p The slander levelled at the socialist economy and economic policy has long been part of the arsenal of anti- communist propaganda.

p The economy as the principal area of the drive to build a developed socialist society and create the material and technical basis of communism is the target of intensive ideological attacks by the enemies of socialism.

p The anti-communist ideas about the economy of socialism and capitalism have undergone considerable modifications. The appearance of one theory or another and the choice of one or another method of fighting socialism depend on many factors, the chief ones being the achievements of socialism and the alignment of forces in the world.

p The first anti-communist theories about the socialist economy were founded on the belief that socialism could not be built and that all the attempts to that end were doomed to failure.

p Such was the basic concept of the first critics of socialism as an economic system, namely, the founders of the 19 thcentury subjective school of bourgeois political economy (Eugen Bohm-Bawerk, Leon Walras and others). Walras, for instance, emphasised time and again that the socialists neither knew nor understood economic laws. He regarded the system of dynamic equilibrium, allegedly generated by 44 spontaneous market competition, as the best means of achieving a highly effective economy. As he saw it, socialism with its measures to eradicate social vices in fact spelled out coercion over economic laws. He contended that by introducing into the principle of the distribution of resources a moral criterion, that was alien to the interests of production, socialism was undermining the foundations of the economic system itself.

p Immediately after the October Revolution in Russia the monopoly bourgeoisie and its spokesmen hoped that the socialist economy and socialism itself would prove to be unviable. Robert Wilton, correspondent of The New York Times at Petrograd, wrote at the time: “Obviously, Bolshevism is a destructive, not a constructive, agency.... Thus from an economic point of view the continuance of the present regime is an impossibility. From a political standpoint it is equally absurd.”^^1^^

p However, as the course of events upset all these forecasts, socialism won growing actual recognition as a viable economic system. From the theory that socialism would unescapably collapse the bourgeois ideologists began gradually to go over to the theory that socialism would inevitably lag behind the capitalist countries.

p The successful building of socialism in the 1930s, the outcome of the Second World War, the building of a developed socialist society by the Soviet people after the war, and the achievements of the other socialist countries led to a further change in the attitude of the theorists of anti- communism. Bourgeois science and propaganda had to acknowledge not only the very possibility of the existence of a socialist economy but also many of socialism’s economic advances. In recent years this recognition took the form of the theory of the “convergence” of the two socio-economic systems. The declaration of the architects of this theory to the effect that the finest elements of the two systems converge contains the admission that these finest elements are to be found in socialism. This attitude is essentially at 45 variance with the formerly predominant belief that socialism would inevitably fail and collapse.

p This virtual recognition of socialism’s achievements did not signify a change in the basic attitude of the ideologists of the bourgeoisie. The fundamental aim of the various bourgeois theories about socialism remains to distort the nature and mechanism of the socialist system. But today new methods and tactics are being used in an effort to attain that aim.

p One of the major new orientations of anti-communist activity relative to the socialist countries is to try to provoke socialism’s degeneration, to “soften” socialist ideology and the political regime.

To this end the anti-communists are concentrating their efforts mainly on giving a false picture of socialism’s socioeconomic system and of the position of the individual in socialist society. Their prime targets are the CPSU and the Soviet Union. Anti-Sovietism is thereby becoming the main content of anti-communist policy and propaganda.