p As seen in retrospect, the path travelled by mankind shows quite obviously that this epoch of ours has to tackle in practical terms the tasks it has inherited from past ages and millennia, and to cut through the Gordian knots tied up by the exploitative system.
p The extremely uneven development of various parts of the globe is characteristic of the capitalist epoch. A handful of imperialist powers has amassed vast wealth, while peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America live in terrible poverty. Millions of people there have never put pen to paper or read a book, and can only dream of having their fill of food.
p For ages, the exploitative society was based on the principle of great injustice: the exploiters advanced along the path of progress but kept the vast masses of deprived men and women in the dark. When the first seats of the slave-holding civilisation originated, with their developed art of writing, the figurative arts, and culture, the rest of the world was steeped in the darkness of barbarism and semibarbarism. The slaveholding civilisation “enlightened” the barbarians with fire and sword. The raids on the settlements of the neighbouring tribes were designed to capture slaves and the products of the labour of others. New states, based on slavery, emerged on the periphery of the slave-holding world, but the vast majority of the population of the globe still remained at the stage of prehistory. As for the masses of men and women turned into slaves, their condition was even worse and more arduous. They were no more than the pedestal of the history and culture of slave-holding society, as Marx put it.
260p When feudalism emerged, the framework of world history was considerably extended, but the tribal system and barbarism still remained outside the feudal world in Europe and Asia. The economic, social, political and cultural development of the serfs within feudal society was variously hampered by the landowners’ oppression.
p Capitalism further extended the framework of world history, but it clamped the fetters of colonialism on a majority of mankind and pushed whole countries, peoples and continents away from the path of progress. A vast impoverished countryside, where people still live in hovels, surrounds the developed urban civilisation of the capitalist world. Within the capitalist countries, the imperialist bourgeoisie has constantly sought to keep vast masses of working people from culture.
p The true progress of all mankind began in our epoch, when the peoples of the socialist countries took control of their own future, with the peoples of the once colonial countries wresting their independence from a weakened capitalism, and with the working class, giving a lead to all the working people, becoming the decisive force in capitalist society as well. History becomes truly worldwide because vast masses of people are involved in historical activity.
p Progress ultimately amounts to the activity of masses of people making use of the real historical prospects opening up before them to overcome the obstacles and difficulties in their way. Progress is always connected with the discovery of new ways and creative initiative. Without activity by the masses, it is impossible to convert latent possibilities into reality. The theory of progress, in short, means mankind’s confidence in its future. This confidence is great when it relies on an understanding of the laws of social development, on men’s awareness of their powers and the potentialities latent in historical reality. Any theory of progress is, in effect, relevant to the extent to which it brings out the historical potentialities and shows men real ways for their activity.
p The Marxist-Leninist parties, which express the working people’s urge for progress and which guide their struggle for progress, are of tremendous importance for the whole of the world process today. Progress and its requirements cannot be seen as something independent of the historical activity of the masses. Marx wrote that “~‘history’ is not a person apart using man as a means for its own particular aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims". [260•2 The clearer the view vast masses of men have of their real purposes and the ways of achieving them, the better they are organised for struggle for these purposes, the faster and deeper is the progressive development of every aspect of society. The Programme of the CPSU says that the Communist 261 Party “looks keenly into the future and shows the people scientifically motivated roads along which to advance,” arouses titanic energy in the masses and leads them to the accomplishment of great tasks". [261•3 Without the Marxist-Leninist parties it would be impossible for mankind to advance along the path of progress, for these parties have sprung from the powerful forces of progress and are their instrument and concentrated expression.
p Mankind’s progress implies the need to eliminate the gap which has been created over the centuries between mental labour, as a privilege of the few, and manual labour, which has become a heavy burden on the majority. In exploitative society the benefits of progress are fully enjoyed only by a privileged minority. Modern technology—the use of chemicals, mechanisation, automation, remote control and computers—provide the means for eliminating this social injustice, but these can be used to the full only under communism, when society is organised on the right lines. Thus, the greatest social injustice in the history of culture can and must be righted. This is a real task in the progressive development of society today.
p The development of the productive forces makes it possible to eliminate another inherited contradiction, that between town and country, but this will become a reality only with the development of social property. There must be a change in the social organisation of capitalist society so that communist principles come to prevail in production and other social spheres. The answer to this question, posed by mankind’s development over the centuries, is also to be found in the CPSU Programme.
p The proposition, put forward by Marxism-Leninism and elaborated in the CPSU Programme, showing that all the exploitative forms of social organisation have outlived themselves and that in our day the organisation of society on socialist lines is the only highroad of progress, is of vast importance for an understanding of the prospects before present-day social development and the shaping of convictions proper to the communist world outlook. The apologists of capitalism keep extolling the path of capitalist progress, addressing their hypocritical speeches to the nations which have thrown off the yoke of colonialism. But the capitalist way is a way of suffering for the people, a way of crises in economic development. Capitalist development will further ruin the peasantry, which in these countries already has a heavy burden to bear. For the workers, capitalist development means back-breaking toil for the enrichment of a handful of capitalists, with a swelling army of unemployed. The petty bourgeoisie will be crushed in the competitive struggle with growing big business. The benefits of culture and education 262 will remain out of reach of the masses. The intelligentsia will be forced to sell its talents. That is the way of capitalist progress.
p Lenin used to stress Marx’s scientific analysis of capitalist society and capitalist progress as a vast advance in the development of theory. [262•4 At the time, capitalism was the highroad of social development. Today, a new highroad has been laid. On the map it is no longer marked as a dotted line that is to be laid in the future, but as a road that has already been built, and it is fully described in the CPSU Programme.
p Today, Marxism, having summed up the vast experience in building the new society, provides an analysis of socialist society and socialist progress, showing that the capitalist way of development is no longer as pre-eminent as it used to be. This marks a fundamental turning point in the development of social thought. “Economic growth”, to use the bourgeois term, is now inseparable from social progress and consists in raising all the peoples and all the ethnic and social sections of the population to the heights of abundance, culture and civilisation. Capitalism has proved that it cannot do this. The Soviet Republics in Central Asia are evidence that socialism can. That is the modern “formula of progress”.
p There are various signs that the turning point is at hand. In our day everyone has heard, and few have denied, the advantages of the planned economy. It is safe to say that the idea of planning has already made its way into the minds of the masses. In the underdeveloped economies, the idea of planning is now accepted by a vast majority of the population. Not everyone as yet understands that economic planning is possible only on the basis of social property in the means of production, and that it can be the result only of a fundamental social transformation of society. Bourgeois propagandists have tried hard to obscure the issue and to confuse the minds of men. But the great results of the socialist system of economic activity have already been appreciated, and the idea of planning has been accepted almost everywhere. Vast masses of men have already come out in favour of it. The key change in the awareness of the masses is already taking place. The masses want economic and social development to be guided consciously, and capitalist economic chaos to be eliminated. Reality itself will suggest the next step which is of crucial importance, namely, the awareness of the need for switching to social property. This idea is making headway among the masses, and world development is running in this direction.
p Mankind has been rising from blind poverty and ignorance to culture and civilisation through labour. Great social injustice has been a concomitant of progress. Throughout the ages, men were born and died with the idea that mankind was too poor for everyone to have their fill of 263 food, and that wealth was the lot of a few lucky people, while the majority were doomed to indigence. The Biblical story that men were cursed with labour for their sins was handed down from one generation to another. Vast masses of men had to live in poverty and do back-breaking toil, so that the great palaces of the doges should be mirrored in the tranquil waters of the canals of Venice, and the pinnacles of Notre Dame should rise to the skies. That was the heavy price civilisation had to pay for its achievements. The cynics said this was the wisdom of history, while the romantics called it the greatest tragedy of mankind. But both believed that nothing could be done about it, for otherwise the poets and the composers would not be heard, scientific thought would dim, while the architects would have nothing to build. Mankind would start to regress, moving back to the dulling poverty of primitive times, which was a fetter on man’s creative powers. Rebellious thinkers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries accepted this as being inevitable and hailed the sanctity of poverty, which would wash away the contagion of money-grubbing in a purifying stream. That would renovate mankind. Some suggested that for the sake of progress social justice should be sacrificed for ever, while others urged a return to the past so that social justice could triumph. It was a vicious circle.
p Marx, Engels and Lenin found the way out of this vicious circle by developing the theory of scientific communism and showing mankind clear prospects of implementing the age-old vision of social justice along the path of progress, instead of away from it. When this vision began to be implemented the old-established notions crumbled. When the purifying storm of the October Revolution broke out, when the workers and the toiling peasantry began to reshape the face of their vast country without the landowners and the capitalists, the world of the old notions of progress was shaken. Men all over the world came to ponder the great truth: the first commandment of modern progress is elimination of man’s exploitation of man. That was a truth the Utopian socialists first announced. Marxism has shown that that is the immutable law of social development. It has been transformed into historical reality by the October Revolution.
p When the Communist Party and the Soviet people fulfilled their first Party Programme and started on the second, many people came to realise the truth of the great power of unfettered human labour.
p Since then, the path of progress has been inextricably connected with the practical experience of the revolutionary transformation of society. The USSR’s transition from the first to the second phase of socialist construction will be an important stage in the progressive development of all mankind, because the entry of Soviet society into communism will be a new stage in the development of the productive power of labour, showing the vast potentialities of the new system, which has proclaimed 264 that labour will become the master of the world, and which has resolutely moved on from the world dominated by capital.
p While the Soviet people built socialism, unfolding step by step the unprecedented productive forces of free labour, they had yet finally to escape from the grip of poverty to which the country had been doomed by the domination of the landowners and capitalists. Whereas in the bourgeois world, men’s minds were still being warped by the false theories of capitalist progress. At the same time hundreds of thousands of men were dying of hunger in the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, and in the USA itself tens of thousands of unemployed and slum dwellers lived from hand to mouth.
p Then comes the turning point in the minds of men blinded by stories about capitalism creating wealth and abundance on the globe. Men in various countries come to accept the idea of social wealth and abundance created by all and for all. Marx anticipated the period when all the sources of social wealth will flow in abundance, and this period is at hand. The fact that mankind has reached the point in world history when the sources of social wealth can flow in full abundance works a fundamental change in the whole of world development, giving rise to new and powerful forces of progress, testifying to the weakening of reaction and stagnation, and to a revolution in the minds of men.
p In order to appreciate this change in the minds of men, one should bear in mind that the concept of wealth has always been connected with the notion of private fortune and personal luck, against the background of a great many unfortunates. That was the idea ever since the notion of wealth first appeared on the ruins of the primitive communal system. The emergence of a rich elite in society had a religious halo about it. The “rich man" and the “lucky man" were synonymous, while the notion of “luck” appeared to contain the benevolence of some supernatural force operating for “Divine election”.
p That was the origin of the idea that wealth was the good fortune of a happy few and poverty the lot of the many, and that it was impossible for everyone to be rich. That was the key principle of the ideology of the class society. Capitalism which emerged in the historical arena created the cult of the lucky individual who rose to wealth. Indeed, getting to the top at the expense of everyone else became the motto that was considered fit for every deprived individual and for whole nations. For that purpose the concept of human happiness was debased to the level of a philistine standard, of the “minor happiness" of the man who had had his dinner, the microscopic wealth of a few saved dollars. The more abundant the festive board of the capitalist, the more crumbs will fall from it for the working people—that is the political wisdom which lies at the root of all the theories of “people’s capitalism”. Another rule says: “Persevere, you, too, have a chance to become rich and take your place 265 at the festive board.” The whole of bourgeois propaganda in the USA has long praised this “conventional wisdom" and presented various versions of the “theory of chance”. A contemporary US writer, considering the keynote of bourgeois propaganda, has reasoned on these lines: why should the worker in the USA seek to gain the whole world, as Marx and Engels suggest, if he has a chance to become the owner of a filling station. A petty view of happiness indeed! This tiny fortune will disappear overnight through the blind workings of the capitalist system, the chaotic and relentless forces of capitalism. Bourgeois ideologists have boasted of the fact that capitalism creates incentive for work through the overriding private-property instinct. Addressing themselves to the sections of the working people with an embryonic class awareness, bourgeois propagandists emphasise the individual’s personal welfare, and assert that present-day capitalism is best able to satisfy his interests. That is where they seek to switch the ideological struggle, with various peddlers of the poisonous concoctions of anti-communism being most assiduous in this effort.
p Today, communism has accepted the challenge in this area as well and has carried on its offensive for the sake of man against bourgeois individualism, which is an ideological echo of the world dominated by private property.
p In the contemporary struggle between socialism and capitalism the great power of social property and the new relations between men developing on its basis and resulting in man’s individual development is being increasingly revealed. Idealism and metaphysics have a harmful role to play in their efforts to obscure the material basis of social relations. That is a characteristic feature of all the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois theories, which seek to drag social thought away from its Leninist path.
p It is a great achievement of Marxism-Leninism, the true science of society, that it has made a profound study of the social bonds between men and that it has identified in their diversity the most important ones. Bourgeois sociologists, who have written a great many books in their efforts to salvage bourgeois individualism and to provide theoretical backing for its principles, have never tried to bring out the basis of relations between men in society. They have indicated family relations, professional relations, national relations and the various hobbies which bring men together (like art and sports), and many other secondary ties between members of society. But the main thing they want to obscure is the highly important truth that production is the basis of social life and that the relations of production constitute the basis of all the social ties between men and of man’s own development.
p Lenin said that relations between men involving them in social labour constitute the basis of all the diverse social ties. No society can exist without strong ties between men in the process of labour. The stages in 266 the history of society are determined by the stages in the development of labour and the nature of these ties.
“Whatever the social form of production, labourers and means of production always remain factors of it. But in a state of separation from each other either of these factors can be such only potentially. For production to go on at all they must unite. The specific manner in which this union is accomplished distinguishes the different economic epochs of the structure of society from one another." [266•5 Why is every new epoch progressive with respect to the preceding one? It is so because it is ultimately an epoch of qualitative and quantitative growth in the productivity of man’s creative labour. The social relations, which change with its emergence, are a condition for that growth. The political organisation of society, expressing and consolidating these relations, also ultimately has an influence on the development of the productive power of labour. The culture of society is an indicator of the quantitative and qualitative level reached in society’s material and spiritual standards through the growing productivity of labour.