p Capitalism initiated a rapid growth of the productive forces, created a powerful economy in the more developed countries, swept away feudal partitions, gave rise to a world economy and spread the system of exploitation throughout the world, making it particularly onerous and ruinous to the majority of the peoples, who became colonial slaves. The productive forces grew swiftly due to capitalist relations of production, which engendered capitalist profit as an incentive for developing production. In pursuit of profit the bourgeoisie expanded production, and improved machines and technology in industry and agriculture. However, 30 these relations gave rise not only to an unprecedented growth of production but also to productive forces that threatened the capitalist system with destruction. Marx and Engels compared capitalism with a magician, whose incantations had called into action forces that had become much too powerful for him to cope with.

p The greatest service rendered by Marx and Engels was that they brought to light the basic contradiction of capitalism—the contradiction between the social nature of the process of production and the private capitalist method of appropriation. Under capitalism, production is of a markedly social nature; millions of people, concentrated at the large enterprises, take part in this production, but the fruit of their work is appropriated by a small group of big proprietors. This contradiction, which is a concrete expression of the antagonism between the productive forces and the relations of production, gives rise to crises and unemployment and calls forth an irreconcilable class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, a struggle which ends with the socialist revolution, with the replacement of capitalism by socialism.

p The socialist revolution thus has a definite economic foundation—the contradictions in capitalist production—and comes forward as a historical necessity. This necessity springs from the development of production, which is cramped by capitalist relations of production, and by its nature, being collective, demands the abolition of private capitalist ownership and the establishment of public, collective ownership.

p A materialist understanding of history and an analysis of the objective laws of social development, of the objective dialectics of capitalism and its inner contradictions, brought Marx and Engels round to the theory that the socialist revolution was not only necessary but also the only means of replacing capitalism by socialism, a necessary prerequisite for the emancipation of man and the creation of conditions for his real development. This scattered the illusions of the great Western Utopian Socialists about turning capitalism into socialism by reforms, by achieving a “harmony” of class interests.

Interpreted from the materialist standpoint, history has made it possible not only to elicit the real essence of the 31 social surroundings in which man lives and develops and show the ways and means of changing these surroundings for the benefit of man, but also to reveal the essence of man himself, his place in the system of social relations, within the framework of the social whole to which he belongs. This smashed the vicious circle concerning the relations between man and his surroundings, the vicious circle that had defied pre-Marxian social thought.