p The objective laws governing the scientific and technological revolution in socialist society differ fundamentally from those that apply under capitalism. This is due, first, to dissimilarity of the socio-economic conditions in which this revolution takes place and, second, to its dissimilar social effects, which directly or indirectly influence its character and rate of advance. Under capitalism scientific and technological progress entails intensified exploitation of labour, redundancy, and higher profits for the bourgeoisie.

p In socialist society, which is free from exploitation of man by man, planned automation and mechanisation of production rule out the possibility of unemployment and serve to promote the people’s welfare, as Soviet experience conclusively testifies.

p Similarly, the driving forces of technological progress are fundamentally different under capitalism and under socialism. Explaining the mechanism of technological progress under capitalism, Marx wrote: “The law of the determination of value by labour-time, a law which brings under its sway the individual capitalist who applies the new method of production . .. this same law, acting as a coercive law of competition, forces his competitors to adopt the new method."  [110•1  To elucidate this idea Marx quotes from an English economic treatise: “... so that every art, trade, or engine, doing work with labour of fewer hands, and consequently cheaper, begets in others a kind of necessity and emulation, either of using the same art, trade, or engine, or of inventing something like it, that every man may be upon the square, that no man may be able to undersell his neighbour."  [110•2 

p Thus, the technical improvement of production and products is an economic necessity to every producer, born of competition, of the struggle for survival, for defeating the rival producers. The profit of each individual manufacturer and defence of the class interests of the bourgeoisie, not of society as a whole, are the forces motivating technological progress under capitalism. These principal motives still hold at the present stage of bourgeois society, i.e., under statemonopoly capitalism, when the capitalist state, carrying out a system of measures that proceed from the class interests of monopoly capital, tries to give these measures a semblance of national necessity. Actually, however, all such measures ultimately prove to be a masked offensive by the monopolies against the vital interests of the working people.

p The problems of the scientific and technological revolution are today a vast field of tense ideological struggle. The essence, character, prospects and social effects of this revolution, all are questions to which radically different answers are found in scientific socialist ideology, on the one hand, and bourgeois ideology, on the other. Bourgeois cnceptions follow different trends. One of them is a variety of social pessimism, which reflects the decay of the capitalist system. The supporters of this trend, apprehending the conflict between the productive forces and capitalist relations of production in a distorted way, contend that the progress of science and technology leads to man’s social and moral annihilation.

p The American sociologist Lewis Mumford, for instance, believes that technological progress and liberal human culture are incompatible. It is not difficult to see that such views on the development of science and technology under capitalism reflect the deepening antagonisms of bourgeois society at its present stage and the negative consequences of the capitalist form of technological progress. It is common knowledge that modern capitalism uses the brilliant triumphs of the human mind first and foremost to create the weapons of annihilation that world imperialism needs for persecuting its aggressive policies, for fighting socialism and the antiimperialist popular liberation movement. Therefore, under the conditions of imperialism there does indeed exist a most acute antagonism between the progress of science and technology and the development of civilisation. But this 112 antagonism is due to the evils inherent in capitalism, not to the scientific and technological revolution.

p Under socialism, however, technological progress has entirely different consequences. Systematic introduction of the latest achievements of science and technology in the socialist countries consolidates the new social relationships, raises the economic and cultural standards of the working people, and strengthens and advances the socialist countries. Under socialism the scientific and technological revolution is a mighty force contributing to the building of communism. Socialism alone provides the adequate social pattern for present-day technological advance, which under capitalism is fettered and impeded by private ownership. Bourgeois ideologists either fail to see, or deliberately shut their eyes to, these facts. At the same time, their dread of the progress of science and technology reflects the contradictory character of this progress under capitalism.

p Equally unsound is the approach taken by other bourgeois ideologists who interpret the scientific and technological revolution in terms of apology for modern capitalism. In the process of acute ideological struggle they increasingly resort to distortion of reality, to shifts and subterfuges, seeking to frame their “own”, bourgeois explanation of the laws governing the development of society.

p To defend the foundations of capitalism, all sorts of theories and conceptions have been invented, of which the theory of “economic growth stages" and the theory of “a single (new) industrial society" advanced by F. Perroux, Raymond Aron and John K. Galbraith are fairly widespread. The authors of these theories often quite skilfully tailor their facts to fit into a preconceived pattern and, in so doing, give an anodyne account of the development of capitalism today, seeking to hide its true face and its imminent doom from the peoples.

p The “industrial society" theory passes over completely the question of the relations of production, the sum total of which makes up the economic structure of society. Industrialisation as a real historical process is viewed out of any immediate connection with its actual economic base, capitalist or socialist. This is done quite deliberately in order to gloss over the principal factor determining the character of the current epoch, viz., the existence and struggle between two 113 socio-economic systems, capitalist and socialist, and also to pervert the scientific criterion of social progress.

p The authors of the “new industrial society" theory regard the progress of science and technology separately from the class struggle, seeking to belittle the revolutionary role played by the working class in the development of society at present. This is exactly what John Galbraith does in his book The New Industrial State  [113•1 . R. Aron, in addition, seeks to create the false impression that, in the industrial state, the party of the working class loses its revolutionary spirit.  [113•2 

p This difference in approach to the progress of science and technology among bourgeois ideologists and theorists reflects the contradictory tendencies in the development of science and technology in the era of monopoly capitalism, which were uncovered by Lenin, viz., the monopolies’ inherent tendency to hold back the progress of technology and the tendency to promote it. By sharpening the contradictions of capitalism these two opposite tendencies increase the need for the socio-economic and political transition to the new social system, to socialism.

p Time and again in bourgeois political and legal literature on the problems of scientific and technological progress one finds the unscientific idea that industrialisation supposedly brings about “the same living conditions" under capitalism and socialism. Those sharing this point of view allege that as corresponding indices of production come level and identical forms of planning emerge, the two opposite socioeconomic systems presumably tend to converge, while the “sharp edges”, political as well as ideological, between socialism and capitalism “wear down”.

p John Galbraith speaks of the “convergent tendencies of industrial societies, however different their popular or ideological billing...".  [113•3  Another American, N. Preston, tries to prove that capitalism and socialism have some common characteristics, including recognition of the fact that under capitalism, too, public welfare is a national concern. In his opinion, all this is bringing nearer the end of the ideological 114 struggle, the time when all the nations and parties will adopt a common system of administration and regulation of the economy.  [114•1  M. Duverger, a bourgeois French ideologist, expresses himself approximately in the same spirit.  [114•2 

p The main object of the bourgeois “convergence theory" is to deny the necessity for revolutionary reorganisation of capitalist society. The crudely technological approach, concentration and overemphasis on the coincidence of minor, purely managerial features coupled with complete silence on the socio-political nature of the existing systems and, first and foremost, on the fundamental distinction between socialist and capitalist economic relationships—such are the basic methods of argument adopted by the “convergence theory”. Imperialist reaction regards this theory as a major instrument of “eroding communist ideology”.

p Closely associated with the “convergence theory" is the theory of “technological determinism”, which has been widely publicised of late. Its supporters argue that technology per se, regardless of its social environment, gives rise to identical social and political processes. It is widely known, however, that the application of a certain kind of technology under capitalism produces diametrically different social results from what the same technology produces under socialism. Bourgeois ideologists attempt to assess the role played by technology in isolation from the social context of its development and use this to slip in the notion of “technology” in place of the Marxist-Leninist concept of the productive forces, on the one hand, and to negate the significance of socio-economic relations to society’s development, on the other.

p From the “convergence theory" they deduce that the fundamental distinction between socialist and bourgeois ideologies becomes progressively less and less important. Hence there arises yet another bourgeois theory—the “ deideologisation" theory. Its exponents seek to show that the road to truth lies through overcoming “ideology” as the antipode of science, through renouncing the class approach. This theory is spearheaded against Marxism-Leninism, its aim 115 being to increase the influence of bourgeois and reformist ideology.

p An expression of the imperialists’ fear of the growing appeal of socialism, the “convergence theory" also springs from a desire to whitewash monopoly capitalism and prove that it is capable of changing into an utterly different, noncapitalist, kind of society. It is not accidental either that some bourgeois ideologists avoid using the word “capitalism” altogether, so obnoxious has it become.

p The scientific and technological revolution, which under capitalism involves extreme concentration and centralisation of capital, intensifies the contradictions between social production and private appropriation. This further reveals the historically obsolete nature of capitalist relations and private ownership of the means of production, and fosters the growth of material prerequisites of socialism.

Under socialism alone, does the progress of science and technology have free scope and bring higher living standards for the people, thus hastening the triumph of communism.