the official ideology it produces on the one hand, and the large mass of working people working within it on the other. The education structure, which has the function of training new workers and ideologically forming them in accordance with the system, and the health organization, which is in charge of the reproduction (healing) of the workers themselves, are also social relations that the capitalist state embodies to a large extent in the social state type and to a lesser extent in the neo-liberal state type.

The capitalist state is an organization of domination-subordination, in other words, of power relations between the capitalist class on the one hand and the proletariat and intermediate layers on the other. The capitalist state is predominantly an organization of political power, but it is also an organization of power with its economic, ideological, cultural, military-police and legal organizations. For example, there are hierarchical power relations between the conscripts and privates of the army, who are predominantly workers and peasants, the officers, who are wage labourers because they sell their labour power, and the broad mass of the police and the military-police bureaucracy, and this is domination as a type of power relation. The institutions of the state are the organizations that contain the power relations between the politicians-bureaucracy and the public workers.

Legal structure

The function of the legal dimension of social relations is to regulate social relations with its theoretical (laws, constitution, legislation) and practical aspects. These regulated relations also include economic practices.

The legal dimension of social relations includes legal practices and relations and norms (rules) that regulate people's behaviour/actions. Legal practices and relations are constituted by the legal subset of the state, which is an organization of power (judicial processes in courts, prisons, etc.). Law, as one of the superstructures, has a certain organization and functioning, in other words structure.  The acts and transactions of individuals and legal entities in capitalist societies are regulated by legal structures and rules. Unlike other rules, for example technical regulatory rules or moral norms, in the processes of regulating the behaviour and actions of individuals, organizations, institutions, the legal structure constitutes an alienated sphere of power (not under the control of people). The legal structure is an organization of power that ensures the subordination of workers to the social domination of capital through the state's practices of repression and coercion, the ideology of law, and the dominant moral understanding of rights and justice in society.

Legal structures are among the power organizations of the capitalist class, the ruling class. In this power organization, ideological values produced through legal practices are at work in addition to oppressive practices/domination. Legal practices (legislative practices as well as judicial practices) result not only in sanctions/repression but also in the establishment of ideological hegemony (approval and consent) over people.

Ideological and cultural dimensions of social relations

Everything solid is evaporating!... Cultural values and practices of past centuries are dying out in the grip of market relations, undergoing metamorphosis and being replaced by new ones. In the reality of living active individuals as patterns of emotion, thought and behaviour, ideologies manifest themselves as ideological motives, attitudes and behaviours not only in production processes but also in different social practices and relations. Ideological feelings and thoughts, attitudes and behaviours, which are reproduced every day, maintain their dynamism within the social system/whole with the changes in one side or the other of social relations.

Today, art and sporting activities are in the web of capitalist production and market relations. As components of the culture industry, artistic production and sporting activities are also sites of ideological struggles with the social relations and practices they embody. As in artistic productions and activities, inter-ideological struggles are also observed in the social relations shaped around sporting activities. In art, practices and activities that glorify the status quo and backwardness are opposed to critical and developmental productions and activities. While the participation of working people in artistic production remains very limited, during the consumption of industrial artistic products and activities, ideological manipulation takes place for the formation of a hegemony that establishes and reproduces the social power of the capitalist class. Leaving aside the amateur participation of workers in sporting activities, it is seen that the social function of the relations woven around these practices is to contribute to the formation of the hegemony necessary for the social power of the capitalist class.

Hegemony structures of social power

In capitalist society, the power of the capitalist class is formed and reproduced on a social scale. The social power of the capitalist class is not achieved through state organization alone. There are also economic, ideological (educational, communicative), cultural (literary, artistic, sportive), civil society organizational (unions, associations, foundations, etc.) dimensions of social domination/power. In the relationship established between workers and bosses on the scale of enterprises, there is not only an economic and legal relationship, but also a sovereignty-subordination relationship. The education system and the media contain practices and interpersonal relations that participate in the formation of the hegemony necessary for the social power of the capitalist class. Trade unions, as corporatist organizations that reconcile the interests of the working class with those of the state and the bosses, ensure the attachment of workers to the capitalist system, and so on... We call the organizations that participate in the formation of the social power of the capitalist class in all these dimensions and reproduce this power every day the hegemony structures of social power.

Hegemony is realized through compulsion and coercion, fear, intimidation, ideological approval, consent and attachment, distraction and occupation. The TV series that working people watch, the best-selling books they read, the tabloid press and various hobbies they engage in in their non-working time can be given as examples for the production of consent and “distraction and occupation”. The social power of the capitalist class is ensured and reproduced through the hegemony established. Through various social processes, organizations and productions, the social power of the capitalist class is established and re-established.

The power/dominance relations between the capitalist class and the proletariat and other social segments exist in ordinary times in the form of the masses' dependence on the system and their immobilization under hegemony. In everyday life there is a dynamic equilibrium in these power relations. For example, with a strike in an enterprise, the balance in the power relations between the boss and the workers is temporarily disrupted as a result of the transformation of class antagonism into active struggle, in other words, into contradiction. In a cross-section of a nationwide revolutionary situation, the hegemony over the working masses disintegrates and cannot be reproduced. This is called a crisis of hegemony. The death knell of the social power of the capitalist class has sounded. The masses participating in the revolution have alternative organizations and political parties and counter-hegemonic means (e.g. trade unions, associations, foundations, media, cultural organizations, etc.). The revolution does not take place in the form of the working class seizing political power from outside through its party. In a historical episode characterized by a crisis in which the social power of the capitalist class cannot be reproduced, political power passes from the capitalist class to the proletariat with the support of the instruments of social counter-hegemony. The existing social and political power disintegrates and the masses form their own power through newly developed alternative power organizations and the vanguard party. It is seen that new power sprouts out of the cracked old power structure.

Communist society

All the epochs of humanity from prehistory to the present day, viewed in retrospect, are the evolution of communities on their way to becoming societies. The differences (language, religion, culture, etc.) between the communities called nations, which today are citizens of different nation-states, will continue to evolve in interactions as social riches once the compartmentalization of capital power over these communities on the scale of countries is eliminated. Communist society includes all the people of the world and is built on a world scale. The potential world society of the capitalist era will be realized when national and nation-state borders cease to be a hindrance.

Since the class determination of social relations will cease to exist under communism, the relations of political sovereignty and rule observed between people in this period of history will also cease to exist. This means the disappearance of the state as an organization of political power, domination and oppression. Under socialism, the state will gradually abandon this old function. Only when the state as a political organization becomes the organizational form of all social life it will wither and dissolve into society. The state(s) will gradually come to perform the objective social work that people living all over the world collectively organize and take under their control. Tasks within the scope of social engineering, such as planning, realizing production processes, meeting needs, educating younger generations, caring for the elderly and disabled, supporting the renewal of the environment, etc., will be carried out by an organization that includes everyone. In short, while as the organization of domination and political apparatus the state/states fades and dissolves within society, an organizational structure will gradually be created that encompasses all of humanity. The state/unity of the states will become the organization of society encompassing all humanity. The state will be identified with organized society.

The extinction of law under socialism means that the domination and ideological function of law will disappear over time (for example, under socialism, housing, education and health are rights and legally expressed as such, but according to the capitalist class they are not rights in today's capitalist system). In the abundant society of communism, where people's needs are adequately met, where there is maximum equality of access to all opportunities for everyone, including the disabled, where people have control over their living conditions, that is, where they are free from alienation, there is no talk of justice and rights. Law no longer has any ideological function other than being the written record of the principles of the functioning of society and the scientifically regulated social relations. Under communism, the legal structure, as a simple and natural (non-alienated) social organization, deals only with the individual/psychological causes of crimes and functions in a pedagogical-medical way, since the social causes of crimes have disappeared.

The relations of production are not the “cause” and superstructures are not the “effect”. There are no cause and effect relations between the base and superstructures, between the mode of production and other aspects of social relations. In the communist world society, as in all history, artistic, philosophical, scientific, ethical and aesthetic productions will be created in accordance with the relations of production. In communist society, due to the absence of class antagonism in the relations of production, artistic, philosophical and materialist dialectical, scientific, moral, ethical and aesthetic productions, values and principles will not be diminished.

Today, scientific activity takes place predominantly as R&D activities in the context of production processes. Moreover, inter-class relations and struggles are not reflected in the content of scientific-technological products and knowledge/theories in the natural sciences. It is therefore absurd to speak of a “proletarian science” or a “bourgeois science”. On the other hand, just as metaphysical ideas and idealist philosophical views once dominated the natural sciences in their birth and infancy, today in the field of human/social sciences there are struggles between various ideologies masquerading as science and scientific approaches. A gradually developing realism in the social sciences will be the product of the opening communist era, and will reach a certain maturity with the increasing control of people collectively over social processes.

The production and reproduction of metaphysical ideologies, on the other hand, will come to an end as alienation in relations with nature and other human beings is eliminated, as these relations become transparent, easy to understand and collectively controllable.