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p The contemporary bourgeois consciousness was fully aware of the fact that the individual is not only juxtaposed to society, not only sets his own personal interests in opposition to it, but is also a part of a vast system of relationships thereby participating in the struggle between heterogeneous interests of a social, suprapersonal nature. It was impossible to ignore the existence of various trends towards unity, the concentration of economic, political and spiritual forces in contemporary society, reflecting the process of transition from monopoly to state-monopoly capitalism. Naturally this process was perceived indirectly and obliquely. It undoubtedly underlay those systems of thought that regarded man as a self-contained individual entity but nevertheless as existing in the element of all kinds of relations with people and the world. The primary and most primitive philosophical expression of these unifying tendencies to be observed in social development was unanimism, which included the One, the personality, the individual in “universals”, “forces”. The 239 unanimists, and especially Jules Romains, were wont to dissolve the “Ego” in “We”, the individual in the group. For them anything at all could be treated as “We” or the “group”: a crowd of factory workers on their way home from work, a company of soldiers or a group of idlers. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, not without malice, “We observe an event, we take part. That is unanimism, which Romains wished to present in Vie unanime or in Vin blanc de la Villette."  [239•1  By substituting various kinds of group relations for class relations, the unanimists were able to treat the members of casual groups of people as sharing common interests overriding social interests—and indeed to reject the existence of different social interests in each person—and to equate the objective content of the aims pursued by the individual members of the group with the aims of the group itself. In Vin blanc de la Villette, Jules Romains extends the unanimity of the strikers to each individual striker. But he draws no distinction at all between this feeling and the enthusiasm, and sense of comradeship the soldier feels marching through the streets of Paris with his battalion to quell the workers. The result of this approach was to stress the transient nature of class differences and the permanence and omnipotence of those spontaneous unifying principles that operate in bourgeois society, and which Romains and his heroes give preference to making man a collaborator with these forces, which draw him into their orbit. Thus, social factors are rejected by the unanimists in favour of the concept of the unanimity of human wills as the underlying motive of human behaviour. These wills, engulfing man, are directed towards the preservation of existing social conditions and hostile to the class interests opposed to “unanimity”.

p In other words, the idea of unanimity was used as an instrument in the struggle against anti-bourgeois forces, as confirmed by the evolution of Romains’ major work, the twenty-seven volume Les hommes de bonne volonte. Begun as a broad portrait of life and manners, a multilevelled panorama of society on the eve of the First World 240 War, it gradually degenerated, along with the evolution of the political views of the author, to become a reactionary pamphlet against contemporary progressive social movements, and especially Communism. It was not only his reactionary views that prevented Romains from creating a synthetic picture of life, but also the artistic means of depicting people and society that he evolved under the influence of these views.

p If groups are indifferent to the personal interests of the individuals that compose them, these heterogeneous interests being masked by “unanimity”, it is logical that there should be no main hero as the ideological and spiritual centre of a work. “The need to relate everything to a central figure is linked with a perception of the world centred on the individual, and which it would be more correct to call not individualistic but ’individuocentric’, just as there once existed the geocentric system of the universe”, Romains wrote. “But this becomes a relic when the real subject is society itself or a large human agglomeration composed of various individual destinies, each moving independently, not knowing one another for a large part of the time and not asking whether it would be more convenient for the novelist if they all meet by chance at one particular juncture.. ..”  [240•1  Thus Romains proposed replacing the traditional novel built on the principle of the interaction of hero and social environment by the “roman fleuve”, in which parallel subjects, characters and events develop side by side without being linked and related.

p Such a view of life and history is patently false, for Romains, insisting on the casual and undetermined nature of events or historical phenomena, overlooked the real lawconditioned tendencies of the historical process and the fact that events and human actions are far more interrelated and interdependent than meets the eye. Unanimism failed and was discarded for the simple reason that it presented an oversimplified, primitive interpretation of the relationships between the individual and society. An 241 incomparably more complex picture of these relationships is provided by existentialism.  [241•1 

p Despite their very different political sympathies, the existentialists have provided a pretty convincing description of the modern world and contemporary bourgeois society as it appears to the bourgeois perception. This is the secret of the success, popularity and wide acceptance of existentialism, which is to be regarded more as philosophic publicistic writings than as a coherent system of views. Hence its influence on those realist writers who portrayed life in basically existentialist terms.

p Existentialist philosophising is concerned above all with the position of man in the world and society, and his relationships with life, society and other people. This does not mean that it successfully reproduces a genuine picture of social relations, since its analysis of contemporary life and human psychology and assessment of events is based exclusively on the experience of bourgeois man. Although they do not wish to remain within the bounds of anthropocentric thought, the existentialists are unable to free themselves entirely from its influence since their own views are a product of the process of alienation, and they make the individual personality their point of departure, the “One”, as Jaspers puts it. But this “One” exists along with other people, for itself and for others: hence what the existentialists call “co-existence”.

p However, the existentialists regard existence together, in society, as the existence of socially equal units. They are thus regarding man in the abstract, thereby making an abstraction of social relations, depriving them of concrete historical content. For the existentialists self- perception is the content of co-existence.

p According to the existentialists, co-existence arises only together with the concept of the “You-relationship” (Marcel), “communication” (Jaspers), or “being-with- Another" (Sartre), that is, when the One perceives the existence of Another and enters into a relationship with him. In his article “Uber Bedingungen und Moglichkeiten eines 242 neuen Humanismus”, Jaspers tries to prove that individualism is the foundation of humanism. He writes : “Our analysis of struggle for inner freedom views man as One. Does this not make it sound as if the One is everything? On the contrary, the One ceases to exist as an individual in the course of things and remains the One only insofar as he enters into communication with other Selfs ( Selbstsein) and the world."  [242•1 

p It might be thought that by communication Jaspers means those complex forms of social relations that underlie and determine all the other forms of human relationships. But no, Jaspers regards as communicative those relationships in which man reveals his potentialities. Jaspers regards as one of the most important kinds of communication—and here the influence of Scheler is clearly discernible—leadership and service, including such highly different forms of relationships as subjection and responsibility, fidelity and kindness. In other words, Jaspers presupposes social inequality in this kind of communication a priori, viewing an historically transient phenomenon as eternal. Other kinds of communication are communicability, being the basis and prerequisite for the possibility of human relationships, discussion, promoting greater mutual understanding, and political relations, to which, however, he ascribed a secondary importance, insisting on the fallacy that the One is independent from politics.

p Sartre also extracts man from the element of social relations in his philosophical works. In L’etre et le neant, whose basic propositions Sartre has never abandoned, he described the kinds of relationships that exist in the world as he sees it. They do not differ on matters of fundamental principle from those of Jaspers.

p According to Sartre, the One is separated from Another or connected with him above all by virtue of his views, a concept with the significance of a category. To view and be viewed means to perceive oneself as an object for Another, or more precisely rather consider Another as an object for oneself. The knowledge that I am not Another 243 comes from the body which comprises what may be called “my world”. Relationship between “my world" and Another is also effected through language, love, masochism, sadism, indifference, desire and hatred. It is these forms of relationship that Sartre regards as determinant. Existentialism replaces social aim or interest—the real motive force underlying human activity—with the concept of project, which includes a person’s possibilities deprived however of concrete social content. As true children of the twentieth century, the existentialists do not reject technological progress. ”. . .Technology is the destiny of our century,"  [243•1  Heidegger said. However, to prevent the bourgeois consciousness from wallowing in narrow practicality and to ensure its development, they campaigned for the spiritualisation of technology with art—the most typical example being Heidegger’s treatise “Wozu Dichter?" Nevertheless, their concept of man is pessimistic and calls for stoicism.

p The existentialists argue the need for stoicism on the grounds that man exists in the face of death. This is not a new discovery, and throughout his history man has had the courage to ceaselessly create and make use of the available benefits of life, although perfectly aware that he must one day die. For the existentialists however, this knowledge that man stands face to face with death ( nothingness), and that he bears nothingness within him, gives rise to the idea of the absurdity of life based on fear and anxiety. They are only concerned with the freedom of the One, and remain indifferent to the fundamental matter of how this freedom will be achieved. One gets a vague idea that they incline towards bourgeois democracy— even Heidegger and Jaspers in his later years, who were at one time reconciled to fascism.

p The gloomy nature of existentialism, its tendency to separate “purely human" emotions and mental states from their underlying social motives, the view of man as a creature cast into an abyss of fear, anxiety and anguish, and the substitution of “purely human" ties for social 244 relations—all reflect a tendency that is current not only, in philosophy but also in contemporary art and literature.

p Despite its claim to be a “new humanism”, existentialism is in fact far removed from the real genuine humanitarian searchings and aspirations of our age. In his treatise Uber Bedingungen und Moglichkeiten eines neuen Humanismus, Jaspers frankly admitted: “Humanism is not the final end. It merely creates the spiritual space where each and every man can and must struggle for his freedom."  [244•1  Thus, only the activities of the individual directed towards the satisfaction of his own personal interests are recognised, since the struggle for personal freedom alone renders impossible the struggle for the creation of a harmonious system of social relations in which a person, retaining and enriching his own individuality, would not feel a need to defend his freedom from society.

p The existentialist interpretation of freedom, combining a strange form of fatalism with patent voluntarism, inevitably destroys historicist thought. Heidegger  [244•2  says that “freedom is the sphere of fate”, and this idea is natural for existentialism, since the alienated consciousness constantly feels unfree. At the same time freedom is regarded as personal self-will, since the individual is opposed to the world, to the whole sum of social and economic forces, and not dependent on it. The logical deduction from such a self-awareness is Sartre’s proposition that man is condemned to be free.

p The existentialists inevitably link the problem of choice with the concept of freedom, treating it, however, as “purely human”. They hold that existence always occurs in a particular situation, and that therefore man is constantly faced with the necessity of making a choice. This is fairly obvious to anyone, and there is nothing original in the idea in itself. However, the existentialists regard the need for choice as an affirmation of an individual’s willfulness. They divide situations into those that can be resolved and what they call “frontier situations" ( Grenzsituationen). Historical existence, where a man is aware 245 of himself as a person and thus, through himself, perceives time or historicism, is viewed as belonging to the latter category. While a man is capable to some extent of cognizing his personal existence, he is unable to cognize suprapersonal, universal features of historical existence, that is, frontier situations, and is unable to overcome them and resolve them. Thus personal experience sets the limit in cognizing historical experience.

p Generally speaking, not only has existentialism been unable to provide an ideological basis for realism, but when its theses begin to dominate a work of literature they corrode a realistic view of the world, leading to schematisation, rationalising and naturalism. Above all these theses obstruct perception of the real underlying motives of human behaviour, and the social factors that condition them.

p The colouring of real-life processes, events, human actions and social conflicts with existentialist theories is an essential feature of the works of writers, who deal with important socio-political themes, such as Sartre and Camus, Salinger and McCullers, Simone de Beauvoir and Iris Murdoch, Catherine Anne Porter and Use Langner, and numerous other writers who share the existentialists’ views or have come under their influence to some extent. Their works are generally characterised by a certain duality in perception and presentation of reality, causing their stories to have two planes, as it were—the real and the existentialist—with the result that the social content of the contradictions of contemporary life that are treated becomes quite vague. Some of these writers hold anti- bourgeois views. However, this critical attitude to bourgeois society, strongest of all in the works of Sartre and Salinger, never amounts to total rejection of the system that condemns man to suffering and sows evil in life, since the ultimate causes of man’s fear, worry and anxiety are mystified by their philosophy.

p Roquentin, the hero of Sartre’s early novel La Nausee like many of his characters, is rather a peg on which to 246 hang ideas than a real person of flesh and blood. Roquentin finds himself at variance with his normal routine life, for reasons of which he himself is only vaguely aware, after being suddenly gripped by a strange sense of nausea and repugnance for “existence with others”. Although one may agree with him that the sated and sordid world of “others” he is referring to is indeed rather repugnant, he is surely wrong in feeling this way about life as a whole. Roquentin’s feeling leads him to decide that the existence to which he is “abandoned” is absurd. The novel gradually degenerates into an existentialist treatise, examining the behaviour of a man in the situation of “the absurd”, and the author concentrates on the description of his hero’s feelings, which are as uninteresting as they are insignificant.

p Sartre’s three-volume Les chemins de la liberte represents another attempt to study human self-perception and the various possibilities of “choice”, this time in the setting of French life on the eve of the Second World War. The hero is seeking “inner” freedom, in the existentialist sense of the word, that is, “the necessity of choice" to which man is condemned, to define himself in different situations. Mathieu is trying to defend his right to personal freedom, and therefore rejects participation in the political struggle of his time, considering it futile and pointless—this applying equally to the struggle against fascism and the war waged by the ruling classes. He does not wish to join the Communists, since he believes that by joining the Party he will be forced to renounce his personal freedom. And in the name of this same “ personal freedom" he breaks with his mistress and remains alone.

p Sartre treats the relationships between his hero and the other characters in the novel from the existentialist point of view, and devotes a great deal of space to the description of sexual relationships that are not without a pathological tinge. But it is not only love relationships that link the characters of the novel. Since the absolute freedom towards which Mathieu aspires according to the existentialist view is impossible, he is condemned to “existence with others”. Practically speaking, this meant that war 247 drew his “existence” too into its orbit. Sartre shows the various relationships with other people in which his hero finds himself on becoming a soldier in the army: friendship, hatred, fear, subordination, command and so on. The people, including the soldiers, are presented as a collection of “existences” crushed by fear of the future and therefore giving way to their instincts. Sartre’s existentialist views prevented him from perceiving the heterogeneity of the sentiments of the masses and the different currents that flow in the popular sea, the existence among them of truly progressive elements. Thus, the Communist Brunet is presented as Mathieu’s constant counterpart and opponent. Brunet is shown to be remarkably purposeful, hard and devoid of emotions, isolated from the masses by whose name he always swears. His convictions for him are like a fortress in which he takes refuge from the complexities of life.

p Les chemins de la liberte is a collection of incidents and situations loosely strung together, and their motion in time and space gives only a pale imitation of the real motion of life, since their real causes are ignored. The epic principle of a novel is destroyed, since the objective theme—the people’s struggle against fascism—is replaced by the searchings of isolated individuals involved in the system of existentialist relationships with the world for their own personal paths to absolute freedom. While Mathieu’s path ends in true existentialist fashion—although not believing in the ultimate aims of the liberation struggle he dies in a hopeless battle against the nazis, thereby affirming his inner Self, or in existentialist terms, finding himself in a frontier situation he defines his existence in death—the socio-historical situation presented in the novel remains incomplete, for Sartre did not finish the planned cycle (writing only the first three parts— L’age de raison, Le Sursis, La mort dans Fame). The novel is a novel of moods, full of the symbolism that is so characteristic of existentialist writings. Sometimes this symbolism is very straightforward, as in the novels of the American authoress Carson McCullers, who for the purpose of demonstrating the eternal loneliness of man and the complex, painful tangle of human relationships, makes 248 her characters either spiritually sick or physically handicapped. Sometimes, however, existentialist allegory is laid on as a gigantic complex structure, as in K. Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools, where the voyage from South America to Europe of a ship significantly called Faith symbolises the advance of human society towards the Second World War and the relations between the passengers the relations between people at that time, people consumed by national hatred, mutual hostility, competition, antipathy and so on.

p Symbolism is not necessarily incompatible with realism: it can serve to intensify images and thus as a means of realistic characterisation. But in this case it must on no account be allowed to become an abstraction, to substitute absolute concepts for real individuality of a thing or phenomenon, its historically-defined meaning. Realist symbolism reveals this meaning in sense-object expression, and not in the form of idealised abstract universality. Thus the symbolism of Shchedrin’s satire, despite the outward lack of resemblance to reality always preserved the inner truth of a phenomenon, its concrete substance and significance. The existentialists use symbolism to ascribe extra-social universality and permanence to a phenomenon, and thus dimming its historical basis. This kind of glossing over of the concrete social outlines of a phenomenon is typical of Albert Camus, whose dry, didactic prose, while ostensibly transmitting the outward texture of reality, attached to it some hidden mystic sense. This occurred not because his imagery is too farfetched and figurative—on the contrary, it is extremely clear and almost commonplace—but because his existentialist views prevented him from gaining a proper understanding of the underlying conflicts and processes of life and seeing things in their historical perspective.

p If Sartre uses the term “nausea” to convey the relationship between modern man and society, and this abstract concept prevents him from revealing the true state of society, a similar function is fulfilled in Camus’ works bv the concept of “the absurd”. According to Camus, the human tragedy—the tragedy of man “in general”, of the “One”—consists in the absurdity of life. The tragic 249 absurdity of existence arises not from the fact that man exists in the face of death, but because he lives amid chaos, irrationality and injustice, aware of the absurdity of this situation and unable to achieve the clarity necessary to escape from this irrational state of affairs. Man has no hope of changing the absurdity of his existence and this gives him the right to freedom, the right to revolt against moral dogmas. If we remove the philosophical coating from Camus’ reasoning, we can immediately see the social origins of his metaphysics of the absurd and his defence of individual anarchy. As a radical Camus opposed political reaction and fascism, but as a writer and thinker he was spiritually crushed by the historical events of our grandiose and harsh age—its revolutions, wars, fascist terror, the defeatism of the ruling classes—its countless conflicts and multifarious disasters. He was only conscious of the dramatic and dark side of the modern age that has brought people so much suffering, and refused to recognise that the positive creative forces of reason and historical progress are capable of changing, and indeed are already changing, the structure of the world we live in. Camus rejected any view of the prospects of social development but the one deriving from the situation of the absurd, and rejected above all the prospect of a Communist future for mankind. Hence the profound pessimism of his works. Any appeals for action they may contain were fruitless, since he regarded human actions as taking place entirely in the situation of the absurd, in other words, a social situation that was not subject to any change. Camus’ man, remaining within the framework of what already exists, is condemned to futile action, like that of Sisyphus, who in the Underworld was condemned to roll uphill a huge stone that always toppled back again. Unable to perceive the real processes going on in life, and, like all the existentialists, substituting analysis of various “relationships” of fear, despair, enmity, duty, culpability, subordination, and so on, that arise between people in the situation of the absurd for proper analytical investigation of life, Camus announced: “My generation knows that it will not transform the world.” His major novel, La pesle, was devoted to demonstrating the futility 250 of all man’s attempts to resolve this inescapability of absurd situation.

p The outbreak of plague in an Algerian town symbolises above all the rise of fascism and totalitarianism, crushing individual freedom. The characters—both those like Doctor Rieux, the clerk Grand, the social worker Tarrou and their helpers who try to combat the plague, and those who are the plague’s accessories or indecisive people unwilling to struggle against it—reflect the various political forces and sentiments of the time of anti-fascist struggle. There are also parallels between the actual course of the struggle against the plague and the real events of these years. At the same time, the symbolism is meant to be much wider than this. The plague is an inscrutable, inhuman evil, which man is condemned to face throughout his existence, being forced to act to defend himself from it, which involves recognition of others. Camus completely ignores the concrete historical motives that lead people to struggle against evil, treating evil purely as an abstraction. Thus the concrete motives of the antifascist struggle become metaphysical in his novel. Evil comes and passes away again. Like the tides, it advances and recedes, but it is indestructible, for its bacilli live in people themselves. The plague passes, but neither Camus nor his heroes believe that it has gone for good, that its forces, the forces of social evil, will ever be defeated once and for all.

p In the works of Camus, as of other existentialists, contemporary bourgeois realism demonstrates its impotence in the face of the real complexities of life, its inability to understand the real facts and prospects of social development. This departure from social analysis, the major, determining feature of the realist method, and its replacement with symbolical metaphysics, are characteristic features of contemporary bourgeois realism.

p Many bourgeois writers are aware of a decline in the creative possibilities of this method, but seek to restore its former power not by deepening social analysis, but by experiments in form that merely serve to hasten the decline and disintegration of the bourgeois realist method.

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p One such attempt is represented by the so-called “new novel" school, essentially an offshoot of existentialism. Its members energetically reject this connection, for unlike the existentialists they retain faith in reason. However, their “reason” remains an abstraction, since they are far from accepting historical reason, far, that is, from understanding the objective tendencies of the historical process. It is thus more accurate to regard them as a current in the existentialist stream. They make extensive use of existentialist concepts, especially ones like “view”, “you”, and so on. The role of “view” is especially important in Robbe-Grillet’s novels Le voyeur and La Jalousie, where the event—a crime in the former, a double-cross in the latter—are presented to the reader not through action but through a lateral “view”, a subjective assessment of what happens. The concept of “presence” is equally important for them. As in Sartre’s Nausea, things and people (likened to things), reveal in their novels their “presence”, suppressing the characters’ personalities and outlooks. As the result Robbe-Grillet’s novels, for example, rather resemble price lists or registers, spiced with a semi-detective plot.

p The “new novel" writers consider that modern society has entered an “age of suspicion" (the title of a novel by Nathalie Sarraute) due to a growing divorce between the form and substance of human relations, between the form and substance of social institutions and morality, between word and deed. Society is not what it pretends to be: it is utterly false and phoney. This deduction that gives a critical flavour to the works of “new novel" writers means that they recognise the obsolescence of the bourgeois social order, but this does not make them critical realists, since they reject the fundamental principle of the realist method—the portrayal of types. Their “characters” are deprived of individuality and personality, the essential basis for presenting the typical; they are but abstract ciphers.

p The portrayal of social types is a sine qua non of realism. The members of this school, however, whose thinking is patently non-historicist, abandon analytic portrayal of the real relations between the individual and 252 society and between people within society, rejecting the need for “characters” as an aesthetico-cognitive category in the novel. They ignore real human ties and examine not genuine social relations but their surrogate, just as the existentialists do. They thus substitute for social analysis the description of things (Robbe-Grillet), of insignificant emotions (Nathalie Sarraute), of changes in a character’s mental state in the process of self-perception and self-discovery (Butor), and so on. Like the naturalists, they break up the process of life into static elements and try to overcome the stationary nature of their own vision of the world through an imitation of movement, that is, by constantly altering the angle of vision of the action, shuffling events around in time, using interminable inner monologues to reproduce the stream of consciousness of their characters, and frequently resorting to symbolism. They derive their technique from Joyce, Proust and Kafka, and also employ certain devices from Faulkner. Their works fail to reveal the real contradictions of contemporary life, for the simple reason that their limited understanding of the nature of human relationships does not permit them to perceive the movement of history.

p In order to grasp the true underlying causes of historical events it is necessary to perceive and reveal the real forms of human and social relations, and not imaginary ones, the real forces at work in society, and not ephemeral ones. In other words, it is necessary to make a realistic study of society, a proper social analysis of events and relationships in it, and compare the facts and observations derived from such an analysis with the objective movement of history in order to infuse real-life content into a literary work.

p The bourgeois realists are fast losing the ability to investigate the world objectively, with the result that the pictures of life we find in their works are but a vague approximation to reality. Bourgeois realism shows itself incapable of synthetic perception and presentation of the modern world, since it loses sight of the real content of present-day social relationships. These relations are analysed and portrayed in their movement and 253 development by realist literature arising on another, nonbourgeois ideological basis.

p The study of social relationships is a fundamental ideological and aesthetic task for literature whose aim is to understand and take cognizance of life. Realist literature, by studying these relationships in their movement and development, relating them (but not identifying them) with the social order that has conditioned this or that form of human relations, has been revealing the specific features of society, the actual characteristics of a particular social structure and of the changes that have taken place in it, are in progress or are likely to take place. Realism employs the study of human relationships as an instrument for cognizing and presenting society. At the same time, profound investigation of society, its conflicts and contradictions, provides the key to cognizance of man himself, in all the complexity of his personal and social manifestations.

p Many-sided study of social ties and relationships has always been of primary importance in literature, and the greatest literary achievements of the past were all based on portrayal of the relationships between man and society. Today, in contemporary historical conditions, such study has assumed a special importance, for it alone enables literature to perceive, understand and depict the objective conditions which are already putting an end to the state of human alienation—that is, preparing and accomplishing, the establishment of social relations that remove the antagonism between the interests of the individual and those of society, bringing them into harmony and giving the individual every opportunity to develop his abilities and potentialities to the full.

p The practical foundation for the evolution of such relations was laid by the October Revolution and the subsequent process of building socialist society in the USSR. But the bourgeois world, too, has already reached a level of development where, as Lenin pointed out, state monopoly capitalism means full material preparation for socialism. The general crisis of capitalism has produced fundamental changes in the spiritual sphere, in mankind’s intellectual life. Today we are witnessing the establishment of a new 254 human self-awareness, free from the illusions and attitudes engendered by the old society, and communist in nature and character, accompanied by resolute criticism and reassessment of all the social views produced by capitalism.

p The transformation of the world is a reality of our age, and as such no longer remains a secret to the bourgeois consciousness. The defenders of the moribund system of capitalism are taking all kinds of measures to try and protect the pillars of private ownership relations from the great tide of historical change that is threatening to sweep them away. While the more aggressive and ignorant part of the bourgeoisie are placing their hopes in force and thermonuclear weapons as a means of halting the advance of history, bourgeois and social-reformist theorists recognise the inevitability of change and are seeking ways and means of containing the process of social change within the framework of the existing system of social relations, and thus perpetuating this system. Hence the numerous formulas of social reform, plans for reorganisation of administration such as the “New Frontiers" policy of the late John Kennedy, or the “Great Society" concept proposed by US ex-president Lyndon Johnson. Hence the attempts to introduce limited planning into capitalist economy characteristic of Gaullism, for example, and all the current ideas of technocracy, partial nationalisation and so on and so forth.

p Some eager minds—H. G. Wells, for example, in his later works such as Phoenix and You Can’t Be Too Careful—have insisted that the world revolution had already taken place and modern science, communications, mass media and transport have transformed mankind into a great universal family. True, there remained a few outstanding matters to be seen to—such as the abolition of class and national discord, the causes of war, social inequality and so on—but Wells considered that such minor details could easily be taken care of by technocratic administration. The more practically-minded ideologists of big business place their hopes in “people’s capitalism”, trying to corrupt the class consciousness of the proletariat by inculcating private ownership habits into the workers, making !hem “co-owners” of the means of production, 255 shareholders and participants in the share-out of dividends. Naturally the share and role of small shareholders working in production is quite negligible and exerts no influence at all on the course of production. However, the theory of “people’s capitalism" sows the illusion that class conflict is on the wane in contemporary capitalist society, and the fallacy that socialism can be grafted on the capitalist system.

p Similar ideas are propagated and introduced in practice by the so-called “public relations" system, where the aim is to abolish social conflicts arising between workers and employers in capitalist concerns. Arising at the time when the automation of production is beginning to fundamentally alter the occupational structure of the working class, when the new system of production organisation requires a larger number of skilled workers, when the intense strike struggle of the working people is forcing the employers to make certain concessions, “public relations" are called upon to give the workers a personal interest in the success of production. The idea is that a worker who understands the aims of production, a worker who is treated politely, will have no grounds for conflict with his employers so that relations between employers and employees can be based not on hostility and enmity, but on reasonable mutual concessions, a kind of ideological coexistence.

p But the supporters of this system carefully conceal the simple but irrefutable fact that however well he may understand the aims and tasks of production, a worker remains the object of exploitation, a source of profit for the employer. “Public relations" system glosses over the contradictions between labour and capital but is no more able to prevent the exacerbation of the class struggle than any other attempts to soften and take the sting out of the social conflicts of contemporary bourgeois society.

p The same vain purpose was pursued by the American sociologist Galbraith with his theory allotting the capitalist state the role of arbiter and regulator of the antagonistic interests of the monopolies and the working class in his American Capitalism. The Concept of Countervailing 256 Power, which was very much to the taste of big business circles. The same aim was pursued with the idea of the “integrated society" expounded by the late Pitirim Sorokin, based on the totally unhistorical thesis of the possibility of the ideological and economic merging of capitalism and socialism to form a future social order “integrating” features of the two systems that are currently in a state of conflict and competition.

Such theories have various origins: some of them derive from illusions and unwarranted hopes of the possibility of “cheating” the logic of history, and halting its irreversible objective course, its development from capitalist to socialist relations. Others represent a patent demagogical attempt to distort reality and deceive the masses, instilling in them views and habits that are alien to them. But whatever the origins of such theories, they invariably reveal the fact that contemporary bourgeois thought is incapable of grasping the sum total of the contradictions of the modern world and correctly assessing the prospects of the historical conflict between the moribund capitalist system and the socialist system that is steadily affirming itself.