p The Marxist theory of progress is now widely accepted and it is ever more difficult to deny it by means of “cyclic theories”, etc. What bourgeois theorists are most concerned with is the scientific, economic substantiation of the Marxist theory of progress. That is why present-day bourgeois political economy has produced its own theory of progress in the form of a “theory of growth”, which has failed to see the basis of progressive social development. Bourgeois theorists declare that mankind’s progress boils down to “economic growth’,’ to a growth of wealth, but they have failed to answer the question of how and why this growth occurs. Bourgeois theorists, as usual, refuse to see the workingman, the actual producer. Their “theory of growth" juggles different terms like “investments”, “savings”, etc., but they have not tried to gain an insight in the process of production. It appears that capital itself attains such “growth” without the working people’s participation. Consequently, mankind has to thank capital, from which all benefits derive, for progress as well. Professor Walt Rostow, a leading exponent of this theory, is inclined to deal with everything under the sun: Neuton’s mechanics, the establishment of national states, etc., as factors helping “growth”, but he says very little indeed about a category like labour productivity, ignores the various forms in which the working people are exploited and which ensure economic growth in antagonistic-class formations, and fails to analyse the modes by means of which the growth of material resources in these formations is achieved. In short, the exponents of this theory want to conceal the fact that throughout the centuries economic growth sprang from man’s exploitation of man and that a turning point has now been reached at which economic growth, far from requiring any form of exploitation, in effect tends to slow down and hamper social development and for that reason has to be abolished. That is the substance of the modern theory of progress.

p The advocates of the “growth theory" declare that it does not matter who owns the resources and accumulates them—society or its private-property classes, because the country as a whole still becomes richer. Such is Rostow’s theory. But the growth of wealth in the hands of the monopolies and a growing social wealth are not the same thing at all. The former is an obstacle to progress in modern society, while the latter opens up the path for unlimited prosperity.

p Rostow says that the growth of wealth in the imperialist countries means rising levels of mass consumption. But in the capitalist countries the people are short of material goods while imperialism wastes them on preparation for war. Agricultural production is artificially limited while millions of people in the world suffer from malnutrition. A sizable part of the production facilities remains idle, while millions of unemployed look 376 around for jobs. In this age of unprecedented scientific and technical successes and vast development of the productive forces, hundreds of millions of men on the globe live in horrible poverty. Bourgeois economists operate with “averages” to show that the age of “mass consumption" is here. But the fact is that men cannot be content with “averages” which cover up inequality, they want equality, they want a social system under which “averages” do not lie, but express social justice.

p Rostow believes that all social antagonisms are to be found beyond the framework of the capitalist world, in areas which have yet to enter the “mass consumption" age. But it is altogether impossible to separate the rich capitalist city, the centers of capitalist civilisation, from the fringe areas, from the sprawling “village”, which is poor and indigent. This can be done only as an armchair exercise.

p So long as the scientist imagines bourgeois society to be an “aggregation of individuals”, as an arena in which “harmonious forces" operate and are capable of paralysing any expression of “destructive forces”, so long as he refuses to recognise the existence of classes and turns a blind eye on exploitation, he can never hope to advance towards scientific theory of social development. This approach is inherent in the political thinking of the bourgeoisie and is the ideological substratum of present-day trends in Western sociology. The old positivism sought to produce a bourgeois sociology in place of the philosophy of history by borrowing some conceptions and methods from natural science, but it was ruined from the outset by view of society that was distorted for political purposes. Present-day attempts to escape from the bog of positivism by means of diverse theories recognising the importance of the “economic factor”, holding forth on “economic growth" as a “law” of social development are also bound to fail because they have not abandoned the unscientific view of society.

p The positivists of the 19th century saw society as a single organism, but towards the end of the century bourgeois sociology already abandoned the notion. Instead it put forward the idea which boiled down to roughly the following: “Society is not something simple, but is, on the contrary, something very complex. But Comte always required that society should be regarded as a whole, that in it, as in the study of individual organisms, one should move from the whole to the parts, instead of vice versa, so that the part should not in any case be studied in isolation."  [376•28 

p The positivist notion of “society as a whole" was metaphysical, abstract and idealistic through and through. In an effort to escape from this abstraction and urging a study of “real things”, Durkheim struck out 377 at the old schemes, but it was life itself that struck hardest at this “whole”. The view taken by Spencer and Comte of society as a harmonious whole was upset by life: the capitalist world, entering the epoch of imperialism, was shaken by the most acute social contradictions.

p Rostow has now made an attempt to return to the conception of society as a social whole. He has even provided his own classification of society in which, for instance, he labels as “traditional society" the whole of the initial stage, ranging over the primitive system, the whole of ancient history, the whole epoch of feudalism and a part of the capitalist period. This example shows that Rostow has returned to the abstract and metaphysical conceptions of society. He is prepared to recognise the economic basis of society but is incapable of getting through to the essence and significance of its social structure. Rostow’s society “grows” and gets richer, but he does not know what society is, for it is a conception still veiled in mist.

Indeed, what sort of society is it that has no relations of production and classes? The basis of the historical process disappears, while the process itself becomes an agglomeration of diverse and arbitrarily constructed “types” of society.