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p The adversaries of scientific communism are bent on proving that communism and the development of the individual personality are mutually exclusive, that only private ownership and free enterprise are a reliable foundation for man’s development. However, the practice of capitalism has shown the absurdity of arguments of this kind, and this has forced the theoreticians of capitalism to go to the other extreme: they maintain that it is senseless to speak of man’s perfection in this technical age of ours because man is slowly and surely dying, crushed by powerful machines.

p For example, the bourgeois sociologist Erich Fromm writes: “In our day ... not only has ’God died’, as Nietzsche asserted in the 19th century, but man, too, is dead. Only organisation and machines live: instead of becoming their master, man has been turned into their slave.”

p “Man is dead"—how strangely these words fall on our ears. Ours is a century of the greatest scientific discoveries, a century of far-reaching social changes which have opened unparalleled prospects for man’s improvement and for unbounded freedom. It is capitalism that has crushed the working man by social injustice, turned him into, essentially, a slave of powerful machines, and pushed millions of people out of their usual way of life, out of the very process of production.

p Through exploitation, violence and pillage capitalism has accumulated incalculable wealth, but it neither knows nor can know what to do with man. Having divested man of his birthright, capitalism is mortally afraid of the social, socialist renewal of man and mankind. The crisis of man in capitalist society is a crisis of capitalism itself but not of man or mankind as such, as the bourgeois falsifiers of present-day social development would have us believe. Feeling that capitalism must inevitably collapse, they are trying to bury man alive and endeavouring to impress on people that there is no sense in dreaming of a happy future, much less of fighting for it, because mankind will perish all the same—if not in the all-engulfing conflagration of a nuclear war then from the oppression of new technology.

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p What is the purpose of this strange concern of the spiritual pastors of capitalism for man, and why are they sounding the death knell for mankind?

p The answer is quite obvious: they seek to poison the minds of the working people, destroy the human, social element in them and, primarily, their hopes for the future, to strangle their desire to fight for and build a new life, to cast aspersions on the citizen of socialist society, on the socialist and communist system, and prove that that system cannot create a man free of the prejudices of the old society. The opponents of communism admit that communism can create powerful technologies and an abundance of material blessings but argue that it is unable to change the vicious nature of man and free him from individualism, self-interest, superstition and fear.

p The spiritual fathers of capitalism close their eyes to Soviet socialist reality in which the features of the new man are coming to the fore more and more distinctly. In proportion to the progress of socialist economy and the improvement of social relations people are growing intellectually, improving themselves morally and physically, and, step by step, freeing themselves from the spiritual heritage of the past. Much, very much, has been accomplished for the people by socialism. It has inspired them with an unquenchable thirst for life, given them confidence in the future and fired them with the aspiration to make their contribution towards the building of that future. There is a great deal of work waiting to be done and its difficulty is that it is being undertaken for the first time in mankind’s long history. Moreover, it is complicated because human nature is complicated, and will take a long time because no monumental work can be accomplished quickly. “Education,” Lenin wrote, “is a long and difficult business.” Age-old customs and survivals, the tenacity of old habits and the influence of hostile ideology make this business all the more difficult.

p Communist consciousness is formed by the Soviet social system, in the course of the people’s participation in the building of communism, in joint, planned and organised work, in the process of the development of new social relations in production and everyday life.

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p Planned, purposeful education is possible only on the basis of economic successes, of successes in changing social relations. While changing and remaking the economy and social relations, people themselves change intellectually and morally. In other words, the establishment of the communist way of life determines the formation of the corresponding communist consciousness.

p Being an element of communist construction, communist consciousness in its turn influences the formation of the communist way of life and the solution of economic, social and political problems. The reason for this is obvious: communist society is built not spontaneously but as a result of the conscious, purposeful activity of the people and, naturally, the higher the level of the people’s communist consciousness the more successfully and the quicker will communist construction proceed. Any underestimation, even if it is insignificant, of the role of communist consciousness can become a serious impediment to the onward movement of society.

p Economic development, the framing of a communist attitude to work and the formation of communist social relations and culture are the objective foundation for the moulding of the new man, for cultivating a communist consciousness in him. However, by themselves these conditions will not ensure the triumph of communist principles and ideas in the mind of every person. Therefore, the Party regards the communist upbringing of the people and its ideological work in this sphere as an indispensable condition for the building of communism.

In addition to pointing to the need for communist education, the Party has shown the content and basic direction for this education. On this question, the Programme of the C.P.S.U. states that communist education means “to educate all working people in a spirit of ideological integrity and devotion to communism, and cultivate in them a communist attitude to labour and the socialised economy; to eliminate completely the survivals of bourgeois views and morals; to ensure the all-round, harmonious development of the individual; to create a truly rich spiritual culture. Special importance is attached by the Party lo the mould ing of the rising generation.”