R. KOSOLAPOV

Progress Publishers Moscow

Translated from the Russian by Richard Dixon

CONTENTS

I. Epistemological Bases of the Marxist-Leninist

Conception of Freedom.......12

II. Elimination of Alienation of Labour as a

Condition for Social Freedom.....47

III. Spiritual and Political Premises of Labour's

Transformation into Free Self-Activity . . 85

IV. Transformation of Labour into the Primary Vital Need, the Highest Expression of Freedom 115

V. Shortening of the Working Day as a Basic Prerequisite for Freedom.......172

VI. Communist Partisanship and Freedom of

the Individual........... 184

P. KOCOJIAROB

KOMMyHH3M H CBOBO^A

Ha

First printing 1970

Printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

Needless to say, for every revolution, socialist or democratic, freedom is a very, very important slogan. But our programme says that if freedom runs counter to the emancipation of labour from the yoke of capital, it is a deception.

V. I. Lenin

The creation of communism's highly developed material and technical basis and the achievement of greater labour productivity than under capitalism, for which the Soviet people is striving, are not ends in themselves. They would lose all their meaning if socialist society were not guided by the slogan of the Communist Party: "Everything for the sake of man, for the benefit of man." The policy of the Soviet Union and primarily its theoretical basis, which is scientific communism, are indeed expressions of the humanistic content of Marxism-- Leninism.

This is a truth of which the working people in the socialist countries are already profoundly aware, but it is not yet realised by many people in the countries of the capitalist system who, sincere as they maylje, are nevertheless prejudiced against communism. Yet communism

is fulfilling the historic mission of delivering people from social parasitism, from all forms of exploitation and oppression, and from the horrors of war; it expresses most completely and tangibly the ideals of peace and labour, equality and freedom.

One of the favourite gambits of reactionary forces in the field of theory is to present the problem of freedom in a distorted manner. "It is ridiculous," Wladyslaw Gomulka has written in this connection, "that efforts to tell us, Communists, the meaning of freedom are made by those who trample it underfoot in the most shameless manner.''^^1^^

The Philosophisches Worterbuch founded by Heinrich Schmidt and published in Stuttgart in 1957 contains the slanderous statement that "Marxism considers freedom a fiction".^^2^^ The authors don the mask of ``objectivity'': they mention the Marxist concept of freedom among a number of points of view, including some which are patently unscientific. There is no suggestion of a developed and really objective account of it.

That is understandable. The mind of the bourgeois philosopher is organically incapable of grasping the plain and clear principles of the Marxist teaching on the emancipation of mankind. "Soviet society ensures the real liberty of the individual," says the Programme of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. "The highest manifestation of this liberty is man's emancipation from exploitation.''^^3^^ It is

naive, to say the least, to expect an ideologist of the capitalist class to agree with this stand, the very essence of which negates the capitalist social system.

``The history of the concept of freedom since antiquity," the authors of the Philosophisches Worterbuch write, "generally relegates the concept of creative freedom far into the background in comparison with that of freedom from hindrance (by compulsion, causality or fate).''^^1^^ There is indeed such a tendency. But it is distorted.

Why, for instance, is freedom from hindrance placed side by side with creative freedom, although in reality the first is only a condition for the second? Why is the scientific concept of causality placed side by side with that of compulsion---which plays a transient, even if notable, role in history---and with the mystical cpncept of fate? (Creative, active freedom cannot be counterposed to causality, precisely because it itself is always caused by the social medium, the system of dominant social relations.) Why, finally, do the West German philosophers overlook the scientific interpretation of creative freedom formulated in the Marxist concept of labour's transformation into the primary vital need?

Is it not because they do not give the name ``fiction'' to that which deserves it? That is, not to freedom as understood by Marxists, but to the scientific integrity of those who wrote the Stuttgart "dictionary of philosophy''.

~^^1^^ Pravda, June 21, 1963.

~^^2^^ Philosophisches Worterbuch, begrundet von Heinrich Schmidt, Stuttgart, 1957, S. 177.

~^^3^^ The Road to Communism, Moscow, p. 460,

Philosophisches Worterbuch, S. 176.

In their criticism of the Marxist concept of freedom, the anti-communist ideologists generally fasten on to individual inexactitudes or the unwarranted loose formulations that one sometimes comes across in literature. An indication of this is what is said by the well-known ``specialist'' in ``criticism'' of Marxist philosophy, Gustav Wetter, who counterposes the views of the Soviet people to Engels's principles of freedom and necessity.

'•Hypocritically praising Engels's definition of freedom, Wetter sees in it a double meaning: freedom and cognised necessity, and the ability to take decisions with knowledge of the facts.

^v Wetter needs this subtle distinction not to expound Marxism objectively, but for something far more prosy, namely to declare that only the first meaning of freedom is known to the masses in the Soviet Union, that there, "by the essence of freedom is understood cognised necessity, bare knowledge of the necessary laws",^^1^^ that the masses ``only'' have the right to know everything, while the taking of the most important decisions (and hence, according to Wetter, real freedom) is the monopoly of the party.

Thus an abstract and at first glance inoffensive exposition and hashed version of the Marxist concept of freedom serves a quite concrete propaganda task: to set in opposition to each other the people and its integral part, its advanced detachment and collective leader, the Communist Party. Thus, it would seem, the

academic problem of freedom and necessity is made the field of a most acute political struggle between two world outlooks, two systems of social relations, two ways of life. Bearing in mind the exclusively propaganda gains to be achieved by exploiting the question of freedom, bourgeois ideologists spare no efforts to knock together all sorts of new theoretical constructions for the purpose of discrediting MarxismLeninism in the eyes of the masses. It is therefore of exceptional importance to give a clearcut definition of the Marxist position on the subject.

Of course we must not be blind to the fact that the correct understanding of the Marxist concept of freedom is hindered by the declarations of some ``Leftists'', including Maoists, who refuse to recognise universal human ideals because the bourgeoisie proclaimed them to gain popularity, though it was never able or willing to put them into practice. If the Communists were to lend themselves to such a logic, they would have to abandon not only the implementation of many of their slogans, but even the humanist essence of their teaching. But the Communists maintain a fundamentally different stand: they hold that the slogans, including that of freedom, which have been distorted and debased by capitalism, must be restored to their true meaning and translated into life, and this can be done only by taking the road of socialism and communism.

Moreover, there is another aspect of the problem to be noted. Not only must the Marxist views be upheld and developed in struggle against opposing ideologies and all forms of opportunism in the labour movement; they

~^^1^^ Gustav A. Wetter, Sowjetideologie heute (Soviet Ideology Today), I, Fischer Rucherei, 1963, S, 98,

must also be applied in communist education, the very essence of which, as C.P.S.U. documents have repeatedly pointed out, is man's preparation for his working life, the tempering of people in labour, the fostering of love and respect for work.

Such an approach to the question is by no means fortuitous. Even in the U.S.S.R. there are still people for whom work is only an obligatory means of obtaining sustenance, and not the main content of life, while freedom is seen as deliverance from work. The struggle against such parasitic outlooks is waged with various weapons, including those of philosophy. Only by showing that such a parasitic way of life is completely opposed to true human freedom can we paralyse ideologically the views and habits forced on part of socialist society by the capitalist past and the present bourgeois influence of the West.

While obstinately calling the imperialist countries "the free world" and assiduously publicising the fictitious delights of the capitalist, first and foremost American, way of life, world reaction spares no effort to denigrate the achievements of the peoples who have taken the path of socialism, although those very peoples are notable for having done much for the real emancipation of the individual. This is considered quite natural in Soviet literature, and for that reason it does not always present a complete picture of that true freedom which dawned in October 1917, and which is continually developing and becoming increasingly rich in vital content.

This work is devoted mainly to explaining the C.P.S.U. thesis: "The emancipation of labour is the basic condition for real freedom ol the individual.''^^1^^

i 50th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, p. 26.

I. Epistemological Bases of the Marxist-Leninist Conception of Freedom

ception is incorrect and can even cause Con^j siderable harm.

It is generally from this conception that people proceed when they pose the ``devastating'' question: "You say that real freedom exists under socialism. What kind of freedom is it when a man is not allowed to live as he wishes, when he is forced to work, to submit to discipline, to reckon with the opinion of the collective?" If we base ourselves only on the everyday understanding of freedom, it is difficult to combat such petty-bourgeois parasitic point of view. To fight the ideology of private property, the survivals of capitalism in people's minds, we must be armed with scientific Marxist concepts which have been tested in the crucible of revolutionary practice, in the historic dispute between the proletarian and bourgeois world outlooks.

Why is the interpretation of freedom as the possibility to act according to one's wishes ineffective? First and foremost because there are all sorts of wishes and not all of them help by their fulfilment to raise the level of individual freedom.

It might appear that the better off a man is, the more possibilities he has for satisfying his desires and the greater is his freedom. In fact it is not so. There are many people under the exploiting system whose craving for affluence becomes an insatiable lust for enrichment. In time, they lose all interest in anything but gold, that ideal embodiment of wealth. Let us recall Pushkin's Covetous Knight and Balzac's Gobseek, who neither knew nor wanted to know to whom the treasures they were hoarding could be of any use.

Freedom is a boon. Freedom must be won and defended. These words are on the lips of the best sons and daughters of all nations. The twentieth century, in which we are living, has made a start on the all-round social and national liberation of the individual.

Freedom is usually imagined as the real possibility for acting according to one's own desires. I am free when I act of my own will, when I am not hindered by any forces or circumstances from behaving as I wish, when I suffer no restriction or coercion. Such is the opinion of those who are not familiar with the scientific definition of freedom.

Can any objection be raised against that understanding? Of course not, if it is only a question of the everyday use of the word `` freedom''. Such an understanding is justified to a certain extent in work-a-day life. But in life we cannot restrict ourselves to such commonplace conceptions. There is a certain limit beyond which the problem of freedom begins to be the object of at least a certain theoretical thinking and we realise that the everyday con-

My father sees In money neither friend Nor servant, but a master---whom he serves. And serves him how? Like an Algerian slave, Like a chained dog. Within his fireless hovel He lives; drinks water, eats dry crusts of bread, Ne'er sleeps at night, but runs about and barks. The gold meanwhile is sleeping in the chests. All quietly.^^1^^

while seeing that which is better to him, to follow that which is worse.''^^1^^

The conclusion to be drawn from this is that if the pursuit of one's desires, which is considered as the most important mark of freedom, is given immoderate rein, it can lead to the exact opposite: freedom may become deprivation of freedom.

On the contrary, a certain restriction and the moderation of desires and demands, which seems an infringement of freedom, can in reality become the most important prerequisite for freedom. To pursue one's desires is freedom, while prohibition or impossibility to do this is slavery; to pursue unbridled desires is slavery, to limit them according to reason is freedom. These dialectics, with which everyone is familiar in practice, bring out clearly the weak sides of the everyday understanding of freedom.

The question now is: if freedom grows into its opposite when our desires are unlimited, what must be the nature of those limits? What must we base ourselves upon and be guided by in moderating our own appetites and concentrating our will so as to be free? We are indebted to Spinoza for posing this question (though in another form) and for first attempting to answer it.

The great thinker turned his attention to the concept of necessity. If man is carried away by passions, we must inquire into their nature.

That is how Alber describes his father's attitude to money. And it is scarcely exaggerated.

The desire to gain possession of some object at any cost can incite a man of weak morale to steal, to set himself against the whole of society by his crimes. If a liking for good wine is allowed to grow into an obsession for alcohol, it changes a man into a morally degenerate drunkard, a degraded individual, and hinders the realisation of all his other desires. A man may be obsessed by unbridled ambition or lust for power, the craving for wealth, a passion for gambling, an unhealthy interest in other people's secrets or an addiction to slander. In all these cases, normal rational human desires grow inordinately and handicap the individual. Here one cannot but recall Spinoza's profoundly wise words: "Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage; for, when a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so that he is often compelled,

~^^1^^ The Works of Alexander Pushkin. Lyrics, Narrative Poems, Folk Tales, Plays, Prose, "The Covetous Knight" tr. by A.F.B. Clark, New York, p. 419.

~^^1^^ Benedict de Spinoza, Improvement of the Understanding; Ethics and Correspondence, Washington and London, 1901, p. 189.

We find that passions can be divided approximately into two kinds: first, feelings which give rise to desires without satisfying which life would be impossible (the need for food, drink, sleep, activity, love, etc.), i.e., emotions necessarily inherent in human nature; second, passions springing from delusion, caprices, extravagances, bad manners, pernicious influence of the environment.... Knowledge of these two kinds of passion and the ability to distinguish between them and to follow the former is a mark of freedom.

According to Spinoza, man "follows and obeys the general order of nature, and... accommodates himself thereto, as much as the nature of things demands".^^1^^ Apprehending nature around him and his own nature by means of reason, man arranges his activity according to the knowledge he has received and to necessity. Spinoza writes: ".. .reason makes no demands contrary to nature... .''^^2^^ "Desire which springs from reason cannot be excessive.''^^3^^ And further: "I call free him who is led solely by reason.''^^4^^ By these words he means that freedom is born only after rational cognition of nature. Hence the well-known formula: freedom is cognised necessity.

Thus Spinoza poses the problem of freedom as a moral problem. People see freedom in doing as they wish, in freedom of behaviour. But what are the consequences of that behaviour? In so far as that behaviour does not lead to undesirable results, man is free. But contin-

~^^1^^ Ibid., p. !96.

~^^2^^ Ibid., p. 204.

~^^3^^ Ibid., p. 233.

~^^4^^ Ibid., p. 238.

uation of the same behaviour might be fraught with undesirable consequences: what appears as freedom can become deprivation of freedom. Spinoza seeks a means of warning people against such unpleasantness, and he finds it in cognition and observance of nature's laws. Since the question of cognition arises, the problem is revealed in its theory-of-knowledge (epistemological) aspect.

:

The merits of this approach have already been mentioned here. But it also has serious shortcomings. The philosopher analyses the field of consciousness, the struggle between reason and the passions, only in the final reckoning turning to the laws of nature. Here cognition of necessity, that is, the problem of spiritual activity, presents the most substantial problem. However, the conditions for utilising cognised necessity and observing the laws of nature are not only not defined, they are not even implied. The reason for this is that man's subjective cognitional activity is taken as the point of departure, cognition itself is considered on the individual, not the social plane; and finally, the problem of freedom itself is analysed outside the process of historic development. The opinion reached is that the only barriers to human freedom are an irrational manner of thinking, ignorance and bad morals, that man has only to be insured against these shortcomings and he will be free.

But is the problem so simple? When man has gained knowledge of the laws of nature, is he not hindered from behaving rationally and freely by something which actually exists and depends neither on morality nor on cognitional activity? Spinoza did not pose these questions

2-1976

because of the historic limitation of his world outlook. An attempt to continue his analysis was made by the outstanding German philosopher, Hegel.

Hegel highly appraised Spinoza's treatment of freedom and necessity. Freedom, in his opinion, consists in man's consciousness of the lawgoverned nature of world development, in cognition of the laws of his own being and in acting wholly within the framework of those laws, interpreted from objective-idealistic positions. "Man is most independent when he knows himself to be determined by the absolute idea throughout,"^^1^^ that is, the deified thought of nature represented as non-human and superhuman. The thesis that freedom is cognised necessity is repeated on a new basis. Hegel makes a step forward by recognising that freedom is capable of development. This is a higher degree of consciousness of self as being determined by the absolute idea throughout. "World history is progress in cognition of freedom, progress which we must know in its necessity.''^^2^^ Marxism prizes the historic approach of this formula, at the same time rejecting the idealistic basis of Hegel's argumentation and substituting for the absolutisation of knowledge the concept of socio-historic practice, the true source and foundation of all cognition. The viewpoints of Spinoza and Hegel are taken into account, mastered, reconsidered, corrected according to the materialist outlook, and surpassed by scientific

communism. This latter is the modern teaching on the prerequisites, conditions and practical ways for achieving man's social emancipation, a teaching which has been proved by the experience of hundreds of millions.

No rational basis on which to solve the problem of freedom can be found unless we make it clear what kind of freedom it is, freedom of what, which is taken as primary, basic and radical. It is precisely on the preaching of a distorted idea of this basic freedom that many speculations of modern imperialist ideology are grounded.

``Freedom (Freiheit)," says the Stuttgart Philosophisches Worterbuch, "is the possibility to do as one wishes.''^^1^^ In bourgeois society, that is an abstract possibility, since the only material guarantee for implementing any wishes under capitalism---the possession of capital---is accessible to only a few.

Besides, and this has already been said, not every act which accords with one's own desires is free: there are desires which can lead to even greater deprivation of freedom. So that it is not a matter of abstract, but of actual possibility of following not every desire, but conscious, rational desires.

Sharply contradicting even their own definition of freedom, the authors of the Philosophisckes Worterbuch state that "freedom is freedom of will. The will is always free by nature.''^^2^^ What has happened to "the possibility to do as one wishes"? Freedom of will is not enough for freedom of action; and besides, if

~^^1^^ The Logic of Hegel, London, 1931, p. 283.

~^^2^^ G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen uber die Philosophic der Weltgeschichte, I. Band: Einleitung, Leipzig, 1930, S. 40.

~^^1^^ Philosophisches Worterbuch, S. 176.

~^^2^^ Ibid.

the will is always free by nature, any argument about freedom is beside the point, since freedom is an a priori eternal attribute of the will. According to that logic, every man must be free (since every man has a will, whether strong or weak) irrespective of the condition in which he finds himself. To fight for freedom is only a waste of effort, since the idea is to win what man has had, allegedly without noticing it, from the very beginning of his conscious life. By thus relegating freedom to the sphere of the spirit and isolating it from the real life not only of thinking and ``willing'', but also acting people, bourgeois philosophy is doing its part to carry out the social orders of the ruling class: if freedom is treated only as an attribute of the spirit, it is easy to conceal the people's deprivation of material freedom.

In reality freedom is an attribute of the vital activity of social man, and the determining element in it is work, sharing in the production of material and spiritual values. Only inasmuch as freedom is inherent in human activity does it belong to one aspect of this activity, consciousness.

Marxism-Leninism recognises that freedom of will which is inseparable from freedom of activity. Any restriction of the latter limits freedom of will in one way or another. In its turn, lack of a strong will, timidity and hesitancy, even given all the conditions which favour the realisation of one's intentions, can limit freedom of action, jeopardise the fulfilment of a plan and the achievement of the set objective. The will cannot act in the capacity of pure will, it exists only intertwined with activity, as an inseparable element of it, giving

this or that colouring to acts and contributing to the success or failure of an undertaking.

What then is the basis for a sufficiently strong will, without which free action is impossible? Discarding psychological considerations of the qualities of this or that man's character, which, of course, necessarily affect the activity process, but play a subordinate role, we find something which directs man's activity in a certain selected direction. This is called assurance. Even the weak-willed man, if he is convinced he is right, is capable of, for him, unexpectedly courageous free action. But, here too, we cannot avoid psychological conclusions. What lies at the root of his assurance? It is knowledge---knowledge of the conditions, circumstances, methods and laws which can be utilised and on which one can rely.

Free activity is that which accords with one's own desires, which is continually corrected by knowledge of the object to which it is directed, of the conditions in which it takes place and of the nature of the requirements evoking the desires. The results of such activity cannot be unexpected, for they have been more or less taken into account in the initial idea of which the act is the fulfilment. Thus we arrive again at the well-known formula: freedom is cognised necessity (conformity to laws), necessity mastered by man as the law of his conscious activity.

At least four situations can be observed in life: a) a man does not know the necessity, that is, the properties, the laws of the environment in which he must act; neither has he any real means for carrying out his intentions; b) a man knows the necessity, but he cannot

submit it to himself because he lacks the material conditions for utilising it; c) a man does not know some law, although he has the possibility of ``saddling'' it; d) a man has both the knowledge and the relevant material possibilities.

In which of these four cases can we speak of freedom? Not in the first, of course. And naturally not in the third, for what can one accomplish if one does not know one's possibilities and is unable to concentrate one's strength and resources in the right place and at the right time? Perhaps in the second? But what can knowledge give if it is not practically utilised?

A complete theory can be worked out, practical recommendations can be given---as was done by the Russian scholar Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935), who was far ahead of his time when he advanced the idea and proved the possibility of space flights by man---but those plans may not be accomplished in practice first and foremost because of the limitations of contemporary production. Since only the nature of man's acts provides the objective criterion of his freedom, knowledge alone is a necessary, but insufficient prerequisite of freedom. Knowledge only half opens the door to the edifice of freedom to let us peep in; only work takes us inside. That is why freedom is possible only in the fourth case, when the achievements of science in disclosing the secrets of nature are backed by the relevant material possibilities. Between cognition of necessity as a prerequisite for freedom and the effective achievement of freedom, there may be a fairly long interval to bring to maturity the material

prerequisites by means of which man will include cognised necessity as a link in the system of social practice. Cognised necessity will become freedom only when the conditions are fully provided for it to become the basis of successful human activity.

The over-estimation of the knowledge of the laws of nature, society and thinking which runs through the works of Hegel, is alien to Marxism. Hegel considered the history of society as progress only in awareness of freedom. For Hegel the world spirit, the divinity, embodied in man, knows itself. Man acquires the highest independence by becoming conscious that he is wholly determined by this divine power. Since it is a matter of self-cognition by some suprahuman and superhuman reason through the human reason created by it, there is no issue into really existing practical life. Freedom, notwithstanding a number of conjectures of genius about the role of practical labour activity in history, is locked up in the sphere of cognition and is interpreted as pure cognition of necessity.

Rejecting this idealistic view of the problem, we nevertheless assign to cognition the honourable role it deserves in the conquest of freedom. First of all, it opens up new perspectives before man; allows ways and means to be outlined for gaining mastery over objective laws; secondly, given the relevant economic potential and the socio-political conditions for its success, it leads directly to greater freedom. In any case, by its social function, cognition acts as an emancipating force, mitigating man's dependence on blind laws which previously operated as fatal and irreversible forces.

Epistemologically, the Marxist-Leninist teaching on freedom is based on the materialist solution of the basic question in philosophy. When analysing in his Materialism and Empirio-criticism the well-known propositions on freedom and necessity which Engels gives in Anti-Diihring, Lenin formulates the following four epistemological premises for a scientific conception of freedom:

1. Necessity to recognise the laws of external nature. Negation of the laws of reality or attempts to present them as purely logical connections depending entirely on the mode of thought of one individual or another willynilly leads to exaggeration of the role of consciousness, the spirit, and makes man's life dependent on the fortuitous, uncontrollable tyranny of individuals. Where there is no necessity, that is to say, no permanent connections between phenomena independent of anyone's will, there is no freedom. What kind of freedom is it if you cannot, at least in outline, foresee what will happen in a minute, an hour, a day, and so on? Can you act with assurance if you do not know whether you can be sure of anything?

2. "The necessity of nature is primary, and human will and mind secondary. "The latter must necessarily and inevitably adapt themselves to the former.''^^1^^ This principle must become quite an everyday, habitual principle of all human activity. Correspondence of man's thoughts and acts with the necessity of nature results from his deep understanding of the essence of surrounding phenomena and his own

essence. Thanks to his acquired activity, he has set himself in counter-opposition to nature, he has the capacity to transform it, but being part of it, he has not ceased to submit to its laws. The human soul is a flower growing out of material soil. It has specific features sharply distinguishing it from all other natural phenomena, but not to such an extent that it stands entirely apart from the universal natural system of the world and is transformed into something supernatural, divine, not of this earth. The genuinely free soul is not ashamed of its earthly origin and its dependence on matter. On the contrary, a necessary condition of its true freedom is a profound assimilation of the naturalness and inseverability of this tie, because of which alone its independence and selfactivity are possible. ``Dependence'' in the sense of origin, secondariness, derivation, is the basis of the highest independence of man's seltactivity, which creates a circle of phenomena oi social reality by relying on knowledge, on true reflection of the laws of nature corresponding to the object and on scientific foresight. 3. Alongside cognised necessity, there is necessity not cognised by man. Hence, epistemologically there cannot be any freedom where man is surrounded by phenomena unknown to him, which have not yet been the object of profound scientific investigation. Disregarding all other factors or supposing them already granted, we must deduce that progress in freedom is directly dependent on progress in knowledge. Definition of the level of freedom in such a case depends on the correlation between those laws of nature, society and thought which have been cognised and those which have not.

~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 14, p. 188.

Directly related to this problem is investigation of the abilities and limits of human cognition. Marxism-Leninism admits that human cognition in general is, in principle, unlimited and universal if scientific progress is backed by progressive growth of its material and production base. There are phenomena which we do not know, but there is no unknowable phenomenon. The question of the unconditional knowability of every law of reality around us must not be confused with the question of the historic limitation of the possibilities of our knowledge. The point of departure here is the materialistic viewpoint: "the recognition of the objective reality of the external world and of the laws of external nature, and of the fact that both this world and these laws are fully knowable to man but can never be known to him with finality. We do not know the necessity of nature in the phenomena of the weather, and to that extent we are inevitably slaves of the weather. But while we do not know this necessity, we do know that it exists.''^^1^^ The degree of freedom in this case depends on the success achieved by science; mankind's unlimited capacity for more and more profound apprehension of nature's secrets testifies to the unlimited possibilities for increasing human freedom, which will never halt the process of its ascendant development.

Knowledge is unlimited in potentiality and limited at each historic moment. Factors which limit possibilities of knowing also limit the degree of freedom. They include, first, the limited level of social production, the relative

poverty of human practice, and society's temporary inability to master this or that law of nature; second, social relations of exploitation, which make the popular masses bondmen and slaves, become a brake on the development of the economy, science and culture, and act as the ultimate cause of the class-limited approach in investigating natural and social laws; third, the natural limitation (in limited periods of time) of the abilities, experience and knowledge of individuals, collectives, social groups, generations, and even concrete-historic societies-----

How are these factors overcome?

The first is removed and reproduces itself again on a higher basis resulting from the growth and development of the productive forces and man's scientific and technical potential. This process is essentially uninterrupted and progressive.

Outmoded social relations are replaced by new ones as a result of revolutionary leaps, so that mankind arrives at last to a form of relations between people which, by virtue of its nature, cannot act as a brake on progressive development in all fields of human activity. We have in mind communist social relations, begotten by mankind in suffering over centuries and providing the maximum favourable conditions for activity on the basis of cognised necessity and an enhanced level of freedom. The formation of communist social relations is at the same time the basis for the social emancipation of the individual.

The natural limitations of the individual are overcome as far as possible by his harmonious development and the many-sided nature

~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 14, p. 189.

of the collective in which he works. The limitations of the collective are corrected by the far richer many-sided nature of society and ultimately by the all-round social-historic practice of mankind.

Considering the question on the narrow epistemological plane, we see a definite correspondence between the sum of truths accumulated by people and the totality of the freedom won by them. Truth and freedom! That is not merely an attractive word combination. It poses a profound philosophical problem. The accumulation by mankind of the many truths which together form the single Truth is a process. By no means parallel to this process, but intertwining with it, is the more comprehensive and complex process of growth of freedom. It is the task of a special philosophical investigation to clarify the connection between them, the complexity of interrelations and influences. And it is not enough to say that the accumulation of truths as a whole promotes the development of freedom; we must also trace this sometimes contradictory and tangled interrelation through various concrete historic conditions.

4. In Engels's treatment of the correlation between freedom and necessity Lenin sees "a leap from theory to practice".^^1^^ That in itself rejects the shallow formula, "freedom is cognised necessity", according to which success in cognition is in itself success in freedom. In reality, the development of science is only a condition promoting mankind's emancipation, a necessary but by no means sufficient premise for the emergence of social freedom. It is

important not only to gain knowledge of laws, but also to reorganise mans practical activity in such a way as to allow him to rely on those laws to obtain the practically necessary, material, and therefore indisputable result.

As Lenin notes, "for Engels all living human practice permeates the theory of knowledge itself and provides an objective criterion of truth. For until we know a law of nature, it, existing and acting independently of and outside our mind, makes us slaves of 'blind necessity'. But once we come to know this law, which acts (as Marx repeated a thousand times) independently of our will and our mind, we become the masters of nature. The mastery of nature manifested in human practice is a result of an objectively correct reflection within the human head of the phenomena and processes of nature, and is proof of the fact that this reflection (within the limits of what is revealed by practice) is objective, absolute, eternal truth.''^^1^^ Only that activity is free which is guided by truth; only that proposition is true which is capable of becoming a guide to free activity. Such are the basic epistemological premises of the Marxist concept of freedom.

We consider freedom as a certain condition of man's vital activity, as an attribute which can be proper only to acts of rational beings. The ascribing of attributes of freedom to inanimate objects, plants, and even animals, is the result of misunderstanding of the specific character of human behaviour, which is linked with a greater or lesser degree of mastery over the surrounding conditions.

~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 14, p. 189.

~^^1^^ Ibid., p. 190.

Not a single living being besides man compels the laws of nature to submit to it or is able to make purposeful and practical use of them in its own interests. "The animal," Marx wrote, "is immediately identical with its lifeactivity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life-activity. Man makes his life-- activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life-activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life-activity directly distinguishes man from animal life-activity. It is just because of this that he is a species being. Or it is only because he is a species being that he is a Conscious Being, i.e., his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity.''^^1^^

Out of which attributes of concrete reality does freedom grow?

First, from chance in the manifestation of necessity. The concrete activity of a given concrete person is fortuitous in relation to the lawgoverned process of historic development. However, such activity remains ``pure'' chance only as long as it is not conscious, that is, not based on knowledge of the laws governing the motion of all real things. An act motivated by cognised necessity, while remaining a fortuitous form of its implementation, has at the same time certain specifics. Necessity is more immediate in it than in unconscious elemental activity, the motives of which are not clear to the agent. That is precisely why it has the attrib-

ute of freedom. The transition from the mediate, latent, unconscious, sometimes unexpected manifestation of law in historic events to more immediate and conscious embodiment of that law in man's vital activity is also one of the laws of social development and a testimony to the constant growth of freedom.

Second, activity is an essential attribute of freedom. Even water will not flow under a stone lying on the ground. That is true in the literal and figurative senses. A stone is determined almost wholly by circumstances and depends on them. Relative independence and activity are features proper to living organisms which have a reciprocal relationship with nature and are capable of independent movement in one direction or another. In this sense, the snail is ``freer'' than the stone on which it crawls, for it has incomparably more possibilities for ``choosing'' the conditions of its existence.

Third, a premise of freedom, and hence of conscious life is a developed attribute of reflection, which is highly perfected in the higher animals.

Fourth and last, given all these premises, there must also be manifestation of such a form of activity in the living organism which allows it to counterpose itself to nature as a factor of its transformation, to set itself apart from nature and acquire relative independence by virtue of some new capacity which no living creature had before it. This form of activity, this capacity, the formation of which signifies the emergence of man, this new factor which allows a constant increase of man's mastery over the conditions of his vital activity, is

~^^1^^ K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Moscow, 1967, p. 71.

labour. To it belongs the main role in the progressive development of freedom.

``Freedom is cognised necessity." This splendid formula of Spinoza and Hegel in the new reading and revelation given by Marx, Engels and Lenin, is quoted often enough. But its interpretation does not always reflect the substance that Marxism-Leninism infused into it.

Thus, when the well-known words of Engels on the conditions for achieving freedom are quoted, the matter is presented in such a way as though Engels speaks only of natural laws, although in reality he thereby refers "both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves".^^1^^

Indeed, does cognition of necessity alone ensure the transformation of necessity into freedom? Do ignorance of the laws and acts opposed to the laws always coincide? Can people act in violation of laws even if they know them? Or not know the laws and still act in accordance with them?

What is freedom---knowledge of the laws and the possibility of mastering them? Or knowledge and actual mastery? If it is the latter, then what is the condition of that actual mastery?

Does only the accordance of human activity with the known objective laws under socialism make increasing subordination of the laws to society possible?

These and many other perplexing questions arise quite often. It is natural too, since we

cannot limit ourselves to considering freedom from the point of view of the process of cognition, evading the question of practice---we cannot do that because the problem of freedom, while it has its epistemological aspect, is mainly a practical, social problem, to be solved not only in science, but in the economic, political and moral spheres of human life.

In his book, Materialism and Empirio-- criticism, Lenin considers it chiefly from the epistemological point of view, inasmuch as he is fighting against the idealistic understanding of conformity to laws in nature. It is for that purpose too that he utilises Engels's proposition on freedom and necessity, basing himself on the firm foundation of the materialist interpretation of natural and social phenomena. The Machists, Lenin said, did not ``notice'' "the epistemological significance of Engels's discussion of freedom and necessity".^^1^^ He goes on to examine "the epistemological premises upon which this argument is based".^^2^^ This does not exclude, but presupposes the presence of other, possibly no less important aspects of the problem. It was not for nothing that, having examined the significance of Engels's words for the scientific solution of the basic question of philosophy, Lenin noted: "For Engels all living human practice permeates the theory of knowledge itself.''^^3^^

Let us quote this famous discussion by Engels: "Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity.

~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 14, p. 187.

~^^2^^ Ibid., p. 188. On this point see also pp. 24-29 of this book.

~^^3^^ V. I, Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 14, p. 190.

~^^1^^ F. Engels, Anti-Duhring, Moscow, 1969, pp. 136-37.

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To him, freedom is the appreciation of necessity. 'Necessity is blind only insofar as it is not understood.' Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves,---two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject. Therefore the freer a man's judgment is in relation to a definite question, the greater is the necessity with which the content of this judgment will be determined; while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows precisely by this that this is not free, that it is controlled by the very object it should itself control. Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity ( Naturnotwendigkeiten); it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development.''^^1^^

From these words it follows that Engels, imparting a new, materialistic content to Hegel's formula, emphasises not so much knowledge of laws as mastery, based on knowledge, over the external and internal conditions of man's

vital activity. Hence, the epistemological aspect interests Engels only inasmuch as it can influence the practical realisation of human freedom---man's mastery over the laws of nature and society, which is possible only by the transformation of the latter into the conscious basis of human activity. This specific must always be borne in mind. Knowledge of necessity is a premise of mastery over nature and social conditions---otherwise freedom is impossible, but the decisive word is with practice, which actually guarantees this or that level of freedom.

Since necessity and law are primary, and freedom is secondary, attempts are sometimes made to interpret the problem of the relation between freedom and necessity as one of the concrete expressions of the correlation between spirit and matter. In a general form that is admissible, but it contains a danger. Proceeding from the proposition that necessity is primary, we can come to the wrong conclusion, namely interpret freedom as secondary, and by a certain, not wholly conscious, inertia of thought, as a spiritual phenomenon. That is the same as to consider that freedom is only cognised necessity, i.e., actually to pay homage to idealism. In reality, the question is more complicated. What is counterposed to necessity in the category of freedom is not cognitional activity alone, not only consciousness, but conscious practical (mainly productive) human activity, which was never a purely spiritual phenomenon. So that freedom is secondary in regard to necessity not as consciousness is in relation to being, but in the sense in which man's purposeful activity is secondary in regard

~^^1^^ F. Engels, Anti-Duhring, Moscow, 1969, p. 136-37.

to nature, since man counterposes himself to nature as a factor of nature. That is why we must judge the degree of freedom not only by progress of knowledge, but taking into consideration the productive potential that society has achieved at the given stage in its development. Hence freedom includes factors of two kinds: theoretical, scientific (cognition of necessity as such) relating to the sphere of social consciousness, and practical, economic and social, determined by the circumstances of social being, society's ability to utilise the achievements of science, the laws of which it has gained knowledge, in its own interests.

The history of the development of freedom shows that most frequently these two factors do not coincide in time. By virtue of the relative independence of social consciousness, scientific knowledge does not always keep step with practical production activity. And although every scientific task arises from practical requirements, not all the problems solved (forms of cognised necessity) can be immediately introduced into practice and mastered; many of them wait long years for the conditions for their realisation. Science, being deeply rooted in social practice, in production, is capable not only of summing up facts and the experience of past social development, not only of divulging the laws of the present, but also of foretelling the future. There can be a fairly long time interval between cognition of necessity and its utilisation in human activity.

The time-lead which science has on practice becomes a natural phenomenon when the true scientific, dialectical-materialistic world outlook is made the methodological basis of investiga-

tions. This is testified, in particular, by the circumstances which accompanied the appearance and spread of Marxism as the scientific expression of working-class interests. Karl Marx's Capital provided comprehensive proof of the transitory character of capitalist mode of production. Knowledge was gained of the necessity of capitalism's downfall and the rise of the new, communist society on its ruins. The proletarian vanguard was given a powerful ideological weapon. However, Marx's scientific forecast did not mean that the fact of knowing necessity would lead to the transformation of bourgeois society into communist society. The knowledge and explanation of the historic tendency had to be supplemented by practical transforming activity. This task was carried out for the first time half a century ago by the working class of Russia, who, in alliance with the working peasantry under the leadership of the Leninist Party of the Bolsheviks, carried out the socialist revolution. Freedom came only a certain time after the knowledge of necessity. From this we can conclude that the interval between knowledge of laws and its introduction into human practice warns us against an ill-considered attitude to the formula: "freedom is cognised necessity". MarxismLeninism teaches that freedom is cognised and practically mastered necessity.

The term ``freedom'' is generally used in two senses---one limited, the other universal. In the first sense, we speak of free activity in the case of a man who has gained knowledge of and mastered some small part of nature, some of its connections and laws. He acquires freedom who, having studied some production

process, for instance, begins to use his knowledge with greater assurance to enhance the effectiveness of that process, to introduce improved technology, and so on. When we speak of free use of one mineral resource or another, of freedom in handling a tool, or of the prospects of the free use of atomic energy to raise people's welfare, what is meant every time is man's mastery over some particle of nature, external or his own, greater or smaller, but having all the same a relative and limited significance. This is freedom of action, freedom of one or several kinds of activity, but not complete, entire and universal freedom.

Being an attribute of the human life process in any formation, freedom does not express the social content of life-activity, which varies according to the state of society as a whole. Possession of private property, which is sometimes taken for the real basis of freedom, is only a manifestation of very relative freedom, which does not give exemption from subordination to blind necessity. One can be skilled with the paint-brush or the chisel, be an expert in one's job, have one's own shop, and still be under the yoke of social dependence. Achievement of mastery over an aspect, a particle of natural and social necessity cannot of itself bring man social emancipation.

The second sense in which the term `` freedom'' is used presupposes man's mastery over the natural and social conditions of his vital activity in its principal spheres. In this sense, freedom has a social character and signifies a qualitative change in the life of man, thus differing from freedom in the first sense. The beginning of the transition to universal free-

dom marks the end of pre-history and the entry into the true history of human society.

Leaps from necessity to freedom in the first sense are effected continuously and constitute the specific feature of human activity in general. Universal social freedom begins only with the appearance of socialist production relations and is perfected throughout the whole period of socialist and communist construction. It is precisely the emergence of this freedom that is implied in the formula used by Engels concerning mankind's leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. Freedom in the first sense is partial (or particular) in regard to human life, in the second it is general.

Freedom is a relative phenomenon. The history of society has often provided instances of man's partial emancipation in conditions of predominating lack of social freedom. It is therefore necessary to clarify the concrete question: what kind of freedom is meant, freedom from what, freedom in relation to what?

Marxism-Leninism proceeds from the principle that in social life freedom means freedom of a man or a group of people which consists of mastery over known and practically assimilated laws of nature and society, the relative independence of man's life-activity in respect of the material conditions of its realisation, an independence which is achieved, however, by strictly taking into account those conditions and the high level of development of the productive forces.

Freedom is not only "freedom to live". Physical existence by itself is not a sign of a free man. Life in itself (the slave also

received "freedom to live" when, instead of being killed, he was turned into a working animal) is only the natural premise for raising the question of freedom, not for solving it. Its solution assumes not only man's physical existence, but also a certain definite maintenance of his life, his vital activity. Freedom of man's vital activity, such is the basis of all freedom.

Here again various interpretations are possible, since life-activity is manifested in diverse forms, essential or unessential, some of which may even operate against acquisition of freedom when certain limits are overstepped. Marxism-Leninism singles out of these diverse forms of activity the essential one, by virtue of which, properly speaking, human society emerged, namely participation in producing material and spiritual values---labour---the emancipation of which constitutes the essence of man's emancipation. The main criterion of freedom is the level of freedom of labour activity, and since the majority of people are engaged in it, the degree of freedom of the majority of the population of a given country.

Three most important aspects of the problem are distinguished in philosophical works. On the one hand, steady growth of society's productive forces increasingly ensures all mankind's freedom in relation to nature. The savage's subjection to cold, hunger and illness, which was only mitigated to a very small extent by purposeful activity to obtain the means of subsistence, is replaced more and more by man's mastery over nature as the productive forces grow. Man began to free himself from that subjection at the higher stage of the tribal sys-

tem, when the growth of the productive forces allowed him to produce a certain surplus over and above the minimum necessary for his existence. This was a leap to a new state. The surplus product was a kind of symbol of relative emancipation from the rule of nature; it was the material foundation for enhanced human freedom.

But by virtue of the dialectics of history, that very surplus provided the basis for a new form of subjection and deprivation of freedom which has now become a feature, a part of society. That is another aspect of the problem. Since a ``surplus'' product had appeared, there arose the problem of its distribution and consumption. The progress of freedom consisted only in the exemption of a few from exhausting labour, in the appearance of a class of people standing above society and appropriating the labour of the masses. At the same time, that progress sealed the deprivation of freedom of the overwhelming majority of those who created material values. These began to be exploited by those who secured the disposal of the real means of human freedom---the means of production and of subsistence.

Society's increasing emancipation from nature in conditions of antagonistic class society does not involve the corresponding emancipation of the working people. The former process is almost continuous, in the form of evolution and revolution; the latter proceeds by leaps in the form of social revolution. The first problem is solved by the development of scientific and technical potential, the second can be radically solved only by socialist revolution.

Finally, the third aspect, which is directly

connected with the first two, is man's freedom in relation to himself, freedom from fettering prejudices, rational control of his own acts, which, given all the other conditions, is a feature of moral freedom, the summit of freedom of the individual.

Freedom in its single and partial aspects is realised throughout the course of history and is expressed in increased freedom of society as a whole in relation to nature. The beginning of the emergence of universal freedom, which must necessarily embrace the three aspects, is the liquidation of the antagonistic production relations and of exploitation of man by man. An essential moment in this process is the overcoming of class antagonism and the moral legacy of society based on private property, the moral renewal of man: "The alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution;... revolution is necessary ... not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.''^^1^^

The concept of historic necessity also becomes more concrete in the light of what has been said. As a rule, it means an objective law necessarily operating in homogeneous phenomena, a universal and constant connection. There is no justification, in our view, for interpreting the concept of necessity identically in such pairs

~^^1^^ K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, p. 87.

of categories as "chance and necessity", " freedom and necessity". The categories of "chance and necessity" and "freedom and necessity" are correlative, and that alone must affect the content attributed to them in one case or another.

When it is a question of necessity in relation to its chance manifestations, what is meant is all necessity in general, without distinction as to the specifics of human activity, for chance and necessary connections are typical of inanimate as well as animate nature, of thought as well as of society. It is a different matter when necessity is investigated in connection with freedom. Since freedom is understood as human freedom, freedom of human activity, necessity also is "humanised" whether we wish it or not, that is, it is investigated from the standpoint of its role in human practice, and acquires a historic and social colouring. And here it is not sufficient to note that necessity is an objective law, an answer must also be given to the question of whether or not it is known and mastered by man.

Necessity which remains unknown is generally called blind, that is, unexpected and inevitable in its operation---fatal necessity. Cognised necessity is the beginning of the transition of necessity into freedom, the latter's ideal premise. Finally, the third kind is cognised and practically mastered necessity, in the process of transformation or already transformed into freedom, that is, necessity, which from being a law imposed on man from outside has become the law of his own activity. In practice, the most important of these kinds of necessity is the last.

Deprivation of freedom, man's enslavement, takes place under the sway of blind necessity and can last for a time when necessity has already been cognised but the productive forces, the material conditions for its inclusion in the sphere of practical human activity have not yet been created. But in itself the bridling of the forces of nature and their harnessing for man's service likewise do not give us grounds to qualify the society in question as free. It seems at first sight that given definite scientific premises, the degree of freedom is directly proportionate to the level of labour productivity, or, conversely, that, given a definite level of labour productivity, the enhancement of freedom depends on increasingly deep cognition and mastery of the laws of nature. There could be no objection to this were it not for certain other social factors. Thus, in a society of exploitation, progress in labour productivity leads to intensification of mass oppression. The blessings of technical progress, science and culture often operate not for man's good, but counter to it. It is sufficient to recall the overproduction crises under capitalism; automation, which puts people out of the work in the West; or the use of the power of the atom to wipe out thousands of civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The list of such facts could be continued indefinitely, and they are all eloquent on the same point. Indeed, freedom depends on cognising and mastering necessity. But, being by their nature emancipatory, both science and a high production potential can become a power for enslaving the masses in certain conditions when they are in the hands of a group of people. There can be no freedom

without eliminating the social conditions on which the domination and prosperity of the bourgeoisie depend and which the bourgeoisie would like to conceal even from itself.

Knowledge of and practical mastery over necessity are used in a society of antagonistic classes in the interests of the owners of the means of production and often increase the blind social forces that weigh down upon the working masses. Therefore, as far as society as a whole is concerned, the taming and harnessing of natural forces in class formations is merely technical mastery, freeing men from the influences of the natural elements. In order that such mastery should grow over into freedom, it must be placed at the service of the working majority, that is, it must be supplemented by social mastery. This is impossible it the monopoly of the ruling class over the means of production is not liquidated and the socialist revolution is not carried out.

Blind necessity differs from cognised necessity mainly by the fact that man is ignorant of the means for utilising it and the conditions for evading it. This explains his complete dependence on blind necessity and his inability to counter it.

Although knowledge of necessity has not yet been transformed into freedom, it already provides man with the possibility for planning his activity, avoiding adverse consequences and ensuring favourable results.

For cognised necessity to be transformed into freedom, account must be taken of it in human activity, of which it must become the law. This requires material premises which are not

contained in knowledge but emerge in practice, in the struggle which brings mankind step by step nearer to the wished-for rule of universal freedom. One must not overlook the fact that in a society of antagonistic classes even knowledge of necessity and conditions already mature for its utilisation do not produce the desired results for the working majority because they are monopolised by the propertied minority. Necessity may remain on the level of technical mastery and may not reach that of social mastery. Therefore, a socialist society which has liquidated the exploitation of man by man submits to a new form of necessity; first, cognised; second, technically mastered; third, utilised in the interests of the whole people, i.e., socially mastered. This kind of necessity acquires the hue and savour of genuine freedom.

II. Elimination of Alienation of Labour as a Condition for Social Freedom

When we considered the category of necessity in relation to human activity, we singled out four kinds: blind necessity, cognised necessity, cognised and technically mastered necessity, cognised and technically and socially mastered necessity (i.e., freedom). But such a division does not take into account the nature of necessity itself or the sphere in which it operates. Turning :to Engels, whose words were quoted earlier, we see that freedom envisages man's control (based on knowledge and practice) "over ourselves and over external nature". There can be no doubt that the first thing Engels had in mind was nature ("external nature", natural necessity). Secondly, he included here objective social necessity. But ``ourselves'' means not only the laws of social necessity outside our mind, it means also our interior ego, our psyche, our habits, the system of our ideas and emotions, morality, and so on. Apparently, by control "over ourselves" is understood also control over the internal, subjective conditions of life-activity, the ability to master oneself in keeping with the necessity of which we have gained knowledge.

Natural necessity is gradually cognised and mastered by mankind as its productive forces grow, and society as a whole, gaining relative self-sufficiency and independence of nature, thereby spontaneously prepares the conditions for its complete emancipation.

In antagonistic formations, social necessity is investigated by the science of the ruling class only insofar as it can strengthen the position of that class. Unlike the natural sciences, in which the discovery and application of a new law proceeds more or less smoothly, in the field of the social sciences, the discovery and application of a new law affecting the interests of the obsolescent social forces encounters extremely powerful opposition on the part of the latter. In each such case, what is required is a social force, personified by the foremost class or an alliance of progressive social groups, capable of smashing or undermining this resistance.

In social life, freedom is achieved on the basis of cognition and mastery of necessity, which, if the matter is not confined to the technical aspect, requires that the majority of the population should overcome the resistance (economic, political, military, moral, and so on) offered by the reactionary minority. That is why, having come to know the necessity of the downfall of capitalism and the victory of the new system, people by no means immediately make a start on the practical fulfilment of that foresight: they have to overthrow the reactionary force which acts in violation of necessity but is itself also necessary, since the law clears a road for itself by suffering the counter-influence of phenomena to which it itself gave birth.

When the first, natural necessity is known and mastered, it signifies the relative emancipation of society as a whole. When the second, social necessity is known and mastered, it signifies the emancipation of some single class. If this class is the proletariat, all the country's working people (and ultimately the whole of the population) are emancipated, having carried out the socialist revolution.

As for individuals or small social groups which enter into the composition of every class, the conditions for their emancipation consist of general-human as well as class premises. But one premise is still required, namely the freeing from antiquated traditions and from prejudices, the cleansing of both the social and the individual being and consciousness from survivals of the past, in order that people should fully realise their freedom. Otherwise distorted consciousness may play the role of blind necessity, of an external force enslaving man. In the transition from capitalism to communism, this applies in the first place to the socio-psychological and moral consequences of alienation of labour.

Marx's investigation into alienation of labour in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which led in a general form to the conclusion that the capitalist system would inevitably be replaced by the communist system, was the first attempt at a scientific elaboration of the problem of the elimination of exploitation of man by man as the decisive condition for social freedom.

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Attention is often directed to the fact that the category of alienated labour as a characteristic of all antagonistic-class societies is rarely used in the works of the mature Marx, who is known to have concentrated largely on a detailed study of the capitalist formation. But that provides no justification for interpreting the concept of alienated labour as a result of the exclusive influence of Hegel and Feuerbach or as a concept inadequately expressing the processes of social and historic development which it denotes.

It would be wrong to deny that in the 1840s Marx and Engels were fascinated by Feuerbach's philosophy. A certain overestimation of that metaphysical materialist's views is felt also in The Holy Family, which was written in the same year, 1844. But at the same time there is a critical revision of the whole philosophical legacy, as is proved at least by the famous Theses on Feuerbach, written a few months after the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.

The category of alienation was indeed used before Marx. But for the proletarian thinker it had its own, special, new meaning. It is sufficient to compare the concept of alienation as used by Feuerbach, not to mention Hegel, and then by Marx, to be convinced of the diametrical opposition between their methodological approaches. For Feuerbach, who was investigating the causes of poverty, suffering, spiritual degeneration and dehumanisation of people, it was a question of spiritual alienation of man's best capacities and their attribution to an imaginary lord, God. Surrendering all his virtues, all his forces to the deity, man

empties himself, deprives himself of his substance, and therefore suffers. According to Feuerbach, the task is to restore these qualities to man, to deprive god of his halo and make man god. The whole matter boils down to criticism of religion and to replacing one religion by another.

The young Marx adopts a different approach to the problem. Considering man as a really active, nature-transforming factor, he concludes that the cause of oppression and suffering is the fact that, as a result of the division of labour, man is ousted from many kinds of activity, deprived of his universality, that his activity is void of content, he is robbed of the results, and therefore of the process of his labour, the material conditions for his lifeactivity and that the principal manifestation of his life is materially alienated. The task is not to replace some creeds by others, but to restore to man in the first place the material conditions and the results of his labour, which is possible only by eliminating the intermediary between the worker, on the one hand, and the means, object and product of his work on the other, that is, the capitalist. The intention is to make a criticism not of religion, but of the relations existing between men. We are offered a brilliant counterposing of Feuerbach's idealistic viewpoint to the twenty-six-year-old Marx's materialistic stand. This alone warrants the opinion that the Manuscripts, side by side with the Theses on Feuerbach, are an outstanding draft of a new world outlook.

The insufficient attention paid by Marxists to alienation of labour has been exploited for a number of years by the revisionists. Individ-

ual Marxist philosophers, on the other hand, have exaggerated the young Marx's terminological peculiarities and suggested that the category of alienated labour be rejected on the pretext that it was overcome by the author himself and can only lead to a false interpretation of already established Marxist propositions.

The term alienated labour denotes a completely scientific concept and is treated with mistrust because it sounds Hegelian rather than for reasons of substance. In Marx's Capital--- as will be noted later---the analysis of alienation of labour is continued and concretised. Besides, failing an analysis of the question of alienation of labour, it is difficult to solve a number of problems of historical materialism, scientific communism and Marxist-Leninist ethics, in particular the problem of freedom and necessity.

Labour---the simplest basic moments of which are always purposeful activity, the instruments and the object of labour---represents man's transforming action on the material of nature for the purpose of giving it the required form. In labour man reveals his skill, knowledge and capacities, manifests his essence in one way or another. When we examine a finished article, we notice also the method by which the raw material has been worked, the ideal plan which the craftsman has tried to embody, the level of his qualification, and so on. We judge of the worker by the product of his work, because he has partially objectified himself, putting part of his ego in the form of labour into a thing external to himself. This giving, this transfusion of the subject's capacities to the object, their transformation from attrib-

utes inherent in the subject into attributes of the external object, constitutes a general feature of labour---otherwise it would be impossible to adapt an object to man's requirements.

If we consider the active being of man as a thesis, the obj edification of his substance in work, the placing of his qualities outside himself, the going beyond his own ego resembles a kind of negation of subjectivity, an antithesis. The synthesis will be the process of personal and productive use of the product created, the return to the worker of what he transferred to the object during his work, the assertion, repeated over and over again, of man as the active factor in production. This third point, in opposition to the second (objectification), is the assimilation, the subjectification of the object, which itself operates as an important prerequisite for objectification; in life we observe their close intertwining, their mutual interpenetration and determination.

Being closely connected and presupposing one another, these three moments of human activity are nevertheless distinct and sometimes separate in space and time. We can, indeed, imagine a man not engaged in labour activity, not objectifying his essence, as is typical of people belonging to the exploiting class. On the other hand, a man may work, turn out products, and yet be deprived of the possibility to use them. The act of objectifying the subject in labour is separated from the act of assimilation, the subjectification of the product of labour. It is precisely this feature of labour, the objective division of producing and using, of giving and assimilating, that allows the product to be held back from the worker who

produced it. The product may be made by one and assimilated, used, by another. If this other produces nothing himself and renders no services of equivalent utility to society, the result is exploitation of man by man.

Practice shows that man's objectification of his own capacities in the process of labour (the subject-object relation) exists and will continue to exist as long as there is social production. As for the appropriation of the material embodiment, the coagulation of work, the product, in favour of a non-worker (and this social alienation, which arises in relations between men, is precisely what is meant by Marx), it did not arise immediately and is transient, temporary.

In the primitive community, which had available only very elementary tools and produced just as much as was needed for the subsistence of the people that constituted it, there could be no question of alienation of labour in the sense mentioned above. Poor development of the productive forces, low labour productivity, limited practice, ignorance of social and natural laws made man entirely dependent on nature. Besides this dependence, there was the dependence on the collective, without which a man could not live by himself, a dependence which, despite the remote resemblances to social relations under socialism and communism, was a rigorous necessity and sometimes took far from idyllic forms. .It was hot a free union of harmoniously developed individuals, but a group of beings, weak and defenceless by themselves, who could acquire only in union the minimum strength needed to fight nature. There was no alienation for the

simple reason that there was nothing to alienate and nobody to alienate it.

Private property and the slave system appeared on the basis of higher labour productivity, which ensured a certain surplus of products over and above the vital minimum. It was this surplus that became the alienated product. A certain group of persons began to alienate in their own favour not only property, but even people, workers, treating them as implements of labour. The slave system not only means that all the fruit of the slave's work belongs to the master; it also signifies complete mastery over the man, the negation of the slave's human qualities, so that he can no longer even belong to himself. Alienation of labour here means also alienation of the personality, impersonification of the worker, all the slave's time being considered as belonging to the master, although in actual fact part of the slave's working time naturally goes to replace the minimum of means of subsistence he uses.

A similar state of affairs remains under the serf system. The only difference is that here the peasant, remaining personally dependent on the feudal lord, is allotted land and the means for cultivating it, and works part of the time for himself.

In the conditions of capitalist production, the worker is released from personal dependence; as a person he cannot be anybody's property, but he is still deprived of the means of production. He acquires personal freedom, but freedom with no material basis, illusory freedom, since economic dependence on the owner

of the instruments of production and the objects of labour remains.

Alienation of the personality is eliminated--- and this is the enormous merit of bourgeois revolutions and their great stride towards genuine freedom---but alienation of labour is preserved.^^1^^ The product of labour, being constantly at the disposal, not of the worker who produced it, but of the owner of the means of production, "confronts labour as something alien, as a power independent of the producer"^^2^^ just as the propertied appropriator does not depend on the propertyless producer. In such conditions, "this realisation of labour appears as loss of reality for the workers; obj edification as loss of the object and objectbondage".^^3^^

The character of labour does not exclude the revival in certain historic periods of the past alienation of the human personality itself.^^4^^ An

~^^1^^ Let us recall Article 18 of the 1793 Constitution of the French Republic, which legislatively sanctioned the principle: "No kind of work, cultural activity or trade, can be prohibited; each one has the right to produce, to sell his services and his time. But nobody has the right to sell himself: the person of man is not alienable property.''

What is the meaning of "to sell one's services and one's time"? While the complete sale of man is forbidden, the partial sale of man's working power for a time, alienation of his capacities, is allowed. Herein lies the half-and-halfness of the bourgeois revolution.

~^^2^^ K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 66.

~^^3^^ Ibid.

~^^4^^ Only a hundred years ago there was a legal formula current in the U.S.A. which said: "A slave is a human being who is legally not a person but a thing." Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln. The Prairie Years and the War Years, New York, p. 122.

example of this is the nazi practice of enslaving hundreds of thousands of citizens in the European countries during the Second World War. The equation of people of ``impure'' races to working animals, a brainless, primitive, undemanding mass, capable, however, of carrying out any kind of work, was the ``ideal'' which ``inspired'' the "master race", Hitler's nurselings, in their predatory campaigns. The physical extermination of millions of unsubmissive and objectionable people and the systematic stamping out of all that was human in those who remained alive was the task set to the forward detachment of world imperialism, German fascism, only a quarter of a century ago. "Fascism and slavery---these two concepts are inseparable,"^^1^^ said D. N. Zorya, the U.S.S.R. assistant chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. Forced labour in Yugoslavia, Poland, France, Greece, Czechoslovakia and the temporarily occupied parts of the Soviet Union, the mass herding of people to Germany, constituted a deliberate system.

How did those unfortunate people live? Goring's "Green File" contained the assumption that "the problem of payment would be reduced to the question of providing the workers with food".^^2^^ "Memo for the Treatment of Foreign Civilian Laborers in the Reich" emphasised that German labour legislation did not apply to "Eastern women domestic workers": "No claim to leisure time is given. Eastern women domestic workers may leave the house-

~^^1^^ Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Vol. VIII, Nuremberg, 1947, p. 131.

~^^2^^ Ibid., p. 138.

hold only when on duty connected with the needs of the household.... Visiting the theatres, restaurants, cinemas and similar. . .

institutions is forbidden___ Eastern female

domestic workers are enlisted for an indefinite time.. .. Clothing as a rule cannot be supplied,"^^1^^ and so on and so forth. The main sense of such an attitude to human beings is the absence of any impassable boundary between the slave system and capitalist exploitation, the possibility of the revival and intensification of slave labour under the private property system in order sometimes to replace expensive hired labour.

Essentially the same system is preserved in a number of colonies and dependencies. John Gunther, author of Inside Africa, writes that "the worst thing about Portuguese Africa is forced labour; the Portuguese authorities admit that it exists, say that it is necessary and even a 'good thing' for its victims and condone it. ... It is not quite---but almost---a form of slavery. The man becomes a chattel.''^^2^^

Jean-Pierre Goffings writes in "La mystification du `Citoyen' portugais d'outre---mer. L'exemple du Mozambique":

``There is, however, at least one difference between Mozambique and the home provinces of Portugal. More than 99 per cent of the inhabitants of Mozambique are not considered as citizens. This group of non-citizens comprises (besides some 5,000 other persons) the six million Blacks in Mozambique. The natives of Mozambique who do not qualify as citizens

are legally defined as `Indigenas'. They are subject to a complex set of legal and administrative controls known by the name of ' Indigenato'. This confers on them a status which differs radically in spirit and content from that of citizen. `Indigenato' is based on the idea that Africans are not yet ready to become citizens of glorious Portugal culturally, linguistically or intellectually.''^^1^^

Not only the Portuguese colonies suffer this tragic fate. The "coloured people" in Rhodesia and the Republic of South Africa, many peoples in Latin America and Asia are groaning under the heel of foreign exploitation. And what can we say of the less developed countries in the capitalist system when the most powerful imperialist state, the U.S.A., is still unable to settle the question of civil rights for 10 per cent of the population.

The product of labour assimilated by the capitalist increases his might. What is produced by the worker multiplies the power dominating and enslaving him. The product of labour, the thing created by the hands of man, begins to rule over man: "the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien objective world becomes which he creates over-against himself,"^^2^^ and the poorer he himself becomes, materially and spiritually.

Lenin reckoned the relation of the capitalist's profit to the proletarian's wages from the results of an investigation of Russia's factories and works in 1908. The number of workers

i Remarques Africaines, No. 340, July 20, 1969,

^P~^^2^^ K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 66.

~^^1^^ Ibid., p. 152.

~^^2^^ John Gunther, Inside Africa, London, p. 574.

at the time was 2.25 million, and their wages totalled 555.7 million rubles a year. The average wage was about 246 rubles, or 20 rubles 50 kopeks a month.

The profits of the capitalist amounted to 568.7 million rubles a year. Thus, each worker brought the capitalist 252 rubles a year, i.e., more than he received himself (246 rubles). "It follows," Lenin wrote, "that the worker works the lesser part of the day for himself and the greater part of it for the capitalist.''^^1^^

Still sharper contrasts are observed today. Whereas in the middle of the 19th century the U.S. worker worked about three-fifths of the time for himself, and two-fifths for the capitalist, he now works two-thirds of the time to enrich the capitalist and only one-third for himself. While creating a meagre basis for his own welfare, the proletarian at the same time creates in the best of cases an equal (but as a rule greater) economic basis for his own exploitation.

The fiction of "people's capitalism" spread by bourgeois ideologists is an effort to depict the small shareholder as a co-participant in capitalist property, which, it alleges, is oecoming nationalised. But whose position is strengthened by the so-called "dispersal of capital", "hand-outs" of shares, property ``diffusion'', etc.? Only the position of the capitalist. The sale of shares is an excellent way of squeezing out of the workers a part of their wages which the capitalist could not lay his hands on in any other way. Experience of a number of years shows that the inflow of contributions by small

shareholders mainly strengthens capital against labour.

In spite of efforts to prove the contrary, "social partnership" continues as in the past to guarantee "some people the cheese and others the holes in the cheese". The capitalist partner can cut wages, or throw the worker-partner out on the street, even if the latter has a few shares in the enterprise, i.e., he maintains his position as a representative of the ruling and exploiting class. The income which the worker receives as a shareholder brings only a quantitative change in his position. It is not high enough to provide the basic source of subsistence.^^1^^ The lot of the worker continues to be dull daily work for the capitalist. The worker remains a proletarian to whom the class of capitalists, by no means guided by altruistic considerations, returns only a portion of his, the worker's, own unpaid work. If the capitalist makes up his mind to do that, it is because it is profitable for him. By admitting the proletarian to share with him, he only emphasises the immense gulf that separates the "social partners". Alienation remains an unalterable fact and is even intensified.^^2^^ This leads to exclusion

~^^1^^ The average value of workers' snares in the U.S.A. is not higher than $ 1,000, and the usual dividend from such a share is about $ 40 annually (Victor Perlo, The Empire of High Finance, New York, 1957).

2 "What the abundance of these small depositors signifies is not the decentralisation of big capital but the strengthening of the power of big capital, which is able to dispose of even the smallest mites in the 'people`s' savings" (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 96).

One-fifth of American families in the lowest income brackets received 4.9 per cent of the national income

~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 18, p. 257.

of the workers from the production management and to their alienated attitude to the business of the enterprise.

Marx saw the constant alienation of the labour product, of the basic results, the coagulation of human activity, as the transformation of man's very activity into a process not belonging to him, into uninterrupted self-- alienation of the labour process. "The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it.''^^1^^ Not belonging to the worker, but to the capitalist, the worker's activity ceases to be his self-activity, "it is the loss of his self".^^2^^

in 1953, and 4.5 per cent in 1960. The share of the richest one-fifth of families increased from 44.7 to 45.7 per cent.

There is a continual increase in the share of 1 per cent of the U.S. population consisting of persons with an income of $ 60,000 or more (in 1950 they held 76 per cent of shares) in personal fortunes: 23.3 per cent in 1945, 24.2 per cent in 1953, 26 per cent in 1956, and 28 per cent in 1961. The share of 99 per cent oT the population with low and average incomes is falling,

In his book The Rich and the Super-Rich. A Study in the Power of Money Today, Ferdinand Lundberg analyses the figures on the incomes of the population:

``Owing to the very great incomes received by 1 per cent and less of the population, mostly from investments, the actual participation of some 90 per cent of the population in `real' income takes place at levels ranging; far below the stated average of $ 2,260 per person.''

~^^1^^ K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 69.

^^2^^ Ibid.

That is why the exploiter system objectively cultivates an attitude to work as to an obligation which is alien to and unworthy of man. Aversion to work for the exploiter is sometimes transferred to all work in general. Moral alienation of the worker from his work becomes the other side of the material alienation of the process and product of labour.

Productive life, Marx says, is a special kind of life-activity peculiar to the human race: it is the specific life of man as a social being. Alienation of labour therefore means alienation of the specific life, the social principle, and its compulsory nature makes the truly human form of life-activity a means of maintaining physical existence. Exploitation lays man waste, makes him alien to his own essence, to labour. Man's life-activity, his labour, loses all independent meaning and value if it does not hold out a directly utilitarian result. Thereby man's dependence mainly on his physical (animal by origin) requirements is asserted. In substance, "living on credit", which has become a mass phenomenon in the Western countries and creates an appearance of prosperity for many families, is such a form of dependence. The American family, for instance, is threatened with ruin if the payments for goods bought on credit exceed 12 per cent of its income after taxes. And yet the average family, according to government figures of early sixties, spends 18 per cent of its net income every month on payments for goods bought on credit. The disease is driven more and more inside and becomes chronic. Not to speak of the unemployed and their families, millions of Americans suffer from economic instability, uncertainty of the

future, fear of losing the goods they are using before they have even become their owners. In terms of social purpose, their work in such circumstances can only be a means of subsistence. And it can fulfil that modest function only by serving as a means of enriching the capitalist, that is, indirectly. While creating wealth for capitalist society, the proletarian strengthens the force that oppresses him by making use of and at the same time aggravating his poverty.

Since the October Revolution, and especially in the postwar period, notable changes have taken place in the domestic life of the developed capitalist countries. The example of peoples who have taken the socialist road has been exerting mounting pressure on public opinion and the consciousness of the workers. The threat of complete moral and political failure compels the monopoly bourgeoisie to seek means of creating the appearance that the burden of exploitation is being alleviated. A certain rise in the material well-being of some sectors of workers is usually presented by monopolist propaganda as a ``refutation'' of Marx's theory of the exploitation and impoverishment of the working class.

The only real argument for those who support that opinion is perhaps the hackneyed statement that the conditions of capitalist production in the 1960s are not what they were a hundred years ago when Karl Marx investigated them. One result of the contemporary scientific and technological revolution and the application of its latest achievements is a certain intellectualisation of labour and the fact that the object of exploitation in our times is

not only and not so much the physical as the intellectual powers of the worker. Having discovered this new means of making profits, capitalism can exist without cutting down consumption of the products which satisfy the physical and most elementary cultural needs, and even allowing them to grow. Our opponents are right only in the sense that phenomena of this kind could not be massive at the time when Marx created his theory. But do they refute the substance of that theory?

When speaking of the definite growth in the real wages of a number of categories of workers in the developed capitalist countries, one must bear in mind that the concessions made by the monopolies to the working people are more than compensated for by the considerably faster growth of massive profits due to the sharp intensification of labour, the introduction of new technologies, etc. From 1960 to 1966, the after-tax profits of the U.S. corporations rose by 80.5 per cent, whereas the average nominal wages of the workers in the manufacturing industries increased by less than 28 per cent and real wages only by 11.5 per cent. In France, the real weekly wage of one employee increased by 30 francs from 1958 to 1967, while the "incremental value" produced by each worker was 220 francs greater. In these two countries, the incomes---and what incomes!--- of the capitalists have been increasing seven times faster than those of the proletarians.

The ``reorientation'' of exploitation, which formerly exhausted the body, towards exhaustion of the nervous system, which is less perceptible to the proletarian but not less productive

5-1976

for the exploiter, towards limiting not the physical but the intellectual and cultural development of the exploited---while there are no means of measuring quantitatively the degree to which social requirements are satisfied--- allows bourgeois writers to compare the physical volume of consumption in the advanced capitalist countries with that of some socialist lands and wax eloquent on the alleged possibilities which capitalism provides for raising living standards. This social demagogy diverts the attention of a large portion of the population in the capitalist countries from the workers' relatively growing social and cultural underconsumption. It covers up the increasing lag in the development of the personality of each in comparison with the possibilities already afforded by production. That is all the apologists of capitalism can achieve in their assault on Marx's teaching.

``Man doth not live by bread alone," is an old saying that still sounds apt today. Besides a definite level of material security, the present degree of development of the productive forces assumes that the production worker also has a high standard of culture and technology. The requirements whose satisfaction was hindered by capitalism a hundred years ago and those on the non-satisfaction of which it is growing rich today differ in origin, form, and object, but they are of equal importance for the development of the personality if it is to maintain its present cultural and historical level. Changes in the forms and objectives of exploitation in no way shake the Marxist concept of alienation of labour, of exploitation; on the contrary, they bring new facts to support it.

Man is generally not fully conscious of all his needs. But the fact that many of them remain unsatisfied is sometimes reflected in apparently inexplicable phenomena. For instance, the capitalist countries with the highest standards of living also lead in the number of suicides. Why is that? Why do more people commit suicide in countries where, at first sight, the working people have most of what capitalism can give?

There is no denying that each individual instance of such a dramatic ending has its own particular explanation. But what are the social causes? "The true stimulus of human life," writes the great Soviet pedagogue Anton Makarenko (1888-1939), "is the joy of tomorrow.''^^1^^ But we know that the achievement of material wealth is the limit beyond which under private ownership creative quests, attempts to assert one's personality and thought of the purpose and meaning of life appear useless and empty. When a man has freed himself from daily anxiety about his bread, has ensured his subsistence as a well-to-do " average physical individual", he has already reached his ceiling and finds himself deprived of "the joy of tomorrow" precisely when he has ensured favourable conditions for the most intensive quests and reflections. Not having the opportunity or the ability "persistently to transform the simplest kinds of joy into the most complex and humanly significant",^^2^^ the

~^^1^^ A. S. Makarenko, Pedagogicheskiye Sochineniya (Pedagogical Works), R.S.F.S.R. Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, 1948, p. 179.

~^^2^^ Ibid.

individual is unable to ensure for himself adequate living conditions as a personality. In the world of capitalist exploitation, the individual is not his own master, and when he attains material prosperity, the roads to the future open to him under that system of social relations peter out and he can go no farther.

This is the origin of the dramatic situations, typical, though not always comprehensible to their actors, which lead to suicide. It must be repeated that it is not a matter of individual, but of social motives. They are rooted, in our opinion, in the hopeless condition of the personality and the impossibility of real and comprehensive realisation of its social potentialities, in the absence of prospects for developing creative individual freedom under capitalism.

``The immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labour, from his life-activity, from his species being," Marx asserts, "is the estrangement of man from man. If a man is confronted by himself, he is confronted by the other man. What applies to a man's relation to his work, to the product of his labour and to himself, also holds of a man's relation to the other man, and to the other man's labour and the object of labour.''^^1^^

It may at first appear that the fact of alienation of labour affects only the workers, that the exploiters who appropriate the product thus enrich themselves as personalities and have possibilities for self-improvement. But the

dialectics of the process make the basis of the propertied classes' prosperity---alienation of labour---at the same time a force which disfigures and dehumanises them.

The position of the slaveholder, the feudal lord, or the capitalist, which gives them material and spiritual values and ensures the satisfaction of all their desires, precludes, or at least does not stimulate their personal participation in labour. Moreover, there spontaneously appears a scornful attitude to labour as the lot of the needy and unprovided-for. A ``strong'' personality does not work, or else directs the labour of the weak. Appropriation without labour produces aberrations in the psyche of the exploiter and breeds in him aversion for this truly human lifeactivity.

If the proletarians, who are opposed to working for exploiters, do all the same apply their human nature to practical purposes by producing useful objects, the bourgeois appear mainly in the shameful role of consumers of the fruits of other people's labour. In the strict sense of the word, that is not human, but animal activity, even though it emerged on the basis of social production and has acquired a definite social form. This is clearly an example of man's "loss of his self". "Here the worker stands higher than the capitalist from the very start inasmuch as the latter has his roots in this process of alienation and finds complete satisfaction in it, whereas the worker, its victim, revolts against it from the very outset and sees it as a process of enslavement.''^^1^^

~^^1^^ Arkhiv Marxa-Engelsa (Marx-Engels Archives), t. II (VII), Moscow, 1933, p. 34.

~^^1^^ K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, pp. 72-73.

Since the capitalist is obliged to fulfil the function of overseer and manager of the production process, his activity acquires a certain specific content, but here the process of labour itself is only a means of increasing value. "The selfexpansion of the value of capital, the creation of surplus value is consequently the determinant, dominating and all-absorbing aim of the capitalist, the absolute aim and content of his activity, in reality only the rationalised objective and striving of a hoarder of treasure, the paltry and abstract content which compels the capitalist, on the other hand, to be a slave to capitalist relations in the same way as the workers, but the other way round, at the opposite pole.''^^1^^ The capitalist is also deprived of the freedom to express his creative human potentialities.

Such in brief is the content of the Marxist understanding of the alienation of labour, which the founder of scientific communism maintained to the end of his life. We cannot explain Marx's use of the category of alienation of labour simply by his fascination by Hegel and Feuerbach in his youth, since we know that the mature Marx of 1863-1865 expounded this category in detail, drawing on enormous experience and theoretical material, in the rough draft of Capital.

In this work Marx opposed the idea that the capacity of materialised labour to be transformed into capital, "i.e., to turn the means of production into means of mastery over living labour and its exploitation",^^2^^ is inherent

in things as such, as use values, as means of production. Capital is a "definite relation of production, a definite social relation into which the owners of the conditions of production enter with living capacity for labour in the production process.... In reality, the capitalist's mastery over the worker is only the mastery over the conditions of labour which have become independent of the worker (and which, besides the objective conditions of the production process, the means of production, include also the objective conditions for the preservation and effectiveness of labour power, i.e., means of subsistence).... The functions fulfilled by the capitalist are the functions of capital itself, only consciously and wilfully carried out, the functions of value increasing its value by absorbing living labour. The capitalist operates "only as personified capital, capital operates as a person, just as the worker operates only as personified labour, which for him is only suffering and strain, but which belongs to the capitalist as a substance creating and multiplying wealth, as it is in reality, as an element incorporated in capital in the production process, a living and variable factor of it. The capitalist's mastery over the worker is therefore the mastery of thing over man, of dead labour over living labour, of the product over the producer, since in reality commodities, which become the means of mastery over the workers (but only as a means of mastery for capital itself), are only the result of the production process, its products.... Considered historically, this transformation is a necessary stage for achieving by force, at the expense of the majority, the creation of wealth as such, i.e., the

~^^1^^ Ibid.

~^^2^^ Marx-Engels Archives, p. 31.

creation of unlimited productive forces of social labour, which alone can form the material basis for free human society. It is necessary to go through this contradictory form in exactly the same way as man in his religious consciousness must first oppose his spiritual forces to himself as independent forces. It is the process of alienation of his own labour."^l ". . . the necessary material conditions for realising labour are alienated from the labourer himself and act... as fetishes endowed with their own will and their own soul,... commodities act as

purchasers of people----It is not the worker

that purchases the means of subsistence and the means of production, but the means of subsistence purchase the worker in order to associate him with the means of production."² "... 'the social' and so on in the worker's labour is opposed not only 'in imagination', but also 'in fact', not only as something alien, but as something hostile and opposite, as materialised and personified in capital.''^^3^^

In his economic manuscripts of 1857-1858, Marx analyses the forms of dependence, the process of the evolution and elimination of alienation of labour.

1. "Relations of personal dependence (at the beginning absolutely primitive)---such are the first forms of society, under which man's productivity develops only inconsiderably in volume and in isolated points.''^^4^^ The reference is to the slave system and the serf system, in

which alienation of labour was linked with alienation of the worker's personality.

2. "Personal independence, based on material dependence,---such is the second major form, under which, for the first time, a system of general social exchange, universal relations, over-all requirements and universal capacities was created.''^^1^^ This is a peculiarity of capitalist society. "The worker leaves the capitalist to whom he hires himself whenever he likes, and the capitalist discharges him whenever he thinks fit, as soon as he no longer gets any profit out of him, or not the anticipated profit. But the worker, whose sole source of livelihood is the sale of his labour power, cannot leave the whole class of purchasers, that is, the capitalist class, without renouncing his existence. He belongs not to this or that capitalist but to the capitalist class, and, moreover, it is his business to dispose of himself, that is, to find a purchaser within this capitalist class.''^^2^^

~^^1^^ Ibid.

~^^2^^ K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Moscow, 1962, Vol. I, p. 83.

Worthy of note are the answers given by French workers to the question: "What, in your opinion, is a worker?"---Somebody who works... Somebody who is squeezed dry... Heaven knows... An unlucky fool. .. A miserable nonentity.. . A pariah. . . A poor imbecile. ...

Here is how a fifty-year-old French proletarian expressed his understanding of his own situation: "A worker? He's a modern slave; like his remote ancestor, he's inseverably tied to his work; like him who works not for humanity, but for the minority who have authority and riches in their hands. He thinks he is free because he can change his exploiter. But, if he expresses his dissatisfaction, he is beaten with a police truncheon and thrown into prison just as slaves in ancient

~^^1^^ Ibid., pp. 32-34.

~^^2^^ Ibid., pp. 58-60.

~^^3^^ Ibid., p. 98.

~^^4^^ Ibid., Vol. IV, p.

3. "The free personality, based on universal development of individuals and their subordination to collective social production as their social property, such is the third stage. The second stage provides the conditions for the third",^^1^^ which begins with socialism.

Thus we see outlined Marx's absolutely clear position on the question of the connections between the problems of alienation of labour and the emancipation of the personality.

Can one speak of social freedom when the bulk of the product is confiscated in favour of non-workers and is a means of intensifying the dependence of the worker on the capitalist?

Can one consider as free a man whose activity belongs to somebody else? Is it a sign of free fulfilment of a worker's capacities that his specific human capacity for labour is taken away from him?

Is a man free when he regards his work as a burden and feels free only at home, among his family, at leisure, etc.?

Is a man free if he is slavishly dependent on the product he himself produces?

Marx's penetrating analysis permits only a negative answer to all these questions. "The whole character of a species---its species character---is contained in the character of its lifeactivity; and free, conscious activity is man's

species character,"^^1^^ Marx wrote in 1844. We cannot speak of freedom when precisely that activity is alienated from the individual and opposed to him as a force hostile to him. "No matter how much the social link of individuals with one another, which has come to be an independent force ruling over individuals, is pictured as a force of nature, chance, or in any other form, it is the necessary result of the fact that the point of departure is not a free social individual.''^^2^^ "The alienation and independence in which this link still exists in relation to the personality prove only that they are still in the process of creating the conditions for their social life and have not begun that life on the basis of those conditions.''^^3^^

Even the high development of science ( cognition of necessity), even the enormous development of the productive forces and the high level of labour productivity achieved in a number of capitalist countries do not ensure social freedom. The most important condition for its

~^^1^^ K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 71.

``As we see," writes the Soviet philosopher ₍Y. Davydov in connection with these words of Marx, "in the present case it is a matter not of a man's freedom as of `that' concrete individual, but of the freedom of a man as 'representative of the species', as a representative of society as a whole. It is a certain concretisatipn of the concept of freedom from the standpoint of its content. And this content is revealed as social, as labour, which is the substance, the deepest essence, the most fundamental basis of human freedom." (Y. N. Davydov, Trud i svoboda [Labour and Freedom], Moscow, 1962, p. 29.)

~^^2^^ Marx-Engels Archives, t. IV, p. 170.

^^3^^ Ibid., p. 96.

Rome were beaten with sticks and incarcerated in solitary confinement. He thinks he will be defended by the system of laws and complicated but none too clear decrees. In reality, the worker is caught in a web which ties him still tighter to his boss. ... A worker is only a slave." (France Observateur, 30 juin 1960, p. 13.) ~^^1^^ Marx-Engels Archives, t. IV, pp. 88-90.

conversion from a possibility into reality is the removal of alienation of labour, in the first place that economic component of alienation which is private ownership of the instruments and means (and hence the product) of production, and their transfer to the immediate producers personified by the state of the working class or socialist co-operatives. That is the basic content of the proletarian revolution, the period of transition from socialism to communism in the first stage of freedom. Simultaneously the transition to planned economic management has as its consequence that the social connections are coming more and more under the control of the associated workers, gradually losing their ``mystic'', incomprehensibly fatal character.

The product now belongs to those who produce it. It has ceased to be an instrument of enslavement of man by man and directly strengthens man's mastery over nature. The time is receding into the past when the product appeared "only as objectified, sensuous, visual, and therefore an indubitable expression of my self-loss and my impotence".ⁱ On the contrary the mode of appropriation and consumption is a visual demonstration of the workers' omnipotence.

Labour becomes work for oneself. It is transformed from compulsory into voluntary, conscious work, developing into cognised necessity, the first vital requirement of free people.

The universal obligation to work means that all must engage in socially useful activity,

that there cannot be a man not engaged in the one thing that makes him a man---work.

Alienation of man from man disappears. In opposition to the egoistic morality of private ownership, which warrants the saying: "man is to man a wolf", there is assertion of the principle which has now become part of the moral code of the builders of communism: "Collectivism and comradely mutual assistance: one for all and all for one; humane relations and mutual respect between individuals ---man is to man a friend, comrade and brother.''^^1^^

With the cessation of alienation of the material results and the process of activity begins the elimination of all other expressions of alienation of labour. The survivals of the former adverse attitude to labour, the psychology of the man deprived of freedom, parasitism, the private-owner, egoistic strivings and other vestiges do not die away automatically. They make themselves felt also after the destruction of the objective conditions which gave birth to them, and are a serious hindrance to socialist and communist construction. The Party fights all these echoes of labour alienation and considers this fight one of the most important conditions for the emergence of communist society.

It would be one-sided to consider, as some sociologists do, that the radical and only cause of labour alienation is division of labour, pro-

~^^1^^ Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, Abt. 1, Bd. 3, MarxEngels Verlag, Berlin, 1932, S. 547.

~^^1^^ The Road to Communism, p. 566.

gressive specialisation, man's restriction to a narrow sphere of professional activity, and the impossibility, because of this, for an individual to assimilate and master the universal wealth of social practice. If this is the way things are viewed, the problem of overcoming labour alienation is reduced to the problem of removing the limitations to the individual's active potentialities and providing conditions for his activity to reproduce the whole content of what is elaborated by society as a whole over a long period of historical development.

Why is it that the elimination of labour alienation (and without it there can be no question of any other alienation) cannot be made dependent on overcoming division of labour?

First, because division of labour, beginning with its simplest forms (division according to sex and age in the primitive commune) and ending with the inevitable differentiation between productive and all other functions in developed communist society, is a feature of the social productive forces and a necessary premise for effective organisation and uninterrupted growth of social labour productivity. The existence of various specialised branches is a changing but indispensable attribute of modern social economy, which has long ceased to be a natural economy.^^1^^

Secondly, if division of labour is considered as a social relation in regard to the activity of social groups and individuals, here too, it does not always involve alienation of labour. The latter did not exist, for example, in the tribal commune, when the women ran the household and engaged in agriculture and the men hunted and tended the cattle. There will be none under communism either, although then too society will be unthinkable without more or less clearly defined professional groups which will be constantly exchanging professional activity.

Labour alienation is not an eternal companion of division of labour; it is connected with only one form of it---the division of society into antagonistic classes. Only the position of the monopoly private owner of the means of production (and under the slave system of the worker's person too) allows the representative of the ruling class to alienate to his benefit, as Pushkin wrote, "labour, property and time", that is, the life-activity of any worker in the form of the labour process, in which he utilises for production means and objects of labour belonging to others. It is from this fact that one must draw the conclusion on social slavery as a system; it is the elimination of this situation that will signify the beginning of the leap to the reign of freedom.

Linking social emancipation with the elimination of alienation, it would not be right to make the latter dependent on the elimination of division of labour, which is supposedly possible only under communism. Such a stand obscures the problem of elimination of private ownership of the means of production, of ex-

~^^1^^ "The division of labour as the aggregate of all the different types of productive activity constitutes the totality of the physical aspects of social labour as labour producing use values. (K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.)

ploitation of other people's labour and of the parasite classes, that is, the problem of the destruction of the material kernel of alienation of labour as understood by Marx.

It is particularly important to note this, because the polemic that has been going on for years with opportunists of all shades requires repeated refutation of one and the same conception, namely the denial, dished up according to all sorts of recipes, of any qualitative specific character of socialism as the beginning and first phase of communism. Abstract arguments about the elimination of labour alienation in the vague distance of the communist future are not enough. In the struggle against bourgeois ideology and opportunism, it is necessary to show concretely the concrete process of eliminating labour alienation and the corresponding emancipation of the working people's creative activity at the present stage of socialist and communist construction.

Far be it for us to think that maximum freedom is achieved under socialism. To hold such a view would be to place limits on development. The emancipation process is a continuous one. In the economic field, it depends directly on the course of socialisation of production, and not only on the assertion and development of public socialist ownership of the means and objects of labour in its two forms--- by the nation and by groups---but also on the convergence of these two forms, on the establishment of absolutely identical relations of all workers to the means of production, and on the methods and speed of development into a classless society. To overcome completely both the social

alienation of labour and its consequences it is necessary to eliminate all other causes hindering the transformation of labour into free activity. In particular it is a matter of purely technical phenomena which, regardless of the type of social system, make the production process unattractive: the fact that it is backbreaking, wearisome, monotonous, accompanied by unpleasant sensations of cold, heat, sharp changes in temperature, dampness, noise, pungent smells, and so on; briefly all that, to use the word of a well-known German Marxist philosopher, Georg Klaus, produces "technical alienation" and acts as a kind of last-ditch ally of social alienation. This is perhaps the only material factor which may still in some way delay the formation of the communist attitude to labour under socialism. Its disappearance is predetermined by the development of largescale socialist engineering, especially in the automation phase when, as Marx said, "labour appears not so much as something enclosed in production, but as something in which man is supervisor and regulator of the production process".^^1^^

An inevitable concomitant of the progress of freedom is the struggle against moral alienation from labour, which outlives its economic roots, and against the adverse attitude to labour activity inherited from the exploitation system. And this is only part, and not the biggest part, of the problem of emancipation of labour.

~^^1^^ Karl Marx, "Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Dkonomie (Rohentwurf), 1857-1858", Moskau, 1939, S. 592.

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It is true that the degree of emancipation depends on the degree of development. But it must not be anticipated that in communist society man will be able to absorb all the wealth of social practice. To make that a condition for man's versatility and freedom would raise doubts concerning one and the other. A worker will not attain all-round development because he has mastered all kinds of work, which not even the greatest genius could do, but because he has mastered all aspects of labour.

This means that thanks to modern technique and technology everybody will be able to operate with success:

both in the field of physical and of brain work, or more correctly, in work harmoniously combining both elements;

both in an executive and in managing and organising capacity;

both in mechanical (routine) processes and increasingly creative ones;

both in the material and in the spiritual fields.

The universal basic specifics (``parameters'') of labour listed above will cease to be typical of the activity of the various social or professional groups---and in this sense social division of labour will disappear---they will be inherent in the individual labour of any worker, who will naturally be required to master two or three professions. But will that be absolute elimination of division of labour?

Not in the sense of organisation of the technological process on a social scale, but naturally, in a certain conventional sense, in individual activity. Belonging to several profes-

sional groups and being able to do everything in each, in the sense of having mastered all aspects of a concrete form of activity, man will be able to alternate work, which is possible only on the basis of its developed technical division, a condition which has nothing to do with the fantastic ideas of some magic ability of the future worker to produce literally all concrete kinds of material and spiritual values.

The formula, "Man has one-sided development and is therefore alienated", is incorrect. Besides, there are different kinds of onesidedness. The ``one-sidedness'' of the bourgeois who lives at the expense of the ``one-sidedness'' of the proletarian worker is one thing. Quite another thing is a certain one-sidedness of people of various professions subject under socialism to the principle of universal labour. These are qualitatively incomparable things. It would be objectivistic to measure them both with the same yardstick of "division of labour" without emphasising the compelling necessity to eliminate the first ``one-sidedness'', without which there can be no question of social freedom and all-round development of the personality, including elimination of professional onesidedness.

The Marxist stand on this point is clear. The early Marx can be variously interpreted, but that does not change the matter. There is the mature Marx, there are the works of Engels and of Lenin, and finally there is the practice of socialist and communist construction, the collective experience of one-third of the earth's population. In practice division of labour in general is seldom spoken of. In the transition from capitalism to communism,

people are interested in a more concrete question: elimination of the "division of labour" between the exploiters and the exploited, the most formidable obstacle to social freedom. Elimination of alienated labour as such, which is possible to its full extent only in a society divided into those who work and those who live on the work of others.

III. Spiritual and Political

Premises of Labour's Transformation

into Free Self-Activity

Social freedom necessarily presupposes the elimination of alienation of labour. But before that, it is necessary to achieve such a level of the productive forces, such a degree of social development that alienation of labour ceases to be a necessary condition for progress and becomes a brake on further development. This takes place simultaneously with the formation of the historic force which has the mission of doing away with exploitation, as well as a vital interest in doing so. This force is the proletariat.

As the historic task arises from the changing conditions of social life, in order to attain its fulfilment it must penetrate to the consciousness of representatives of the class capable of carrying out this revolution by virtue of its objective position in society and its subjective qualities. Hence there must be knowledge of necessity, and this knowledge must be shared by the proletarian masses. The first---the creation of scientific socialism---is inseparable from the second---the introduction of socialism into the working-class movement.

This is followed by the transition of cognised necessity into reality. Having realised the necessity of capitalism being destroyed and a new

society being built, the revolutionary proletarian, made socially unfree by the rule of exploiter social relations, acquires relative freedom, since he begins to fight the system of social slavery with knowledge of the facts. The epoch of socialist revolution begins, and it ushers in the era of progressive development of freedom.

In the process of overcoming alienation of the means, objects and products of labour, labour becomes immediately social. Universally obligatory labour and the principle: "He who does not work, neither shall he eat" are proclaimed. A preparatory step to the socialisation of labour may be the introduction of workers' control over production while it is still in private hands. Further, enterprises may be transformed into state-private ones, so that labour begins to divide into two parts: directly social (for society and for oneself) and private (for the capitalist). After the nationalisation or buying up of the private owner's share of the capital, this residue of private labour also disappears. In the state sector, labour is socialised on a nation-wide scale; in the cooperative (collective-farm) sector, it acts as immediately social within the framework of the given collective owning the instruments and means of production.

The product of labour becomes unalienated, it ceases to be a means of exploitation and is transformed into the property of its collective producer, the working class or the members of the agricultural co-operative. Labour power ceases to be a commodity, its sale by the workers or peasants to the owner of the means of production loses all sense, since they themselves are these owners. A corresponding change

occurs in the nature of relations between individual workers and the state or the collective to which they belong. Man rightly considers himself as sharing in the production process and in ownership of all the material and spiritual values which society has at its disposal. Thus the most important condition for social freedom is achieved.

The impossibility of eliminating alienation of labour under the rule of private-property relations was proved by Marx. But does alienation in all its four forms immediately disappear?^^1^^

In economic and production relations, the elimination of alienation of labour, the return to the workers of the material results and the very process of their activity is a condition and result of the socialist transformation of production. It is a slower process to weed out distorted ideas imposed by alienation in the sphere of consciousness, to bring man to participate willingly in the labour process, and to overcome the oppressive prejudices according to which work is a regrettable necessity and a heavy burden imposed by God in punishment for sin. The communist principle on this question is known to the whole world: a hostile attitude to labour stems not from the inherent essence of labour in general, but from the historically determined and transient fact of its exploitation, and it must sooner or later share its fate.

The universal obligation of labour proclaimed by the proletarian revolutions is its social

' Estrangement of the product, estrangement of activity, estranged attitude of the worker to his activity (self-estrangement), and mutual estrangement of people.

recognition as the essential form of human life-activity, in relation to which man previously stood in various forms of alienation. There begins the process of the mass transformation of people, their active mastery of the values created by previous generations. The changing of the slave of capital into a man who understands labour as his inalienable attribute constitutes the general meaning of the socialist revolution, which opens the real history of mankind.

The universal obligation to work is not understood by all people in the same way. The working people, who are the overwhelming majority of the population, see it as the legalisation of their position as citizens with full rights, all-round developed personalities, and as the necessity to make all people conscious workers of socialist society. The obligation to work corresponds to the nature of their lifeactivity. Their now unalienated labour is free by virtue of both the new economic laws and the habit of labour which determines the moral and political make-up of the workers and peasants.

There is a different attitude to the principle: "He who does not work, neither shall he eat" on the part of the former bourgeois, landowners and bourgeois intellectuals, big farmers, declasse elements, and so on. The implementation of this principle causes a complete break-up of their mode of life, they lose their unearned incomes and are obliged to partake in useful activity under the control of the working people. It is therefore naive to expect that, in solving these problems, working-class rule can dispense with coercive measures. Not for nothing did Lenin consider education in the

new labour discipline during the transition period a form of the class struggle.

If, after the revolution, the new authority had to deal only with the conscious working class, the universal obligation to work would have no meaning. Sufficient in this respect would be the right to work, that is, the provision of real possibilities to apply one's intellectual and physical capacities in socialised production. But, in reality, the revolution finds itself faced with not only a considerable number of representatives of the parasite sections of society, but also with a certain number of working people who have been led astray by bourgeois society and have the privateproperty psychology. The right to work is not sufficient, since it presupposes voluntary participation in work. But what can be done if, for a certain time, those who have been used to living on others do not have such an attitude to work?

In socialist society, which did not develop on its own foundation, but, on the contrary, "just... emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges",^^1^^ it is inevitable that there will be a combination of the right to work with the obligation to work for a long period.

Does this contain a contradiction? Yes, it does, since it is a question of unity of two apparently mutually incompatible principles. For the man who is accustomed to work, the obligation to work does not exist; the craving

~^^1^^ Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 23.

for activity has become for him an inherent moral quality, a habit, a bidding of the soul, or to use Kant's term, an imperative. Such a man needs only the right to work. Labour is something external, an obligation, for him who either does not work or worked at will, or who has simply not developed a firm habit of work. Besides the right, as the possibility of manifesting his abilities, this man needs compulsion as an external necessity, as a social demand. Thus, in the transition period, and with the relevant corrections under socialism, labour appears as a unity of opposites, a right and an obligation.

Compulsion is frequently regarded ( especially in bourgeois writings) as the direct opposite of freedom, as something incompatible with the idea of free activity. The frank and sincere declarations by Communists that the dictatorship of the proletariat, being an instrument for convincing and leading the working masses in building socialist society, is at the same time revolutionary coercion as regards the exploiter minority and the enemies of the working class, are distorted to make them mean complete suppression of all freedoms and are used by the bourgeoisie to liken communism to totalitarianism, fascism, and so on.

Let us leave this question aside for a moment and raise another one. It has been proved that the worker whose labour is alienated cannot enjoy complete freedom. But is the capitalist who appropriates that labour free?

``Man is a species being," we read in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, "not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species as his object (his own as well as

those of other things) but---and this is only another way of expressing it---but also because he treats himself as the actual living species, because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being.

``The whole character of a species---its species character---is contained in the character of its life-activity; and free, conscious activity is man's species character.

``It is just in the working-up of the objective world, therefore, that man first really proves himself to be a species being. This production is his active species life. ... In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species life....

``Similarly, in degrading spontaneous activity, free activity, to a means, estranged labour makes man's species life a means to his physical existence.

``.. . Man's species being, both nature and his spiritual species property" is turned "into a being alien to him, into a means to his individual existence." Estranged labour "estranges man's own body from him, as it does external nature and his spiritual essence, his human being".^^1^^

We know that the bourgeoisie, exalting free enterprise, are by no means inclined to consider themselves as beings who are harmed, deprived of their being, and yet an objective analysis leads to the opposite conclusion: the capitalist, too, is not free, he is also a ``victim'' of alienation of labour, but in a peculiar way.

~^^1^^ K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, pp. 70, 71, 72.

By virtue of his social position, which makes his life-activity one-sided, labourless and parasitic, the capitalist cannot treat "himself as a universal and therefore a free being". He cannot, as a rule, display in free, conscious activity his "species character", he does not possess "active species life". Considering labour merely as a means of sustaining his physical existence, the exploiter, sustaining his physical existence without labour, does not see labour as his essential being, does not carry out his human role of maker and creator of material and spiritual values. The capitalist is not free in face of the spontaneously operating laws of commodity production, he is subject to the objective logic by which his own capital operates, and is alienated from truly human activity, labour. The difference between the worker and the capitalist in this respect is that the worker partakes in the immediate production process and feels alienation of labour mainly as alienation of the product. The capitalist appropriates the product, but very often participates neither spiritually nor physically in the production process, or else he carries out the function, extremely poor in content, of providing capital. This means that the proletarian, sometimes deprived of the minimum means of normal human existence, objectively expresses himself as a man to a far greater extent than the capitalist who lives in plenty but does not work. As a rule, bourgeois philosophy reduces man's being to possession of private property and declares that every act against it is a crime against the freedom of the personality. Thus there appear two mutually exclusive approaches to the problem: for the one, actively asserted

by Marxism, the basis of man's freedom and development is his personal participation in social labour; for the other, advocated in bourgeois philosophy, that basis is private property, and therefore the possibility of exploiting other people's labour. One cannot help recalling the words of Abraham Lincoln (a hundred years ago the president of the United States could be a great democrat!) that mankind never had a good definition of the word freedom, while the American people were in great need of one. "We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for them to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor.... The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty.... Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures ... and all professing to love liberty... .''^^1^^ The time has come, Lincoln said, to call these mutually opposite concepts by their names: freedom and tyranny. The immortal anti-slavery champion would hardly have disagreed with the communist opinion that the present U.S. policy, particularly towards the Negro minority in the country and the disgraceful intervention in the affairs of

~^^1^^ Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln. The War 'Years, New York, Vol. Ill, p. 41.

Vietnam, can be defined only by the second of these words.

To return to the question of freedom and compulsion, we cannot fail to see that the obligation to work proclaimed by the proletarian revolutions is the means of channelling all people into true human activity, the condition for implementing universal freedom. For the working people, participation in labour is nothing new, but the nature of work is tangibly changed for them. As for the parasitic elements, there is a decisive turn in their lives. The expropriation or buying-up of capitalist property in town and country, depriving the former bourgeois of their unearned income, leads to their transformation into workers or peasants. This process is often a painful one and is accompanied by a number of coercive measures. But there are different kinds of coercion.

There is coercion to maintain the exploiter system, counter to the tendency of capitalism's transformation into socialism, in the interests of the exploiting minority. Such coercion is the natural consequence of alienation of labour and is directly opposed to freedom. A different matter is the coercion without which freedom cannot be implemented, coercion aimed at implementing historic necessity and bringing out in people their truly human essence, coercion which is exercised in the interests of the working people, that is, the majority of the population. Not only does such coercion not enter into conflict with freedom, it is a moment in the process of its formation.^^1^^

Of course, for separate individuals and groups who cling to the habits and traditions of the old society, such an approach seems to negate freedom of the personality. But such an opinion is profoundly erroneous for it proceeds from an unscientific understanding of man's social nature. It continues to hold people captive to the ideas generated by alienation of labour in the society of exploiters and does not allow them to realise and feel keenly the achievement of the revolutionary people, to understand correctly the already existing objective conditions for freedom. People may consider that they are unfree not owing to the absence of real conditions for free activity, but as a result of their incorrect ideas of freedom. This naturally applies not to the masses, but to separate individuals. This phenomenon, which illustrates the lagging of consciousness behind being, forces us to consider spiritual problems as well as economic ones.

But this does not mean that social consciousness as a whole must necessarily follow social being also under socialism and communism. The fact that being is reflected in consciousness, the secondary nature of consciousness, by no means predetermines that consciousness must of necessity constantly lag behind being.

The fact is that, while it reflects the mate-

not felt to be inconsistent with the freedom fought for by such men as Milton and Locke, and later by Washington and Lincoln" (John Lewis, Socialism and the Individual, London, 1961, pp. 78-79).

``Only we, only the system of proletarian dictatorship," says W. Gomulka, "can proclaim, head high, the principle of resricted freedom for freedom's sake. For we are working for the fullest freedom of people, for the broadest democracy" (Pravda, June 21, 1963).

~^^1^^ "Every struggle for freedom has required coercion in order to establish and preserve its victories. This is

rial conditions of people's life, consciousness may, because of its relative independence, not only follow definite changes in society, but also anticipate them in theory, scientifically forecast future social forms, outstrip being. The assertion that consciousness always lags behind being overlooks two extremely important points: first, the heterogeneity of social consciousness itself, second, the specific correlation between social being and social consciousness after the socialist revolution.

Social consciousness consists of social psychology and social ideology. Just as in all consciousness there is a complex interaction between the emotional and the rational, social consciousness contains an intertwining of feelings, emotions, habits, and customs on one hand, and views and interests of some class, formulated and organised into a more or less consistent system, on the other. The former constitute the field of social psychology, the latter, that of ideology; both bear a class character.^^1^^

Psychology differs from ideology, in particular, in being less remote from the immediate conditions of people's life, in immediately reflecting and registering in consciousness even insignificant changes in being, and at the same time in preserving longer old antiquated views sometimes fostered by negligible survivals of the past. By its content, it is negligibly active, constantly following being, adapting itself to

~^^1^^ When the tasks of the transition period, the victory of socialism and society's entry into the period of communist construction, have been accomplished, proletarian Marxist ideology becomes the nation-wide ideology. But for a long time there are noticeable differences in the psychology of the working class, the cooperative peasantry and the intelligentsia.

each new phenomenon, confining itself to particularities and rarely rising to generalisations.

Ideology is based on psychology, expresses its main features, not copying, but scientifically generalising the interests of some class. The ideology that expresses the genuine interests of the masses is always linked not only with psychology, but with science too. Ideology is that part of social consciousness which, proceeding from the requirements and material conditions of social life, displays a capacity for scientific foresight of future development, for anticipating social being not in origin (in genesis, it is always secondary), but in content. It reflects not only what already exists, but also that for which there is a basis, but which does not yet exist in reality.

Besides these peculiarities of psychology and ideology, we must also take into account the position of the class to which they belong. It is interesting to note that the ideology of the exploiting class anticipates events and is on a higher level than psychology only in the periods when that class acts as a revolutionary force in the name of the whole society. An example of this is provided by the views of the French philosophers of eighteenth-century enlightenment, who were head and shoulders above many bourgeois thinkers of more recent times. This is explained by the fact that, having become dominant, the class of capitalists is satisfied with the existing system of social being and concentrates all its efforts on guarding and defending the social and political order which is beneficial to it. That is why bourgeois ideology has not only made no attempt to anticipate the

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course of history since the downfall of feudalism, but has been dragging along behind privateproperty psychology. A tangible proof of this is the crisis of bourgeois social science, the devaluation of the ideas of the "free world''.

The Marxist, proletarian ideology is the direct opposite. Being the genuinely scientific expression of the interests of the progressive class which is destined by history to put an end to the exploitation of man by man in any form, it relies on the working-class movement and the achievements of science. Its outstripping of proletarian psychology---which, especially in capitalist society, has admixtures of petty-bourgeois psychology---is permanent. More than that, Marxist political ideology--- historical materialism, economic science, the theory of scientific communism, and so on--- as a rule and on the whole anticipates in its content the conditions of being too. Otherwise long-term planning, based on the objective law of planned (proportional) development of the socialist economy, would be impossible.

This must not of course be understood to mean that under socialism social science cannot at all, in principle, lag behind the requirements of life. Such a conclusion would be factually wrong. Separate branches of science, the solution of certain problems may be retarded for some objective or subjective reasons, but the chief thing is that this retardation applies only in particular cases, similar to bourgeois ideology's anticipation of the conditions of social being. Marxist ideology would not be scientific if it did not anticipate the features of the future, did not give a broad perspective of further

development, as is confirmed by the policy documents of the C.P.S.U.

With regard to social psychology, under socialism it depends both on the conditions of being and to a considerable degree on Marxist ideology. There are substantial differences between the two. Whereas communist ideology holds undivided sway in socialist society (it is practically impossible, for example, to find a man in the U.S.S.R. who professes a coherently formulated system of bourgeois views), there remain private-property survivals in the consciousness of individuals, mainly in the field of social psychology. Social psychology naturally rises to the level of social ideology, never entirely merging with it, but accepting its best features.

To pose the question of evolving communist attitudes to labour on a scientific basis, we must distinguish between the forms and methods of solving it in the fields of ideology and of psychology.

Imagine a man who knows and accepts the basic principles of Marxist theory but has not the right attitude to work. Can such a man be considered free?

Strictly speaking, that question cannot be answered either in the affirmative or in the negative. As a member of a society which has cast off the chains of economic and political oppression and eliminated the material basis for alienation of labour, he is no doubt objectively free. But freedom is a real possibility that can be made use of only with a certain degree of activity on the part of the individual. If the individual still considers labour and the rules of social life under socialism as something