p Blinded by their class interests and lacking a scienific method of cognition, the ideologists of the bourgeoisie, which is leaving the stage of history, are unable to understand the diversity and complexity of the social development of our time. Some of them openly state that it is impossible to define the nature of our epoch or establish in what direction modern civilisation is developing because social events arc indefinite and fluid and do not lend themselves to an objective, unbiased assessment. Extremely typical in this respect is the stand of the authors of Where Are We Today?, published in the Federal Republic of Germany. One of these authors, Helmut Schelsky, maintains that to answer the question of “Where are we today?" i.e., to define the nature of our epoch, means primarily to find that by which we must judge the historical place of mankind today. But, according to Schelsky, this “that” is so elusive and indefinite that it is useless to try and define it. Hence, people are unable correctly 56 to evaluate their epoch and to act in accordance with its spirit, i.e., to resolve vital contemporary problems.

p Another group of bourgeois sociologists seeks to prove that the nature of the modern epoch is determined by technical discoveries, chiefly by the discovery of atomic power. No more and no less than the atom bomb is re garded as being at the hub of the modern epoch, which these sociologists call the “technical age”, the “nuclear age”, the “age of the atomic bomb”. For example, the West German philosopher Karl Jaspers writes: “A new situation has been created by the atomic bomb.” Yet the development of society cannot be reduced to technology, to technical discoveries, despite the fact that the present scientific and technical revolution plays an immense role in social development. In order to assess the role of technology it must be remembered that it influences the historical process not by itself but through an intricate system of social relations, primarily of the relations of production, which are predominant in society. Chiefly these relations and the class forces behind them must be taken into consideration when we analyse the modern epoch.

p Marxism-Leninism is the only science that reveals the nature of the modern epoch, whose content consists in the “abolition of capitalism and its vestiges, and the establishment of the fundamentals of the communist order... .”  [56•* 

p As we have already pointed out, Lenin saw the revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism and communism not as a single act but as an entire epoch of struggle between the two antipodal social systems. He legitimately considered that the international working class is the standard-bearer of this new epoch, whose beginning he linked up with the Great October Socialist Revolution, that was the first to set up the dictatorship of that class. He was convinced that the dictatorship of the proletariat, which had triumphed first in only one country would grow from a national into an international organisation, that more and more peoples and countries would gradually take the road of socialist development.

p Lenin’s definition of the modern epoch was further developed at the Moscow Meeting of Communist and 57 Workers’ Parties in November 19(50 and in the Programme of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. “Our epoch,” the C.P.S.U. Programme states, “whose main content is the transition from capitalism to socialism, is an epoch of struggle between the two opposing social systems, an epoch of socialist and national liberation revolutions, of the breakdown of imperialism and the abolition of the colonial system, an epoch of the transition of more and more peoples to the socialist path, of the triumph of socialism and communism on a world-wide scale. The central factor of the present epoch is the international working class and its main creation, the world socialist system.”

This definition of the modern epoch is corroborated by the development of contemporary society and by the practice of the revolutionary liberation struggle of the peoples. It mirrors the decisive events of our times—the victory of the socialist revolution in a large group of countries and the growth of socialism into a mighty world system, the decline and crisis of imperialism and the collapse of the colonial system.