A Realist Guide to Sociology | Mahmut Boyuneğmez

 Mahmut Boyuneğmez

Abstract

Matter’s levels of organization or developmental stages constitute fundamental layers of reality. The social layer emerges with novel relations and manifold structures. Society, as an open system, forms a totality encompassing its constituent relations. Social relations encompass political, economic, governmental, legal, ideological, and cultural dimensions. The organization and functioning of the economic structure are not isolated but interact with other dimensions of social relations. Structures are the organized and functioning forms of relations among subjects. Subjects’ practices occur under the conditioning of structures with specific organization and functioning. Conversely, structures’ organization and functioning evolve through subjects’ activities. The structure-subject dichotomy in social science stems from deficient abstraction. In capitalist society, the capitalist class’s power is formed and reproduced on a societal scale. This power is not solely enacted through state organization but also through economic, ideological (educational, communicative), cultural (literary, artistic, sporting), and civil society (unions, associations, foundations) dimensions of domination. These organizations, contributing to the formation and daily reproduction of the capitalist class’s social power, are termed hegemony structures of social power. The capitalist state is an organization of domination-subordination, embodying power relations between the capitalist class and the proletariat and intermediate strata. Legal structures are power mechanisms of the ruling capitalist class. In the future communist society, the state, as an apparatus of political power, domination, and oppression, will wither and dissolve, becoming synonymous with organized society.

Keywords: Realism, sociology, dimensions of social relations, structure-subject dichotomy, superstructures, social power, hegemony, communism

Introduction

Matter possesses distinct levels of organization or developmental stages, which we designate as the fundamental layers of reality. These layers include the atomic and subatomic particle (microcosm) layer; the chemical layer, encompassing atomic and molecular interactions; the macrocosmic (physical) layer, governed by laws of motion and energy; the biological layer, comprising organisms’ structures and their evolutionary interactions with their environment; the consciousness (mind) layer; and the social layer, characterized by societal changes and development. These fundamental layers coexist and build upon one another without forming a hierarchy. One layer forms the foundation for the subsequent layer that encompasses it. The essence of processes and events within a more advanced layer, containing subordinate layers, is determined by that layer’s structure—its organization, functioning, and the interactions of its elements. For instance, although the biological layer is a necessary foundation for the social layer’s existence, the social layer’s “organization and functioning” (structure) cannot be explained by biological laws. The novel qualities of these fundamental layers, absent in prior layers, are termed “emergent.”

Society is an emergent phenomenon with new relations and manifold structures (the organization and functioning of relations) compared to those in nature. Although social relations rest on a biological foundation, they operate according to laws distinct from those of the biological level of matter’s organization. To explain social phenomena, one must examine the laws and relations emergent within the social layer of reality.

In our view, society is an open system. Products generated through labor applied to nature constitute the system’s fundamental inputs. Production processes are the indispensable, constitutive, and central component of social relations. The productive forces—comprising laboring individuals, means of production, land, technical knowledge, and organizational forms—are embedded in or possess specific relations of production. These relations of production, held by the productive forces, i.e., relations among classes in the economy, constitute society’s economic base or structure. The organization and functioning of this economic structure are not isolated but interact with other dimensions of social relations. Society’s economic structure does not possess an organization and functioning separate or independent from the legal, governmental, ideological/cultural, and artistic dimensions of social relations, which encompass superstructures. Relations within production processes are directly and indirectly influenced by other social processes and relations that appear external to production. The mode of production, as the economic structure, conditions the legal, governmental, ideological/cultural, and artistic dimensions of social relations to varying degrees, limiting their possible forms. Society’s systemic nature denotes that it is a totality encompassing its constituent relations.

Class relations and antagonisms within society’s economic structure find reflections and echoes in ideological and organizational forms in other dimensions of social relations. These organizations are termed superstructures, defined by this characteristic.

The state, everyday politics, political parties, dominant and official ideology, legal regulations, cultural activities, and organizations, among others, do not occupy a position external to the structure of production relations, i.e., economic relations among classes. These elements of the capitalist social system interact with the base as organizations, structures, and practices across various dimensions of social relations. The capitalist base cannot persist or develop without their mediation. The relations between the base and superstructures should not be explained through spatial constructs. In our view, social relations possess 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, encompassing intellectual and practical activities, yields knowledge of objective reality. To the extent that scientific theories, laws, and knowledge accurately apprehend reality, they afford humanity the capacity to transform and control it. Scientific ideas that align with reality’s tendency to change or enable control over various aspects of reality are realist. Realism manifests in philosophical, scientific, political, and practical forms developed to address daily problems. Materialism is philosophical realism, as it acknowledges that objective reality exists independently of thought and can be accurately abstracted intellectually. Thus, materialism is realist because it posits that reality is comprehensible and controllable. Communism recognizes that historical progression has a direction, though not a purpose. It envisages the forms that trends from the past to the present may assume in the future. Due to its intellectual alignment with historical trends of change, communist ideas exhibit realist characteristics. Solutions to daily problems can only be achieved by remaining consistent with prior knowledge and producing the realist ideas necessary for resolution.

The realist (scientific) examination of a problem or topic emerges only when the potential for establishing practical control or dominance over the reality under study begins to manifest. If at least some control over the reality, process, phenomenon, or object under scrutiny is feasible, a realist (scientific) abstraction can be made in this regard. This constitutes the elimination of alienation.

In their intellectual dimension, natural and social sciences, Marxism, historical materialism, and communism are realist theories and ideologies. Currently, realism in the natural sciences generally surpasses that in the social sciences. Marxism is a significant theoretical step toward establishing control over social processes, realistically grasping the fundamental logic of social reality’s functioning in transformation, validated through revolutionary social change. The realist comprehension of social phenomena and processes by all individuals, at least at the level of common sense, will be realized in the communist period of history. This is achievable only through a collective organization embracing society or societies with all their members, equating the state with social organization, and implementing planned social engineering activities to ensure collective control and dominance 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 the path to communism. This characterization does not imply that materialism’s intellectual content is realizable but that, as a philosophical stance, it adopts the realism of scientific ideas and realism broadly.

Structures and Subjects

Structures are the forms of organization and functioning of relations among subjects. The organization and functioning within economic and political entities (e.g., an economic enterprise, party, state, family) formed by subjects should also be regarded as structures. In other words, structures do not refer to state institutions, classes as static groups of people, written legal codes, or ideological doctrines. Let us examine more closely what is meant by structures.

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

Classes are structures, constituted by the formation of relations and interactions among individuals belonging to principal classes, including relations among their substrata.

The organization and functioning of social relations in the economic dimension constitute the economic structure or base.

Another superstructure pertains to the legal dimension of the organization and functioning of relations among classes and individuals.

Regulatory mechanisms and relations (e.g., family, educational organization, the culture industry) in the formation and reformation of individuals’ attitudes, behavioral patterns, emotions, and thoughts about reality are structures with an ideological dimension.

The structure and the subject 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 or interactions that subjects and their organizations establish.

The structure-subject dichotomy in social science is the product of a deficient understanding or abstraction. If it is recognized that a perspectival abstraction is employed, with a bidirectional abstraction perspective, it becomes evident that there is no essential difference, separation, or chronology between structures and subjects. When this is not acknowledged, due to the inadequacy and unidirectionality of abstraction or conceptualization processes, subjects are reduced to structures, as in structuralism, or structures to subjects’ activities, as in methodological individualism. However, structures are the social forms that subjects’ relations assume, and subjects are the human activities that produce, reproduce, or transform these forms.

In classical Marxist works, and even within different sections of a single work, varying emphases on human action, activities, or practices versus structures arise from perspectival abstraction. For example, in Capital, capitalist production is critically examined as a structure—the organization and functioning of production relations—at different levels of abstraction, as well as the activity of capital and working-class subjects.

Structures such as production relations, classes, state, and law should not be used as static concepts. To illustrate with an example from Turkey, in the transition from the pre-1980s to the post-1980s, production relations and class structures across various capital accumulation processes have exhibited a dynamic structure as superstructures, real, effective relations, and the form of their organization and functioning.

Subjects’ practices occur under the conditioning of structures with a specific organization and functioning. Simultaneously, structures’ organization and functioning change through subjects’ activities, particularly evident in certain historical episodes. These are periods when reforms are implemented, or social revolutionary initiatives are undertaken.

Politics and the State

Politics, as a dimension of social relations, must be seen as encompassing specific practices or actions and structures (e.g., state, political parties) within its scope, existing through interactions within the totality of social relations.

Political practices are both voluntarist and conditioned by structural elements, such as the state, parties, mechanisms like elections, trade unions—which, though originally sites of struggle, have distanced themselves from it—, workers’ associations, and cultural organizations and the structuring of inter-class relations. Political practices are realized in interaction with structures across various dimensions of social relations, transforming them, but within the limits and constraints they impose. All political activities of subjects, despite their differences, are components of objective processes.

The capitalist state may exhibit a pronounced economic organization, as in a welfare state, or, conversely, a neoliberal authoritarian security state with significantly reduced organization. However, it is always an organization that affects all other social relations, including economic ones. Struggles between the capitalist class and the proletariat are reflected in the capitalist state’s structure. Moreover, the state is itself an organization where class struggle occurs, with politicians and bureaucracy ideologically aligned with the capitalist class and its official ideology on one side, and the broad mass of working people within it on the other. The educational structure, tasked with training new workers and ideologically shaping them in accordance with the system, and the health organization, responsible for the reproduction (healing) of workers, are social relations that the capitalist state embodies to a large extent in the welfare state model and to a lesser extent in the neoliberal model.

The capitalist state is an organization of domination-subordination, or, in other words, of power relations between the capitalist class on one side and the proletariat and intermediate strata on the other. Primarily an organization of political power, it is also an organization of power and hegemony through its economic, ideological, cultural, military-police, and legal structures. For example, hierarchical power relations exist within the army between conscripts and privates (predominantly workers and peasants), officers, and the broader police (wage laborers as they sell their labor power) and military-police bureaucracy, constituting domination as a form of power relation. State institutions are organizations that encompass power relations between politicians-bureaucracy and public workers.

Legal Structure

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

The legal dimension of social relations encompasses legal practices, relations, and norms (rules) that regulate individuals’ behaviors or actions. Legal practices and relations are constituted by the legal subset of the state, an organization of power (e.g., judicial processes in courts, prisons). Law, as one of the superstructures, possesses a specific organization and functioning, i.e., structure. In capitalist societies, the acts and transactions of individuals and legal entities are governed by legal structures and rules. Unlike other rules, such as technical regulatory rules or moral norms, in the processes of regulating the behaviors and actions of individuals, organizations, and institutions, the legal structure constitutes an alienated sphere of power (beyond individuals’ control). The legal structure is an organization of power that ensures workers’ subordination to capital’s social domination through the state’s practices of repression and coercion, the ideology formed around law, and society’s dominant moral understanding of rights and justice.

Legal structures are among the power organizations of the ruling capitalist class. Within this power organization, alongside repressive practices or domination, ideological values produced through legal practices are operative. Legal practices (both legislative and judicial) result not only in sanctions or repression but also in establishing ideological hegemony (approval and consent) over individuals.

Ideological and Cultural Dimensions of Social Relations

Everything solid is evaporating! The cultural values and practices inherited from past centuries are fading, undergoing metamorphosis, or being replaced by new ones under the grip of market relations. Within the active reality of living individuals, as patterns of emotion, thought, and behavior, ideologies manifest as ideological motifs, attitudes, and behaviors not only in production processes but also in various social practices and relations. Ideological emotions, thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors, reproduced daily, maintain their dynamism within the social system or totality amid changes in one or another aspect of social relations.

Art and sporting activities are currently enmeshed in the web of capitalist production and market relations. As components of the culture industry, artistic production and sporting activities are sites of ideological struggles within the social relations and practices they embody. As in artistic productions and activities, ideological struggles are observed in the social relations shaped around sporting activities. In art, critical and progressive productions and activities confront practices and works that glorify the status quo and regression. While workers’ participation in artistic production remains highly limited, the consumption of industrial artistic products and activities facilitates ideological manipulation to establish and reproduce the capitalist class’s social power. Excluding workers’ amateur participation in sporting activities, the social function of the relations woven around these practices is primarily to contribute to forming the hegemony necessary for the capitalist class’s social power.

Power

Power exists in relations and practices among individuals—between classes, genders, capitalists and workers, bureaucrats and public workers in hierarchical military or police organizations, and managers and workers in public institutions. The necessary or indispensable condition for power relations (conditio sine qua non, “if and only” condition, condition of existence or non-existence) is inequalities among individuals. Without inequalities, power cannot exist. In other words, power relations among individuals exist only in the presence of inequalities. The sufficient condition for the formation of power is the existence of the threat or implication of violence, coercion, or punishment. In the presence of inequalities among individuals, accompanied by violence, coercion, deterrence, punishment, or intimidation—even if only implied—power exists as a relationship.

Power, the subject of political theory, is political and social power. Political power (the state) is a component or element of social power. Separating social relations into a political sphere (state) and “civil society” leads to error. The state is a system of social relations with political, economic, ideological, cultural, and legal dimensions. The capitalist state is not solely an organization of political power but also an organization participating in the formation of the capitalist class’s social power through these dimensions. Social power is produced through various practices, interpersonal relations, and organizations or structures across state-political, legal, economic, ideological, and cultural dimensions, reproduced daily with continuity.

The capitalist state is not merely an apparatus of oppression, coercion, punishment, deterrence, or domination but a set of social relations situated within, not above, society. Beyond oppression, it fosters consent, approval, or consensus, develops cultural and ideological formation in individuals, conceals or obscures certain truths, keeps individuals ignorant of scientific knowledge and perspectives, directs, conditions, and prepares the ground for dependency through various pleasurable, entertaining, or exciting practices among individuals, produces loyalty through activities of charity, and directly participates in the reproduction of religious beliefs. It is a hegemony structure or organization with these functions.

Power is class-based. In the capitalist system, the capitalist class’s power is formed and reproduced on a societal scale. The capitalist state structure is only one component of the capitalist class’s social power. The formation of social power in the capitalist system is realized through or mediated by hegemony structures encompassing various practices and relations. The hegemony structures of social power include the state organization, the state’s sub-organizations (e.g., repression, education, media, culture, justice/legal organization), organizations such as trade unions, political parties, NGOs, components of the culture industry, private or state universities, sports clubs, and capital’s cultural organizations, among others.

The capitalist class’s social power is not achieved solely through state organization. It also encompasses economic, ideological (educational, communicative), cultural (literary, artistic, sporting), and civil society (trade unions, associations, foundations) dimensions of domination or power. In the relationship established between workers and capitalists at the enterprise level, there is not only an economic and legal relationship but also a domination-subordination relationship. The education system and media encompass practices and interpersonal relations that contribute to forming the hegemony necessary for the capitalist class’s social power. Trade unions, as corporatist organizations reconciling the working class’s interests with the state and capitalists, ensure workers’ attachment to the capitalist system, and so forth. We designate these organizations, which participate in forming the capitalist class’s social domination across all these dimensions and reproduce this domination daily, as the hegemony structures of social power.

Hegemony is not solely related to producing consent, acceptance, or approval. Hegemony is formed through violence, coercion, compulsion, force, fear, intimidation, punishment, consent, approval, consensus, attachment, distraction, creating preoccupation, meaning-making, enjoyment, indifference, pacification, ignorance, preoccupation with problems and overwork, control or supervision, and practices and interpersonal relations combining these in various proportions. Television series watched by workers in their non-working time, best-selling books they read, tabloid press, and various hobbies are examples of mechanisms producing consent and “distraction and creating preoccupation.”

The capitalist class’s social power over the working class and intermediate strata, which includes political power and is established on a national scale, can only be maintained if hegemony is established over and among individuals. The hegemony structures of social power are instrumental in this process.

This pertains to the capitalist social system, which includes capitalist democracy as a political regime and the ordinary capitalist state as a state form. In ordinary times, power in the capitalist social system operates through diverse hegemony structures, analogous to organs composed of different tissues.

Fascism, in addition to being a type of exceptional state, describes the subjugation of the entire social fabric, practices, relations, and structures (social organizations) to the determination and control of political power and state ideology (official ideology), i.e., totalitarianism. In fascism, the dispersed rays of social power in capitalist democracies during ordinary times are focused and concentrated at a single point. The hegemony structures of social power in capitalist democracy are situated within the gravitational field of the singularity of administrative or executive power in fascism. Culture, art, sports, entertainment, family life, various aspects of daily life, politics, trade unions, schools/education, and more come under the illumination of fascism’s brown light. The various hegemony structures of social power are compressed within the vise of political power, assuming a narrow and singular mold. In summary, fascism is an exceptional political regime and capitalist state form in which the capitalist class’s social power is homogenized, singularized, and exercises maximum control over social relations.

Social Power and Hegemony

Capitalist society is a system of practices and relations among individuals. Social relations in the capitalist system encompass economic, political, ideological, cultural, and legal dimensions. These social relations include the relations and interactions between the capitalist class, the proletariat, and intermediate strata. The capitalist class possesses social power over the working class and intermediate strata on a societal scale. The capitalist class’s social power is established through its relations with other classes and strata. Power exists through the relations among individuals with differing habitus or class positionings. Thus, capital’s social power has economic, political, ideological, cultural, and legal dimensions.

The capitalist state is an organization or structure that participates in forming the capitalist class’s power over other societal segments through its extensions in economic, political, ideological, cultural, and legal practices and relations, and its interactions and practices in these dimensions. It is not solely a political organization but a component of capital’s social power through its interactions and presence in other dimensions of social relations and practices.

Power is derived through the establishment of hegemony in the practices and relations of daily life. Not only through pressure, coercion, or escape from punishment but also through persuasion, approval, consent, indifference, pacification, ignorance, preoccupation with problems and overwork, creating preoccupation, attraction to distracting and pleasurable activities, and participation in community-like interest organizations, the masses are prevented from objecting to the functioning of the capitalist system, reflecting on its negativities and contradictions, developing emotions, or taking action. In capitalist social formations, capital’s social power manifests as the masses’ obedience and lack of objection to the problems they face.

In the capitalist system, capital’s social power ensures the maintenance and perpetual existence of the exploitation relationship between the working class and the capitalist class. In other words, the formation of this power is necessary for the capitalist system’s survival. Therefore, alongside the capitalist state, various hegemony instruments or structures (trade unions, associations, foundations, chambers, NGOs, establishment parties, sports clubs, capital’s cultural organizations) and legal practices and structures, where economic, political, ideological, and cultural practices converge, function together and interactively as components of the system. To maintain the exploitation relations between the working class and the capitalist class, which are capitalist relations of production, all system components must operate together and in interaction.

This conception adopts an approach that views society as a system or totality, observing the interactions and relations among its components. Here, exploitation relations constitute the system’s pivot or axis. These relations are not solely economic but also encompass moral, ideological/intellectual, legal, and governmental dimensions that accompany the processes and practices between capitalists and workers. For example, laws and the state always regulate and interact with exploitation relations and workplaces. Contracts between workers and capitalists often have a legal dimension. These are relationships in which the parties’ thoughts, emotions, and value judgments play a significant role in their practices.

Power, Authority, and Control

Authority implies voluntary obedience to orders and following the actor considered the leader, individual or group endorsement of the leader’s abilities and social position, and obedience without coercion, violence, punishment, or the implication thereof. Examples include parental authority, professional authority (e.g., a physician’s authority over patients in a hospital), moral authority, and political leader authority. Authority is realized through emotions and attitudes such as love, trust, respect, valuing, self-interest, and, in some cases, ideological loyalty and commitment.

Power, in contrast, is a relationship of domination-subordination among individuals. Power arises from inequality among individuals. Its distinction from authority lies in the constant presence of the threat or implication of violence, suppression, or punishment. Power relations can exist in social organizations, as can economic power or military might, and their formation may be supported by ideological and informational dimensions. Power cannot be reduced solely to political power. However, in capitalist society, the hegemony structures of social power and various practical arrangements involved in the formation and reproduction of the capitalist class’s social power describe the most significant and decisive power relations for this society.

Control, in this context, is the ability to regulate and restrict access to means of production, weapons, information, and social organizations. Through this restriction and control, individuals can be manipulated.

Mechanisms and Practices of Hegemony

Obedience manifests as conformity, submission, acceptance, and commitment through respect, love, trust, gratitude, influence through knowledge, thoughts, behavior, and guidance, compliance with an authority’s directives, preoccupation with problems and overwork, and engagement in pleasurable and preoccupying behaviors and activities.

Obedience is a manifestation of authority or power in interpersonal relations and practices. What distinguishes power from authority (differentia specifica) is that it encompasses “submission” alongside “obedience.”

Submission involves intimidation, coercion, repression or violence, and the implication or threat of punishment, resulting in retreat or deterrence. Submission prevents attempts at alternative behaviors or actions, ensures compliance with prohibitions, and inhibits the development of alternative organizations, political practices, or relations, as well as resistance or opposition. Submission entails not objecting, not reacting, not criticizing or questioning, and not expressing discontent. To submit is to refrain from opposing conditions and judgments, to surrender. For these to constitute “submission,” processes such as pressure, coercion, punishment, attrition, or intimidation must be experienced, or a potential threat must be present.

In the capitalist system, the capitalist class’s social power is secured through mechanisms and practices of obedience and submission. These are termed the mechanisms and practices of hegemony of social power.

Crisis of Hegemony

Power or dominance relations between the capitalist class and the proletariat and other social sectors exist in ordinary times as the masses’ loyalty to the system and their immobilization under hegemony. In daily life, these power relations maintain a dynamic equilibrium. For example, a strike in an enterprise temporarily disrupts the balance in power relations between the capitalist and workers due to the transformation of class antagonism into active struggle, i.e., contradiction. In a nationwide revolutionary situation, hegemony over the laboring masses disintegrates and cannot be reproduced. This is termed a crisis of hegemony. The capitalist class’s social power becomes untenable. The masses participating in the revolution possess alternative political power organizations and parties, as well as counter-hegemonic instruments (e.g., trade unions, associations, foundations, media, cultural organizations). Revolution does not occur as an external seizure of political power by the working class through its party. In a historical episode characterized by a crisis where the capitalist class’s social power cannot be reproduced, political power transitions from the capitalist class to the proletariat with the support of social counter-hegemony instruments. The existing social and political power fragments and dissolves, and the masses form their own power through newly developed alternative power organizations and a vanguard party. A new power is seen to emerge from the fractured old power structure.

In a revolutionary situation, alongside economic and political/administrative crises, a crisis of hegemony renders the mechanisms and practices constituting the capitalist class’s social power ineffective. The hegemony structures or organizations of social power, within which these mechanisms and practices operate, develop dysfunctions and disruptions. A state of disobedience and non-submission has emerged among mobilized active segments of society (workers and various societal sectors among intermediate strata). Moreover, in the presence of a crisis of hegemony, i.e., a revolutionary situation, counter-hegemonic organizations (socialist media, cultural institutions, vanguard socialist parties and organizations, revolutionary or red trade unions, associations, professional unions, and other struggle organizations, as well as alternative power nuclei in the form of councils, assemblies, or shura) are formed and active.

In revolutionary situations, the combination of disobedience, non-submission (resistance and opposition), and active organized struggle in social movements enables revolutionary forces and processes to triumph over status quo, counter-revolutionary, and order-preserving forces and processes. This possibility is termed socialist revolution. However, when a revolutionary situation does not culminate in revolution, outcomes such as counter-revolution (e.g., the 1979 Iranian counter-revolution), reactionary forces “stealing” the revolution (e.g., the 2010 Arab Spring with weak vanguard organizations), military coups (e.g., the 12 September 1980 military coup in Turkey), paramilitary fascist organizations’ terrorist acts to distract, wear down, and divert revolutionary vectors from the goal of power, or social democratic liberalism functioning as the system’s safety valve (e.g., 1970s Turkey) are also possible.

The goal of the struggle for the working class’s power cannot be seen solely as the seizure of political power. For the capitalist class’s social power to become irreproducible, activities, practices, and organizations creating counter-hegemony across various dimensions of social relations are necessary. In a crisis of hegemony, where the capitalist class’s social power falters, alternative power nuclei formed in society must be prepared to develop and flourish under the leadership of a vanguard party in the working-class power. In this crisis phase, capital’s social power fractures and disintegrates, while a new power, with its manifold constituent organizations, supplants the old. Thus, power transitions from the capitalist class to the working class.

In the socialist revolution, the liquidation of exploitation relations (base or infrastructure), the axis of the capitalist system, is realized, while all superstructures and the ideological realm, the ideal dimension of social activities, are restructured in alignment. The functioning and organization of existing old structures are dismantled or destroyed, and these structures are transformed. Structures, as forms of organization of social relations, are reorganized, and their functions undergo transformations. This includes the organization of the state, as a matter of course.

Communist Society

All epochs of humanity, from prehistory to the present, viewed retrospectively, constitute the evolution of communities toward becoming societies. The differences (language, religion, culture, etc.) among communities, termed nations, currently citizens of different nation-states, will continue to evolve as social riches through interactions once the compartmentalization of capital’s power over these communities on a national scale is eliminated. Communist society encompasses all of humanity and is established on a global scale. The potential world society of the capitalist era will be realized when national and nation-state borders cease to be obstacles.

As the class determination of social relations ceases under communism, the political domination and governance relations observed among individuals in this historical period will also disappear. This entails the withering and dissolution of the state as an organization of political domination, oppression, and coercion. Under socialism, the state will gradually abandon this former function. Only when the state, as a political organization, becomes the organizational form of all social life will it wither and dissolve within society. The state or states will progressively undertake the objective social tasks that people worldwide collectively organize and 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, and supporting environmental renewal—will be executed by an organization encompassing all. In short, as the state or states, as an organization of domination and political apparatus, withers and dissolves within society, an organizational structure encompassing all humanity will be created. The state or unity of states will become the organization of society encompassing all humanity. The state will become socialized, or public, and identified with organized society.

The withering of law under socialism implies that law’s function of domination and ideological role will gradually disappear (For example, under socialism, housing, education, and health are rights, legally expressed as such, whereas, according to the capitalist class, they are not rights in today’s capitalist system). In communism’s abundant society, where individuals’ needs are adequately met, maximum equality of access to all opportunities exists for everyone, including the disabled, and people control their living conditions, free from alienation, there is no discussion of justice or rights. Law no longer has any ideological function beyond being the written record of society’s operational principles and the scientifically regulated principles of social relations. Under communism, the legal structure, as a simple and natural (non-alienated) social organization, addresses only the individual or psychological causes of crimes, functioning in a pedagogical-medical capacity, as the social causes of crimes have been eliminated.

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 or between the mode of production and other aspects of social relations. In the communist world society, as throughout history, artistic, philosophical, scientific, ethical, and aesthetic productions will be created in alignment with the relations of production. In communist society, due to the absence of class antagonism in the relations of production, artistic, philosophical (including its various subtypes and materialist dialectical forms), scientific, moral, ethical, and aesthetic productions, values, and principles will not diminish.

Currently, scientific activity predominantly occurs as research and development within production processes. Moreover, inter-class relations and struggles are not reflected in the content of scientific-technological products or knowledge/theories in the natural sciences. Thus, speaking of a “proletarian science” or “bourgeois science” is absurd. However, just as metaphysical ideas and idealist philosophical views once dominated the natural sciences during their birth and infancy, today, in the field of human or social sciences, struggles persist between various ideologies masquerading as science and scientific approaches. A gradually developing realism in the social sciences will be a product of the emerging communist era, reaching a certain maturity with increasing collective control over social processes.

The production and reproduction of metaphysical ideologies, however, will cease as alienation in relations with nature and other individuals is eliminated, rendering these relations transparent, easily comprehensible, and collectively controllable.