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The Self-Organisation of
Society- Part II 2.1.2 The Synchronous
Description of Society 2.1.3 The Diachronic Description of Society 2.2. Society as the Unity of Different
Qualitative Systems 2.1.2 The Synchronous Description of
Society
There is a difference between
employing words for a curtate description of empirically given phenomena and
employing words as a sort of “glasses” for viewing the world (categories). The notion of “society” first of
all means thinking about human beings and imagining “all human beings together”
as society. This is the empirical concept of society. Unity here is considered
as a unity of many human beings and can be described in two different ways: on
the one hand in its systematic structure (synchronous) and on the other hand as
temporal process (diachronic). Concerning the philosophical concept of
dialectic we employ, the first approach refers to the dialectical logic
(logical relationships of categories) and the second to the historical logic
(temporal evolution) – here still within the logic of essence[i].
We first deal with the synchronous description of society. Sociological theories can be categorised
by the way they relate structures and actors (see Fuchs/Hofkirchner/Klauninger
2002). Individualistic and subjectivistic theories consider the human being as
an atom of society and society as the pure agglomeration of individual existences.
Structuralistic and functionalistic theories stress the influence and
constraints of societal structures on the individual and actions. Dualistic
sociological theories conceive the relationship of actors and structures as
independent, arguing that actors are psychological systems that don’t belong to
societal systems. Finally, dialectical approaches try to avoid one-sided
solutions of this foundational problem of sociology and conceive the
relationship of actors and structures as a mutual one. Functionalist and structuralistic
positions are unable to see human beings as reasoning, knowledgeable agents
with practical consciousness and argue that society and institutions as
subjects have needs and fulfil certain functions. This sometimes results in
views of a subjectless history which is driven by forces outside the actors’
existence that they are wholly unaware of. The reproduction of society is seen
as something happening with mechanical inevitability through processes of which
societal actors are ignorant. Functionalism and structuralism both express a
naturalistic and objectivistic standpoint and emphasise the pre-eminence of the
societal whole over its individual, human parts. Mechanistic forms of
stucturalism reduce history to a process without a subject and historical
agents to the role of supports of the structure and unconscious bearers of
objective structures (Althusser). In individualistic social
theories structural concepts and constraints are rather unimportant and quite
frequently sociality is reduced to individuality. There is a belief in fully
autonomous consciousness without inertia. E.g. methodological individualists
such as von Mises, Schumpeter and von Hayek claim that societal categories can
be reduced to descriptions of the individual. “If interpretative sociologies
are founded, as it were, upon an imperialism of the subject, functionalism and
structuralism propose an imperialism of the social object“ (Giddens 1984: 2). In Hegelian terms, individualism
reduces society to individual being-in-itself or abstract, pure-being, whereas
structuralism and functionalism consider the role of the human being in society
merely as being-for-another and determinate-being. Only dialectical approaches
to society consider the importance of both aspects, unity as being-in-and-for-itself.
Already Hegel criticised atomistic philosophies (Hegel 1830I: §§ 97, 98) by
saying that they fix the One as One, the Absolute is formulated as
Being-for-self, as One, and many ones. They don’t see that the One and the Many
are dialectically connected: the One is being-for-itself and related to itself,
but this relationship only exist in relationship to others (being-for-another)
and hence it is one of the Many and repulses itself. But the Many are one the
same as another: each is One, or even one of the Many; they are consequently
one and the same. As those to which the One is related in its act of repulsion
are ones, it is in them thrown into relation with itself and hence repulsion
also means attraction. Also Marx criticised the reductionism
of individualism in his critique of Max Stirner (Marx/Engels 1846: 101-438) and
put against this the notion of the individual that is estranged in capitalism
and that can only become a well-rounded individual in communism. Stirner says
that the individual can only be free if it gets rid of dominating forces such
as religion, state, and even society and humankind. He argued in favour of a
“union of egoists” and stressed the superiority of the individual and the
uniqueness of the ego. Societal forces would be despotic, they would limit and
subordinate the ego of the individual. Marx interposes that: 1.
individualism doesn’t see the necessarily societal and material interdependence
of individuals and doesn’t grasp their process of development because it limits
itself to advise them that they should proceed from themselves. “Individuals have always and in all
circumstances “proceeded from themselves”, but since they were not unique
in the sense of not needing any connections with one another, and since their needs,
consequently their nature, and the method of satisfying their needs, connected
them with one another (relations between the sexes, exchange, division of
labour), they had to enter into relations with one another“ (Marx/Engels
1846: 423). 2. Individualism wouldn’t
adequately reflect the real conflicts in the world and due to an idealistic
inversion of the world it would replace political praxis by moralism. Stirner
wants do away with the “private individual” for the sake of the “general”, selfless
man, but consciousness is separated from the individual and its existence in
the real, material world. “It depends not on consciousness, but on being;
not on thought, but on life; it depends on the individual’s empirical
development and manifestation of life, which in turn depends on the conditions
obtaining in the world. If the circumstances in which the individual lives
allow him only the [one]-sided development of one quality at the expense of all
the rest, [If] they give him the material and time to develop only that one
quality, then this individual achieves only a one-sided, crippled development.
No moral preaching avails here“ (Marx/Engels 1846: 245f). In medieval thinking individual
meant inseparability and identity, it was a concept that denoted the
relationship of a private human being to God (mediated by the church). An
individual was defined as a fixed member of a certain group, as inseparable
from its social role. The possibility of becoming something else was very
limited in medieval times. The term individual was connected to the religious
idea of the unity and indivisibility of the Trinity (God, Jesus, Holy Ghost).
Until the 18th century the term individual was rarely used without
explicit relation to the group of which it was the ultimate indivisible
division. With the rise of capitalism mobility increased, at least some men
could change their status. The understanding of the term individual changed and
the individual was considered as being separable from its social role. With the
movement against feudalism and traditional religion there was a stress on a
man’s personal existence over and above society. Individualism has had its rise
with the emergence of modern, i.e. capitalist society and is related to ideas
that have been developed during the course of the enlightenment such as a free
will as well as rationally and responsible acting subjects. The enlightenment
formed an integral element of the process of establishing modern society. The
concept of the modern individual is also one that has been made possible by
questioning religious eschatologies of an unalterable and God-given fate of
humankind. The rise of this modern notion of the individual has also been
interrelated with the rise of the idea of “free” entrepreneurship in market society.
Freedom has been conceived in this sense as an important quality and essence of
the modern individual. The idea of the modern individual can be seen as a
logical consequence of the liberal-capitalist economy. According to this
concept, morally responsible and autonomous personalities can develop on the
basis of economical and political freedom that is guaranteed by modern society
and trade is considered in a model which postulates separate individuals who
decide, at some starting point, to enter economic relationships and produces a
collective result due to their egoistic interests (theorem of the invisible
hand). It also stresses that society guarantees individuality by removing obstacles
to individual freedom and to rational and reasonable actions. In the ideology
of individualism, individuality is clearly identified with following
self-interest economically. Egoism and selfishness are often fetishised by
assuming that they are natural characteristics of all individuals and that they
emerge from rational and autonomous thinking. But it can also be argued that
our modern society is not reasonable because it does not guarantee happiness
and satisfaction of all human beings, in fact these categories are only
achievable for a small privileged elite. Nowadays individuals are not
only seen as owners of a free will, it is also generally assumed that this free
will can be applied in order to gain ownership of material resources and
capital which make it possible to realise individual freedom. So freedom is seen
as something that can be gained individually by striving towards individual
control of material resources. This shows that the concept of the modern
individual is unseparably connected with the idea of private property. The idea
of the individual as an owner has dominated the philosophical tradition from
Hobbes to Hegel and still dominates philosophical ideas about the essence of
mankind. But this concept could never be applied to all humans that are part of
society because the majority of the world population still does not possess all
these idealistically constructed aspects of freedom and autonomy, this majority
is rather confronted with alienation and the disciplinary mechanisms of
compulsions, coercion and domination. Hence the modern idea of the individual
can be seen as an ideology that helps to legitimate modern society. The idea of
already existing autonomous individuals may be a nice ideal, but nonetheless it
can today be seen as nothing more than imagination and self-deception. Besides individualism and
structuralism, there is also dualism. In sociology, the main representative of
the sciences of complexity is Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann argues that action-based
conceptions of society are reductionistic because they reduce societal order to
rational human beings and that they can’t adequately explain the increasing
complexity of modern society as well as emergent properties of societal systems
(Luhmann 1984: 347). Luhmann wrongly infers from this that the explanation of
societal relationships should neglect acting subjects. This results in a
dualistic theory that due to the neglect of human subjects itself can’t
adequately explain the bottom-up-emergence of societal structures and the
top-down-emergence of actions and behaviour. Luhmann’s theory has been
criticised as deterministic one because he doesn’t adequately reflect the wide
contingency of societal systems that is due to the fact that action involves
the realisation of one of several possibilities in a specific societal
situation. Luhmann argues that self-reproduction is a necessity of a societal
system that is not based on human actions (Luhmann 1984: 395, 655), conceives
society in functional terms, applies Maturana’s and Varela’s
autopoiesis-concept sociologically and sees society as a self-referential
system with communications as its elements. He argues that individuals are
(re)produced biologically, not permanently by the societal systems. If one
wants to consider a societal system as autopoietic or self-referential, the
permanent (re)production of the elements by the system is a necessary
condition. Hence Luhmann says that not individuals, but communications are the
elements of a societal system. A communication results in a further
communication, by the permanent (re)production of communications a societal
system can maintain and reproduce itself. Luhmann can’t explain how one
communication can exactly produce other communications without individuals
being part of the system. An autopoietic conception of society must show
consistently that and how society produces its elements itself. Luhmann does
not show how communications are produced, he only mentions that communications result in
further communications. He can explain that society is self-referential in the
sense that one communication is linked to other ones, but he can’t adequately
explain that it is self-producing or autopoietic. Luhmann’s abandonment of the
human subject in society results in functionalist descriptions that have no
room for critical considerations of how society could or should be in. He says
himself that he does not have an agenda of a societal problems-approach and it
has been criticised that he wants to deny critical and oppositional thinking
their legitimacy. Things only have to function, Luhmann sees the task of sociology
in locating disfunctionalities and eliminating them. This theory is only
critical in the sense that it is critical against all oppositional movements
and of opposition. Warnke (1977) argues that with relativism and perspectivism
Luhmann and other system theorists try to eliminate the philosophical
categories totality, concrete-universal and essence and replace the
dialectical-materialist demand for concretness by an abstract philosophical
body. Contrary to pausing at the abstract thing-in-itself or the abstract
being-for-another dialectical philosophy would be in a mediation of both in the
being-in-and-for-itself which means concretisation. Luhmann’s concept of a
system would see a whole as something complete and finished, whereas the
dialectical concept of totality would consider a whole as developing and
becoming as well as an endless process of parts and wholes sublating their
difference by each moment passing over into the other and again composing their
difference through unity. A consistent alternative that
bridges the shortcomings of individualism, structuralism and dualism is a
dialectical theory of society. By saying that societal self-organisation means
the self-reproduction of a societal system, one must specify what is being
reproduced. Applying the idea of self-(re)production to society means that one
must explain how society produces its elements permanently. By saying that the
elements are communications and not individuals as Luhmann does, one can’t
explain self-reproduction consistently because not communications, but human
beings produce communications. One major problem of applying autopoiesis to
society is that one cannot consider the individuals as components of a societal
system if the latter is autopoietic. Applying autopoiesis nonetheless to
society will result in subject-less theories such as the one of Luhmann that
can not explain how individuals (re)produce societal structures and how their
sociality is (re)produced by these structures. Another alternative would be to
argue that society can reproduce itself by the biological reproduction of the
individuals, but doing so will result in the neglect of the differentia
specifica of society. Neither assuming society is a
self-referential communication system, nor describing society in terms of
biological reproduction provides us with an adequate idea of how the
self-reproduction of society takes place. Society can only be explained
consistently as self-reproducing if one argues that man is a societal being and
has central importance in the reproduction-process. Society reproduces man as a
societal being and man produces society by socially co-ordinating human
actions. Man is creator and created result of society, society and humans
produce each other mutually. Such a conception of societal self-organisation acknowledges
the importance of human actors in societal systems. Saying that man is creator
and created result of society corresponds to Giddens’ formulation that in and
through their activities agents reproduce the conditions that make these
activities possible (Giddens 1984: 2). The individual is a societal,
self-conscious, creative, reflective, cultural, symbols- and language-using,
active natural, labouring, producing, objective, corporeal,
living, real, sensuous, anticipating, visionary, imaginative, expecting,
designing, co-operative, wishful, hopeful being that makes its own history and
can strive towards freedom and autonomy (see Fuchs 2002f). In the societal production of
their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are partly
dependent and partly independent of their will. By societal actions, societal
structures are constituted and differentiated. The structure of society or a
societal system is the totality of behaviours. A specific structure involves a
certain regularity of societal relationships which make use of artefacts.
Societal structures don’t exist externally to, but only in and through agency.
In societal formations such as capitalism societal structures are alienated
from the human being and the human being estranges itself from the societal
structures because certain groups determine the constitution and development
process of these structures and exploit others for facilitating these
processes. Alienated societal structures still exist only in and through
agency, but some groups have privileged access to and control of these structures,
whereas it is much harder for others to influence them according to their own
needs and interests. Societal structures in alienated societies are an object and
realm of societal struggle. By societal interaction, new
qualities and structures can emerge that cannot be reduced to the individual
level. This is a process of bottom-up emergence that is called agency.
Emergence in this context means the appearance of at least one new systemic
quality that can not be reduced to the elements of the systems. So this quality
is irreducible and it is also to a certain extent unpredictable, i.e. time,
form and result of the process of emergence cannot be fully forecasted by
taking a look at the elements and their interactions. Societal structures also
influence individual actions and thinking. They constrain and enable actions.
This is a process of top-down emergence where new individual and group
properties can emerge. The whole cycle is the basic process of systemic
societal self-organisation that can also be called re-creation because by
permanent processes of agency and constraining/enabling a societal system can
maintain and reproduce itself (see fig. 1). It again and again creates its own
unity and maintains itself. Societal structures enable and constrain societal
actions as well as individuality and are a result of societal actions (which
are a correlation of mutual individuality that results in sociality).
structures
constraining and enabling agency Fig. 1.: The
self-organisation/re-creation of societal systems Terming the self-organisation of
society re-creation acknowledges as outlined by Giddens the importance of the
human being as a reasonable and knowledgeable actor in sociology. Giddens
himself has stressed that the duality of structure has to do with re-creation:
“Human social activities, like some self-reproducing items in nature, are
recursive. That is to say, they are not brought into being by social actors but
continually recreated
by them via the very means whereby they express themselves as actors“ (Giddens
1984: 2). Saying that society is a re-creative or self-organising system the
way we do corresponds to Giddens’ notion of the duality of structure[ii]
because the structural properties of societal systems are both medium and
outcome of the practices they recursively organise and both enable and
constrain actions. Societal systems and their reproduction involve conscious,
creative, intentional, planned activities as well as unconscious, unintentional
and unplanned consequences of activities. Both together are aspects, conditions
as well as outcomes of the overall re-creation/self-reproduction of societal
systems. The mutual relationship of
actions and structures is mediated by the habitus, a category that describes
the totality of behaviour and thoughts of a societal group (for the importance
of Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptions such as the habitus for a theory of societal
self-organisation see Fuchs 2002b). The habitus is neither a pure objective,
nor a pure subjective structure, it means invention (Bourdieu 1977: 95, 1990b: 55).
In society, creativity and invention always have to do with relative chance and
incomplete determinism. Societal practices, interactions and relationships are
very complex. The complex group behaviour of human beings is another reason why
there is a degree of uncertainty of human behaviour (Bourdieu 1977: 9, 1990a:
8). Habitus both
enables the creativity of actors and constrains ways of acting. The habitus
gives orientations and limits (Bourdieu 1977: 95), it neither results in
unpredictable novelty nor in a simple mechanical reproduction of initial
conditionings (ibid.: 95). The habitus provides conditioned and conditional
freedom (ibid.: 95), i.e. it is a condition for freedom, but it also conditions
and limits full freedom of action. This is equal to saying that structures are
medium and outcome of societal actions. Very much like Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu
suggests a mutual relationship of structures and actions as the core feature of
societal systems. The habitus is a property “for which and through which there
is a social world” (Bourdieu 1990b: 140). This formulation is similar to saying
that habitus is medium and outcome of the societal world. The habitus has to do
with societal practices, it not only constrains practices, it is also a result
of the creative relationships of human beings. This means that the habitus is
both opus operatum (result of practices) and modus operandi (mode of practices)
(Bourdieu 1977: 18, 72ff; 1990b: 52). In the Liberal-individualistic
tradition (e.g. Hobbes, Locke) the individual was postulated as an axiom and
society derived from it. In the collectivist tradition (e.g. Rousseau, Hegel)
one starts from society or the State and derives the individual from it. The
founder of Cultural Materialism Raymond Williams (1961) says that there must be
mediating terms between individual and society such as relationships, class,
association or community in order to avoid reductionism. Erich Fromm suggested
the mediating term ‘social character’, in anthropology one speaks of a ‘pattern
of culture’. Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus is also a mediating category,
Williams already pointed out implicitly the necessity of the notion of the
habitus at the beginning of the 1960ies. Williams wants to avoid both an
absolute totalisation of society and the individual. He considers the
individual as a societal being and each individual as unique. “The conscious
differences between individuals arise in the social process. To begin with,
individuals have varying innate potentialities, and thus receive social
influence in varying ways. Further, even if there is a common ‘social
character’ or ‘culture pattern’, each individual’s social history, his actual
network of relationships, is in fact unique” (Williams 1961: 74). The
individual is unique for Williams due to a particular heredity expressed in a
particular history. Society is not a uniform object, individuals enter various
groups and hence Williams says that due to the fact that the individual
encounters tensions, conflict as well as co-operation in these relationships
and as a result of the interactions in groups and between them, new directions
emerge in society. Williams distinguishes several types of individuals: members,
subjects, servants, rebels/revolutionaries, reformers, critics, exiles, vagrants
and self-exiles/internal émigre[iii].
We would need such descriptions in order to get past the impasse of the simple
distinction between conformity and non-conformity. For Williams these forms are
forms of active organisation (action, interaction), he considers the
relationship of the individual and society as a complicated embodiment of a
wide area of real relationships where certain forms may be more influencing
than others. Society would not just act upon the individual, but also many
unique individuals through a process of communication create the organisation
by which they will continue to be shaped. The uniqueness of the individual is
“creative as well as created: new forms can flow from this particular form, and
extend in the whole organization, which is in any case being constantly renewed
and changed as unique individuals inherit and continue it” (Williams 1961: 82).
The relationships individuals enter are creative, social change and emergent
properties result from it, and these resultant patterns create, i.e. enable and
constrains, the individual’s history of thinking and actions. Williams’
concepts corresponds to (and in fact anticipated) the reflexive categories of
Giddens and Bourdieu. Saying that the uniqueness of the individual is creative
and created complies with Giddens’ formulation that in and through their
activities agents reproduce the conditions that make these activities possible
as well as to Bourdieu’s formulation that habitus provides conditioned and
conditional freedom and is a property for which and through which there is a
social world. “If man is essentially a learning, creating and communicating
being, the only social organization adequate to his nature is a participatory
democracy, in which all of us, as unique individuals, learn, communicate and
control. Any lesser, restrictive system is simply wasteful of our true
resources; in wasting individuals, by shutting them out from effective participation,
it is damaging our true common process” (Williams 1961: 83). In modern sociology, Pierre
Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens have devoted their work to bridging the
traditional, strict oppositions between subjectivity/objectivity,
society/individual, structures/action and consciousness/unconsciousness
dialectically. They both want to solve the problem of relating societal
structures and actions dialectically. Bourdieu has introduced the dialectical
concept of the habitus that mediates between objective structures and subjective,
practical aspects of existence. The habitus secures conditioned and conditional
freedom, it is a structured and structuring structure that mediates the
dialectical relationship of the individual and society. For Bourdieu, in the
societal world we find dialectical relationships of objective structures and
the cognitive/motivational structures, of objectification and embodiment, of
incorporation of externalities and externalisation of internalities, of
diversity and homogeneity, of society and the individual and of chance and
necessity. Bourdieu’s suggestion that the habitus is a property for which and
through which there is a social world means that habitus is medium and outcome
of the societal world and that societal structures can only exist in and
through practices. Such formulations very much remind us of Giddens’ main hypothesis
that the structural properties of
societal systems are both the medium and the outcome of the practices that
constitute those systems. Although
Bourdieu’s theory might be considered a more “structuralistic” conception than
Giddens’, the similarities concerning aims and certain theoretical contents are
very striking and aspects from both theories can enhance a theory of societal
self-organisation (see Fuchs 2002a, b). The notion of the re-creation of
society suggest a dialectical relationship of structures and actors. Saying
this, one should clarify why exactly this is a dialectical relationship. Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel has outlined that the purpose of dialectics is “to
study things in their own being and movement and thus to demonstrate the
finitude of the partial categories of understanding” (Hegel 1830I: Note to
§81). The dialectical method “serves to show that every abstract proposition of
understanding, taken precisely as it is given, naturally veers round its
opposite” (ibid.). The negative constitutes the genuine dialectical moment
(Hegel 1830I: §68), “opposites [...] contain contradiction in so far as they are,
in the same respect, negatively related to one another or sublate each other and are indifferent to
one another“ (ibid.: §960) Opposites, therefore, contain contradiction in so
far as they are, in the same respect, negatively related to one another or sublate each
other and are indifferent to one another. But the
negative is just as much positive (§62). The result of Dialectic is positive,
it has a definite content as the negation of certain specific propositions
which are contained in the result (§82). An
entity as pure being is an identity, an abstract empty being. Being is
dialectically opposed to Nothing, the unity of the two is Becoming. In
Becoming, Being and Nothing are sublated into a unity. This unity as result is
Determinate Being which can be characterised by quality and reality. Quality is
Being-for-another because in determinate being there is an element of negation involved
that is at first wrapped up and only comes to the front in Being-for-self.
Something is only what it is in its relationship to another, but by the
negation of the negation this something incorporates the other into itself. The
dialectical movement involves two moments that negate each other, a somewhat
and an another. As a result of the negation of the negation, “Something becomes
an other; this other is itself somewhat; therefore it likewise becomes an
other, and so on ad infinitum” (§93). Being-for-self or the negation of the negation
means that somewhat becomes an other, but this again is a new somewhat that is
opposed to an other and as a synthesis results again in an other and therefore
it follows that something in its passage into other only joins with itself, it
is self-related
(§95). In becoming there are two moments (Hegel 1812: §176-179): coming-to-be
and ceasing-to-be: by sublation, i.e. negation of the negation, being passes
over into nothing, it ceases to be, but something new shows up, is coming to
be. What is sublated (aufgehoben) is on the one hand ceases to be and is put to
an end, but on the other hand it is preserved and maintained (ibid.: §185). In
society, structures and actors are two opposing moments: a structure is a
somewhat opposed to an other, i.e. actors; and an actor is also a somewhat
opposed to an other, i.e. structures. The becoming[iv] of society is
its permanent dialectical movement, the re-creation or self-reproduction of
society. The Being-for-self or negation of the negation in society means that
something societal becomes an other societal which is again a societal somewhat
and it likewise becomes an other societal, and so an ad infinitum. Something
societal refers to aspects of a societal system such as structures or actions,
in the dialectical movement these two societal moments in their passage become
an other societal moment and therefore join with themselves, they are
self-related. The permanent collapse and fusion of the relationship of
structures and actors results in new, emergent properties or qualities of
society that can’t be reduced to the underlying moments. In the
re-creation-process of society, there is coming-to-be of new structural and
individual properties and ceasing-to-be of certain old properties. “Becoming is
an unstable unrest which settles into a stable result” (Hegel 1812: §180). Such
stable results are the emergent properties of society. In
respect to Hegel, the term societal self-organisation also gains
meaning in the sense that by the dialectical process where structures are
medium and outcome of societal actions a societal somewhat is self-related or
self-referential in the sense of joining with itself or producing itself. By
dialectical movement, societal categories opposing each other (structures and
actions) produce new societal categories. A societal something is opposed to an
societal other and by sublation they both fuse into a unity with emergent
societal properties. This unity is again a societal somewhat opposed to a
societal other etc. By coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be of societal entities, new
societal entities are produced in the dialectical societal process. For
Marx the individual is of great importance in his social analysis, not as an
isolated atom, but as a societal being that is the constitutive part of
qualitative moments of society and has a concrete and historical existence. “The first premise of all human history is,
of course, the existence of living human individuals“ (Marx/Engels 1846: 20).
He considers the individual in its abstract being-for-self, its connectedness
to others and its estrangement in modern, capitalist society. The individual as
a societal, producing being (“individuals co-operating in
definite kinds of labour“) results in phenomena such as modes of life, increase
of population (family), forms of intercourse (Verkehrsformen), separation of
town and country, forms of politics (nation state), division of labour, forms
of ownership (tribal ownership, ancient communal and State ownership, feudal or
estate property (feudal landed property, corporative movable property, capital
invested in manufacture), capital as pure private property), production of
ideas, notions and consciousness. For Marx, a certain mode of production is
combined with a certain mode of co-operation (ibid.: 30) and the history of
humanity is closely connected to the history of the economy. Opposing the
atomism of Max Stirner and Bruno Bauer, Marx writes that the “individuals
certainly make one another, physically and mentally, but do not make themselves“
(ibid.: 37). In the German Ideology (Marx/Engels
1846), Marx
speaks of societal relationships as forms of intercourse, whereas he later
replaced this term by the one of relationships of production. He says that with
the development of the productive forces, the form of intercourse becomes a
fetter and in place of it a new one is put which corresponds to the more
developed productive forces and hence “to the advanced mode of the
self-activity of individuals” – a form which in its turn becomes a fetter and
is then replaced by another etc. The history of the forms of intercourse would
be the history of the productive forces and hence the history of the
development of the forces of the individuals themselves (ibid.: 72). Marx considers man in the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx 1844) as an universal, objective
species-being that produces and objective world and reproduces nature and his
species according to his purposes. Human beings are societal beings, they enter
societal relationships which are mutually dependent actions that make sense for
the acting subjects. Individual being is only possible as societal being,
societal being (the species-life of man) is only possible as a relationship of
individual existences. This dialectic of individual and societal being (which
roughly corresponds to the one of individual and societal existence or of
actors and structures) was already pointed out by Marx: “The individual is the
social
being. His manifestations of life – even if they may not appear in
the direct form of communal manifestations of life carried out in association
with others – are therefore an expression and confirmation of social life.
Man's individual and species-life are not different, however much –
and this is inevitable – the mode of existence of the individual is a more particular or
more general mode of the life of the species, or the life of the species is a
more particular
or more general individual life“ (Marx 1844: 538f). Marx said one
must avoid postulating society again as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual as
e.g. today individual/society-dualism does. “Man, much as he may therefore be a
particular
individual (and it is precisely his particularity which makes him an
individual, and a real individual social being), is just as much
the totality
– the ideal totality – the subjective existence of imagined and experienced
society for itself; just as he exists also in the real world both as awareness
and real enjoyment of social existence, and as a totality of human manifestation
of life“ (ibid.). Saying that man is creator and created result of society as
well as that in and through their activities agents reproduce the conditions
that make these activities possible, corresponds to Marx’ formulation that “the
social character is the general character of the whole movement: just as
society itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him“ (ibid.:
537). Up until now we have only considered the systematic aspect of the
self-reproduction of society as a whole towards its parts. It is also an
important question how these systematic relationships develop temporally. We
will have different results depending on which approach we choose: one that is
based on concepts of self-organisation and systems theory, or one that is based
on a historical-concrete analysis of societal forms. 2.1.3 The
Diachronic Description of Society
Society is not a static state,
but a permanently self-maintaining and self-renewing process. In a first
approximation, a living organism can be used as an analogy for this process.
The living is characterised by self-maintenance: “We recognise that a
dispensing order has the power to maintain itself and to produce ordered
processes”[v]
(Schrödinger 1987: 74). The individuals however are in this concept only indifferent
against each other, the parts are not defined as inner qualitative difference
to each other (Hegel 1830II/1986: 373, § 343 corollary). Such a neglect of the
individual distinctiveness as subjects of society is connected to the point of
view which tries to primarily describe the identical self-reproduction of
society. Such descriptions can mainly be found in old systems theory (1st
order cybernetics) which are based on equilibrium theories (e.g. the social
systems theory of Talcott Parsons). The concept of autopoiesis, which not
accidentally stems from biology, is transferred by one of its main proponents,
Humberto Maturana, to society, whereas Francisco Varela opposes such an application.
Also the newer concepts of self-organisation stress first the emergence of
systematic wholes from interactions of their parts. Self-organisation as
“irreversible process which results from the co-operative interaction of
subsystems in complex structures of the whole system”[vi]
(Ebeling/Feistel 1986) or as synergetics where a “cyclical causality” (Haken)
between whole and parts is assumed, correspond to this idea. However the
concepts of self-organisation have new potentialities: they refer to
qualitative changes. As “new systems theory” they also refer to the unpredictability
of structural breaks. Maybe not accidentally this thinking has become modern at
the time when the limits of steering in the manner of the “welfare state” first
showed up (see Müller 1992: 343). These concepts which are based on
non-equilibrium, non-linearity and the existence of fluctuations, show at least
the inappropriateness of the old equilibrium models and are meanwhile also used
in economics and management theory. However, most of the existing concepts of
economic self-organisation legitimise neo-liberal politics by arguing that
human beings can’t at all intervene into the capitalist economy in order to
solve social problems and that hence market-based regulation will do best (see
Fuchs 2002g). That this is not the case is clear due to the worsening of the
global problems in the last two decades of neo-liberal politics in the world
system. A number of authors have tried
to conceive sociological models in analogy to Ilya Prigogine’s abstract
principle of order through fluctuation. They see society as a system where not
equilibrium and stability is the normal state, but non-equilibrium and
instability. Modern society is described as process-like and evolving through
phases of crisis and instability. Ervin Laszlo (1987) argues that
Prigogine’s principle is a general one that applies for the evolution of all
complex systems, also for society. According to this hypothesis systems do not
remain stabile, if certain parameters are crossed, instabilities emerge. These
are phases of transition where the system shows high entropy and high degrees
of indetermination, chance and chaos. Evolution does not take place
continuously, but in sudden, discontinuous leaps. After a phase of stability a
system enters a phase of instability, fluctuations intensify and spread out. In
this chaotic state, the development of the system is not determined, it is only
determined that one of several possible alternatives will be realised. Such
points in evolution are called catastrophic bifurcation (Laszlo 1987, Schlemm
1999, Fuchs 2002c, d). In a very abstact form we can say: It is determined that
this evolutionary process will sooner or later result in a large societal
crisis, but it is not fully determined which antagonisms will cause the crisis
and how the result of the crisis will look like. There can be no certainty, the
sciences and hence also the social sciences are confronted with an end of
certainties (Wallerstein 1997). There could e.g. be the emergence of a new mode
of development, the ultimate breakdown of society due to destructive forces or
the emergence of a new formation of society caused by social agency of
intervening subjects. If a certain threshold in the development of concretely
existing antagonisms is crossed, a new, not pre-determined quality will emerge.
This is what Hegel has discussed as the measure or the turn from quantity into
quality (Hegel 1830I: §§107f). Arguing only abstractly doesn’t
take into account the different qualities of societal formations[vii].
In one or the other manner the first humans organised themselves and this
organisation dissolved, somehow large city states, the Greek republic, Asiatic
nomads, capitalism, actually existing “socialism” organised themselves. We need
also more concrete analyses which are not only abstract-general, but also don’t
simply list the sum of all observations and singular phenomena. 2.2. Society as the
Unity of Different Qualitative Systems
For such an approach
dialectical-speculative thinking is needed[viii].
Whereas in usual thinking (within the logic of essence) a starting point is
considered as being already given/posited and further implications are deduced,
in dialectical-speculative thinking (within the logic of notion) the posited
(das Gesetzte) must be given grounds for and hence all thinking must be integrated
into a context of justification and mediation. We distinguish an abstract
generality (“humanity”) from a concrete generality[ix]
where we are referring to concrete societal formations. On such a concrete
level, one can qualitatively describe the mediations which determine the
development of the societal formation in question. We want to outline this
shortly for the concrete-historical societal formation of capitalism: First we have to distinguish
different societal spheres, such as production, consumption, distribution,
politics, culture, etc. In society all spheres are mediated – in order to know
later what is concretely mediated with each other, the single moments must also
be analysed separately. We here concentrate on the capitalist economy. Like in
all societal formations, goods are produced in capitalism that satisfy human
needs. The specific ways this is done distinguish different societal formation.
In capitalism the production process is based on the fact that single economic
actors produce goods which are sold on the market after their production in
order to achieve a profit that allows re-investment, more production, more
selling, again more profit etc. Marx called this process the accumulation of
(money and commodity) capital. Capitalist production doesn’t satisfy immediate
needs (as was e.g. the case in the production of the medieval craftsman), but
each capitalist is in need of the so-called “anonymous market” for the
socialisation of the products. That the single capitalist enterprise produces
in an isolated way, is of course not something biologically given, but a
societal relationship. Marx is speaking of private labour that produces
commodities. Another foundation of capitalism has been the detachment of the
means of production from the workers. Marx is speaking of “double free
wage-labour”, the workers don’t own the means of production and the produced
goods and they are forced to sell their labour power (Marx 1867: 181-183). Wage
labour and the industrial division of labour (which has been enabled by machine
technologies, Marx speaks of machine-systems, large industry or the
co-operation of many similar machines that are powered by a motor mechanism
such as the steam engine, see Marx 1867: chapter 13) are necessary conditions
for the full development of capital accumulation. On this foundation a functional circle takes place (according to Fuchs
2000): The capitalist buys with his money (M) the commodities (C) labour power
(L) and means of production (Mp) (these two commodity types are separated – in
another societal formation without the same base the cycle of production takes
place in another way). The means of production are considered in their value
form as constant capital (c) and can be subdivided into circulating constant
capital (the value of the utilised raw materials, auxiliary materials,
operating supply items and semi-finished products) and fixed constant capital
(the value of the utilised machines, buildings and equipment) (Marx 1885:
chapter 8). The value of the employed labour power is termed variable capital
(v). Constant capital is transfused to the product, but it doesn’t create new
value. Only living labour increases value – labour produces more value than it
needs for its own reproduction. In production due to the effects of living
labour onto the object of labour surplus value (s) is produced. The value of a
produced commodity C’ = c + v + m, this value is larger than the value of the
invested capital (C = c + v). The difference of C’ and C (Dw) can exist due to
the production of surplus value and is itself surplus value. Surplus value is
transformed into profit (surplus value is “realised”) and value into money
capital by selling the produced commodities on the market. It is not sure if
all produced commodities can be sold, hence not all surplus value is
necessarily transformed into profit. But normally after the whole process there
is more money capital than has been invested into production, and such “surplus
value generating money” is termed “capital” and is partly re-invested into new
production (accumulation).
Fig. 1.: The economic
self-organisation of capital: The expanded reproduction cycle of capital
Whereas in all societies humans
produce, the way they do this is typically different in different societal
formations. It’s a false inference to generalise the form of production just described
as something that is typical for all types of societies. In reality this is not
and doesn’t have to be the case. There are again at least two approaches: We
can positively describe how the expanded reproduction of capital (and the
reproduction of the economic base of society) takes place. This would mean to
assume the positing of its moments (e.g. labour as private labour of isolated
producers that is socialised by the market after production and the separation
of the main means of production and labour power) and to not further question
the moments. There would simply be capital, the production of commodities, the
selling of labour power etc., but it wouldn’t be argued why that’s historically
the case and how this capitalist situation could change or be overcome. Or we
can question from where these moments come from, whether they can be changed,
i.e. if they have developed historically and can be sublated. Or we analyse the
foundations of the existence of these conditions and hence also the possibility
of changing these conditions. Both approaches are scientific –
the first form corresponds to a positive science of the given (e.g. of the
political economy of capitalism), the second is critique (e.g. as the critique
of the political economy of capitalism). These forms represent typical examples
for Hegel’s logic of essence and logic of notion. In capitalism these
relationships are especially confusing: The driving power of production are not
the needs of the humans, but the “need of capital” to increase itself
(“Everything must be profitable!”, “Capital is shy like a roe deer – where it
can’t make profit, it won’t invest”). In capitalism goods are only produced
because they are a means to generate surplus value and profit – and
possibilities to avoid production and to increase capital nonetheless are
welcome (stock-market!). It seems like capital is the “subject of development”
itself, it turns itself loose and dominates and coins all human relationships.
In its different forms such as money it becomes a fetish which can’t simply be
shrug off as an illusion, but exists as “necessary appearance” as long as the
foundations which can only be recognised by the second form of thinking (critique,
logic of notion) are given. Something abstract, not concrete needs and concrete
actions determine social life! Such a “real abstraction” can induce one to use
as methodology an abstract level such as systems theories that remain purely
abstract. Such theories in fact map real relationships (the “necessary appearance”)
of this society, that’s why they are very convincing. Theories of
self-organisation even map the internal states of crisis and hence can be used
to avert and abandon political and political-economical intervention that is
necessary for realising social and ecological interests. An analysis whether
crises are only crises of renewal or which perspectives of sublation there are,
is only possible in a concrete-general manner by researching the concrete
qualitative moments of capitalist development (for the relationship of crisis
theory and self-organisation theory and a concrete analysis of Fordist and
post-Fordist capitalism as well as the societal crisis of Fordism see Fuchs
2002g). [i] For the relationship of logic of being,
essence and notion see Hegel 1830I/1986, p. 179 (§83), pp. 304ff (§159); see
also Schlemm 2002 [ii] “According to the notion of the duality of structure,
the structural properties of social systems are both medium and outcome of the
practices they recursively organise” (Giddens 1984: 25) and they both enable
and constrain actions (26). [iii] “To the member, society is his own community. […] To the servant,
society is an establishment, in which he finds his place. To the subject,
society is an imposed system, in which his place is determined. To the rebel. a
particular society is a tyranny; the alternative for which he fights is a new
and better society. To the exile, society is beyond him, but may change. To the
vagrant, society is a name for other people, who are in his way or who can be
used” (Williams 1961: 81). [iv] We don’t mean the temporal becoming, but
the systematic-logic one. [v] Translated from German [vi] Translated from German [vii] Concerning the critique of an absolutised
abstract view see Schlemm (1999: 25f), Schlemm (2001d: 17f). [viii] Whereas the “pure“ dialectical is the
transition of one moment into its opposed moment and the other way round, i.e.
it creates nothing new (Hegel 1830I/1986: 172 (§81)), the
“speculative-dialectical“ in Hegel’s philosophy means that this movement leads
to a higher unity (Hegel 1830I/1986: 176 (§82)). [ix] See Schlemm (1997/1998) This paper is published: Christian Fuchs, Annette Schlemm: The Self-Organization of Society. In: Zimmermann Rainer E.; Budanov, Vladimir G. (Eds)(2005): Towards Otherland. Languages of Science and Languages Beyond. INTAS Volume of Collected Essays 3. Kassel: kassel university press. p. 81-109.  
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