p In the arsenal of means of promoting communist work and the attainment of the highest possible level of labour productivity immense importance attaches to a correct combination of material and moral incentives for work.
p Material stimuli acquire the form of personal, collective (group) and social interest in receiving remuneration for work. As distinct from collective and social interest, which is linked up with the material interests of the entire personnel of a factory or collective farm, or of society as a whole, personal material interest expresses the striving of each individual to receive a definite share of means of subsistence for his work. This striving, it should be emphasised, springs from the knowledge that the share received for work depends upon the quantity and quality of this work and on its productivity.
p The need for providing material incentives during the entire period of communist construction is due to the fact that society has not yet reached the level where it can produce an abundance of consumer goods and also to the 245 fact that a distinction still exists between mental and physical work and between skilled and unskilled labour. In this situation, renunciation of material incentives and transition to equalitarian payment for work would deal social production an irreparable blow and give rein to idleness and parasitical sentiments.
p Some people hold the view that material incentives run counter to communist principles, that they foster bourgeois habits, lead to a race for personal benefit, moneygrubbing and a drive for gain. This view is quite wrong, because material incentives are an indispensable condition of the success of communist construction. These incentives and the desire to have their requirements satisfied as fully as possible spur people on to improve their production know-how, enhance efficiency, perfect implements of labour and technologies and steadily raise the productivity of labour. Material incentives have opened broad vistas for honest and dedicated work and for cultivating the great force of example by labour.
p Under socialism personal incentives objectively do not clash with the interests of society because labour is founded on public ownership and its products go to ensure the welfare and free, all-round advancement of all people. Thanks precisely to material remuneration for work each person receives direct social recognition. At the same time, it is extremely important that the objective harmony between what is personal and what is social should be realised by every member of society and that every person should clearly understand that by working for himself he works for society, and that the welfare of society is his own welfare.
p Experience has shown that relinquishment of material incentives lead to difficulties and disproportions in building up production, which in their turn negatively affect the welfare of the people. Difficulties of this nature were experienced for a long time, for example in Soviet agriculture. The principle of material incentives was violated in industry as well. The restoration and development of this principle make it possible to expand the economy swiftly and raise the standard of living.
p Material incentives are an extremely important, but not the only spur for work. In socialist society the working 246 person is the master of his country, building a new society. For him moral encouragement and moral satisfaction are just as important as material encouragement. That explains why with progress in building communism more and more importance is attached to moral incentives for work—moral recognition of work, respect of fellow workers and of society as a whole, duty and responsibility to the people, satisfaction with the results of one’s work, pride in one’s work, honour, conscience and zeal, the joy of creative work, and the quest for the new, emotional upsurge and aesthetic delight in the work itself and in its results. “In the course of the advance to communism,” declares the Programme of the C.P.S.U., “the importance of moral labour incentives, public recognition of achieved results and the sense of responsibility of each for the common cause will become continuously greater.”
Moral incentives play an ever larger role not through a reduction but, on the contrary, an improvement of material incentives. The main thing in stimulating labour is to achieve a synthesis of material and moral incentives. Only when they harmonise and intertwine, material and moral incentives are, on the one hand, a source for steadily boosting people’s labour activity and the growth of labour productivity and social wealth and, on the other, a source for the growth of the national wealth and for the development of the working person, for the moulding of lofty moral and spiritual features in him.
Notes