Social Organism

In Marxist philosophy, social organism is an overarching category that encompasses all social life and its relations, and is used to explain human society as an organically unified whole constituted by the simultaneous existence and interdependence of various social relations based on the mode of production.

The term “organism” was originally a biological term that referred to the “general term for an entity with life”, was later used to refer broadly to things capable of self-existence and self-development similar to living organisms. Social activity is a phenomenon similar to the motion of biological organisms, but it is also different in essence. Social organism has practical existence, systemic and “putting people first” nature, is an organism with self-consciousness, and its inner mechanism of regeneration and renewal is a unity of material production, intellectual production and the production of human beings themselves.

In the history of ideas, Kant has put forth the concept of organism, and Saint-Simon has initially put forth the thought of social organism. Hegel regarded human society as an organic whole, and with respect to the highest moment of this organic whole, the State, he considered it more to be an actual Idea, and that the State is an organism, which is to say that it is the development of the Idea to its differences, as the nature of the organism is that all its parts must constitute a certain unity, if one part asserts its independence, the other parts go to destruction. Comte, the founder of positivist philosophy, first applied the concept of “social organism” to the field of sociology, and put forth that in the social organism, the family is the cell of society, the race or class is the organization of society, and the community or city is the organ of society. After Comte, Spencer held that society is an organism, which is essentially the same as a biological organism, that biological organisms are composed of the sustaining system, the distributing system and the regulating system, and the same is true of the social organism. The expositions of different thinkers preceding Marx and his contemporaries on the categories of “organism” and “social organism” touched upon certain important features of the organism or social organism, which shone with the light of wisdom in their respective epochs. But they all had certain defects. Although Kant and Hegel clearly put forth the category of “organism”, this category, like their speculative philosophy, is based on idealism. Although the theories of social organism of Comte and Spencer were based on the latest achievements in the development of natural science, their theory of social organism has obvious mechanistic characteristics, especially Spencer’s use of social statics to expect a balanced ideal state of society, which is against the objective law of the development of the society itself, and has the conservative colors of justifying the existing situation and the eternal rationality of capitalism. In the process of forming his theory of social organism, Marx has overcome the limitations of previous thinkers. Marx has founded a scientific view of practice, laid the theory of the social organism on the basis of practical activity of society, and revealed the objective law that the development of the social organism does not operate according to biological laws, but according to the laws of human practice. Because Marx upheld the principle of the unity of materialism and dialectics on the basis of practice, Marx’s theory of social organism has become a scientific conception of the history of society or a scientific theory of social development. Marx borrowed the term “organism” to show that society is an organic whole consisting of men and all the conditions and elements of social life, which are interdependent, interacting and developing.

Social organism is an overarching category of historical materialism; its constituent elements summarize the three major spheres of social life: the productive forces, the relations of production (the economic foundation) and the superstructure. This category was summarized and refined by Marx in his gradual in-depth study of the vertical and horizontal processes of the history of society; it is another expression of social formation. When Marx studied “social formations” and “economic formations of society”, the thought of social organism runs through it from beginning to end. This thought was first elucidated in The Poverty of Philosophy, and in criticizing Proudhon’s attempt to construct the edifice of an ideological system solely based on a single a priori economic category and logical formula, Marx clearly pointed out that in constructing the edifice of an ideological system by means of the categories of political economy, the limbs of the social system are dislocated. The different limbs of society are converted into so many separate societies, following one upon the other. How, indeed, could the single logical formula of movement, of sequence, of time, explain the structure of society, in which all relations coexist simultaneously and support one another? In the later A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Capital, Marx studied various social organisms, especially the dialectical movement of “capital”, the capitalist economic organism, and came to the conclusion that the development of the social organism is the result of the reciprocal causation and self-renewal of its elements. Similarly, in the social organism, labor is only undertaken on a certain basis—first naturally evolved—then a historical presupposition. Later, however, this basis or presupposition is itself transcended, or posited as a transient one, which has become too narrow for the unfolding of the progressive human pack. Social organisms also exhibit characteristics of openness, self-organization and regeneration due their mutual causation and self-supersession. Through the study of political economy, especially the writing of Capital, Marx had already completed the anatomy of capitalism, the most developed social organism at that time, and in the preface to the first edition of Vol. 1, Marx held that “the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing.”

The proposal of the category of social organism is conducive to implement the method of systems thinking to the study of society as a whole, and is of great significance for proletarian parties to formulate their lines, guidelines and policies. As Lenin said, what Marx and Engels called the dialectical method—as against the metaphysical—is nothing else than the scientific method in sociology, which consists in regarding society as a living organism in a state of constant development (and not as something mechanically concatenated and therefore permitting all sorts of arbitrary combinations of separate social elements).