The Category of "Social Law"

Abstract

A law is one of the basic concepts of the dialectical materialist conception of determinism as a philosophical theory of the objective interrelationship and mutual conditioning of phenomena in the material and mental world. A law establishes a rigorously determined connection among circumstances, i.e., a totality of derivative components and conditions of their actions and results. By overlooking the existence of two different levels—the concept and the objective reality corresponding to it—some philosophers erroneously interpret Marx's theses concerning the approximateness of the realization of the laws of society. Let us take, for example, Marx's thesis that "In general, in capitalist production general laws are realized in a very confused and approximate way, merely as a prevailing tendency, as a kind of average among constant fluctuations that is never solidly established."1 Some investigators see this as an objectively existing social law in itself, attributing to it an "inexactitude" of operation, variation, and approximation, instead of seeing it as a specific application of a particular law. They thus forget that Marx said, in the Foreword to the very first volume of Capital: "The question does not specifically have to do with a greater or lesser degree of development of the social antagonisms that derive from the natural laws of capitalist production, but rather lies in these laws themselves, these trends, which operate and are realized with iron necessity."