p Of all the slogans played up by the bourgeoisie today the most fraudulent one is that of “freedom of the individual”, which liberalism held up in the old days. In capitalist society today, the rights of the individual can be maintained only through vigorous and strong democratic organisations, against which monopoly capital, in effect, directs its attacks. In the US labour movement, any sign of democracy is 345 ousted and replaced by boss oligarchy. Monopoly capital in other countries also hopes to achieve this. No trace has been left of the cultural and educational societies, working people’s and petty-bourgeois clubs, which were so popular at the end of the 19th century. The common man finds himself in the vice-like grip of monopoly capital. The monopolies seek to isolate him, to foster a philistine mentality of self-complacency and to confine his mental horizon to the narrow framework of a consumer world. The individual can have no freedom of his own, because the monopolies have established a whole system of coercion over the isolated individual.

p The sociologist David Riesman has drawn this important conclusion: “...skill democracy, in fact, based on respect for ability to do something, tends to survive only in athletics."  [345•18  “Skill democracy" in the capitalist world has always been bounded by the framework of private-property relations and the narrow limits of competition. Under monopoly capital it disappears altogether, and that is what Riesman means.

p Of course, so long as private property is there bourgeois individualism continues to be a most important aspect of the bourgeois world outlook, and this fact is being used by the ideologists of neoliberalism. But under monopoly domination, individualism is distorted and tends to degenerate. The whole of social life and all the spheres in which human capabilities are used are dominated by the giant monopolies. Under their crushing weight, the ordinary man loses his bearings in society dominated by unknown social forces and cannot realise his true role or social value. He keeps switching from an inflated ego, solipsism, amoralism, etc., to servility, a sense of debasement, mysticism and awe of supernatural forces.

p Extreme individualism tends to impoverish the personality, producing mental quirks and even ailments, which, bourgeois socio-psychologists admit, spring from a sense of hopeless loneliness. It is an elementary proposition of scientific psychology that human consciousness develops in relations with other men. Where social relations are impoverished man’s consciousness is likewise depleted. Men who live alone fora long time and have nothing to say to anyone lose their power of speech. That may be one of the roots of the modern abstract art and other phenomena in bourgeois Western culture suggesting the impoverishment of the creative personality. Some bourgeois theorists hold “freedom of art" to be freedom from any principles. But creativity is impossible without a world outlook based on stable and guiding principles which direct a man’s will. Without principles any world outlook will disintegrate or degenerate and become nothing but arbitrary action.

p Thus, state-monopoly capital modifies the old bourgeois individualist outlook in its own way. Of course, the basis of this individualism—private-property 346 relations—is still there, but it is no longer possible for the individual to display the same spirit of enterprise. The ideology of parasitism increasingly constrains the individual, killing all his active and creative elements. Abstract art is an expression of this dulling ideology.

p These features of parasitism are increasingly intensified as capitalism moves to its decline. The active, creative personality transforming the world is no longer held up as a model. In fiction it is the inward-looking character who ignores the surrounding world that is victorious. Instead of engaging in action, he goes through a succession of mental states. The “active principle" will be found, perhaps, only in the detective thriller, where the exciting plot consists in the duel between the criminal and the sleuth. That may explain the popularity of adventure stories and sensational reports about unusual events among readers who are fed up with writings in which nothing happens.

p In the present state of the economy and politics in the imperialist countries there can be no question of freedom in the sphere of spiritual culture even in its bourgeois liberal sense. The bookmarket, the cinema, etc., are under the control of the big monopolies. The destruction of democratic institutions in the political sphere has told on the cultural sphere as well. The notorious “individual of the free world" is in effect an impotent and defenceless person, who is hemmed in on all sides by market relations controlled by the monopolies, which use the situation not only to control prices but also the preferences of the audiences, whose members are habituated to a definite spiritual-food ration.

p Bourgeois ideology contains less and less liberal ideas of the old days, and more and more old reactionary feudal dogmas. Indeed, words like “religion” and “order” now have the same meaning with which they were invested by the reactionaries in the feudal period. The old ideas of the Holy Alliance, which arrogated the “right” to interfere in the affairs of other states to establish order, are being brazenly revived. The racist ravings of Count de Gobineau, who preached a “natural” inequality of the races in the mid-19th century are now being presented as the latest word in political wisdom and even science (so-called psychoracism).

p Let us stress that state-monopoly capital has not abandoned its attempts to change the political organisation of society to suit itself as it moves away from bourgeois liberalism. It has no intention—or possibility—to abandon such attempts. Indeed, the political organisation of bourgeois society known as bourgeois democracy took shape in the premonopoly epoch of capitalism. The new period of domination by capital has brought changes in the political organisation of bourgeois society, giving rise to plans for transferring to one favourite party the functions of the old bourgeois parties, so as to oust all the political organisations of the working class from legal political activity. As the real prospects for the working class making use of democratic 347 institutions and representative bodies for its own class purposes grow, monopoly capital seeks to withdraw all the instruments of government from democratic pressure. Clerical parties have also been used for this purpose. In Italy, the Christian Democrats, a clerical political organisation connected with the Vatican, has been brought to the fore in the hope that it could use the vast machine of the church and play on the religious preconceptions of the masses to promote the political interests of the reactionary circles. Soon after the war, the Catholic MRP in France and in West Germany Adenauer’s Christian Democrats also a clericalminded party, were advanced for the same purposes.

p But this stake on the clericalisation of political life in some West European countries has failed, because the working class has become too strong a political force for monopoly capital to be able to try that kind of trick unhampered. Besides, the establishment of mass clerical parties recruiting working people into their ranks has proved to be less than safe for the monopolies. The true attitude of the working people, their urge for unity with the political organisations of the working class, their urge for peace and their opposition to the monopolies’ domestic and foreign policy began variously to break through to the surface in these parties. By now there are Leftist trends among the Catholics, with some of them increasingly demonstrating their anti-capitalism and willing to make arrangements with the working class and the Communists. The Papacy has had to reckon with these trends as well, and an indication of this was the change of line carried through by the Pope John XXIII in the latter years of his life. Some Catholic priests who had made a point of working in industry admitted that they could not go along with capitalism and that instead of improving the bourgeois system it should be eliminated. One could say that the postwar attempt to bring clericalism to the fore in political affairs has failed, although it is still dangerous.

p Even today one should not forget that monopoly capital also breeds the ideology of fascism, an ideology of extreme chauvinism, racism and wild anti-communism. On the periphery of the bourgeois world the monopolies continue to implant starkly fascist regimes. In the dependent and semidependent countries terroristic military dictatorships directly controlled by foreign monopoly capital are being installed. That is the case in some Latin American countries, where there is lawlessness, an inflated police machine, killings and political assassinations, harassment of progressives, provocations and subversive actions practised as a political system. All of this is a very far cry from the theory and practice of bourgeois liberalism.

p Of course, it would be wrong to say that bourgeois social thought has been ossified altogether. It still displays shrewdness and the ability to take risks when it comes to tackling economic problems on which the profits of the monopolies depend. But the most acute contradictions built into the capitalist system, the snags constantly occurring in 348 production, the disproportions in the development of various sectors and regions, the slow pace of development as a whole—all these are problems that capitalist social science has been unable to solve. The attempts to tackle social problems amount to suggestions for various improvements in the condition of some sections of the working people, which are presented as being designed to eliminate exploitation and to persuade the people in the capitalist countries that political power and forms of property are questions which have lost their erstwhile importance. That is the substance of the talk about transformation of present-day capitalism.

p For the development of bourgeois social thought this postulate means a claim that the basic issue—the origin of social and national oppression and what will happen to exploitation in the course of historical development—has been superseded. That is a question social thinkers have tried to answer for centuries. Some said it was everlasting and inevitable so long as human society existed, while others contended that exploitation had to go with the institution of social property. Present-day social thinkers in the bourgeois world have to substantiate this sophism: “Western” society today has neither exploitation nor domination of social property.

There is some analogy here with the development of bourgeois philosophical thought, which has now allegedly managed to rise over and above materialism and idealism and to overcome their “extremes”. In place of the fundamental question of philosophy, it has allegedly proposed other “aspects”, in virtue of which the relation between mind and matter has ostensibly lost its erstwhile importance. Bourgeois philosophical and social thought has declared these “accursed questions" to be nonexistent, and to have been overcome by the development of capitalist society. Accordingly, science, including social science, needs allegedly to deal with other “aspects”, leaving aside the cardinal problems of world outlook, to study the “particular” and the “concrete” questions, confining itself to positivism and empiricism. However, in our day the specific problems in the individual sciences, the social sciences in particular, are ever more closely connected with the general questions of world outlook. Such is the logic of social life and of the development of scientific knowledge itself.