Draft for a Marxist reply to Luhmann's System Theory
Posted by softrockcookie
“Draw a distinction” was one of the major prerequisites for Luhmann’s sociology and a most important method of Talcott Parson’s action (system) theory.
In Luhmann’s system theory, not the scientist, but the system itself goes in the direction of independence, self-control and self-consciousness. It says systems evaluate and check environmental processes themselves and therefore declare themselves as an own (cognitive) system. But what happens if someone tries to render or change such a system? Following Luhmann’s theory, it mainly depends on the possible penetration and acceptance of the system itself to be changed. If the attempts to change a system will succeed is not to be known a priori.
However, in practice we can see that systems change all the time – with, through or against other systems, although these processes are not easily to be seen or estimated at first. Systems can authoritative be changed, destroyed and (re-)built by human beings, if the necessary means for these processes are available.
In social systems, Individuals are only on the basis of ideas which correspond to the material conditions able to win over the masses. The masses must be the social basis for a system change and none other (especially no elements who are dominant or conform in/with the existing system).
What is also true about reality is that “history knows all forms of peculiar transformations [of society]”, which also means that a certain political, social, economical or cultural system does not necessarily lead to a corresponding equivalent system in another strata.
- Example 1: The New Economic Policy of Lenin after the civil war. Here the dictatorship of the proletariat through the soviets in which the Bolsheviks still had a majority ruled society (which represented the political system), while there had to be concessions to the capitalist elements in the Russian economic system.
- Example 2: The („free“) market economics can also exist under a political dictatorship. The government of Pinochet in Chile or in some way Putin’s Russia can be listed here.
- Example 3: Any kind of bonapartism, where political rule („the rule of the sword“) is somewhat independent and (totally or pretty) contradictory to the economic and cultural basis.
- Example 4: Stalinism as a (centralised) planned economy without any possibility of democratic intervention by the working class in neither economics nor politics nor culture.
However, i believe that a rational, progressive change in all parts of society can only be achieved by a genuine democratic Marxist position for any part of society.
Logically, the economy is the approximative material basis for the rule of capitalism, because it is the economy from where all the privileges, influences and power of the capitalists stem from. With these, they can (more) easily change the other systems in their will – or better: they were able to do so rather good in the past.
In today’s phase of capitalism only total reactionary or discredited ideas find themselves on the cultural-ideological strata of society, for example postmodernism or reprints (e.g. caricatures) of Fascism and Liberalism, as well as unmarxian “renewals“ of Marxism…
The problem of postmodernism itself is not that it proclaims “the end of history”, but that every scientist (no matter if he/she is an economist, physicist, sociologist…) wants his/her science to end with his/her discovery and theory. To make this possible, they construct their theories in such a way that no counter-argument is really possible if one steps up to (or rather: drops down on) the plain of that theory. The same is somewhat true for Luhmann’s theory. Popper would call this anti-scientific per se – interesting enough that Popper defended Luhmann for obvious reasons (Popper was also an anti-materialist and anti-Marxist).
On the social level of society the conflicts and contradictions are as open to see as never before. Mostly such conflicts, because there is no genuine Marxist leadership (in the world working class movement), get channeled in other ways by the bourgeoisie to be then split and destroyed.
The “historical interests of the working class” is not a construct of Marx and Engels which they sucked out of their thumbs. The workers themselves get conscious of them through their own experiences from economical and/or political conflicts. Marxists can get easily in touch with these experiences and generalise them, as well as take them to a higher level.
What is also true is that the economy alone doesn’t solve political, cultural or social problems per se if it gets altered, but it can lay the necessary basis for a change in the other major system parts as well. If these stimuli will have contradictory or harmonic effects on the other system parts cannot be foreseen yet, because there are too few successful historical examples.
Luhmann’s theory contains good methods for the logical and structural view on systems and their comparison with each other. However, it provides not enough to be used as a (political or practical) philosophy. The insight theory of his theory is completely idealistic (“we can’t really grasp the full of reality, but only describe it”). Therefore, prognoses are not possible. In reality, prognoses are possible, for example through an objective and honest study and evaluation of past and recent events (what is done by Marxists).
There are also other approaches from which Luhmann’s theory can be encountered. For example, the philosophical basis of this theory, its idealistic insight theory, which says that no statement about reality (and history, the future and so on) can be made. The whole of the theory is only describing (the state of the system) and not really dynamic, it only describes systems as far as they function anyway. How would he explain the developments inside the Russian society from 1917-91 or the processes inside the Communist Parties before and thereafter?
Luhmann’s theory seems to be an antithesis to Habermas’ Theory of Communication. This is also a petty bourgeois university professor’s theory with the same idealistic philosophical core. It is itself another form of “change the thinking and thereby change society”, namely “change the communication and thereby change society”. A capitalist would have his laugh about it. Suffice it to say that Luhmann’s theory of development consists mainly of “the development of communication”. Alan Woods points out the overemphasizing of communication and words in his book “Reformism or Revolution – Marxism and socialism of the 21st century – Reply to Heinz Dieterich” :
For the intellectual, the only reality consists of words. For him, it is really the case that ‘in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.’ The idea – or more correctly, the prejudice – of the intellectual that imparts to words a supernatural significance, is merely a reflection of the real conditions of existence of the intellectual. In postmodernism narrative is everything, and we can only know the world through the words of individuals. Here language appears not as a phenomenon that connects people with the world and each other but something that separates and isolates. It is a barrier, beyond which we can know nothing. (...)
The intellectual’s mystification of words is therefore not new. It has its roots in the division between mental and manual labour. But it has acquired its ultimate expression in modern bourgeois philosophy (...) (Woods 2008, p. 39)
Following Luhmann, no system can be changed from the outside, but only by itself. However, what if the (majority of the) people (or masses) who constitute the system want to (consciously) change it? In the past, we have seen that they are able to do so, if the necessary leadership with the right programme gains a mass support, or if the class balance on a world scale pushes the leaders to the one or the other side.
Luhmann got a very important impetus for his theory by Humberto Maturana’s “autopoiesis” theory, which mainly references biological systems such as the eye. It might work quite well for biological systems such as human bodies and organs, which really regulate themselves as long as they function normally. However, the regulation processes in nature are very different from the non-natural system of capitalism, which doesn’t regulate itself through markets, but eventually produce over-production crises like the one which we are going through now – and which can only be regulated by a total wreckage of productive forces on a world scale (probably through wars or mass unemployment). This is very different from the „harmonic“ natural regulation processes.
Almost 55 years ago, in one of his best works, Georg Lukacs wanted to explain the specifics of German philosophy and its development in his book called “The Destruction of Reason”. In this, he also takes a short critic of German sociology. Let us read what he states:
These two crises [of the economic school of Ricardo in England and of Utopian socialism] and most of all the solution of both in the form of the creation of historic materialism and Marxist political economy set an end to the bourgeois economy as a basic science for the insight into society. Two poles developed: the first one is the new bourgeoise vulgar economy, also called subjective economy, a specialised discipline which renounces to explain social phenomena and which sees as its main target to get the surplus value theory out of the economic science; the second one is a human science without economics: sociology.
Of course, sociology first had the goal to become an universal science for society (Comte, Spencer). She therefore tried to find another basis for itself in the natural sciences and not in economics.” (Lukacs 1953, p. 461-462)
He then explains why and how the sociology is related to progressive thought and therefore needed another basis than economics. He continues:
However, precisely because it is entangled with the progress thought, sociology cannot hold itself as a universal science. Very soon it drifts into a natural scientific, mostly biological explanation, which follows the socio-economical development of the bourgeoisie, into an enemy of progress, into partly reactionary ideologies and methodologies. The greater part of it turns to peculiar investigations. It becomes a pure singular science, which doesn’t touch questions about the structure and development of society. (...) The social agnosticism as a form of the defense of ideological hopeless positions gets a – unconsciously functioning – methodological organ. This process has big similarities with the action of the capitalist bureaucracy – it solves unfitting uncomfortable questions by pushing acts from one office to the other without end and no office claims to be competent enough to take the objective decision. (Lukacs 1953, p. 462-463)
All in all it is to say that Luhmann’s theory is a bad, somewhat postmodern attempt to create a far better general sociological theory. One could explain many social phenomena with it, e.g. why the political system can’t influence the university system positively/directly. On the other hand, the explanations need a bunch of argumentative creativity, without which it is not plausible anymore. The reason for this is quite clear: reality doesn’t develop in fixed categories – categories can only be a helping schema for explanation, but nothing more. As long as a method or philosophy (or sociology) doesn’t take into account dynamics and development, it must necessarily fail…
Further questions to be solved:
- Why are systems just evaluative systems of communications?
- Ok, systems exist (for Luhmann, compared to Parsons) – but only in form of communications?
- What about systems of society as a whole?
- What about early human societies without (sophisticated) communication?
- Can only systems themselves explain their function?
Literature:
Woods, Alan (2008): Reformism or Revolution, London: wellred books [online version]
Lukacs, Georg (1953): Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag [german edition, translations by the blog author]