p If the historical tendency of development that was most important for mankind was to be realised, if vigorous action by the working class and all the working people was to be intensified, and if their consistent, staunch and all-round struggle for changing capitalist society in the direction of its own development was to be carried on, there was need for intense ideological battles to release the working class movement from the influence of bourgeois ideology and the habitual cliches of bourgeois thinking. It was the bourgeois view that recognition of the objective course of social development inevitably implied a reduction in the importance of men’s conscious activity. That was an important defect of the bourgeois mechanistic, metaphysical materialism, as Marx observed in his Theses on Feuerbach. On the other hand, recognition of the role of men’s conscious, creative activity in the historical process implied, for bourgeois ideologists, a denial of objective uniformities, voluntarism and diverse forms of subjectivism.

Both these cliches were especially harmful at a time when society was moving towards socialist revolution, as the vast social energy of the working people was being awakened for the destruction of the old and the creation of a new system. The awakening, organisation and direction of this great energy of the masses became the key questions in social thought. One of the most vital tasks was to overcome the bourgeois cliches and the ideological influence of the bourgeoisie on the working class, and this called for historical revolutionary action by the masses.