p Convergence as a theoretical concept is nothing basically new, although the ideologues of anti-communism together with the present-day theoreticians of revisionism try to put it over as something in the nature of a great discovery. Actually this theoretical concept is merely a continuation of the revisionist system of opinions of the .Bernsteins, Kautskys and Hilferdings larded with the pseudo-scientific 179 formulas of modern bourgeois philosophers, sociologists and economists.

p The strategic aim of the theory of convergence is to impugn the economic system of socialism, discredit the idea of public socialist ownership of the instruments and means of production and show the superiority of the capitalist system of production and its solid economic foundations as the ultimate and supreme achievement of mankind. To be sure, the apologists say, the system of capitalism has many serious flaws and stands in need of further improvement, but it will achieve this by merging with and eventually absorbing the socialist system in the U.S.S.R. and other socialist countries. This theory is based on the fact that both capitalism and socialism are simply different forms of the modern "industrial society". Therefore, scientific and technological progress, we are told, is bound to lead to socialism gradually losing its class character and merging with the “Aryan” blood of capitalism, growing into it. Such is the basic concept of the ideologues of the theory of convergence.

p The bourgeois and revisionist ideologues misinterpret the economic reforms in the U.S.S.R. and other socialist countries, our search for new, more efficient methods of management based invariably on the principles of Marxism- Leninism. Their line of argument is something like this: seeing that commodity-money relations are being established and profits and material incentives stimulated, the U.S.S.R. is adopting capitalist methods of management and a similarity is now to be observed in the ways of development of the capitalist and socialist systems, which will lead to the eventual and complete convergence of capitalism and socialism.

p The theory of convergence has various ramifications, the most widespread of which is the concept of an "integrated industrial society" of the French sociologist R. Aron  [179•*  and the concept of "stages of economic growth" of the American economist and sociologist W. Rostow.  [179•**  The difference between these concepts, however, is only a seeming one. Broadly speaking, they are identical. They have one aim—to prove that owing to the modern scientific and technological revolution, economic programming and forecasting, the bourgeois 180 and socialist systems are converging "all down the line", economically, politically, socially, theoretically and ideologically, and on this basis there is emerging an integrated "modern industrial system”.

p Propaganda of this theory has been taken up by a vast army of bourgeois ideologues, who are clarifying and spelling out down to the minutest detail all the “charms” of this doctrine and the ways towards its realisation. -Their one aim is to prove that both these systems are moving towards a single system, which is better than the "new capitalism" and better than "pure socialism". Noteworthy in this respect is an article in Business Week for October 9, 1965, which claims: "While Russia is making tentative steps in the direction of capitalism . .. many Western nations are at the same time borrowing bits and pieces from socialist state planning. It makes a very pretty picture—of Communists becoming less communistic, capitalists becoming less capitalistic as the two systems move closer toward a middle ground.”

p Originally the founders of the convergence theory concentrated their efforts on proving the idea of a growing similarity between capitalism and socialism in the field of economic development, having in view the ways and nature of development of industry, cities, technologies, and the dynamics of the structure of specialists and managing personnel. Then they turned their attention to the sphere of cultural and welfare amenities with the aim of demonstrating the growing similarity between the capitalist and socialist countries in the field of science, education and culture. Variants of the convergence concept were next used to build up evidence in support of a “real” process of convergence that was supposed to be taking place between these two different types of systems in a socio-political context and which would end in the levelling of social life, general welfare ("a mass consumption society") and uniformity in people’s thinking and behaviour. Quite an ideal schema for an "integrated industrial society”.

p It is envisaged still more ideally, however, in the concept of "stages of economic growth". In the light of this concept five stages of growth are itemised: the traditional society, the preconditions, take-off, maturity and, finally, high mass consumption. And so, at the fifth stage, we get the so-called post-industrial society. As described by its founders it will be a paradise on earth.

p So far so good. But what about the private ownership of the instruments and means of production? What about the monopolist, millionaire and multi-millionaire clans, who preside over the destinies of many nations? Unfortunately, the ideologues of the bourgeoisie pass over these burning questions in silence, or, to be more exact, they fear them as the devil fears incense. The trouble with these scholars, to put it mildly, is that they did not arrange their schemata with the bosses of capital. No wonder that among the vast army of convergologists we find scholars who more and more express undisguised concern at the reactionary tendencies of the imperialists, who are using the great discoveries of science to the detriment of the peoples’ vital interests.

p In this connection I would cite Jean-Jacques ServanSchreiber, a prominent French ideologist, proponent of the convergence theory. In his well-known book Le Defi Americain he writes of things one should take very careful note of. I shall quote a few passages from his book. "Within a decade and a half a third industrial power could appear in the world (after the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.), not Europe, but American industry in Europe. Already today, in the ninth year of the Common Market’s existence, the organisation of this European market bears largely an American character"; "If we allow the free import of American capital under present conditions we shall condemn European industry ... to a subordinate role, and Europe itself to the status of a satellite.”

p Then what has to be done? "Today," says the author, "we need for that an awakening, a rude awakening. Unless this happens, Europe, like many an illustrious civilisation before it, will decline without knowing the reason why." So this, then, is the "integrated industrial society". But this is nothing compared with what is to come, when society evolves into the so-called post-industrial society!

p Objectively the convergence theory sets out to prove the thesis concerning the possibility of such a convergence of the countries of socialism with those of capitalism as would ultimately lead to a restoratioii of bourgeois conditions in the U.S.S.R. and other socialist countries and demonstrate the “needlessness” of a socialist revolution in the capitalist countries and the need for peaceful coexistence between the bourgeois and socialist ideologies. Such well-known writers as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel P. Huntington state 182 point-blank: "In the West ... the widespread theory of convergence assumes that the fundamentally important aspects of the democratic system will be retained after America and Russia ‘converge’ at some future, indeterminate historical junction . .. the Communist Party and its monopoly of power as the real victims of the historical process: both will fade away.”  [182•* 

p In the article "Moscow Changes Its European Strategy" published in the Bonn bulletin Parlamentarisch-Politischer Pressedienst the substance and social orientation of the convergence theory are characterised still more outspokenly. It states that the theory of convergence "by the will of its spiritual fathers implies the weakening of the socialist system and elimination of the fundamental tenets of socialist society, such as the dictatorship of the proletariat and the leading role of the proletariat, and state socialist property. ..". Here we see all the "i‘s” dotted.

p Now the convergence theorists are bent on having the bridges built that would bring about this fusion, first in the sphere of the economic basis, that is, through obliteration of the distinctions between the capitalist and socialist forms of ownership, and then in the ideological and political spheres. These pseudo-logical constructions of the bourgeois theoreticians—the outspoken ideologists of anti- communism—are now being taken up by some so-called Marxist theoreticians.

p Numerous examples could be cited of how this absurd convergence theory, which is objectively out of keeping with the nature and substance of the modern evolution of socialism is being peddled ad nauseam in the press in different variants. Some of these theoreticians started dallying with schemes for setting up, together with the capitalists, joint concerns and corporations in the socialist countries; it was even suggested that a single world concern be set up to be controlled by a single world state and a single world government, and it was hinted that such a body could be the United Nations.

p The bourgeois and revisionist theoreticians went to no little trouble to produce evidence showing that such an utterly Utopian idea was workable. In programming and forecasting, to which the ruling circles of the imperialist 183 countries resort ever more and more often in their competition with the socialist countries, they see the possibility of capitalism’s balanced and crisis-free development and social improvement. All this is aimed at proving that socialism no longer enjoys the advantages of planned, balanced and purposeful development. The programming and prediction projects have so turned the heads of the revisionists that they no longer think of the inevitable collapse of the rotten system of capitalism, no longer think even of criticising its negative aspects.

p All these theoreticians think of is how to laud and boost the capitalist system for all time. Whereas only a few years ago the bourgeois theoreticians programmed and predicted the capitalist economy for the eighties, today we already have projects covering not only the twentieth century, but the whole of the twenty-first century. There are no few theoreticians today who call themselves innovators and who are completely engrossed in long-term programming and prediction schemes for capitalism. Forgetting the vital interests of the working class and the oppressed people, they have lightly and shamelessly surrendered to bourgeois ideology. There is hardly any sense in going into the details of the modern theoretical projects of the convergence devotees. On all essential points their sponsors can easily be caught out in plain plagiarism. Here, as nowhere else, do we find duplicated the theories of “ultra-imperialism” and " organised capitalism". I shall attempt to show this concretely, after which the pseudo-scholarship of the sponsors of the convergence theory will stand fully revealed to the reader.

p The theory of capitalism evolving into socialism, which was the forerunner of the present convergence concept, took shape in the heads of the revisionists at the end of the nineteenth century, that is, at the initial stage of the imperialist phase of capitalism. Then new phenomena in capitalism’s development, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, were first perceived by the penetrating mind of Engels. Seriously ill at the time, he drew the attention of the theoreticians of Social-Democracy to the need for concentrating their efforts on a thorough study of the new processes that were taking place in capitalism and to draw from this the necessary theoretical and practical conclusions in the interest of the proletariat and its fight for socialism.

p It should be said for the then prominent theoreticians 184 of Social-Democracy—Kautsky, Hilferding, Bauer and others—that Engels’s appeal found in them a definite response. They did not live up to expectations however. On the contrary, they went out of their way to prove that Marxism was outmoded and inapplicable to the new conditions, for which they fabricated their famous theory about "capitalism growing into socialism". The emergence of monopoly organisations and the formation of all kinds of international economic and political associations, coalitions and agreements among the capitalist states were regarded by the revisionists as a sign of capitalism’s better organisation and balanced development.

p This is most salient in the Kautskian theory of “ ultraimperialism”, which took a long time evolving and which was brought to full maturity during the First World War and after it. The gist of this concept is that capitalism, on entering the imperialist stage, becomes an international instead of national phenomenon and is bound, through economic cartelisation, to build up into a united world concern, to become a planned, organised, all-embracing international economy. In his Die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung, published in 1926, after eight years’ existence of the world’s first socialist state, Kautsky leaves this out of account; on the contrary, he does not now confine himself to a general statement concerning the possibility of “ultra-imperialism”, but defines the concrete ways in which it will become established.

p What is more, Kautsky even found the organ which was to carry out the planned transition from “ultra-imperialism” to socialism. Whereas the economic substance of "ultra- imperialism" lies in the cartelisation of world economy, its political organisation was to be the League of Nations as an instrument for the international regulation of economic life, for the international unification of nations, for doing away with wars and building socialism. The League of Nations, he wrote, "is absolutely essential not only for averting the dangers of war, but also for building the new society which is to take the place of capitalist society. The League of Nations, which already carries weight today, will reach its full strength when the elements of the new society become a power and when socialist-democratic governments will stand at the head of the world’s leading states”.  [184•* 

p The material used for brushing up and polishing the Kautskian theory was Hilferding’s theory of "organised capitalism", which also took a long time shaping. Whereas in his Finance Capital, which appeared in 1910, he merely made approaches towards substantiating the theory of "organised capitalism", in his later writings this theory was completely rounded out. Leaving out of account such a fact of worldwide historic importance as the October Socialist Revolution, which broke the chain of imperialism, Hilferding remained true to type, as if nothing important had happened in life. In his opinion, capitalism was conforming to pattern: on the one hand, there was a growth of the monopolies which bound industrial, trade and banking capital together into a mighty complexus of finance capital; on the other, there was the mounting process of broad intervention by the state in economic activities, which leads to state control of the capitalist economy and its automatic conversion into socialism.

p As a result of this, we are told, no room is left for free competition, capitalism does away with the anarchy of production and becomes a planned economy, "organised capitalism". At the Parteitag in Kiel in 1927 Hilferding said: "We are just now in the period of capitalism which has largely coped with the era of free competition and the ascendancy of blind market laws; we are now coming to the capitalist organisation of the economy, in other words, from the free play of economic forces towards an organised economy.”  [185•*  And further: "Organised capitalism really stands for the principled substitution ... of the socialist principle of planned production for that of free competition.”  [185•** 

p Thus, the doctrine of "organised capitalism" consists in the fact that under the impact of the laws of development inherent in capitalism monopolies are formed which gradually draw into their orbit the whole of capitalist economy, and together with the state regulation of the capitalist economy gradually convert it into a planned socialist economy. In modelling the skeleton of "organised capitalism", Hilferding let his imagination run away with him at the thrilling prospect of capitalism’s conversion into socialism. The main instrument of this conversion, we are told, was to be " political and economic democracy”.

p The theory of political democracy, in a nutshell, was this: capitalism becomes automatically transformed into its opposite—into socialism. This takes place not by methods of revolutionary action, but by peaceful means, by democratic methods—by methods of winning the majority in parliament, through which the machinery of state will be geared to social democracy and will then carry out a number of reforms. In other words, wait -and go on waiting till doomsday. Theoretically the gist of economic democracy amounts to self-government by means of taking over control of the economic apparatus through the trade unions. "Democracy at the factory is a chance for everyone, to the best of his ability, to become a manager of production.”

p But lest the workers entertain too sanguine hopes of becoming managers of enterprises belonging to the capitalists he tells them in advance: "The establishment of economic democracy is a tremendously difficult problem, which can be tackled only in the course of a prolonged historical process: in proportion as the economy is organised by concentrated capital it becomes more and more subject to democratic control.”  [186•*  Consequently, the conversion of "organised capitalism" into socialism is a long process, which will take place peacefully, quietly, smoothly and, above all, subject to the observance of political and economic democracy. Simultaneously with the process of development of "organised capitalism" and under the salutary influence of SocialDemocracy on the bourgeois state disarmament of different capitalist countries will be effected and costly militarism and wars will be done away with. Misunderstandings and conflicts, if any, were to be settled by the League of Nations, and thus socialism would hold sway throughout the world. Needless to say, history made cruel fun of these idealistic and extravagantly illusory projects.

p Demonstration of the theory of imperialism fell to the lot of Lenin, who fulfilled the precept of Engels with credit and honour. It was one of those difficult problems to the solution of which Lenin had devoted practically his whole life, finally advancing a consistent theory of imperialism, on the basis of which he authenticated his famous doctrine of socialist revolution. In substance Lenin’s theory of imperialism, which is an elaboration of Marxist political economy, 187 gave a correct scientific assessment of imperialism as the highest’ and ultimate stage of development of decaying and moribund capitalism which is characterised by the ripening of both the material preconditions and the subjective factors of socialism on the eve of the socialist revolution.

p Capitalism, ever since it had created for itself the appropriate material and technical base, has been developing in cycles. The cycle is a necessary and unavoidable form of the motion of antagonisms inherent in capitalism. The various phases of the cycle, such as crises, depression, revival and booms, are merely a condition reflecting the various degrees of tensity of the prevailing antagonistic contradictions between the social nature of production and the private nature of appropriation. The sharpening of capitalism’s antagonisms at the stage of imperialism is reflected in the extremely acute nature of the uneven and conflictive tendencies of imperialist development.

p The law of uneven development is an irrefragable law of capitalism. It affects all aspects of capitalist society— economics, technology, politics and ideology. In capitalist society everything develops spasmodically and unevenly: not only separate enterprises and industries, but all and entire countries are subject to this law. A special feature of imperialism’s uneven development is the extremely spasmodic, jerky and conflictive nature of that process. These are inherent in the very nature of monopoly capitalism, with its methods of violent pressure and suppression, its inextricable interlinking of economics with politics, its practice of seizures, partitionings and recarvings.

p And so the epoch of imperialism clearly reveals that the material prerequisites of socialism—concentration and centralisation of the means of production, the high level of technology and the socialisation of labour—have reached full ripeness. Imperialism shows that society’s productive forces have outgrown capitalist relations of production all down the line, and that the latter have become a hindrance to the progressive social movement. Monopoly capitalism by its whole development demonstrates that the course of events objectively drags the capitalists, "against their will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialisation”.  [187•* 

p Lenin then spelled out this process of “dragging” by showing that it manifested itself in the evolution of monopoly capitalism into state-monopoly capitalism. He wrote: ".. .state-monopoly capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no intermediate rungs.”  [188•* 

p But whereas the ideologues of imperialism regarded this “rung” as “ultra-imperialism” or "organised capitalism", Lenin did not deny the objective tendency towards regulation and organisation, but clarified that "capitalism is now evolving directly into its higher, regulated, form”,  [188•**  and this posed the question of its revolutionary overthrow and was "an argument proving the proximity, facility, feasibility and urgency of the socialist revolution, and not at all as an argument for tolerating the repudiation of such a revolution and the efforts to make capitalism look more attractive, something which all reformists are trying to do”.  [188•*** 

p The monopolists can tolerate and even encourage state regulation and attempts at national planning of production in so far as this is in their interest and does not strike at the roots of capitalism—private property. Every real step towards socialism, however, is bound to meet with furious resistance on the part of the imperialists, who will not stop at unleashing war. History provides clear proofs of this. That is why I devote such attention to the bourgeois concept of convergence, which is the theoretical basis of modern revisionism.

p The convergence theory is the outcome of the profound crisis of bourgeois political economy, extra proof of the theoretical aridity of bourgeois and revisionist thinking. And this is quite explainable. Let us hear what Marx has to say on this point—it might have been said today instead of a hundred years ago. "In so far as Political Economy remains within that horizon, in so far, i.e., as the capitalist regime is looked upon as the absolutely final form of social production, instead of as a passing historical phase of its evolution, Political Economy can remain a science only so long as the 189 class-struggle is latent or manifests itself only in isolated and sporadic phenomena.”  [189•* 

p Let us look at the shrewd sagacity of this judgement with a sober eye. If bourgeois political economy, already in the days of Marx, had begun to lose its scientific objectivity and sunk to an abject apologetics of capitalism, then with its transition into the final, imperialist stage, when the class struggle reached its highest pitch, this bourgeois economic theory became a mean servant that dolls up the muddied image of imperialism and patches up the holes in it. Sterile in its defence of the economic foundations of imperialism, bourgeois political science is constrained to have recourse to such concepts, which, like the theory of convergence, affect only the superstructural elements, the problems of organisation and administration, without going into a deep social analysis of the antagonisms of the economic basis—the relations of production of modern imperialism.

p A feature of all modern revisionist theories is the attempt to reduce the substance of the new processes in the development of capitalism to some single, more advantageous phenomenon. In clinging to one or another positive fact in the development of capitalism the revisionists elevate it into an absolute, thereby obscuring the most essential, deep-going and natural processes of the whole system of imperialism, its most vulnerable and incurable ills. The fact of the matter is that the bourgeois economists and their revisionist followers are unable either to work out a scientific theory of modern imperialism or adopt one that has already been worked out, because to do so would mean pronouncing the death sentence upon capitalism and imperialism.

p One might say that ever since the great scientific discoveries by Marxism-Leninism of the laws of social development little has changed in the theoretical views of the revisionists. Today as then the revisionist concepts in the assessment of capitalism fit nicely into the pattern of the two main trends that existed before. One of these identifies imperialism with capitalism, contending that imperialism differs in no essentials from capitalism of the epoch of free competition. The other, on the contrary, draws a line between imperialism and capitalism, passes over in silence the close coexistence of the monopolies with free competition, 190 denies that imperialism is capitalism and follows its general pattern, ahd makes imperialism out to be a new type of production relations differing fundamentally from those of capitalism. What these two trends hold in common, though, is a deliberate hushing-up of the fact that imperialism is the last stage in the development of decaying and moribund capitalism, that imperialism reproduces on an extended and deeper scale all the contradictions of capitalism and leads it to its inevitable downfall. Such is the inexorable objective law of history.

One question remains to be answered. How could this convergence theory arise, how could the utterly absurd concept seep into the minds of theoreticians who call themselves Marxists? There can be no evasive answers to this question. This concept went down with the revisionists because they had lost the memory of the Marxist-Leninist class approach to the phenomena of social development. Such theories result from ignoring the existing inner antagonistic contradictions of imperialism, from ignoring the basic contradiction of our epoch—the contradiction between socialism and capitalism onjL world scale.