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p Production, science and technology, which are advancing with fabulous speed, have reached a level of development which today is high enough to give mankind immense power over the forces of nature and make it possible fully to satisfy the material and spiritual requirements of the world’s entire population. It has been estimated that all the people inhabiting our planet could live comfortably if production capacities and scientific and technical achievements were used to benefit the whole of mankind without exception.

p What then is the hitch? Whose fault is it that in the non-socialist world only one in ten people receives adequate nourishment and the rest are undernourished; that nearly half of the world’s adult population is illiterate? Whose fault is it that blood was shed and continues to be shed in senseless wars fought in the interests of an insignificant minority; that the nuclear mushroom hangs as a sinister shadow over the earth; that vast sums of money are spent on preparations for a monstrous thermonuclear war? Whose fault is it that in a considerable part of the globe, Man, that most wonderful of nature’s creations, who is endowed with the most diverse creative abilities, is not only denied the opportunity to deploy these abilities but also suffers from exploitation, social injustice, hunger and disease? Whose fault is it that in some countries, which pride themselves on their civilisation, a dark skin is regarded as a badge of inferiority? Whose fault is it that a huge part of mankind was harnessed to the yoke of colonialism, 10 which continues to rule the destinies of tens of millions of people?

p The blame falls squarely on capitalism, which accentuated the contrast between poverty and wealth, and raised war, colonialism and racism to the level of official policy. It expends incalculable material and labour resources to please a tiny handful of monopolists, humiliates the working man and uses many of the latest achievements of science and technology to his detriment.

p Definite social conditions are required in order to make it possible to utilise the tremendous wealth available to mankind, the mighty production capacities and the remarkable achievements of modern science and technology. Capitalism must be destroyed and superseded by a new society, whose lofty and only object is to provide all people with a happy and free life worthy of human beings and deliver them from wars.

p This new society is communism, and the science giving an integral picture of the laws governing its formation and development is called the theory of scientific communism.

p Let us analyse this brief definition in some detail.

p No class antagonistic society has ever set out to promote the all-round development of the working man. The working man has always been used as a means for achieving other objects, for example, as under capitalism, for getting superprofits. Under communism, however, the working man comes forward as the “end in itself" of social development (Karl Marx). The theory of scientific communism discloses the economic, social and cultural conditions under which the all-round, harmonious development of man can be promoted.

p However, before these conditions can be created, the old social system—capitalism—must be abolished by revolutionary means. This implies that scientific communism examines the question of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the creation thereby of the prerequisites for the emancipation of man. It demonstrates that the downfall of capitalism is historically inevitable due to the operation of objective laws and its inner contradictions. It reveals the revolutionary forces that are undermining and destroying capitalism, and points to the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat 11 as the indispensable means for putting an end to the old, capitalist society.

p Problems linked up with the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism occupy an important place in the theory of scientific communism. Capitalism is destroyed to clear the road for the new, communist society. This poses scientific communism with yet another major problem, namely, that of bringing to light the laws of the formation of communist society and studying this society as a complex social organism. Man, with all his diverse relations and abilities, his inclinations and requirements and his creative and physical possibilities, stands in the limelight of communist society. That explains why the lofty humanitarian principle of “everything for man, for the good of man" is the basic programme slogan of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. A science treating of a society in which prime concern is shown for man cannot help but deal with the creation of the economic, social and spiritual conditions for the moulding of fully developed people. Scientific communism studies man, generalising and synthetising all the available scientific data about him as a creative, social and intellectual being, as a link in the social system and in the system of nature.

p It also studies economy—material production, exchange, distribution and consumption in communist society—but only in the measure that this serves man as an economic condition for his all-round development. Social relations and spiritual life, too, are studied by scientific communism as a condition of man’s social and cultural development, and as a manifestation of his creative activity.

p Scientific communism studies the communist social and economic system, i.e. interrelation and unity of its economic, social and spiritual aspects, paying particular attention to how each of these aspects and all of them together serve man and help to achieve the highest degree of social development.

p Society develops by virtue of the operation of objective laws. In the final analysis, however, this operation depends upon the people themselves, on the profundity of their knowledge of the substance of social phenomena, on their purposefulness and level of organisation, how 12 effeclively these laws are applied. The development of society is thus visualised as a complex intermingling and interrelation of objective laws and the subjective factor.

p To achieve harmony between objective conditions and the subjective factor of social development, the working masses must understand objective laws and master the mechanism of their operation. They must learn to co-ordinate their activities with the requirements of these laws M> that society can make effective use of them for the benefit of man.

p This advances yet another important problem of the theory of scientific communism—that of finding the ways and means for co-ordinating the subjective activity of people with the requirements of objective laws and bringing to light the ways and means of utilising these laws in the interests of man. Scientific communism uses its knowledge of objective laws to disclose progressive trends or individual stages of social development, directs and regulates social progress in accordance with these trends, shows the obstacles impeding the attainment of one aim or another and helps people to remove these obstacles. In other words, it investigates how the conscious regulation of social processes and of communist construction operates.

p Scientific communism is thus a science dealing with the ways and means of destroying capitalism, with the laws governing the creation of the new, communist society, and with the economic, social and spiritual conditions for the all-round development of man; it is a science dealing with communist society as a complex social organism; it is a science dealing with the conscious, purposeful direction of social processes in the interests of man.

p This distinguishes scientific communism from the other components of Marxism-Leninism, i.e., from Marxist philosophy and Marxist political economy.

Like Marxism-Leninism as a whole, the theory of scientific communism did not emerge out of nothing. It inherited the communist ideas of the past, ideas that had been maturing for centuries in mankind’s leading minds. We must, therefore, briefly review the history of communist thinking in the past and trace its growth from a utopia to a science.