From The Psychology of Management of Labour Collectives: Guides to the Social Sciences, Chapter 1: The Methodological And Theoretical Foundations of the Psychology of Management of Labour Collectives, pg. 9 out of 386 of the PDF, by Aleksey Mikhailovich Stolyarenko:
Marx, Engels, and Lenin, who developed the science of society, showed that society is governed by objective laws; they discovered these laws and proved that management of the various spheres of society, directions of its activity, and social institutions is effective and progressive insofar as it is based on them. Marxism-Leninism has developed a scientific conception of society as an integral self-governing system. The term “system” is taken to mean an object whose properties are not reducible to a mere sum of the properties of its constituent parts or elements. Not a single property of a single element is manifested as the property of the system.2 The elements function and develop within the framework of the system, so that their properties are subordinated to those of the system as a whole. In the absence of interaction between elements, not a single property of any of them can manifest itself, and it is not manifested in pure form in interaction. System properties always have some traits that are different from the properties of the constituent elements, being a result of integral functioning of the system, a qualitatively specific result of its inner phenomena. The systems approach in science should be distinguished from the “atomistic” of functional approach, which studies system problems in isolation from the conditions and the causes from which they arise. The ‘‘atomistic” approach in the theory and practice of management is manifested in the view of management as a phenomenon independent of all others, as well as in isolated consideration of problems and phenomena that are systemic in nature, one that takes into account only individual cause-and-effect dependences (though they may be correct ones) unconnected with their entire ensemble at a systems level.
It’s basically the same concept as an ‘effective theory’ like in statistical mechanics, cool!
This is from a Soviet book from, I believe, the 1980s when they were more developed theoretically in academia (unfortunatelly, not so much for the general leadership of the Soviet Union).
Never heard of the “effective theory” but I like this explanation of what a system is.