LBLYAKHMAN, O.SHKARATAN
__TITLE__ Man at WorkMOSCOW
PROGRESS PUBLISHERS
Translated from the Russian by Yuri Sviridov
CONTENTS
Page 1
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Introduction..................
Chapter One. The Age of Revolutionary Change .... 11
Chapter Two. The Main Features of the Scientific and
Technological Revolution in the USSR...... 58
Chapter Three. The Scientific and Technological Revolution
and the Social Structure of Society........ 145
Chapter Four. The New Structure of the Working Class . . 200 Chapter Five. A Class of Workers and Creators.....231
Chapter Six. The Soviet Intelligentsia in the New Situation ....................254
Conclusion...................299
First printing 1977 © nojiHTH3RaT, MocKBa, 1973 r.
© Translation into English from" revised Russian edition. Progress Publishers 1977
10505-803
014(01)-77
INTRODUCTION
The scientific and technological revolution, marking as it does a momentous upheaval in technology, production organisation and methods, has occurred in response to the changing role of science in production and to the need for regulating the interaction between production and the environment globally, on the scale of entire countries and continents.
Technology as such is a non-class category, which is why today many trends in the development of science and technology are common to all advanced countries, irrespective of their social systems. This provides a basis for expanding the scientific and technological co-operation among different countries, so as to enable them to join their efforts in protecting the environment and in initiating and maintaining production and technological knowhow and experience.
However, the application of scientific and technological breakthroughs, the social and economic consequences of the scientific and technological revolution, and the conditions stimulating creative activity in all sections of society, which ultimately determine the pace of the scientific and technological revolution, all have a direct bearing on the nature of the particular social system.
The 24th (1971) and the 25th (1976) Congresses of the CPSU characterised a qualitatively new stage in the
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L. BLYAKHMAN, O. SHKARATAN
socio-economic progress of the USSR, the stage of fullscale mature socialism. This stage began in the 1960s and it is marked, in particular, by an organic combination of the laws, principles and advantages of socialism and the achievements of the scientific and technological revolution, which takes a direction fully consonant with the interests of man and society. At the same time it is the accelerated development of science and technology which underlies a gradual growing over of mature socialism to still more developed forms, to a communist society in the proper meaning of the term. The scientific and technological revolution is a crucial factor in overcoming essential differences between mental and manual work, between various classes and social groups; it accelerates progress towards a socially homogeneous, classless society.
In recent years there have been a spate of scholarly writings in the Soviet Union on the social effects of the scientific and technological revolution. The latter are exceedingly varied and affect not only the social structure of society, but also family, ethnic and interpersonal relationships, as well as relationships between different generations, etc. For all that, however, we believe that the crucial question is this: what shifts does the scientific and technological revolution bring about in the class, social structure of society under different social systems?
This question has been examined in recent years by a number of Soviet scholars, including V. G. Afanasyev (Nauchno-tekhnicheskaya revolyutsiya, npravleniye, obrazovaniye [The Scientific and Technological Revolution, Management and Education], Moscow, 1972), V. D. Kamayev (Sovremennaya nauchno-tekhnicheskaya revolyutsiya [The Contemporary Scientific and Technological Revolution], Moscow, 1972), I. A. Maizel, (Nauka, avtomatizatsiya, obshchestvo [Science, Automation and Society], Leningrad, 1972), S. V. Shukhardin et al. ( Sovremennaya nauchno-tekhnicheskaya revolutsiya [The Contemporary Scientific and Technological Revolution], Moscow, 1970) and N. I. Dryakhlov et al. (Nauchno-tekhnicheskaya revolutsiya i obshchestvo [The Scientific and Technological Revolution and Society], Moscow, 1972). The same
INTRODUCTION
subject is considered in the collection of articles Nauchnotekhnicheskaya revolutsiya i sotsialny progress (The Scientific and Technological Revolution and Social Progress, Moscow, 1972), Chelovek---nauka---tekhnika (Man, Science and Technology, Moscow, 1973), in the joint Soviet-Czechoslovak study Nauchno-tekhnicheskaya revolutsiya i sotsializm (The Scientific and Technological Revolution and Socialism), under the general editorship of R. M. Kedrov, Moscow, 1973), and the Soviet-Polish work Problemy razvitiya sotsialnoi struktnry obshchestva v Sovietskom Soyuze i Polshe (Problems of the Development of the Social Structure in the Soviet Union and Poland, edited by V. Veselovsky and M. Rutkiewicz, Moscow, 1976).
Western scholars have made a close study of the USSR's social structure. The more objective Western sociologists, although most do not adopt the Marxist viewpoint, make apt remarks about the influence the scientific and technological revolution has on the social development of Western countries. Optimistic forecasts about the age of prosperity coming to the West through the scientific and technological revolution are more and more often superseded by overtly pessimistic observations about the exacerbation of all the contradictions in bourgeois society.
Most of their works are written, however, from the viewpoint of the convergence theory which tries to prove that the trends and final results of the development of socialist and capitalist societies under the scientific and technological revolution are identical. That this theory is untenable has been convincingly proved in a number of works by Soviet and foreign Marxists.
This book purports to analyse the essence of the scientific and technological revolution, its principal trends and its impact on the social structure of Soviet society, specifically on changes in the numbers, composition and make-up of the working class and the intelligentsia. Whilst for the most part presenting the material in a historical context, we have, at the same time, endeavoured to set forth our own ideas on the future course of particular phenomena and trends.
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CHAPTER ONE THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE
In most cases we reiterate the established position of Soviet scientists and scholars on the problems discussed. In some cases we take issue with some of our colleagues and give our own interpretation of individual problems in the hope that this may contribute to the further elaboration of the problems posed by the scientific and technological revolution.
We focus our attention on the Soviet Union's industrial work force and on the production intelligentsia. A considerable portion of the material used in this book comes from literary sources and statistical publications. Many sections are based on the results of concrete sociological studies, the most important of which were conducted between 1965 and 1975 in Leningrad, Pskov, Porkhov, Nevel, Kazan, Almetyevsk, Menzelinsk and Minsk.
The 20th century will go down in the annals of history as the age of momentous upheavals in just about every area of human endeavour; as an era that has seen historymaking proletarian revolutions and national liberation wars, which in more recent times coincided with the striking acceleration of scientific and technological progress that has come to be known as the scientific and technological revolution.
The word ``revolution'' usually brings to mind popular uprisings, the fall of dungeons and prisons and an armed struggle between oppressors and the oppressed. Can this term be applied, then, to upheavals in science, technology and production? Are we justified in describing discoveries made in the quiet of laboratories, and in the hum and noise of factory workshops, or changes occurring in the structure of production and in the material life of society generally as a ``revolution''? What is the essence of and the interaction between upheavals in science and technology and the social movements of today?
To answer these questions satisfactorily we have to turn to the history of human society. Lenin wrote: " Continuation of the work of Hegel and Marx must consist in the dialectical elaboration of the history of human thought, science and technique." * This is the only way
V. I. Lenin. Collected Works, Vol. 38, pp. 146-47.
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13to trace the evolution of a particular phenomenon through the entire course of human history, the only proper way to identify the landmarks of that evolution, to evaluate its present state and foresee its future course and ultimate result.
Lonin provided a remarkably profound and lucid analysis of the essence of the revolution in physics at the turn of this century, an analysis applicable to today's scientific and technological revolution which is affecting every area of human knowledge. The discovery of atomic fission (the splitting of the atom) and the possibility of converting the atoms of one set of elements into those of another, a process accompanied by the liberation of nuclear energy, along with the discovery of the mutual transformation of mass and energy amazed and perplexed some physicists at the time, so much so that, watching the collapse of long-established and familiar notions on the structure of matter, they went to the length of announcing the disappearance of matter as such. Lenin, on the basis of dialectical materialism, showed that a revision of established notions about matter was neither abnormal nor extraordinary. On the contrary this revision, in Lenin's view, constituted a perfectly normal and legitimate stage in the process whereby relative stability in the development of a particular science is followed by a period of radical change and upheaval. The electron, the discovery of which rocked the foundations of physical theory at the end of the last century, was fully in keeping with Lenin's prediction to the effect that the electron was as inexhaustible as the atom.
The new world of anti-particles, the "strange world" of anti-matter will probably provide the launching pad for new upheavals in science. Already now the annihilation phenomenon (the transformation of particles and anti-particles) which liberates fantastic quantities of energy, is becoming the subject of scientific research and not just the pet theme of science-fiction writers, as it had been hitherto.
Similar revolutions are occurring in other areas of science. Thus, chemists have been forced to revise their ideas on the mechanism of chemical reactions and the nature of intermolecular bonds. This revision has opened up the prospect of channelling chemical reaction in a desired direction to produce chemical compounds with the desired properties. The most striking achievement of modern chemistry is undoubtedly the synthesis of giant
THE REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE
Human history demonstrates that scientific knowledge develops in two basic forms. The evolution of science spans many years as new facts come to light within the framework of old theories and established scientific principles and notions. Some people may think that at times science approaches the peak of knowledge about the world around us. They may argue that every discovery has been made, every phenomenon satisfactorily explained, so that no blind spots are left on the map of human knowledge. They believe that laws existing in a particular field of science, once they have been recognised as classical ones, are there to stay immutable and sacrosanct.
As time goes by, however, new discoveries are made and new facts come to light which do not fit into the framework of old theories and ideas. Whenever that happens a revolution occurs. A scientific revolution, as defined by the Soviet Academician B. M. Kedrov, represents a radical ``dismantling'' and reconstruction of established opinions and notions in particular areas of science; a revision of fundamental principles, laws and formulations, as a result of the accumulation of new experimental data, the discovery of new phenomena, and the emergence of a new system of notions and new theoretical conclusions which conflict with the old ones.
The turn of this century saw a revolution in physics which scrapped the old idea of the atom, as the ultimate indivisible elementary particle of matter, and introduced the theory of relativity and the quantum theory. Subsequently these discoveries allowed investigations to be made of the structure of the atomic nucleus and the properties of elementary particles beginning with the electron, the proton and the neutron.
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15molecules and the consequent development of a wide variety of polymer materials.
Truly breath-taking prospects are being presented to mankind in connection with the revolution in biology as investigations are conducted into the workings of genes and their role in developing hereditary features and properties of plants, animals, and humans.
The existence of genes as material vehicles of heredity were discovered way back in 1865 by G. Mendel, the father of genetics. In 1900, when the laws of heredity were corroborated, genetics as a science in its own right was established. In the mid-20th century scientists unlocked the physical and chemical essence of genes to show that they were in fact large molecules of nucleic acid which predetermined the unique nature of cellular proteins. The scientists discarded obsolete notions on the mechanics of heredity and its vehicles---genes---as being something immutable. Molecular genetics and molecular biology made their appearance. Biochemistry, cytology, physiology and genetics, until then separate sciences, joined forces, forming at the same time an alliance with physics and chemistry.
The discovery of genetic laws holds out the possibility of using micro-organisms, fungi, algae and other elementary organisms on a wide scale in a variety of applied branches of the economy.
The development of fundamentally new genetic methods of boosting crop yields makes it possible for new strains to be evolved without reliance on the selection of random mutations. One of the major results of the revolution in biology has been the possibility of scientifically regulating processes occurring in living nature.
But perhaps the most promising area of modern genetics is the study of the possibility of regulating human heredity. The penetration of science into the sanctum sanctorum of heredity, the unlocking of the mystery of the heredity mechanism, will enable medical geneticists to find effective ways to regulate human heredity and combat hereditary diseases.
Breath-taking prospects are being opened in another area. According to available data provided by geneticists,
physiological characteristics are not the only factors transmitted from one individual to another; some psychic characteristics such as aptitude, ability, and emotional make-up are also transmitted and subsequently improve or deteriorate under the impact of education, upbringing and the environment. All this sets genetics, along with psychology and educational science, a complex but at the same time exceedingly important and, in principle, feasible task of precisely determining basic inclinations and abilities of individuals early with a view to improving professional and vocational training.
One other area of science where a revolution can be expected in the near future is psychology. The eminent Soviet psychologist A. N. Leontyev sees the exploration of creative processes as a major avenue for the future development of psychological research. Today no one looks upon discoveries as a matter of chance. But it is not clear yet just how discoveries are made. The promise of cardinal changes occurring in the field of psychological research is bound up with the study of the laws governing creative thinking, creative imagination and human intuition.
Psychologists are exploring the laws governing what is known as heuristic thinking, that is to say, the search for solutions whereby some of the alternative approaches, which cannot lead to the goal, are discarded before they are ever put to the test. In the long term, progress in psychological research will enable us to govern the upbringing of the younger generation and mould their abilities with far greater efficiency than is possible today. This will serve the purpose of developing man as a creative personality.
The catalogue of areas of science undergoing their particular revolutions could be continued. The important thing to emphasise at this point, however, are the special features characterising the development of the scientific revolution in general.
First of all, this revolution is affecting a variety of interconnected areas of science, such as physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, etc. The current scientific revolution involves the entire spectrum of scientific dis-
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ciplines and also the organisation, technical equipment and management of science as a branch of human endeavour. This, for the first time in history, holds out the promise of evolving a unified system of scientific knowledge describing the laws governing all forms of movement.
The upheaval in social sciences worked by Marx, Engels and Lenin resulted in the emergence of a new, socialist social system. The revolution in natural science we are witnessing today is furnishing man with effective instruments to influence nature at all levels ranging from the microworld of genes, atoms and molecules to the terrestrial and outer space.
Secondly, we are witnessing a rapid process of differentiation and integration of different sciences. Physical chemistry, radiation chemistry, statistical physics, molecular biology, mathematical linguistics are among the new disciplines that have come into being on the interface of different areas of science. More and more such sciences emerge as time goes by. The upheaval in genetics, for instance, would have been unthinkable without the discoveries in chemistry and without the emergence of the novel physical concepts relating to atoms and quanta.
As a result, and this points to the third feature of the contemporary scientific revolution, the division of sciences coupled with the constant emergence of new, highly specialised fields of knowledge and with the integration, unification and development of comprehensive research allows a changeover to be made from the formulation of new theories in individual areas of science to the development of what is known as meta-theories which explain the laws governing the development of matter as a whole at all levels, ranging from the world of elementary particles to the macroworld of the cosmos. As a result the area of unexplored branches of knowledge is shrinking and blind spots still persisting on the interface of different sciences are disappearing; this process is accompanied by the development of systems analysis and a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to the study of individual problems and of the world as a whole.
THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE
17Fourthly, there is a changing pattern in modern scientific methods of searching for truth. Karl Marx noted in the 19th century that scientific knowledge acquires a truly scientific character when it allows and in fact makes imperative the employment of mathematics. Systems approach, whereby a phenomenon is explored in all its interrelationships with other phenomena as part of a more complex system, calls for the introduction of mathematical methods and principles into all branches of science, including traditionally ``non-exact'' sciences such as philology, psychology, meteorology, geology, economics and law. Mathematics itself is changing its face as it becomes a science of mathematical structures. Modern science is more and more having to deal not with apparent, visual, definite particles, materials and processes, but rather with their mathematical models and symbols, the analysis of which often makes possible to obtain a more reliable knowledge of the object itself. The transition from the study of specific processes and phenomena to the study of their models in no way invalidates the Marxist proposition that only life, practice and reality can serve as the workable criterion of the correctness and relevance of scientific ideas. On the contrary, mathematical models allow a* more penetrating insight to be had into the inner workings of real processes if only because they make it possible for the incredible variety of factors and links in nature and society to be quantified and measured and computers to be used to analyse them and to extend the boundaries of the experiment.
Another salient feature of the current scientific revolution is the conversion of science, an offspring of human consciousness, into a direct participant in production so that it becomes a productive force in its own right, a potent material force shaping the development of production.
Human history knows three stages in the evolution of the interrelationships between science and production. In the first stage, dating from the emergence of scientific knowledge to the industrial revolution of the 18th century, science developed in accordance with its internal laws, had no direct connection with either production or
2---054
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19technology and only influenced them in a haphazard way. The small-scale fragmented economy could dispense with the help of science which only explained the outside world.
The second stage spanned two centuries separating the first and second industrial revolution. Large-scale machine industry transformed production along new, rational lines replacing obsolete methods by a conscious application of natural science, scientific data to production. The advent of the machine was preceded by major discoveries in mechanics. The first inventions were made that incorporated the production aspects of scientific research. Examples include the combustion theory, the study of the composition of pig iron and steel, the theory of organic compounds synthesis, and the mathematical principles of calculating structures and mechanisms. All these and other breakthroughs paved the way for new processes in chemistry and metallurgy, the construction of new types of bridges and dams, the production of dyestuffs, etc. The natural and technical sciences moved to the fore as they not only explained the laws governing the evolution of nature, but also illuminated the ways along which new products, new technology and industrial methods could be developed. Science, though, was still separated from production.
Most technological improvements in the early stages of the development of machine industry were hit upon empirically on the basis of the direct observation of production and its current needs, or were the result of endless experiments conducted as often as not by rule of thumb, by trial and error. Often thousands of experiments had to be made to find the answer to a problem. The great inventors of the past such as Watt and Edison were self-taught and were working their way towards production from experimentation rather than from science. The steam engine was developed before the laws of thermodynamics were discovered. The electrical field theory was evolved by the light of the electric bulb.
On the other hand, decades separated the scientific breakthroughs from the corresponding changes in production. A full century separated Faraday's experiments
from the practical application of the electromaguetism he discovered.
As long as 102 years separated the discovery of the principle of photography (1727) from the first photograph to be made (1829). Eighty years separated the first transmission of a radio impulse (1840) from the first broadcast (1920). It took fifty-six years, from 1820 to 1876, to introduce the telephone.
Quite recently, between 1900 and 1913, the average time lag between research and production was 36 years in the case of 75 major discoveries. Roentgen's discovery was ridiculed by his contemporaries as the subject of cartoons and was not applied until forty years later. In the same period a production technologist and a scientist who worked on the same problem far from being personally acquainted usually belonged to different generations. In the mid-20th century the time lag between discovery and introduction shrank to 13 years in the case of nylon (it took three years for the discovery to be used in an invention, while another ten years were required for introducing the new material into industry), 14 years in the case of television (1926-1940), six years in the case of the atom bomb (1939-1945) and five years in the case of the transistor radio (1948-1953).
Modern machine production cannot be improved empirically, it is too complex for that, and if one were to go about it by the rule of thumb and the method of trial and error, one would have to work through millions of alternatives before the desired solution could be found. The modern worker and engineer must work in close contact with the scientist who not only gives explanations for nature's mysteries and formulates the laws governing the evolution of the Universe, but also provides answers to mundane production needs, without which new technologies and design configurations are unthinkable.
The third stage in the historical evolution of science begins with the direct co-operation of scientists and industrial workers and engineers. Science marks the first stage of modern technology and production processes. New products, machines, materials and processes orig-
2*
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21inate in the laboratory before they are used in industry.
Marx's shrewd prediction to the effect that production would become an experimental, material-creative and objectified science * is coming true. The development of modern production is determined less by the quantity of labour put in and more by the level of technology which is dependent on the general state of science and on the quality and standard of industrial methods, i.e. on the application of science in production.
Science, from an independent autonomous force, is becoming part of the system embracing science, technology and production, and the major changes within the system originate in most cases in the realm of science. Needless to say, science does not join production as an isolated element, but alongside technology and manpower. Scientific knowledge influences production through people, technology and industrial methods rather than through itself.
Modern science is rapidly becoming a major form of social consciousness. It not only explains the world but is increasingly used as an instrument for controlling processes occurring in nature, human society and man himself. In other words it is becoming a potent instrument for transforming the world. We are witnessing a radical turn towards man as natural sciences with their exact methods join forces with social sciences to form a comprehensive and unified science of man, society, and thought.
In effecting the transition from the use of individual machines to fully automated complexes where man is no longer employed as an appendage to the machine, science must not only aim at improving existing technology but must primarily stimulate and develop man's various faculties and abilities and must gain important insights into the mechanism of human creativity and improve existing systems of upbringing and education.
Apart from the increasing humanisation of science, we are witnessing its democratisation. Indeed, from the pro-
vince of a selected few, it is becoming a mass profession. Experts predict that by the year 2000 as much as half the available working time will be devoted to science.
THE REVOLUTION IN TECHNOLOGY
A revolution in technology is the appearance of fundamentally new type of technology, especially as the result of radical changes occurring in the means of labour created by man.
Human history has known many revolutions in technology including those that occurred with the use of the flint, the invention of the wheel, the windlass and tackle, pumps and other hydraulic machines, water and wind mills, and many other fundamentally new instruments of labour.
The means of labour characterise social structures in the same way as the bones of fossil animals characterise the species of animals long since extinct. Marx wrote that water and wind mills were characteristic of feudal society and the steam engine of capitalist society which used it to organise large-scale factory production and to create a new social class deprived of the means of production, retaining individual freedom, but obliged to work as wage labour---the proletarian class.
The founders of Marxism-Leninism devoted special attention to studying the history of technology as the material basis of society. Technology and production methods reveal the sort of relationships existing between man and nature, making it possible to understand the social conditions of his life and the consequent views, notions and ideas of his time.
The first technological revolution of modern history which did not just affect a particular sphere of production (technological revolutions occur after each major invention), but the entire material and production base of society began in Britain in the late 18th century. It was caused by the appearance of mechanical machine-tools and lathes, fundamentally new working machines.
* Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Krltlk der Politischen Okonomie (Rohentwurf), Moscow, 1939, pp. 599-600.
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23Any mechanical device comprises three distinctly different parts---the engine, the transmissive mechanism and the working tool itself. However, the principal part of the machine is the working tool. The other parts exist for the sole purpose of setting the tool into motion. In turn the tool changes the form, or shape, or composition of the objects of labour---raw and other primary materials--- in the desired ways.
The technological revolution began with the invention of a support---a mechanical device that was a substitute for the human hand. Until the invention of the support the machine-tool operator was obliged to hold the cutting tool in his hand shifting it along the work. A revolution occurred when a special device was invented which made the cutting tool exert pressure on the work and which shifted the tool along the work. The human operator joined a gear, a screw and a cutter in a single mechanical system.
The essence of the industrial revolution in the late 18th century lay in the fact that the tool was transferred from the human operator to a mechanism which performed the same operations the human operator did before the invention. This is the fundamental principle of the early weaving machines and textile looms.
After the industrial revolution quantitative changes were triggered off accompanied by design modifications of the tools of labour. By the 19th century the full range of now existing machine-tools had been invented including the turning lathe, the drilling lathe and the planing machine. Later design modifications resulted in greater precision and capacity of the machine-tools.
Following the first technological revolution, the machine was established in its own right, and the principle of machine production triumphed. But at that time the human operator continued to act as a simple motive force.
The second technological revolution was associated with the use of the steam engine as a machine generating movement. The steam engine replaced the muscular power of the human operator in another major production function---locomotional. The power of the new engine was wholly under the control of the human operator. Pro-
duction became independent of the location of water or other natural resources. It was now possible to concentrate and enlarge production independent of the available wind or water power.
The steam engine was invented in the late 17th century. But not until the 1780s was it applied to production on any important scale. It was only when the steam engine was joined to the working machine that the second technological revolution occurred, ushering in a new era of the development and improvement of a wide range of engines based on the principle of converting thermal energy into mechanical.
Thus we see that the second technological revolution was integrally bound up with the first. Machine production took on a fully integrated form with the development of a steam engine which set working machines in motion, and especially with the appearance of the fully automatic steam engine (one fitted with a valve) which set a whole system of working machines in motion.
Towards the end of the 19th century another technological revolution began---the electrical revolution. Electric motors, internal combustion engines, turbogenerators using the power of falling water, steam and compressed gases changed the existing machines in fundamental ways. Noisy and cumbursome transmission systems were replaced by relatively noiseless quiet electric drives that set the entire machine in motion and later its individual parts.
Major inventions in the field of transport and communications offered the possibility of improving the third component of the machine, the transmission mechanism, in a fundamental way. The invention of the telegraph, radio and later television revolutionised the existing means of communication.
A typical feature of technological progress is its ever mounting acceleration. The technological revolution of the Renaissance era which involved the extensive use of water and wind power was separated from the invention of the steam engine by two centuries. The invention of the steam engine was separated from the invention of the internal combustion engine and electric motor by almost
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25a century. But the next technological revolution followed 50 years after the beginning of the age of electricity.
The current technological revolution differs from all previous revolutions in that it affects the entire technology rather than individual areas of production.
The contemporary upheaval in technology is based on the transition from a technology employing a single mechanical form of movement to a technology based on the all-round use of many different forms of motion, including the highly complex, notably in physical, chemical and biological processes.
The meaning of the current technological revolution lies in the transition from a system of working machines to a fully automated system incorporating the computer, i.e. the transition is being made to instruments of labour employing mechanical, chemical, physical (notably electronic) and biological processes to perform production functions without the direct participation of the human element. In other words, the working machine has effectively replaced man's hands, the steam engine replaced man's muscle power while a modern automatic computercontrolled machine frees man from all types of monotonous, non-creative work.
The advent of the ``automation'' (the computer) system constitutes a revolutionary upheaval in technology which opens the way for the development and improvement of new means of labour: for converting separate elements of comprehensively mechanised production into a system of automatic devices comprising automatic engines, automatic tools and automatic control devices.
The revolution in the means of labour offers the possibility and indeed demands a matching revolution in the rest of the elements of the production process including the objects of labour, technology, production organisation and industrial labour as such.
The contemporary technological revolution, which has logically coincided with the era marked by the transition from capitalism to communism, holds out the prospect of creating an adequate material and technical basis for the creative labour of man in a communist society.
THE SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION
The mid-20th century saw the union of a scientific revolution and a technological revolution to form a scientific and technological revolution which began to unfold on a scale unprecedented in human history. The scientific and technological revolution (incidentally, the term was coined by the eminent Marxist scholar John Bernal of Britain) represents a period of simultaneous and interconnected qualitative changes in science and technology.
What are the salient features of the contemporary scientific and technological revolution?
The changes we see in science and technology do not occur more or less simultaneously but are interconnected in the profound way, being organic components of a single revolutionary process. New scientific knowledge forms the basis of major technical discoveries. Thus, in 1953, research in mathematics and cybernetics resulted in the development of the first electronic computer. Progress in physics and electronics has resulted in rapid improvements in computer technology. So much so that in the latter half of the 60s the computer became the basis of the current scientific and technological revolution.
The history of those outstanding discoveries which brought about the scientific and technological revolution indicates that they were by no means the chance result of inventors and scientists working separately but rather the predictable result of the purposeful activity of large bodies of scientists and inventors. Thus the invention of a junction transistor in 1951 was preceded by research in solid body physics from 1945 onwards with the specific purpose of improving existing communication technology. The development of the nuclear reactor came about because of the purposeful search for a way of using nuclear fission which had originally been discovered in 1938 for the purpose of creating an atom bomb. The discovery of a technology for producing man-made diamonds came as the crowning achievement of a series of theoretical studies initiated originally for this very purpose.
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There has only been one major discovery in past decades which was accidental. In 1928, A. Flemming obtained a culture of penicillin quite inadvertently and in this way discovered the first antibiotic in medical history. However, this discovery did not form the basis of a special industry until 10 years later, when in 1939 a second antibiotic was discovered and systematic studies were initiated to investigate a new class of substances. All the other discoveries which marked the new era in the development of the productive forces, such as the discovery of laser, maser, radar, nylon, etc., came as a result of purposeful research into the theory of electromagnetic oscillations, giant molecules, etc.
However, it would be wrong to think that under the current scientific and technological revolution technology is a passive reflection of the changes occurring in the fund of scientific knowledge. The technological revolution provides new means and equipment for science, which vastly enhance its possibilities and efficacy. At the same time technological changes set scientists new tasks and give rise to new requirements. The last few decades confirm that scientific discoveries by themselves do not produce major changes in production until the right technical conditions are available. Thus, many types of plastics were known back in the 1920s while an aluminium smelting technology was discovered even earlier. However, it was not until the late fifties, when major successes were recorded in petrochemistry and in the production of iron and steel smelting equipment, that aluminium and plastics began to be mass-produced as substitutes for steel. Polyethelene- and polysterol-making technologies have been known since 1937 but it was not until the sixties, when fundamentally new equipment for their production was available, that polymers came onto the mass market.
Another salient feature of the current scientific and technological revolution is the ever mounting pace of change. Many generations have expressed their surprise at the tempo of progress in their time. However, the rapid changes we see today are in a totally different class. These changes occur within progressively shorter periods
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27of time and have increasingly greater implications affecting several areas of science and industry at a time. The mechanical machine-tool and the automobile increased travelling speeds 10- to 30-fold. The aircraft flies at a speed 100-400 times faster than that of the pedestrian, while the modern computer calculates millions of times more rapidly than a human calculator.
The comprehensive nature and the giant scale of the revolution in science and technology is another of its salient features.
The current scientific and technological revolution is a simultaneous, interconnected upheaval originating in fundamental discoveries and affecting all the principal areas of science and technology. It is producing qualitative changes in the character of the means of labour, energetics, objects of labour, industrial methods and processes, and production organisation and management.
In appraising the possibilities offered by the scientific and technological revolution we can conclude that human intelligence is acquiring tools with which to control processes on a global scale. The power of human intelligence can only be used expediently when mankind is organised in a communist society. In conditions created by the scientific and technological revolution capitalism is turning into a force threatening the existence of every living being on Earth. Capitalism has demonstrated that it is capable of wantonly plundering natural resources and of using the fruits of human creativity for purposes of destruction. Capitalism threatens the world with nuclear weapons. It is destroying nature itself with industrial waste, in the name of the further enrichment of a handful of capitalists. In the same conditions, communism, by contrast, is not only a far more progressive and humane system but is in fact the only possible social system on earth.
REVOLUTION IN PRODUCTION
Changes occurring in science and technology within any social system inevitably give rise to changes affecting all areas of social life. The transition to fundamentally
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29new technology above all produces a revolution within the organisation of social production and the division of labour. The role and place of man vis-a-vis production undergoes a fundamental change as does the method of uniting the human operator with the means of production at an industrial enterprise. This revolution, which comes about as a result of major technological breakthroughs, was described by the founders of Marxism as a production revolution (or industrial revolution if it affects only industry) .
There have been four production systems in modern history. These differed from each other according to (1) the place the worker held within the production process; (2) the method of his union with the means of production; and (3) the nature of the division of labour. A production system becomes the dominant form of production after "conquering every element of society or fashioning missing organs out of the latter. In this way a system becomes an integrated whole as human history marches on." *
The first system is cottage industry (petty peasant and artisan production), which is based on the skill of individual workers performing various jobs, on their individual art and nimbleness in performing specified operations. An artisan or a peasant acts upon nature using primitive tools. The dominant type of settlement is the village which dominates over the town with its merchants and artisans both economically and politically. In the peasant and the artisan's work physical and mental labour are in unity. This activity rests on the skills, habits, traditions and production experience handed down from father to son. A family collective coincides with a production collective. Normally all members of the family work the same field or in the same workshop. The family dwelling is the place where they both live and work.
The next production system---large-scale manufactory ---was the first industrial production system in history. A manufactory is based on the co-operation of labour on
a large scale. Hundreds of workers are brought together in the same workshop. Manual labour is divided into particular operations which require less experience and less skill. This division of labour into individual operations prepares the ground for the use of machines. Within the manufactory, dwellings are separated from workshops while the family collective is separated from the working collective. However, the village is still the dominant type of settlement because production is tied to the water or wind mill.
The manufactory for a long time coexisted with the crafts, since it did not at first involve urban artisan production, but rural industries (especially weaving), which did not require a high degree of workshop skills and experience and therefore easily gave place to the manufactory production. *
The third production system was large-scale machine industry. Its appearance marked a fundamental change in the mode of production, the change which Marx and Engels called the industrial revolution.
This revolution, which originated in the late 18th century in Britain, ushered in an era of large-scale machine industry, and intensified the antithesis between town and country, and between mental and manual work. It was an era in which the family collective was completely isolated from the production collective and the dwelling place from the work place.
The industrial revolution began with radical changes in the cotton industry and was completed when engineering, the hard core of industry, was transferred to an industrial base, and when it became possible "to construct machines by machines". ** This process of converting large-scale machine industry into a single form of industrial production accompanied by the conversion of industry into the principal sphere of production and of employment, has come to be known as industrialisation.
The historic significance of large-scale machine in-
* Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Polittschen Okonomte (Rohentwurf), op. cit., p. 189.
* Karl Marx, op. cit., pp. 400-415. ** Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1974, p. 363.
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31dustry lies largely in the fact that in mechanising labour it converts it into a scientific process which places the forces of nature at the service of man; it extends the boundaries of cooperation of labour in an unprecedented way and reduces most labour operations to observing, supervising and regulating. Individual labour as such ceases to be productive, retaining its sense only within the framework of collective labour of many workers.
Marx and Engels, in their analysis of the industrial revolution in England, repeatedly emphasised that it constituted a complete upheaval in civil society which was the more all-pervading and radical the quieter was its tread. The revolution was set in motion by the working machine and the steam engine which followed. *
The transition to factory production implied that the worker lost his status as the principal agent of production and became an appendage to the machine, performing functions the machine was still unable to perform, namely, the control over particular technological processes. In Marx's apt words, here it is not the human operator who animates the machine (his tools of labour) with his skill, deftness and virtuoso work, but rather the machine itself possesses skill and power, itself being the virtuoso. The human worker's labour is thus deprived of its creative element, as it is wholly dependent upon and regulated by the machine. The worker's role is but a link in the overall production system whose unity resides not in the live worker but rather in the mighty system of machines. **
Those, then, were the changes the first industrial revolution brought about in the method of uniting the worker to the means of production and equally in the worker's place within the production process.
The machine system of production implied the emancipation of production from the limitations which had earlier been imposed upon by the worker's lack of phys-
ical power and by the unique and rare nature of artisan skill. This formed the basis for an intensive growth of factories and plants on a fundamentally new principle. Simultaneously, the worker was freed from the most arduous jobs where he had acted as a draught animal in the period of artisan and manufactory production. However, in becoming partially liberated from arduous jobs, the worker was also liberated from his independence within the production process. His personal skill and art and the entire range of habits and skills inherited from his father and grandfather were no longer needed. The principal area in which his labour was used was now mechanical, monotonous operations involved in starting up and switching off machine-tools, in setting and measuring and in removing the product upon completion of the machine operation. Whereas an artisan worked for decades to acquire his qualifications, a matter of weeks were required to train an industrial worker for his job under large-scale machine industry.
In this system the immediate production of goods is separated from decision-making. People become little more than operation performers. Their daily work within the production process does not offer any prospect of creative development and the realisation of their individuality.
Large-scale machine industry is the first production system which makes the application of science to the productive process imperative. However, the object of this application is still largely the machine system itself, the materialised labour which is becoming progressively more important than live labour. The amount of means of labour per industrial worker is the main yardstick for judging the extent to which science has been applied to production. Knowledge is outside the worker under a machine production system.
Large-scale machine industry prepared the ground for man being alienated from production and being confined to performing specified work, and thus removed any possibility of creative work which is the highest ultimate meaning of human life. This situation conforms to the very nature of capitalism where private property presup-
* See Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 4, Moscow, 1975, p. 307.
** See Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Okonomie (Rohentwurf), p. 589.
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33poses the separation of decision-making (the owner is the sole decision-maker) from actual work on the shop floor which became the lot of wage labour.
Socialism, whilst possessing the same production system as capitalism, fundamentally changes the conditions of its utilisation. The separation of labour from property is done away with and society as a whole or individual groups of workers (collective farms, artels, etc.) are made the sole owners of the means of production. That is why any labour, no matter how arduous and unpleasant, takes on a totally new quality under socialism, making it possible for the worker to work for himself. The alienation of man from the conditions of his existence is ended. For the first time in history work becomes a matter of honour, valour and heroism.
The use of large-scale machine industry under both capitalism and socialism does not allow one to argue that there is any convergence in the material and technical bases of the two systems, or in their respective principles of industrialisation. Socialism's material and technical base is made up of large-scale machine production in town and country, which is developed according to plan throughout the country. This can only be done on the basis of public ownership of the key means of production. Therefore, socialist industrialisation has two aspects to it. Firstly, it is a process of converting industry, notably heavy industry, into the dominant branch of the economy, accompanied by the reorganisation, on an industrial basis, of every branch of the economy. Secondly, this process completes the socialist socialisation of production which begins with the nationalisation of the private property of the landowners and capitalists. In other words, it is the creation of a highly complex and diversified network of production relations offering the working people the possibility of control and supervision over the production and distribution of material values on a national scale.
The industrial revolution, which establishes the third production system, does not complete the mechanisation of labour in all the branches of industry or in other areas of the economy. Mechanised production exists
alongside manual labour in agriculture, transport, etc.
The origins of the fourth production system can be traced back to the mid-20th century. This system has been formed in the shadow of a production revolution which is, in turn, closely bound up with the scientific and technological revolution. The revolution is occurring against the background of mankind's transition from capitalism to communism and of the division of the world into two opposed socio-economic systems. It should be emphasised that the formation of the new production system is closely bound up with the spread and establishment of socialism throughout the world because the basic features of this system are concordant with the very nature of socialism. The spread of the new production system to industrialised capitalist countries implies the completion within them of the organisational and production prerequisites for the establishment of socialism. This sharply exacerbates every social conflict inherent in capitalism.
Soviet scholars hold different views on the relationships between the scientific and technological revolution and the production revolution. Some investigators distinguish between these two terms maintaining that there is no direct connection between them. Others, by contrast, feel the two are identical. Some Soviet sociologists and economists believe that the modern production revolution is confined to the socialist countries.
Like many other investigators the present authors take the view that the scientific and technological revolution and the revolution in production are difierent and at the same time interrelated phenomena. These revolutions are taking place both in the socialist and in the capitalist parts of the world, but the same changes occurring in the realm of science, technology and production organisation have essentially difierent results under the respective social systems.
The essence of the contemporary revolution in production is the transition from factory industry based on machine systems, where the industrial work force performs technical, control, managerial and logical functions which complement the work of machines and mechanisms,
3-054
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35to a production system based on fully automated production complexes within which the functions of guiding the technological process, operational control and management are taken over by computerised systems. The use of computers makes it in principle possible to relieve the human agent of his supervisory and regulatory functions in the immediate production process. Herein lies the essential distinction of the socio-economic consequences of the ``automation---computer'' system from the results of automation without the use of cybernetic devices.
This is not to say, of course, that the new production system puts the human agent outside the sphere of production. Man will continue to design, improve and test new instruments and devices, he will continue to instal and assemble fully automatic lines for mass production, to develop programmes for automatic complexes and exercise overall supervision of the production process. All these operations, particularly repairing, adjusting and setting, require not just mental work, but a measure of manual work too.
Labour is highly unlikely to degenerate into a recreational activity, or to become the simple process of " pushing buttons". Marx wrote that "really free labour ... is a devilishly serious business calling for the utmost concentration possible". * For the young worker production process remains a school of industrial discipline while for the mature experienced adult "who carries in his mind a fund of knowledge accumulated by society production is a matter of applying [that knowledge], an experimental, material-creative and objectified science. For both, however, the process of production is at the same time physical exercise, since labour requires manual effort and free movement." **
Conditions are arising for a radical upheaval in the realm of production. The first industrial revolution freed production from the limitations imposed by the restricted
potential of the human agent as a motive force. The contemporary revolution in production is bound to free production from the limitations imposed by the restricted nature of man's physical and psychological potential. The first industrial revolution created conditions where the worker could be relieved of locomotional functions and the function of direct action on his work tools. As the current revolution in production develops it will eventually relieve the worker of various non-creative operations involved in the production process and of the need to spend a large part of his active life on the performance of monotonous, mechanical operations.
As the human agent is progressively eased out of the production process the non-productive sphere gains in importance as a field for the application of human effort. The non-productive sphere is generally taken to embrace science, education, culture and the arts, everyday services and utilities.
As the current production revolution gains momentum all sectors of the economy are reconstructed on the industrial base. Industrial production is becoming the universal form of making the necessary material values. Agriculture, civil engineering, industrial construction, scientific research and the application of the new scientific knowledge in industry and other related spheres of human endeavour are acquiring uniform organisational frameworks and are increasingly subject to the uniform principles of management and planning.
The essential basis of the contemporary revolution in production is formed by engineering, instrument-making, radio electronics, and the chemical and power industries. In some of these industries the production process is continuous, and this makes it easier to effect a transition to the use of fully automated production complexes. By contrast engineering, instrument-making and radio electronics do not feature a continuous production process, which makes their automation somewhat more difficult. At the moment automated systems are manufactured by non-automated enterprises. So it would be safe to say that the revolution in production is taking its first tentative steps.
3*
* Karl Marx, Grandrisse der Kritik der Politischen Okonomie (Rohentwurf), p. 505. ** Ibid., pp. 599-600.
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37 36L. BLYAKHMAN, O. SHKARATAN
Marx and Lenin foresaw that communist labour would evolve in two stages. The first stage would see the abolition of private ownership of the means of production and the achievement of full equality among all members of society in terms of ownership of the means of production. The Great October Socialist Revolution marked the beginning of this stage. In the first stage the machine system of production, which does not require a fully developed personality for its technological needs, is still retained. An adequate number of skilled industrial workers proficient in specific operations is quite enough. The second stage would involve the disappearance of man's subordination to the machine-based division of labour, and the obliteration of distinctions between mental and manual work. Only then would work become man's prime necessity, only then would the productive forces grow vastly along with the all-round development of all members of society, only then would all the sources of social wealth flow in abundance.
Free time, rather than working time, will then become the chief measure of social wealth. You will remember that Marx described free time as time for the development of individual abilities. An adequate amount of free time for the all-round development of the worker, as a powerful productive force in its own right, will then boost the productive force of human labour. The amount of free time available to the individual, enabling him to improve his cultural attainments, educational level and qualifications, determines, in the final analysis, the scientific potential of the society he lives in, which in turn characterises its production potential.
Thus, communist labour in the full sense of the word presupposes significant changes both in the social system and in the production system. The change in the production system will come about through the agency of the production revolution under socialism.
The history of the social division of labour, like the history of science and technology, is divided into periods of gradual evolutionary development and periods of revolutionary change. The contemporary upheaval brought about by the transition to the use of a system of fully
automated production complexes is of special significance in the history of human society. The new production system is an essential material and technical basis of communist society, a classless society, and only within its framework can become truly all-embracing and comprehensive.
There are also fully automated factories under capitalism, only with this difference: with private ownership of the means of production it is impossible in principle to set up a fully automated system of management for the whole of the national economy, much less for the economies of a community of nations. It is impossible in principle to involve the entire work force in the process of managing production. The new production system is taking shape in both socialist and capitalist countries. In the first case it affects the entire community of socialist nations, while in the second it embraces only individual capitalist and state capitalist concerns. However, under capitalism the contemporary revolution in production serves to exacerbate existing contradictions between the essentially public system of production and the private system of appropriating the results of that production, thus bringing the day of the socialist revolution nearer. The transition to the new production system will be complete only after the victory of the socialist revolution in the capitalist countries.
HAS THE NATURE OF CAPITALISM CHANGED?
Scientific and technological progress in the modern world is increasingly becoming an important area in which there is competition between the world's two opposed social systems. L. I. Brezhnev, General Secretary of the CC CPSU, said: "We do not want to underrate the strength of those with whom we have to compete in the scientific and technological sphere. Here the struggle will be a long and difficult one. And we are fully resolved to wage it in earnest so as to demonstrate the superiority of socialism in this sphere as well." *
* L. I. Brezhnev, The CPSU in the Straggle for Unity of All Revolutionary and Peace Forces, Moscow, 1975, p. 94.
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39Let us now examine some trends in the development of the capitalist countries under the scientific and technological revolution.
To begin with, this revolution has brought about further concentration in production resulting in the formation of super-giant monopolies of a new type, known as conglomerates, or to use the word current in the US, ``behemoths'', which are essentially conglomerations of unrelated industries. At the present time the main factor causing production concentration is the increasing concentration of expensive scientific research projects and patents, as well as the state military orders, in the hands of a few giant monopolies.
To give an example: of the 500 major US industrial companies in 1962, as many as 110 had been swallowed by their more powerful rivals by 1970. The number of annual mergers and take-over bids in the US rose from 2,264 in the thirties to 4,789 in the fifties and 12,579 in the sixties. As a result, in 1974 the 500 giants accounted for almost two-thirds of the revenue receipts of industrial enterprises and transport and communications concerns. Further, 398 of the 500 major corporations developed into conglomerates that seized control not only of the heavy industry, but of every major branch of industry, commerce, agriculture and services.
In 1974, 344 multimillion-dollars industrial monopolies (160 of them American) were a mere 0.002 per cent of all the companies in the capitalist countries, but they concentrated about two-thirds of all the assets, profits and personnel. Between 1963 and 1974 their assets grew 4.5-fold.
The major monopolies, relying on their superior scientific and technological arsenal, continue to swallow up independent companies in other countries, or set up their branches and affiliates there. The intensification of the process, resulting in the formation of multinational monopolies, is a salient feature of the capitalist economy in the seventies.
The major corporations instal computers in their head offices so as to keep careful account of production and sale, stocks and supplies of raw materials and other oper-
ations carried out by their affiliates and branches located across the country. The vast scale of monopolistic socialisation of production enables the monopolies to enhance the role played by in-house planning, both in the field of investment and in the sphere of training and re-training of personnel, organisational modification, etc. The telecommunications and radio-telephonic communication lines owned by the corporations are converted into instruments for the socialisation of production in a capitalist form.
An essential feature of modern capitalism under the scientific and technological revolution is the progressively growing state intervention in economic life through the formation of state-owned enterprises, increasing state investments, and the introduction of state control and programming, on the basis of which the capitalist class seeks to limit the spontaneous and chaotic character of the capitalist economy using credit facilities, taxation, mandatory norms of depreciation, etc. The special boards in charge of planning and scientific research are set up in all the major capitalist countries and they dispose of the multi-billion state investments earmarked for universities and other research centres. In Marx's day the civil service was made up primarily of tax officials and members of the police force; today, however, it includes hundreds of thousands of workers on the nationalised railways, in the airline companies, television companies, power plants, nuclear research establishments, as well as the personnel in the economic agencies awarding military contracts to the major corporations.
Significant changes have taken place in the structure of capitalist property. Mass production based on accelerating scientific and technological progress has become such an expensive activity that individual capitalists, however wealthy, find it impossible to exercise effective control over the production process single-handed and are obliged to invest in a whole complex of research laboratories, industrial enterprises, financial and sales organisations, as well as in their own ``family'' companies. To obtain extra finances the more wealthy of the capitalists exploit millions of small shareholders. The American
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41economist, F. Lundberg, estimated that in the mid-1970 1.6 per cent of the US adult population owned 82.2 per cent of all the country's shares and bonds. The millions of small shareholders do not exercise any appreciable influence on the business activity of ``their'' companies. What is more, they are the first casualty of stock exchange crashes, monetary crises, etc., while the real owners of the corporations, the capitalists, are able to increase their profits during these periods.
The property of small capitalists has also undergone changes. Many small and even medium farmers have become bankrupt. Thus, the past quarter of a century has seen the ruin of about half the total number of farmers in the US. Their total number declined from six million in 1945 to three million in 1969. In the six Common,' Market countries (West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) over a million farms went out of business between 1949 and 1969. The reason was that the farmers could not afford the expensive machinery and chemicals without which it is impossible to compete with the larger agricultural farms. At the same time there has been a rise in the number of small private operators in the maintenance and services field, as well as in some industries where modern technology allows the existence of enterprises employing a relatively small number of workers. As a result, the average size of industrial enterprises in the US and Western Europe has shrunk over the past decade. However, the bulk of these enterprises have become sucked into the orbit of the major capitalist conglomerates, supplying them with individual parts and components and becoming heavily dependent upon them in scientific, technological, financial and economic respects. Thus, the concentration of property and the monopolies' growing control considerably exceed concentration of production. Similarly, the social structure of modern capitalism has changed. A century ago most of the world's population were peasants. In the past decades the proportion of the agricultural population has shrunk dramatically. In the US the decline was from 8 per cent in 1960 to 5 per cent in 1970. For the record, in 1870 the rural pop-
ulation in the USA accounted for 74 per cent of the total.
There is a constant decline in the proportion of the people engaged in free-lance professions and independent trades in modern capitalist society, while the proportion of blue and white collar workers keeps increasing. Between 1950 and 1975 the number of blue and white collar workers grew from 158 to 250 million in industrialised capitalist countries; their proportion in the able-bodied population rose from 68 to 82 per cent.
In 1970, 115 million people were employed in material production of the industrialised capitalist countries ( industry, construction, transport and agriculture), and 101 million in the services (clerks, trade, municipal and communal employees, teachers, etc.). More than half of all workers were employed in the services industry in 1976. Some investigators predict that by the year 2000 over three-fourths of the total work force in the major capitalist countries will be engaged in science, education, public health, management, distribution, the services industry and transport.
However, the scientific and technological revolution and the associated social changes give the lie to the theories of "technological determinism", i.e., the mechanical identification of technological and scientific upheavals and changes in the type of economic and social relations. Many Western sociologists wrote about the spontaneous, automatic transformation of capitalism into a fundamentally different society because of the advances in science and technology which, they claim, make social revolution unnecessary. Fritz Starnberg, for one, declared that by 1971, because of the on-going production automation in the West, especially in the USA, a revolutionary transformation of the entire fabric of social life would have come about, with the establishment of socialist ideals "contrary to Marx's prediction ... under the capitalist mode of production, which is changing before our eyes, solving the old problems of eliminating poverty... " *.
* F. Starnberg, Die militdrlsche und industrielle Revolution, Berlin, 1957, pp. 257, 278, 308.
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43Since the mid-fifties there has been a mounting spate of theories of "social engineering" based on the idea that technological inventions and innovations will allegedly enable society to find antidotes for all the social ills of capitalism, and for all its economic contradictions. The bourgeois sociologists asserted that a social system played a secondary role within a technological system; that the scientific and technological revolution erased distinctions among the social systems existing in different countries (Daniel Bell); that it was the form of production, rather than the form of property, that played the crucial role in society; and that all societies based on large-scale machine industry were therefore similar in principle, and all of them were equally progressive (Raimond Aron).
These concepts make a pretentious claim to the discovery and satisfactory explanation of some fundamentally new phenomena, which do not allegedly fit into the scheme of Marxism-Leninism. Sometimes bourgeois sociologists try to create the impression that the founders of Marxism predicted the imminent collapse of capitalism because of its inability to stimulate technological progress, while capitalism, despite their predictions, has successfully survived and adapted itself to the conditions of the scientific and technological revolution. This claim is totally without foundation. It would be a mistake, Lenin pointed out, to think that capitalism's tendency towards decay precludes its rapid growth. * Marx took the view that "capital's mission in history will have been accomplished when ... human needs are fully developed ... when ... universal industry, thanks to the strict discipline of capital through which successive generations of men have gone, develop into the common property of the new generation ... when ... ownership of common wealth and its preservation make modest claims on society's working time ... when labour whereby man himself produces things which he can get machines to produce for him disappears..." **. As Marx
noted, capital presupposes a discovery of new ways for working objects of labour, an all-round study of the Earth's bowels, a development of natural sciences and a discovery, creation and satisfaction of new requirements. *
The founders of Marxism drew attention to the more recent organisational forms of capital, the growing possibilities of scientific and technological progress, and intra-trust planning. Thus, speaking about the development of major joint-stock societies, Marx wrote that "capitalism is here directly endowed with the form of social capital ... as distinct from private capital". ** Lenin noted: "Scattered capitalists are transformed into a single collective capitalist." ***
However, capitalist production by its very nature is a privately owned system of production and it remains such even when we have "an association of capitalists" instead of the individual capitalist. Joint stock societies, state-owned enterprises, and monopolies with their farflung network of enterprises directed from a single monopolistic centre, represent the continued development of capitalist relations of production, a development which does not change the character of capitalist property.
The present changes taking place in the position of wage labour, notably in the position of the working class in the advanced capitalist countries, likewise do not represent anything fundamentally new. As Engels wrote in 1891, "on the whole, as the workers become better organised, their general situation shows an improvement and no crisis can force it down for a long time below or even to the same level typical of past periods". ****
Lenin, in his analysis of the character of the workers' requirements in different stages of capitalist development, discovered the law of an ascending trend in these requirements as public consumption grows. Soviet economists term this "the reverse side" of the law of grow-
* V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 22, p. 300. ** K. Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Okonomie (Rohentwarf), p. 231.
••• Ibid., p. 312.
** K. Marx, Capital, Vol. Ill, Moscow, 1971, p. 436. *** V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 22, p. 214. **** Marx/Engels, Werke, Bd. 38, Berlin, 1968, p. 63.
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45ing labour productivity, since in the final analysis finished products enter the consumption sphere.
Thus despite the assertions of bourgeois propaganda to the contrary, the new phenomena characterising modern capitalism stem from processes that originated in the time of the founders of Marxism, who took them into account and assessed them for what they were.
Nearly twenty years have passed since bourgeois sociologists first wrote about the advent of "a new society". The year 1971, when their first predictions were to have come true, arrived but their predictions did not. What was the actual impact the scientific and technological revolution had on modern capitalism? Has the character of capitalist property changed? Far from it. In 1970, still some nine-tenths of the US population did not hold any shares. Although some monopolies took steps to sell their shares on credit among their own personnel, a mere 2.7 per cent of the workers and a miniscule 0.3 per cent of the farmers in the US held a few shares. And even among the 10 per cent of the Americans who were formally considered shareholders, even though they held but one share, no equality was in evidence. According to the US economist R. Lendman, in Britain and the USA three-fourths of the shares quoted on the Stock Exchange are owned by less than two per cent of the adult population.
According to the US scholar F. Lundberg, in 1968 200,000 (0.25 per cent of the economically active population) Americans owning property in excess of $1,000,000, controlled the bulk of the national wealth. According to statistics released in 1972 by the Brookings Institute, the leading research corporation in the USA, five per cent of the more wealthy Americans appropriated some 20 per cent of the national income, while a fifth of the US population received a mere 3.2 per cent of the national income. Millions of Americans live just above the poverty line. The scientific and technological revolution has aggravated the unemployment problem. The number of officially registered unemployed in the industrialised capitalist countries grew from 8.7 to 15 million between 1973 and 1975 (over 69 per cent of all
blue and white collar workers). In 1975 in the USA for the first time white-collars accounted for the bulk of the unemployed.
The diffusion of capitalist property has indeed come about. But it has failed to embrace the whole of society, being confined to the capitalist class. Significantly, each top-crust capitalist in the USA sits on the board of a number of companies. Sixteen vice-presidents of the United States Steel Corporation direct another 51 banking, insurance, transport, commercial and other corporations. Increasingly, it is the collective, aggregate capitalist that is becoming the true owner of property, which does nothing to make individual bourgeois less capitalistic.
Has the capitalist world of the seventies become a "welfare state" as some bourgeois ideologists predicted? The answer is No. As John Bernal pointed out, the scientific and technological revolution held out the promise of ending poverty and malnutrition on a global scale. However, under capitalism the position of the majority of the world's population has changed little for the better. Two-thirds of the people wrest their living from subsistence farming, using a hoe and a primitive plough. The differences in the standard of living among the different classes of industrialised capitalist countries have increased, and the gap between these and the developing countries is widening too. In the period 1970 to 1980 the per capita income in the industrially developed countries will grow from 3,100 to 4,000 dollars, but it remains static at 105 to 108 dollars a year for the thousands of million of people in the developing countries.
Many Western sociologists claimed that in the industrialised capitalist countries a new social stratum was emerging, a class of ``technocrats'' and `` technobureaucrats'', to become the leading ruling section of a new, transformed capitalist society (they meant a rapid expansion of the intellectual community under the impact of the scientific and technological revolution). The modern capitalist state, according to these sociologists, was becoming an instrument in the hands of ``technocracy''.
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47However, the stark realities of modern capitalism have given the lie to the bourgeois theoreticians' conjectures about the domination of "the men of science''.
The top crust of the intellectual community, that is the managers, presidents of industrial and commercial companies, publishers and directors of scientific research complexes, who, some bourgeois ideologists claimed, were to rule by virtue of their administrative and technical competence, have in fact joined monopoly capital to become dedicated and loyal servitors of the big bourgeoisie.
That this is so has been admitted by some of the heralds of the new society. Thus, Daniel Bell wrote in 1971 that the special moral qualities of the technocrats with their contempt for profit and readiness to harmonise the interests of society, organisation and individuals had proved to be an illusion.
The scientific and technological revolution has failed to give birth to a "new class", rather it has produced further stratification within the intellectual community (as indeed did the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries).
Significantly, some Western authors now concede the illusory nature of their hopes for a social revolution to be worked by automation. Raimond Aron, for one, has admitted that economic, scientific and technological progress has failed to meet the real interests of society. Domination over nature has signified a rupture of the essential umbilical cord with it, while the growth of technology and science has produced a decline in moral standards, leading to cultural and moral degradation, the exacerbation of conflicts between states, nations, classes and the various sections and groups within society. The price of economic progress has been growing instability in the essential conditions of human existence, a growth in the number of mental patients, psychopaths, criminals and declasse elements. Conflicts are particularly acute in the United, States, where "industrial civilisation" has reached its acme. Daniel Bell presents a catalogue of the still unresolved problems, including inflation, chronic unemployment, the crisis of the cities, conflict between
legislative and executive powers, the growing violence, which the government finds impossible to control and which is exemplified in political assassinations, the economic unevenness in the development of individual industries and areas, the proliferation of black people ghettos in the major cities, and the exacerbation of interracial and inter-tribal conflicts.
However, bourgeois sociologists and futurologists put the blame for the growing conflicts on the scientific and technological revolution rather than on the capitalist society in which it occurs.
In actual fact the revolution in science and technology produces an exacerbation of the contradictions inherent in bourgeois society because it is unable to change the capitalist nature of that society.
WAGE LABOUR AND THE PROLETARIAT UNDER THE SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION
Referring to the rapid growth in the number of intellectuals occupied in the non-productive sphere, bourgeois and reformist theoreticians claim that the role of the working class within the social structure of advanced capitalist countries is on the decline.
The actual position is that there are still important sources for the working class in the capitalist world to grow. Thus, the continued ruin of farmers and the middle urban strata in the FRG, to take but one example, resulted in some 1.5 million people joining the industrial work force between 1950 and 1970. In France, the economically active rural population decreases by an estimated 150,000 annually. In the nine Common Market countries the number of artisans declined from 23 million in 1959 to 17 million in 1970, a drop of 25 per cent. Women workers are another important source from which the working class is replenished.
In 1973 the number of gainfully employed women grew to over 82 million in the industrialised capitalist countries. They accounted for about 39 per cent of all wage earners in the USA and Canada; in Western Europe and Japan the proportion rose to about 33 per cent.
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49One other source from which the working class of the West European countries has been replenished in recent years has been the massive influx of foreign workers. Over all, the industrialised countries of Western Europe had over ten million foreign industrial and office workers in the early seventies. The new categories of wage workers, mostly foreigners, swell the ranks of the unskilled industrial labourers and the skilled workers engaged in assembly-line production. They are the first to be fired during economic crises, as was the case in 1974 and 1975.
The role and proportion of skilled workers grows under the scientific and technological revolution. In the USA, between 1940 and 1970 the proportion of unskilled workers within the engineering work force declined from 24.3 to 13.1 per cent; the proportion of skilled workers grew from 27 to 36.5 per cent; and the proportion of semi-skilled workers rose from 48.2 to 50.4 per cent. Between 1960 and 1975 the proportion of non-manual workers grew from 40 to 50 odd per cent in the USA, from 34 to 40 per cent in Britain, and from 40 to 45 per cent in Canada. The educational standards of industrial workers are rising. Thus in the USA the average length of education in high school increased in the case of skilled industrial workers from 9.5 to 12.4 years between 1950 and 1969; in the case of semi-skilled workers it increased from 9.9 to 11.1 and among unskilled workers from 2.5 to 10 years.
Technological innovations cause the ``lifespan'' of industrial trades to become increasingly shorter and ``old'' traditional trades remain only in name. Individual experience and skill take a back seat to education which enables a worker to master a new skill or trade relatively quickly. Therefore, many working-class families now endeavour to give their children a good education, particularly in an effort to protect them from unemployment in the future. Spending on education is becoming a major item in the budgets of working-class families.
However, the rising trend of skills and educational standards coupled with increases in wages for the working class in some periods and changes within its social
structure have failed to blunt the edge of the class struggle in the industrialised capitalist countries.
Under the scientific and technological revolution production requires the development of the proletarians' personalities, sharp rises in their qualifications, cultural attainments and educational standards. But capitalist production and social relations conflict with the subjective elements of the productive forces even more than with their material elements.
Today the range of interests embraced by the working class is expanding along with its material, social, cultural and spiritual requirements. The working class of today is no longer satisfied with the assured provision of daily bread and elementary housing conditions. Guaranteed employment and confidence in the morrow are coming to the fore as basic interests of the working class along with the goal of freedom from mechanical monotonous labour, untrammelled access to education, culture, and participation in decision-making affecting the daily life and destiny of the working class. These new workingclass requirements cannot be met satisfactorily by a society dominated by the exploitation of the workers by the capitalist class. In the words of the Main Document of the 1969 International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties, "while defending their vital interests, the working people fight for social rights and democratic freedoms. These demands are increasingly directed against the system of domination by monopoly capital, against its political power." * The number of participants in trade union and allied action in the capitalist countries grew from 273 million between 1966 and 1970 to 315 million from 1971 to 1975.
Concurrent with the growth of the working class and the increased revolutionary militancy of the industrial work force in the industrialised capitalist countries some categories of employees and a section of the intellectual community are increasingly reduced to the status of proletarians. Analysing the dialectics of the development of
* International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties, Moscow, 1969, Prague 1969, p. 24.
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51the intelligentsia, Lenin as early as the end of the last century noted that they "occupy a special position among the other classes, attaching themselves partly to the bourgeoisie by their connections, their outlooks, etc., and partly to the wage-workers as capitalism increasingly deprives the intellectual of his independent position, converts him into a hired worker and threatens to lower his living standard". *
A proportion of office employees and intellectuals increasingly approach the working class in terms of origin, character of work, standard of living and life style. At the beginning of this century over half the total of employees and intellectuals came from the bourgeoisie and members of the free-lance professions. Today the proportion of employees and intellectuals with these social origins has shrunk significantly. The majority of employees and engineers in the industrialised capitalist countries of today are finding it increasingly more difficult to gain promotion and secure positions of influence in the managerial hierarchy of the capitalist economy. Today, the social functions of intellectual workers have changed. The power to make decisions is concentrated in the hands of the capitalist owners and a narrow group of their assistants and confidants, particularly so under the impact of the automated control system. So in this respect too the industrial intelligentsia are drawing closer to the status of the workers, coming to perform specific functions within the context of the scientific and technical servicing of production.
Similarly there is a growing number of technicians and laboratory assistants whose working environment and life styles are close to those of the workers. The ratio of skilled workers to technicians and laboratory assistants changed from ten to one prior to 1940 to one to one today.
The former ``independence'' of members of the nonproductive intelligentsia is also disappearing. Teachers, lawyers and doctors, as well as engineers and technicians, are more and more often ceasing to belong to the
``free-lance professionals", i.e. petty bourgeois engaged in the production and individual sale of cultural values, becoming instead, as Marx put it when speaking about teachers, "mere wage-labourers for the enterpreneur of the establishment". *
We are observing a levelling out of the economic and legal status of workers and rank-and-file employees. There was once a time when education was the privilege of the few and the incomes of office workers far and away exceeded the wages of the mass of industrial workers. Today in the USA, for instance, the salaries and standard of living of these categories of employees are lower than those of skilled industrial workers.
The increasing tendency for the working class and a proportion of the intellectual community and office employees to draw together, is accompanied and stimulated by changes in the structure and character of work, which are caused by the scientific and technological revolution. These changes prepare the ground for a redistribution of professional and production functions among the workers and some categories of the intelligentsia, make for more flexible boundaries between them and lead to changes within some of the secondary features of their make-up, behaviour and inter-relationships.
Indeed, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to pinpoint essential differences in the character of work on the assembly line and in the office. The managerial services of major companies now resemble an assembly line, where information moves from one work place to the next and is supplemented with new "parts and components" not unlike a car body in its progress along the assembly line. A modern office has iron labour discipline similar to that in a factory; individual employees not only have to expend their brain power, but also manually operate mechanical calculators, typewriters, etc.
Production automation coupled with the use of computers reduces the range of managerial functions per-
* V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 4, p. 202.
* Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, Part I, Moscow, 1965, p. 398.
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53formed by engineers, technicians and office employees. More and more of them are engaged directly in the sphere of production supervising the work of machines and equipment, performing specified functions involved in servicing and maintaining computers or performing simple managerial operations. They are increasingly having to work in an environment similar to that of skilled industrial workers and for this reason are subject to the same nervous and physical strain and are just as afraid of losing their jobs.
Bourgeois sociologists usually substitute the term `` stratum'' for the term ``class''. They do so for a reason. In an analysis of the social structure of capitalist society recognition of the category ``class'' is tantamount to admitting the existence of antagonisms and a polarity of interests of significant social groups. By contrast, recognition of the category ``stratum'' only implies a description of certain differences between various groups of people based on specific features which form something of a ladder with different people occupying different steps (distinctions based on the size of income, social status, etc.).
One of the pet concepts articulated by bourgeois and revisionist theoreticians in recent years is the concept of what they call "the new middle class" within which, so they claim, the proletariat has become dissolved. The new middle class, according to the bourgeois sociologists, embraces workers by brain and the personnel of the services industry. The Right-wing revisionists, like Fischer and Garaudy, identify all wage labour with the working class, deliberately passing over the fact that the different segments of the intelligentsia occupy different steps of the social pyramid in capitalist society. Even though a proportion of the intelligentsia may indeed be close to the working class, the top crust of the civil servants, including managers and experts, properly belong to the bourgeois class. A large proportion of the intelligentsia, members of the free-lance professions, for instance, may be classified as part of the petty bourgeoisie.
The views of the Right-wing revisionists are essentially indentical with those of the bourgeois proponents of
the concept of '^proletarianisation". To Garaudy, for instance, the intellectuals are a more radical and revolutionary force than the working class by virtue of their individualistic consciousness and critical attitude to society and its institutions. Garaudy sets certain segments of the scientific and technological intelligentsia, as allegedly true repositories of the socialist ideal, against the working class. To Garaudy the intellectuals are a ``pure'' segment of the working class. Garaudy looks upon the majority of the working class as included, integrated into the capitalist system. In doing so Garaudy sets differing sections of the working class against each other thereby obstructing the consolidation of mental and manual workers into a single united army struggling against imperialism, for a democratic transformation of society.
The Left-wing revisionists would have us believe that the scientific and technological revolution has failed to change the composition of the working class. They deliberately confine the working class to the industrial workers engaged in manual labour. They have turned a blind eye to the new social features common to many categories of the intelligentsia and personnel in the services industry in the capitalist countries. They present the intelligentsia as a force essentially hostile to the working-class movement and the working class itself. In this way the Left-wing revisionists try to disunite the working people and split the anti-imperialist front.
The actual position is that despite bourgeois and revisionist theoreticians' assertions to the contrary, the working class, far from disappearing and becoming eroded by the scientific and technological revolution, is expanding and showing a greater organisational efficiency.
In 1950 it numbered 132 million, and by 1975 its numerical force had grown to more than 209 million in the industrialised capitalist countries alone.
Deciding what categories of wage labour belong to the working class presents some difficulty. The novelty, significance and complexity of this problem gave rise to the recent discussion among Soviet social scientists and their Marxist colleagues in other countries.
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55To gain a correct understanding of this question, it is of fundamental importance to be guided by Lenin's proposition to the effect that every class has to be examined not in a static condition, but in its dynamic development subject to the laws stemming from its economic environment. This dynamism must be analysed with reference to the future as well as with reference to the past. * At the same time, while classes exist they possess basic and, within the framework of a given socio-economic formation, immutable features. As Marx put it, the `` proletarian'' in the economic sense of the term stands exclusively for a hired labourer who produces and augments capital and creates surplus value. **
The founders of Marxism devoted considerable attention to the correlation of individual segments of the proletariat and equally to the differences in their particular position and role in the revolutionary struggle. At the industrial stage of capitalist development it is the factory workers who are in the vanguard of the overall struggle of the working people against capitalism. Lenin wrote: "Only a definite class, namely, the urban workers and the factory, industrial workers in general, is able to . lead the whole mass of the working and exploited people in the struggle to throw off the yoke of capital, in actually carrying it out, in the struggle to maintain and consolidate the victory, in the work of creating the new, socialist social system and in the entire struggle for the complete abolition of classes-----" ***
However, the founders of Marxism resolutely rejected attempts to confine the definition of the working class to the factory workers alone. In exposing the unsound concepts of the Narodniks relating to the economic development of Russia, Lenin showed their mistake in determining the numerical size of Russia's proletariat by only classifying the factory workers as working class. Lenin wrote that the mission of capitalism "is fulfilled by the development of capitalism and the socialisation of labour
in general, by the creation of a proletariat in general, in relation to which the factory workers play the role only of front-rankers, the vanguard. There is, of course, no doubt that the revolutionary movement of the proletariat depends on the number of these workers, on their concentration, on the degree of their development, etc.; but all this does not give us the slightest right to equate the 'unifying significance' of capitalism with the number of factory workers. To do so would be to narrow down Marx's idea impossibly." *
Lenin took the view that the revolutionary potential of the working class was heavily dependent on its numerical strength and weight in society. According to him, "the more proletarians there are, the greater is their strength as a revolutionary class, and the nearer and more possible does socialism become". **
However, Lenin in no way reduced the role of the working class to its numerical strength alone. He wrote: "The strength of the proletariat in any capitalist country is far greater than the proportion it represents of the total population. That is because the proletariat economically dominates the centre and nerve of the entire economic system of capitalism, and also because the proletariat expresses economically and politically the real interests of the overwhelming majority of the working people under capitalism." ***
An analysis of the expanding range of activities maintained by the working class occupies an important place in Lenin's methodology for the study of the working class' numerical growth and increased role in society. Writing about the working class of pre-revolutionary Russia, Lenin considered the agricultural farmhands, construction workers, transport workers and domestic wage labour, as well as the trading and office proletarians, as belonging to the proletariat. **** In 1920 Lenin noted that in the West, "an engineering proletariat" was
* See V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 75. ** See Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. i, Moscow, 1974, p. 576. *** V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 420.
* V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 1, p. 316. ** Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 20. *** Ibid., Vol. 30, p. 274.
**** See V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 6, pp. 93-94; Vol. 18, p. 39.
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57rising and that "winning the engineers over to our side is a matter of great importance". *
Using Lenin's methodology for the study of processes under way within the working class it is important to remember the mobility and conventional nature of the distinctions dividing different groups of working people, as well as the tendency towards the progressive coming together of different groups and the strengthening of this tendency as the scientific and technological revolution gathers momentum.
Today Marxist economists and sociologists consider the following groups of wage workers other than manual workers as belonging to the working class: workers by brain who are involved in material production, the employees of the trade industry performing functions of circulation within the framework of capitalist reproduction, office workers and others occupied in the non-- productive sphere (services, industry, managerial personnel of industrial concerns, trusts, banks, etc.).
The composition of the working class depends on a specific economic and social situation, i.e. on the level of capitalist development and the state of the scientific and technological revolution in a particular country. The necessity of a concrete approach to assessing the boundaries of the working class stems from the rich variety of the components of the proletariat in the capitalist world of today.
The scientific and technological revolution gives rise to rapid numerical growth of the working class in the technically advanced branches of automated and conveyor production: the aircraft, electrical engineering and automobile industries. Meanwhile the number of workers in the traditional extractive industries (coal industry in particular), agriculture and transport, though it declined somewhat in the developed capitalist countries between 1960 and 1974 (from 28.8 to 24.8 million or from 16 to 10 per cent of the total work force), became stabilised in 1975 and 1976 and even tended to grow. As
the workers' political awareness and cultural attainments grow their various contingents and strata exhibit more features in common.
Thus, in a number of capitalist countries which are yet to modernise their production (Spain, Mexico, Southern Italy) the working class is dominated by the factory proletariat. In the developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America agricultural workers and miners, i.e. manual workers of the manufactory type, still predominate. In the advanced capitalist countries which followed the US lead in the scientific and technological revolution, the work force engaged in flow-line production is the main segment of the working class. In the USA itself, whilst this segment continues to hold central place, we observe the formation of a mass army of wage workers by brain. By the late sixties they accounted for 47.5 per cent of all wage workers against 37.5 per cent in 1950 and the proportion continues to grow rapidly. In the same period the working class' proportion of all those receiving wages reached 82 per cent in Canada, 93 per cent in the USA, 87 per cent in West Germany, 85 per cent in Britain, 87 per cent in Japan, 76 per cent in Italy and 79 per cent in France. In 1950 the working class accounted for 56.9 per cent of the gainfully employed population in the industrialised capitalist countries and in 1975 its proportion increased to 69 per cent.
As the scientific and technological revolution gains momentum, the working conditions, living standards, and life styles of industrial workers and certain segments of intellectuals and employees become more and more alike.
"'.Lenin Miscellany XXXVII, Moscow, 1970, p. 213 (in Russian).
CHAPTER TWO
THE MAIN FEATURES OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION IN THE USSR
THE STR IN THE USSR
59within a short time. That is why the USSR has scored outstanding successes in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and in space exploration. The absence of limitations imposed by competition and the pursuit of profit means that it is possible to tackle large projects, involving the remaking of nature and the environment, which do not yield immediate profits; to advance technological progress in every economic sphere and in all geographical areas of the country; and to make scientific and technological information available to all specialists concerned.
It is generally acknowledged that vital information is contained in scientific and technical documentation which, under capitalism, is a closely guarded secret in the hands of private firms. To facilitate the collection and retrieval of information, the CMEA countries have set up the International Scientific and Technological Information Centre. It is only possible to set up such a centre under socialism. Alongside this, the international programme for standardising production, unifying assemblies and components, and standardising design, technological and business documentation in the CMEA countries will save tremendous resources and speed up scientific and technological progress.
Socialism offers indisputable advantages over capitalism in terms of the centralised guidance of increasingly complex economic relationships. Thus, over 100 research organisations, institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences, universities, industrial research institutes, design bureaus and enterprises participated in the work on new methods of welding and in the making of super-hard abrasive materials. The effort was guided by a unified plan. As a result, it took only two to four years for the methods of plasma welding to be introduced into industry, and experimental batches of synthetic diamonds and synthetic abrasive materials of improved quality (elbor, cubonite, etc.) to be obtained. This is half the time normally required for the large-scale introduction of a technical innovation in the USA.
Under socialism new forms of inter-relationships between science and production develop. Major research
One of the principal tasks of the long-term programme for the economic, social and political development of Soviet society towards communism is the application of the fruits of the scientific and technological revolution. What are the main characteristics and specific features of this revolution in socialist production?
THE SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION UNDER SOCIALISM
In the USSR, the scientific and technological revolution has been growing in a favourable socio-economic and socio-political atmosphere which includes the construction in this country of a fully developed socialist society and the existence of the socialist community of nations. All this creates the requisite conditions for an all-- pervading scientific and technological revolution.
Under socialism, far more favourable conditions are available for developing the scientific and technological revolution than under capitalism. A planned economy makes it possible for progress in all areas of science and technology to be coordinated and for resources and manpower to be concentrated on solving cardinal problems
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61centres belonging to corporations are a typical feature of industrialised capitalist countries. However, in a situation dominated by private property, cutthroat competition and commercial secrets it is unthinkable for centres to be created for advancing scientific and technological progress within an individual industry, let alone internationally. The socialist countries, however, are setting up such centres on an extensive scale.
The principal means of labour in the era of the scientific and technological revolution, such as automatic systems or unified power grids, etc., by their very nature correspond to public ownership of the means of production.
In the early seventies work got under way on the comprehensive plans for the social and economic development of individual enterprises, cities and industries in the USSR. These plans call for the priority implementation of scientific and technological programmes which, apart from being economically effective, help solve social problems in the further advance of Soviet society--- eliminating arduous jobs and unskilled labour, increasing the creative content of work, improving environmental protection, etc.
The effects of the scientific and technological revolution under socialism and under capitalism could not be more different. Under capitalism this revolution makes the economic development of individual countries more uneven. The drive for technological leadership among the major monopolies becomes one of the main forms of competition. Scientific and technological progress brings in its wake the ruin of farmers and owners of small undertakings, insecurity and lack of confidence in the morrow among the working people, endangers society as a whole, and is increasingly at variance with the class interests of the monopoly bourgeoisie itself. The scientific and technological revolution, in advancing the productive forces, exacerbates the existing contradictions between the financial oligarchy and the rest of the nation, between the imperialist and the developing countries, between the growing requirements of the working people in the context of the increased intensification of labour, and the extent to which these are met.
Under socialism scientific and technological progress provides a solid basis for building up the essential material and technical basis of communisni. Socialism is capable of using the fruits of the scientific and technological revolution to comprehensively develop society and all its members and to enhance social homogeneity.
ON THE WAY TO FULLY AUTOMATED PRODUCTION COMPLEXES
As was mentioned above, the point of departure for the contemporary scientific and technological revolution was an upheaval in the instruments of labour caused by the development of fully automated production complexes based on computers and performing recurrent operations. Depending on the nature of the object of automation (the scale of the processes and operations affected by automated control) and the automation equipment one can distinguish a number of basic stages in the development of the instruments of labour, the first three of which belong in the realm of machine production.
Stage one was the automation of individual operations or a series of basic production operations at a given work place using semi-automatic machine-tools. Here the worker sets the work and removes it after it has been machined. Lathes of this type appeared in the 19th century.
Stage two involved the transition to automated machines performing the entire range of production operations, both basic and auxiliary, at a given work place. Workers are relieved of the need to load and unload and can concentrate on transportation, supervision of the process, maintenance and adjusting the automated machines. In the mass-production industries, automatic machinetools of this type were available before the Second World War.
An automatic production line (automated machine complex) marks a new, higher stage of development whereby the entire range of operations is automated, including basic and auxiliary operations on the work bench,
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63transportation and loading and unloading. The worker supervises the process and maintains and repairs the equipment.
Stage four is automation under the current scientific and technological revolution. This involves automated systems controlling technological processes, automated sections and workshops performing the operations involved in the production of a wide variety of technically similar parts and components under computer control. The fundamentally new problem which was solved at this stage was associated with readjusting the entire system for the production of a new item and the performance of new operations without human participation. In this situation the automatic device must not only ``remember'' and carry out instructions, but must also process the relevant information as it is supplied during the process and readjust the production technology accordingly.
Here is an example: a fully automated machining centre has been developed in the USSR; it is capable of changing the tool and re-grinding it, of deciding on the optimum mode of machining and exercising control throughout the technological process. These functions are handled by a built-in computer. The worker is relieved of direct control over the process.
Automatic workshops and production sectors where the human element is dispensed with perform and supervise the entire range of interlocking production processes. Such workshops and sectors first appeared in the USSR in the fifties. Retween 1965 and 1976 the number of automated lines and sections grew three times over, from 6,000 to 19,000. They include automatically controlled power generators and continuous one-mining complexes.
Between 1970 and 1975 the number of automated control systems (ACS) grew from 900 to 3,200. These control various technological processes in production, power industry, transport, etc. Automation is spreading rapidly. By 1980, 85 per cent of the oil and gas output will come from comprehensively automated oil and gas fields. In a planned economy automation is also used to accomplish social tasks. A total of 120,000 miners were
freed from arduous jobs in the coal and shale industries between 1971 and 1975, with a concomitant introduction of a 30-hour working week (without wage cuts) on underground jobs and greater old-age pensions payable for these jobs from 50 or 55 years of age. During the tenth five-year plan period (1976 to 1980) three million workers will be relieved of hard manual and low-skilled jobs in coal-mining, iron and steel, ferrous metals, chemical, timber and other industries; this particularly concerns loading-and-unloading and other ancillary operations. It is planned to build automated workshops and enterprises in the sugar, meat-packing and canning industries, for the production of wall, rolled, roofing and non-metallic building materials, sanitary pottery, automated machinetool complexes and coal-mining machines. In all these cases the whole complex of operations, from reception of raw materials to packing and shipment of finished goods, will be automated.
Crucial at this stage of automation is the transition to self-adjusting systems, the critical component of which is the computer deciding on the most efficient mode of operation.
The next, fifth stage of automation will be the creation of fully automated industrial enterprises where the entire range of auxiliary processes will be automated as well as the basic processes and where production control will be exercised by ACSs. To tackle this task successfully it will not be enought to have a self-adjusting system. What will be required is a self-educating system capable of searching for the most efficient solutions in a continuously changing environment, capable of assessing the efficiency of its own performance and changing its own logic and programme accordingly. A conventional working machine goes back to its original state upon completion of a specific operation. The more work cycles it has performed, the greater its wear and tear, and the less its value. By contrast, an ACS capable of choosing and maintaining an optimum mode of operation improves itself and becomes more valuable as it accumulates information in its storage device, which enables it to define the probability of particular events.
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65ACSs used in industry not only automate control of the processes involved, but also the designing and development of the new means of labour, and the organisational functions. For the first time in human history it has now become possible to produce automatic devices and machines with the help of automatic equipment and this, of course, makes the entire production cycle complete. A salient feature of this new technology is the appearance of computers into which information can be fed directly by using detectors or by telephone, thus dispensing with manual incoding and the compilation of programmes. The result can be obtained as a printed text, graph or diagram. This makes it possible for data handling to be automated: information on a particular object to be controlled is picked up by a control system, processed in the required fashion and then relayed to the object under control as instructions.
Mechanics and power engineering played the leading role in the R & D efforts put into conventional work machines. Today the development of new means of labour is completely dominated by cybernetics---the science of the general laws governing control, which involves the use of mathematical methods to find a general approach to control systems for a wide variety of objects of diverse origins. Cybernetics makes it possible for systems control to be organised on the basis of optimisation principles. This means that the system in question is switched over to a new mode of operation ensuring either a minimum expenditure of time and effort (in the case of economic activity) or a minimum consumption of raw materials and energy (in the case of organic or non-organic processes) .
Between 1970 and 1976 the number of industrial ACSs grew four times from 400 to 1,600. In 1985 practically all large enterprises will use ACSs for management and control.
The automated control system set up at the Uralmash works provides a good example of the sort of "electronic brain" now being installed at many Soviet industrial enterprises. The Uralmash works comprises over 100 workshops and scores of production sectors handling
thousands of orders at a time, each of which calls for a wide variety of different operations involving machining and processing hundreds and thousands of components in several workshops. Such a complex system calls for adjusting and maintaining an infinite variety of relations and links between different workshops and a continuous monitoring of the totality of factors which determine a smooth production rhythm. Such giant systems often involve control in the absence of complete information on the object of control and the environment. So far no precise mathematical description of these singularly cumbersome and complex systems has been developed. Criteria for rationality and optimum decisions require a wide variety of factors to be carefully taken into account, including uniform work loads on the equipment and the meeting of delivery dates for specified items in the quantities required, and all this must be consistent with maximum profit and economic efficiency. One other complicating factor is that the Uralmash works manufactures both mass-produced items and custom-built machines and mechanisms. The electronic brain at the Uralmash works comprises several sub-systems, the first of which supervises technical preparations, the second maintains operational accounting, the third looks after the material and technical supply, the fourth is in charge of technoeconomic planning, the fifth is engaged in bookkeeping, and the sixth keeps tabs on the movement of personnel. As a result, helped by the electronic brain, the works managing director can at the flick of a moment obtain up-to-date information on how every minute of working time is spent, on how efficiently each gramme of materials is used, etc., and interfere in the production process whenever necessary.
The next stage in the development of automated control systems is associated with the automated production of similar items within a particular industry. Industrial ACSs handle the fundamentally new task of the optimum allocation of the production programme among the various enterprises with a view to ensuring their sensible specialisation. In 1976 there were over 150 industrial, republican and all-Union ACSs. In the tenth five-year
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67period (1976 to 1980) it is planned to establish a unified organisational, methodological and technological foundation for their functioning on the basis of the Ryad (``Row'') computer system common to all the CMEA countries; an integrated fund of standard algorithms and programmes is to be used.
One other stage in the development of ACSs is the automation of control over a complex of industries producing interchangeable items. Here the computer handles a new set of problems, namely, the choice of a method offering the optimum satisfaction of a particular social need. For instance coal, shale, oil and gas can all be used as fuel; many types of materials produced by different industries are interchangeable. The same goal can be achieved by investing in the production of additional items, or by investing in their better maintenance and more efficient exploitation. In this situation interbranch and territorial ACSs are absolutely imperative, particularly for managing the complex municipal economies of major cities.
One should remember that optimisation models, which take as their starting point the possibility of finding the best solution to a particular problem, are not the only basis for tackling economic tasks. Real economic processes always contain an element of uncertainty. The correct decision on a particular economic problem cannot always be reached through the method of calculation. It is often necessary to take into account a variety of social, political and psychological factors, which cannot be measured in terms of roubles, hours, etc. Hence the important conclusion that in principle the computer cannot replace man with his ability to explore problems which cannot be formalised or logically reduced to a system of mathematical symbols.
Future automated control systems will be based on optimising, game (whereby the decision is reached as a result of a game or conflict involving two sides) and imitation models (the latter assess the consequences of the decisions made), combined with the work of skilled experts who will continue to monopolise strategy and the comparison of computer-predicted consequences for each
and every managerial decision. The automation of the decision-making process, and of design and development activity preceding the manufacture of new instruments of labour, will signify the completion of the organisation of a new production system.
Work being done in the USSR on the development of automated planning and control systems for a variety of economic complexes (industry, economic association, etc.) is but the initial stage in the effort to solve the Gargantuan problem of setting up a national automated system for retrieving and processing information, for the purposes of accounting, planning and guiding the whole economy on the basis of a national network of computer centres and a unified automated communications network. Only under socialism can the creation of such a potent instrument for the socialisation of production on the basis of uniform organisational, methodological and technical principles be undertaken. Such a system is a prelude to the development of a national automated system (NAS) controlling the whole of the economy. It will be the highest stage of automation. Such a system could become reality in the next few decades. The entire Soviet economy will thus be transformed into a unified giant factory operating at top efficiency according to an optimum plan. Full optimisation and automation of production will bring incalculable benefits which are impossible under capitalism.
A NEW BASE FOR POWER ENGINEERING
The development of a large-scale machine industry in the USSR required the mass electrification of the country, by which Lenin meant a complete reconstruction of the country's technological base by electrifying all areas of production and the major spheres of human activity. Abundant supplies of cheap electricity to the economy became a top priority goal of Soviet economic development even in the early years of Soviet power.
The period 1976 to 1980 will see important changes in the traditional power industry. More large hydroelec-
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69trie power stations will be built, making it possible for the problems of the power industry, irrigation and water transport to be solved in a comprehensive manner. Superpowerful thermal stations working on low-grade coal will increase their share in the total power balance. Fifteen power stations with a capacity of 5 or 6.4 million kW each will be built at the Ekibastuz and Itat coal fields in Northern Kazakhstan and Western Siberia.
A fundamentally new phenomenon in the power industry which is typical of the era of the scientific and technological revolution is the transition from technology based on the conversion of mechanical forms of energy (the movement of water, steam and gas) to technology employing the entire diversity of forms of the movement of matter. In 1954 the USSR put into operation the world's first atomic power station with a capacity of 5,000 kW. Between 1971 and 1975 atomic power stations were built, each with a capacity of from 200,000 to 1,000,000 kW (including those at Leningrad, Novo-- Voronezh, Beloyarsk and Chernobyl).
Between 1976 and 1980 atomic power stations will account for 20 per cent of the overall increase in power output compared with 13 per cent in the preceding fiveyear period. The lead is taken by very economical stations of two million kW and more, having one million kW reactors and 300,000 kW fast neutron reactors.
A large portion of the Soviet budget goes into financing the production of power and the transformation of energy. The 25th Congress of the CPSU therefore devoted special attention to the development of the atomic power industry and the laying of the scientific and technological foundations of termonuclear power engineering. In the 1980s and 1990s it is planned to make a transition from test and combined (atomic-thermonuclear) reactors to purely thermonuclear reactors and power stations with a capacity of not less than ten million kW each. The new energy sources will lead to new types of power transport, new forms of power consumption and new methods for directly converting thermal and nuclear energy into electrical energy using magneto hydrodynamic generators and thermogenerators, fuel cells and solar
batteries. In 1972 the world's first experimental industrial power station based on a magneto hydrodynamic generator came on line in the USSR; a year earlier tests were completed on the world's first thermo-emission converter reactor named ``Topaz''. The direct conversion of heat into electricity offers the possibility of developing compact powerful, reliable and simple-to-operate nuclear and electric generators dispensing with turbines or rotors.
Breath-taking prospects in power engineering are offered by the successfully developing research into superconductivity. Super-conducting alloys which offer no resistance at normal temperatures hold out the promise of revolutionising electrical engineering.
Technological progress in electric power engineering is spurred on by the continued improvement of the power transmission lines. In the second half of the 1960s a unified power supply system for the European part of the USSR was commissioned, and in 1976 a unified power system for the whole Soviet Union was completed which incorporated 70 per cent of all electric power stations. The system's aggregate capacity is 150 million kW.
In the eighties a unified power supply system covering the whole of the USSR will be completed. This system will embrace all the electric power stations in the country. In preparation for this, new power transmission lines are being set up to convey electricity over vast distances using alternating and direct current lines of 1.2- 1.5 million volts. This impressive power distribution system is controlled from a single centre and is based on up-to-date computer technology.
Public socialist ownership makes it possible for a unified power supply system to be set up not just for one country, but for the whole of the socialist community. The MIR power supply system, uniting the power stations of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Hungary, Poland, Rumania and western regions of the USSR, has been in operation for some time now.
The revolution in the sources, conversion methods, transmission and utilisation of energy opens the way for a rapid development in fully automated complexes and their wide use in every economic area.
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71THE REVOLUTION IN THE OBJECTS OF LABOUR
The objects of labour such as raw and other materials are the most conservative element of production. Centuries have passed, bringing new instruments of labour and new sources of energy, but people continued to process traditional materials such as metals, leather, timber, and natural fibres. The upheaval in the objects of labour, brought about by the scientific and technological revolution, involved the advent of fundamentally new types of synthetic and man-made materials with preset properties often superior to those of natural materials. These provide an unlimited supply of raw materials for further progress in production. As the Soviet Academician P. A. Rebinder put it, instead of the passive selection of materials existing in nature, production has gone over to searching for and developing new objects of labour, more suited to the conditions of the new production system. In this area too man has made a giant step forward in his efforts to free himself from the limitations which have so far constrained his production activity.
As recently as the fifties many economists considered only the instruments of labour and the work force as belonging to the productive forces of society. Today, the objects of labour, it is generally agreed, are becoming a crucial element of production. What is more, the differences between the instruments and objects of labour are often conventional as, for instance, in the case of radioactive isotopes, industrial micro-organisms, or chemical catalysts.
The more common synthetic materials include plastics, synthetic rubber, chemical fibres, artificial leather, synthetic detergents, resins, and films. However, the catalogue of new materials is by no means confined to these products, most of which have become standard over the past two decades. An in-depth study of the physical and chemical properties of a wide variety of substances has helped in the development of new materials of superior strength and conductivity, new alloys and composite metals and non-metals (glass and stone), semi-conductors, etc.
All new materials have a common feature: their arrival on the industrial scene has made new demands on the accuracy, regularity and stability of the production process, and consequently on the skills and qualifications of the work force. The production of many new materials is unthinkable without automation because of the super-high temperatures and pressures involved.
The new materials make it possible to maintain a continuous technological process and automate production at a high level of economic efficiency. Thus the growing production of synthetic materials entails technical, economic and social consequences.
The production of synthetic fibres will increase nearly four-fold during the 15 years from 1965 to 1980 (400,000 tons in 1965, 960,000 tons in 1975 and some 1,500,000 tons in 1980 plan target), and the production of synthetic resins and plastics will go up eight times (800,000 tons in 1965, 2,800,000 tons in 1975 and about 6,000,000 tons in 1980). The Soviet Union has the necessary raw material base for this: the extraction of oil will grow 160 per cent during the 15 years (243 million tons in 1965, 491 million tons in 1975 (first place in the world), and about 640 million tons in 1980 according to plan), and natural-gas production will increase more than 200 per cent (129,000 million cu m in 1965, 289,000 million cu m in 1975 and some 435,000 million cu m in 1980). The proportion of oil used as fuel will decrease in the decades that follow.
Synthetic materials are primarily used for technical needs. In the production of fabrics and clothes they are usually mixed with natural cotton and flax, in the output of which the USSR leads the world (6,100,000 tons of raw cotton in 1970, 7,700,000 tons in 1975 and 9,000,000 tons in 1980 according to plan).
The tenth five-year plan period will see a sharp increase in the production of other materials with pre-set properties: high-grade steels and rolled metals and construction materials based on aluminium, titanium and polymers).
The new semi-conducting materials are the basis for building faster electronic computers with larger memory
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73stores than now, along with minuterised portable radios, transmitters, TV sets, tape recorders and lighting equipment.
The direct conversion of different kinds of energy is yet another area where semi-conductors are used. When solar batteries based on semi-conductors become less expensive and more readily available, they will transform the arid deserts of today. Indeed, water can be obtained underground in most desert areas provided there is electric power. Solving this problem is of special importance in the USSR because large tracts of land are taken up by deserts and arid steppes.
Modern atomic poAver stations use nuclear energy to heat water in a conventional boiler. The USSR has commissioned the world's first converter of nuclear energy directly into electricity based on semi-conductors. The converter is called ``Romashka'' (Daisy). However, for installations of this type to become predominant in the atomic power industry it is necessary to develop semiconductors stable enough to retain their properties under nuclear radiation.
The technique of how to develop man-made diamonds was an important discovery in the USSR. Back in the Middle Ages alchemists had burned diamonds to find, much to their astonishment, that the resultant ashes contained graphite. Since then many generations of scientists thought hard on how to reverse the conversion. In 1969 a superhard material was developed just as hard as diamonds and capable of retaining its properties at temperatures 2.5 times higher than those withstood by diamonds.
Modern chemical theory enables chemists to anticipate the properties of substances and the course and result of chemical reactions. In the years to come, rapid computers will make it possible to calculate the structure of molecules which must be synthesised for the desired properties to be obtained. Today to develop a material with the preset properties chemists still have to have recourse to the method of trial and error. The synthesis of complex compounds with the aid of fully controlled and predictable automated processes will offer the pos-
sibility of developing a suitable material with any preset properties for use in the consrtuction of a new type of machine or instrument.
Thus, the scientific and technological revolution involves the production of fundamentally new materials in sufficient quantities by advanced methods.
THE REVOLUTION IN PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY
Until a decade ago, industrial technology developed along the lines of a progressive diversification of operations. Since the first conveyer line was introduced by Ford in 1914 the number of phases and elements of the production process has grown immensely. Each element was entrusted to the individual worker to become the only form of his labour activity. Mechanical methods of processing such as cutting, polishing and boring were predominant.
The upheaval in technology was simultaneously the effect and the prerequisite for the more efficient use of the new means and objects of labour. We are referring to the transition from the discrete (discontinuous) multi-operation machining processes, which can only develop along the line of progressive diversification, increased monotony and unattractiveness, to continuous processes with their high precision, based on the physical, chemical and biological processing of the objects of labour within closed technological systems and ensuring the complete processing of the semi-products.
It is common knowledge that many automatic lines in the engineering industry which were introduced in the sixties manufactured products at a greater cost than in the case of processing by manually operated lathes. The reason for this was the continued use of old technological methods. The automatic machine-tools did little more than copy the movements of the human operator. When new technology was introduced on a wide scale, notably volumetrical cold stamping and precision founding using thermo-reactive admixtures, cold and hot rolling, etc., produtcivity shot up 6- to 8-fold.
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75Something similar was happening in the textile industry. When all work places were equipped with mechanical and automatic looms, labour productivity went up by 1-2 per cent a year. The introduction of fundamentally new technology, exemplified in shuttleless weaving, non-woven materials produced by knitting and sowing machines, and spindleless weaving, reduced the number of stages and elements involved in the conversion of raw material into a finished product. This prepared the ground for comprehensive automation and boosted productivity several times.
The revolution in technology has brought about precision and accuracy previously unattainable. This is one reason why only top specialists are entrusted with welding operations inside nuclear reactors. The giant size of the parts to be welded makes it especially important to allow for subsequent shrinkage (allowances are negligible indeed). Careful tests of the reliability and accuracy of the resultant seams are conducted using ultrasound and gamma crack-detection instruments. The seams are tested for strength by using helium, a gas with the highest diffusion.
Until a decade ago it was quite sufficient to measure the content of admixtures in alloys to an accuracy of several tenths of a per cent. Today, even several millionth parts of foreign impregnations are impermissible in some cases.
Until recently production technology employed a very narrow range of pressures, temperatures, humidity and other external conditions which are commonly encountered in the lower atmosphere and in terrestrial space. To develop materials with preset properties it is usually necessary to create quite different conditions. Thus, the monocrystals of semiconductors are obtained in high vacuum, in the medium of super-pure inert gases at a temperature of up to 2,000°C with an allowance of 0.2-0.3 degrees and at pressures of up to 150 atmospheres. Only an automated control system is capable of strictly maintaining these parameters.
Thus, automation is effective provided production methods are changed to conform to its requirements, while
new methods are only possible if processes are controlled automatically.
Soviet industry is making increasing use of chemical, physical and biological processes, which help reduce labour, material and fuel inputs and prevent invironmental pollution. Replacing the mechanical processing of materials with electrophysical and electrochemical methods means that the object of labour can be acted upon no matter how it is hard or viscous, with components being now manufactured having complex shapes and configurations which cannot be achieved by conventional mechanical methods. The new methods of machining lend themselves well to automation. At the Kaluga turbine manufacturing works, the Kolomna diesel locomotive works and other plants the use of new machining methods has boosted productivity ten-fold. Electronic technology has remarkable universality and enables continuous operation which offers the possibility of delicate and flexible regulation and control. In particular quantum generators and amplifiers can be widely used for cutting metals, and as catalysts in chemical reactions.
At the Tevosyan Electrostal Plant the steel smelters are using electron-ray beams to process the metal in a high vacuum similar to that existing in outer space. This method is employed to make special steels for the manufacture of components used in computers. A plasma furnace is used to produce ultra-pure steels with the help of magnetic lenses. The resultant metal is super-strong, has high density and plasticity, and is acid-resistant.
Modern chemical technology offers new opportunities as most of the chemical processes currently employed run continuously in closed reactor vessels while the resultant semi-manufactures and finished products are conveyed from operation to operation via pipeline, the most efficient and cheapest type of internal factory transport. Many chemical installations operate in the open to produce a wide variety of goods.
Soviet engineers and workers have pioneered industrial installations for continuous steel-making, as well as techniques for processing hard materials by explosion, and for producing metal rods and moulds from self-
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77hardening liquid mixtures, a novel founding technology. They have also pioneered techniques using natural gas for blast furnace production, methods for manufacturing fine and super-fine metal threads direct from the liquid phase, and many other advanced techniques and production processes.
The Soviet scientists M. G. Basov and A. M. Prokhorov have made a discovery that has given birth to quantum electronics, a totally new branch of science and engineering. We refer to the laser which has been used among other things for probing the lunar surface and planets of the solar system, for processing super-hard materials and for delicate surgical operations. The laser is used to transmit thousands of TV programmes and telephone conversations simultaneously using a single channel.
Changing technology and revolutionary transformations in the objects and instruments of labour lead to basic changes in production organisation in industry. The conventional (classical) assembly line based on standard narrow operations is now obsolescent, and transition is being made to manufacturing increasingly sophisticated products using high precision technologies. This means that the performance of standard operations can only ensure the desired quality standards where there are huge investments in the standardisation of the raw materials. It is far more efficient to use individual processing programmes geared to the characteristics of the particular products involved. Even now the division of operations reduces the labour intensity of production. However, at the same time this leads to increased labour expenditures on the transportation of products from operation to operation and makes the work of the human operator more monotonous and less attractive.
lienl features of the current scientific and technological revolution. Soviet Academician B. L. Astaurov has likened the vital activity of living organism to a vast symphony orchestra containing many different instruments grouped together in ways that often surprise us. The orchestra is so large that it is often impossible for us to scan it from end to end or see the multiplicity of links that keep it together; however the orchestra performs the wonderful symphony of life with perfect harmony and co-ordination. The discovery of the inter-relationships between and the control mechanism governing the play of the constituent instruments will enable man to gain an insight into the essential mechanism controlling all living nature, to learn how to cultivate those of the living species most valuable to him and eventually to control the behaviour of whole populations of living beings in their natural environment. When this is achieved differences between wild and cultivated species of plants and animals will disappear in principle, and all of living nature will be cultured and totally under man's control. .
One area where important progress has been achieved is the industrial synthesis of a variety of physiologically active substances, a process already used in some industries.
In 1966 a microbiological industry was set up in the USSR; it is based on the employment of the vital activity of specific micro-organisms for industrial purposes. The microbiological production of fodder has the advantage of being independent of climate and the vagaries of weather. It can therefore be maintained in any part of the country and assured of an unlimited supply of raw materials. The Soviet Union has developed the production of fodder yeasts based on wood hydrolysis. Further, some types of unicellular algae from the Chlorella family are being used to obtain proteins which are comparable to proteins of animal origin. River hyacinths, an abundant resource, can also be used for the same purpose.
In recent years scientists have discovered the wonderful ability of certian kinds of micro-organisms to feed on paraffin, an essential component of petroleum, and
NATURE ENGINEERING
Man's probing deeper into the secrets of nature, be it in the micro-world or outer space, and the use of processes occurring in nature, which are often extremely efficacious and economical, for production purposes, are sa-
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79in this way convert it into protein compounds. In the USSR protein from oil was first produced in commercial quantities in 1970. Specialised plants have now been built for this purpose and methods have been evolved for using the new proteins as additives to animal and poultry feed which results not only in considerable weight gains, but in a higher quality of meat.
Some kinds of bacteria capable of neutralising toxic compounds used as herbicides and pesticides are being used for industrial purposes. These bacteria are capable of changing their metabolism to feed on substances not to be found in nature, but which are produced in liberal quantities by the chemical industry.
Micro-organisms can be used extensively in agriculture for replenishing nitrogen in the soil. In the current tenth five-year period (1976 to 1980) the microbiological industry will grow faster than any other industry.
The scientific and technological revolution has ushered in an era in Avhich there is systematic exploitation of the World Ocean---from the exploitation of minerals contained in the subsoil of the ocean floor to the farming of a wide variety of sea weed and fish on an industrial basis.
The ocean industry as it develops causes the arrival of new technologies and equipment, new industries and new foods and materials.
The big question now is how to regulate and regenerate marine fauna in desired ways. So far man has been using the riches of the sea primarily through fishing. On
\
average mankind has been using a minute 2 ooo ^ °^
the annual increase in marine proteins. Water pollution, changes in the run-off of rivers, the rampant growth of reeds and seaweeds in shallows and vandalic fishing practices have caused a catastrophic decline in fish catches. The scientific and technological revoluiton makes it possible for, and in fact requires, a transition from conventional fishing practices to fish farming and pisciculture.
Soviet achievements in space exploration are well known. Since 1957 when the first Earth satellite was launched, Soviet space scientists have sent up orbital
stations, and landed automatic probes and laboratories on the Moon, Venus and Mars. In the first 10-15 years, as is common with every novel field of science, expenditure on space exploration exceeded the return. Nowadays space research involving the measurement of the physical parameters and chemical composition of terrestrial space, its electric and magnetic characteristics, the observation of space objects and magnetic fields, is beginning to bring dividends leading to tangible economic benefits. Cases in point include the progress in trunk telephone and telegraph communications, TV broadcasting by satellite, weather forecasting, the investigation of the laws governing the occurrence of minerals, geographic and other investigations. Today, space exploration is not just a matter of prestige for a country but a major direction in the scientific and technological revolution ushering in a new era in man's knowledge and consequently enabling him to use nature's laws for his own advantage more fully and efficiently.
Weather control is no longer science fiction. Equipment for meteorological, radiolocation and hailstorm protection is already being extensively used to protect crops in the South of the USSR and experiments have been conducted into methods of dispersing cloud formations and fog and of cloud seeding.
A transition is now being effected from tentative measures to the management of large-scale hydro-- engineering systems, and to the control of the moisture turnover and hydro-biological processes in water reservoirs. A case in point is the hydro-engineering scheme currently being put into effect in Polessye in the south of Byelorussia. By 1980 the courses of 30 major rivers in the area will be improved and 17 reservoirs built in addition to 25,000 hydro-engineering installations of all kinds; several thousand kilometres of canals will have been dug and 10,000 hectares of protective forest belts planted. All this will transform the land of peat moors into an area of intensive livestock raising for meat and milk, and of fish breeding.
In 1976 an even larger project was launched to reconstruct agriculture in the non-black earth zone of the
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81RSFSR, including regions and autonomous republics in the Volga area, North-West and Centre, an area with a population of more than 40 million. In the historical centre of Russia, tens of thousands of hectares will be subjected to blind drainage and liming, and fields will be enlarged. Tens of thousands of small villages will be replaced by modern settlements with not less than 500 inhabitants each, in which it will be economically expedient to lay on water and gas supplies and build shopping and cultural facilities. This programme will be financed by some 40,000 million roubles from the state budget alone.
The digging of the Irtysh-Karaganda and of the KaraKum canals marked the start of what is perhaps the biggest climate engineering project in the world: to divert the surplus run-off of the Yenisei, Ob and Irtysh rivers into the Syr Darya and Amu Darya basins to irrigate extensive territories in the high fertility depression lying between the Caspian and the Aral seas. The builders will have to correct an error in nature: 85 per cent of the run-off from rivers in Siberia flows into the Arctic Ocean in sparsely populated areas within the Arctic circle, while extensive, highly fertile lands in the south are subject to prolonged periods of drought.
The use of mineral resources is acquiring a new dimension under the influence of the scientific and technological revolution. The latest advances in this area have enabled geologists and prospectors to search for new mineral deposits in a systematic way, on the basis of an exact knowledge of the laws governing the occurrence of minerals. Prospecting is no longer a matter of hit or miss as it often was in the past. The new techniques have recently been used to discover major deposits of oil, natural gas and other resources in different parts of the USSR.
Controlling nature includes the fight against the harmful effects of the scientific and technological progress, notably against pollution and the deterioration of the natural environment. During the construction of surface mines in the area of the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly the extensive restoration of ploughland was resorted to for the first time. By 1980 fertile black earth will have been
scraped off an area of 18,000 hectares and then returned to the original sites.
In 1971 the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Soveit Government approved measures for an efficient utilisation and careful preservation of the natural wealth of Lake Baikal which holds an estimated one-fifth of the world's total of surface fresh water. Special monitoring posts have been set up on Lake Baikal to report on the condition of natural complexes in the lake to appropriate government agencies. In 1977 purifying installations were built on all rivers flowing into the lake; the rivers were cleared of sunken logs and log floating was discontinued. Felling was restricted, afforestation was carried out, nature preserves were set up and fish factories built.
The Central Committee of the CPSU and the USSR Council of Ministers have adopted measures to prevent environmental pollution and to ensure nature conservation on a national scale. This country is developing a national monitoring service to keep watch on the purity of air, water resources and soil. Monitoring posts will keep tabs on the major polluters of the natural environment--- on factories and plants, on collective and state farms using mineral fertilisers and herbicides, on road traffic as well as on the condition of forest felling sites, fishing resources and mining operations.
Moscow, the Soivet capital, is ahead of all comparable cities in the world in terms of air purity. Successful measures have been undertaken to cleanse and conserve the Desna and some other rivers.
Human activity in the era of the scientific and technological revolution produces radical changes in the natural make-up of extensive territories, upsetting the environmental equilibrium that has taken millennia to become established. That is why national and international co-operation in nature conservation is essential if mankind is to develop further. A planned economy coupled with public ownership of the means of production is the best suited to do this.
The problem of nature conservation under the scientific and technological revolution has taken on a global
S-OSA
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33
expenditure in the chemical, iron-and-steel, non-ferrous metals, oil-refining and other industries, even though they are developing apace, and to reduce losses in irrigation networks.
During 15 years (from 1960 to 1975) the ploughland area per capita in the USSR fell from 1.03 to 0.89 hectare, largely due to utilising the land for non-agricultural purposes. It is therefore an urgent economic task to control water and wind erosion and secondary salination, to combat land drying-up and flooding and to restore land under dumps and waste heaps, and land impaired by mining and peat digging. The Law on Nature Conservation adopted by the USSR Supreme Soviet is accordingly specified in obligatory plan assignments.
Not more than 50 per cent of the available oil resources is being extracted in the oil-fields operated in the USSR and other countries. The pumping of bed water gushing up with oil back into the wells increases their debit and decreases the pollution of the environment by industrial sewage. This might seem inexpedient from the point of view of one enterprise, since it raises the cost of fuel and reduces profits. But from the social and macro-economic angle the need to work out a technology for extracting minerals with the least unremediable losses is beyond doubt. When there is the raw material shortage this can also yield an economic benefit, which will accrue to society as a whole rather than to an individual enterprise.
Soviet scientists have long insisted on stabilising the volume of tree felling in the USSR. It has now become possible to consider their proposals and incorporate them into the plan: the production of timber will only increase two per cent in the new five-year period, while the production of chip and wood-fibre boards on the basis of a full utilisation of raw timber will go up 60 to 85 per cent. Cellulose production will rise 35 per cent, and furniture production 40 to 50 per cent. Many industries plan to switch to waste-free production methods, making the fullest possible use of raw materials, and intend using a closed water and air cycle in machines and equipment.
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significance. Pessimistic forecasts are often made in the West about an imminent depletion of natural resources and air and water pollution. Many Western economists, sociologists and demographers see the way out in a curtailment of industrial production and rigorous population control, in a transition to a carefully managed "global equilibrium". History, however, indicates that the potential for meeting human needs has always outpaced population growth. The pessimistic forecasts made in the West ignore the crucial circumstance that mankind constantly develops fundamentally new methods of meeting its growing needs.
The catastrophe predicted by the prophets of doom in the West may occur not because of the depletion of natural resources, but because of their misuse and abuse, which springs from social causes. Capitalism is responsible for the wanton squandering of the planet's resources (including human resources) for purposes of war and war preparations. Vast quantities of resources are squandered to meet the parasitical consumption of the "upper strata" and the artificially stimulated needs of the middle classes. The capitalist pursuit of maximum profits results in the predatory destruction of forests and waters, in the pollution and overheating of the air basin. Thus, mankind must fight the harmful effects not of technological progress as such, but of the capitalist exploitation of the natural resources and of the capitalist orientation of scientific and technological progress.
For the first time ever the USSR tenth five-year plan (1976-1980) included special provisions for the use and protection of natural resources. Industries and individual enterprises have been ordered to cut back on water expenditure, to restore farm land, reduce waste in mineral extraction, minimise and use up industrial waste that pollutes the environment, and build purifying installations. A total of 21,000 cu m of sewage, mainly in the basins of the Black, Baltic and Caspian seas, was purified in 1976 alone by using mechanical, physical, chemical and biological methods. Over 150 million tons of dust is caught yearly by means of purifying intermediary gases.
In the next few years it is planned to stabilise water
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85THE CHANGING STRUCTURE OF PRODUCTION
In the seventies the Soviet economy began to exhibit a tendency which clearly indicated some of the main avenues for the further progress of socialist economy under the impact of the scientific and technological revolution. These lead to changes in production, its closer integration and socialisation, and a steadily growing role of science as a direct productive force; to further industrialisation in every economic area; and to the restructuring of the entire economic mechanism.
The scientific and technological revolution produces significant and accelerative changes in the sectoral structure of the economy leading to changes in the product range, production costs structure and in the gross national product, as well as to alterations in existing technology and production organisation.
The first industrial revolution in human history was based on advance in coal mining, textile manufacturing, the steam engine and mechanical lathes. At the end of the 19th century the economic "centre of gravity" shifted to steel production, electricity generation, the use of internal combustion engines, industrial equipment and products of basic chemistry. The current scientific and technological revolution places the emphasis on those industries using fundamentally new technologies and relying on a new scientific basis, which requires highly skilled personnel. These industries produce advanced instruments and automation equipment, computers, super-- precision machine-tools, fine chemicals and super-pure materials. These can only develop in a country possessing a solid industrial base backed up by advanced science and a work force with a high educational level. The new industries are characterised by a high power-to-man ratio, a high equipment density, early product obsolescence, a wide product range, exacting demands on precision technology, a high proportion of research and development personnel within work teams, and advanced experimental production.
The engineering, electric power, chemical and petrochemical industries accounted for 31 per cent of the total
volume of industrial production in the USSR in 1970 and for 36 in 1975, and this will go up to 40 per cent in 1980. Between 1971 and 1974 the number of those employed in chemistry and petrochemistry increased 8 per cent, in engineering and metalworking 12 per cent, and in industry as a whole only 6 per cent.
Inter-industrial proportions will change substantially during the tenth five-year plan period. The relative growth rate of industry will decrease somewhat (from 7.4 per cent a year in the preceding five-year period to 6.6 per cent), but the absolute increase will continue growing, since the ``weight'' of each per cent in 1980 will be 7,200 million rubles, or 1.4 times more than in the 1971 to 1975 period and 2.1 times more than in the 1966 to 1970 period. It is also very important that production will go up by 60 to 110 per cent in the instrument-- making, radio-electronic, chemical, petrochemical and microbiological industries and in many branches of the engineering industry, even though the ``old'' industries will register relatively modest growth rates.
The major effects of the scientific and technological revolution include the accelerating development of industires forming part of the economic infrastructure, i.e., industries directly serving production. These include transport (notably, road transport and pipelines), warehousing and the provision of packing materials of all kinds (notably, the use of containers, pallets, bottom plates and trays), and efficient information services.
The role of non-productive industries is growing rapidly. These include communal and household services, trade, public catering, health services, the tourist industry, physical culture and sports, culture, public education and general scientific institutions. A considerable portion of all investments and additional manpower resources are channelled into these industries.
The expanding diversity of industrial products and their faster obsolescence is closely associated with the changes occurring in individual industries under the impact of the scientific and technological revolution. Between 1971 and 1975 the number of new types of machines, equipment and instruments launched into produc-
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87tion grew two-fold (from 1,700 to 3,400), and those removed from production rose three-fold (from 500 to 1,500). The dynamic structure of production can also be illustrated by reduced periods for renovating equipment and the range of articles produced.
As recently as the first third of this century industry manufactured as many different products as were required by society. At that time increased output was the only or at any rate the main method of meeting growing demand. Today the range of industrial products exceeds the number of demands roughly by a factor of ten. One and the same social need can now be met with alternative types of products. It is common knowledge that a top quality product is worth two or three products of inferior quality. The output of new and improved products has the same effect as an increase in the output of old products with the advantage that far less money and effort is expended. Today it is far more advantageous do modernise the entire product range, to start the production of new, better quality products, than simply to increase the output of old products.
The state assessment of product quality, now in use in the USSR, which is based on the system of obligatory standards, has meant that it is now possible to plan the major quality indices and to restructure production financing systems accordingly. Greater outlays are now channeled into improving the reliability, longevity and work life of machines, equipment and other products than into increase of their quantity. This task is especially important for the USSR, where there are more than two million workers • engaged in repairing machines, equipment and instruments. Improved work quality in basic production will help reduce wasteful repairs.
A salient feature of modern production is the rising quality resulting from improved design, precision machining and processing, a higher quality of raw materials, and finally, the higher qualifications and level of skill of the designers, manufactures and operators.
The scientific and technological revolution has brought about major changes in the structure of expenditures on production. Notably, the structure of production costs
has changed markedly. In 1932 material expenditures (raw and other materials, fuel and power) in the Soviet Union accounted for 53 per cent of the industrial costs of production. In 1955 the proportion was 72 per cent and in 1971 it was 75 per cent.
The USSR is the only large industrialised state which does not need to import fuel and most other raw materials. But in this coutry, too, raw material production becomes more costly and involves larger investments because poorer and deeper deposits and deposits located in distant and almost inaccessible regions are worked, particularly in the Far North and on the continental shelf. Expenditure on cutting the material going into production is therefore becoming more effective than outlays for increasing raw material production (the former involve, for instance, improved quality and a more thorough processing of materials, as well as a careful preparation of finished products for consumption). Between 1976 and 1980 it is planned to reduce the expenditure norms for rolled ferrous metal by 14 to 15 per cent, for timber materials by 12 to 16 per cent, and for cement used in construction by 5 to 6 per cent.
As technology develops, non-recurrent, advanced expenditures on fixed assets, infrastructure, research and development, the training of personnel, prospecting, and on the protection and reproduction of natural resources play an increasingly greater role than current expenditures on production proper (on average 7 to 10 years). Advanced expenditures entail a long period between investment and the return. This means that the average rate of resource turnover is on the» upgrade, as well as the time of expenditure recoupment. In the second half of the 1970s this country will make larger investments in major economic projects to reconstruct agriculture in the non-black earth area of the RSFSR, to develop Northern areas, to channel the Siberian rivers to the South, etc., and this investment can only be recouped over many years. The programme for the comprehensive mechanisation of labour-intensive jobs also requires large investments. No wonder that in 1976 to 1980 each per cent increase in labour productivity will correspond to
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89a greater asset-to-man ratio (1.1-1.2 per cent in industry and 2 per cent in agriculture), i.e., greater investments per one worker or a growing cost for each work place (between 1965 and 1975 this cost grew twofold). Hence the greater consideration given to investment efficiency and to better use of fixed assets, in particular to fuller use of equipment through shift work, so as to boost the growth of social wealth.
The growth rates of the output of producer goods (Group A) and the output of consumer goods (Group B) are changing markedly. Before the last war the ratio of the rates of advance of Group A to those of Group B was 2.5:1 and between 1961 and 1965 it was 1.5:1. In the period 1966 to 1975 the ratio decreased even more and in the period 1976 to 1980 it will be 1.29:1 (according to plan). The output of consumer goods will be increased almost two-fold at Group A factories, particularly in the defence industry. The growing share of these goods in the aggregate social product stems from the fact that the revolutionary changes in the objects of labour and production methods have resulted in a higher output from the same quantities of raw and other materials.
One other major change in the structure of production has been brought about by technological progress. In the first postwar years the number of industrial processes roughly corresponded to the number of products manufactured, which meant that there were only one or two alternative processes for the manufacture of a particular product. The scientific and technological revolution has led to an unprecedented increase in the number of alternative processes.
With predominantly manual labour, the difference in the labour intensity of products with different alternative methods of their manufacture was negligible. Today when progressive technologies epitomise the latest scientific advances, this difference is vast. Thus the costs of production of electricity, cement, supports and props for use in mines, and other goods differ greatly with alternative methods of manufacture.
The increase in the number of alternative manufacturing processes results in a growing role for specialisation
based on redistribution of the manufacturing programme among the enterprises and sections using different technologies.
Modern mechanisms and instruments often comprise a perplexing multiplicity of parts and components. Automation of their manufacture is only possible where there is specialisation through the concentration of the manufacture of technologically similar parts and components at a minimum number of production sectors. One distinguishing feature of Soviet industrialisation is that oldestablished and new factories and plants had to produce a wide range of goods to meet the needs of a burgeoning industry. Many factories lacked distinctive production specialisation with the result that today the level of specialisation in the old-established industries often fails to meet the requirements imposed by the scientific and technological revolution.
The specialisation of enterprises and their sections, based on the unification and standardisation of parts and components and of technological processes results in significant changes in production. Ball, roller and needle bearings of all sizes are produced on the basis of a standard technology and documentation. Ninety-five per cent of non-wire resistors in the electronic industry are produced on the basis of uniform design and the range of condensers has been cut to 15 basic designs.
Transferring the manufacture of each component to a specialised sector changes the structure of production at a particular enterprise. In the first instance the ratio of live and materialised labour changes, i.e. of the labour inputs of a particular work team and the amount of `` outside'' labour embodied in the cost of materials, semi-- manufactured goods and purchased articles.
Changes in the structure of production (branch, assortment, value and technological) entail shifts in the aggregate social product as a whole. Under the scientific and technological revolution production develops intensively, i.e., with a stable number of gainfully employed and decreasing expenditure of means of production per unit of end product. Between 1966 and 1970 the growth in labour productivity accounted for 73 per cent of the
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91increment in industrial production, between 1971 and 1975 it accounted for 84 per cent, and between 1976 and 1980 (according to plan) it will account for roughly 90 per cent. The growth in labour productivity will also account for the whole increase in agricultural production and in construction.
Up to 1970 the volume of investment in the USSR grew quicker than the national income. Between 1971 and 1975 the share of accumulation in the national income was stabilised and between 1976 and 1980 provisions have been made for the first time for the consumption fund to grow 27 to 29 per cent faster than the accumulation fund spent on production, which will grow 17 to 23 per cent. The consumption fund and the fund for building communal and cultural facilities will account for a larger portion of the national income (it was 80 per cent in 1975), which points to the enhancement of the end results of social production and its efficiency.
The shifts in the structure of production and factors causing its development are of great social significance. In the USSR almost all the able-bodied population is gainfully employed. Some 78 per cent of all able-bodied people worked or studied (discontinuing their production activities) in 1960, 87 per cent in 1965, and over 91 per cent in 1975, i.e., virtually all the able-bodied men and 80 per cent of the women. Moreover, the main source for replenishing the labour force has become young people who have finished their education, rather than persons taking up paid work in place of private or household work, as had been the case before 1965. This source accounted for only 29 per cent of the total in the period 1961 to 1965, 50 per cent in the period 1966 to 1970, 88 per cent in the period 1971 to 1975; between 1976 and 1980 it will comprise almost 100 per cent.
The fast renovation of a large variety of products coupled with constant changes in the production structure require the human operator to take his bearings in the complicated production environment and be able to quickly acquire proficiency in the manufacture of new products by new methods.
The current scientific and technological revolution
makes labour productivity more dependent on what is known as structural economic factors: the use of fundamentally new technological processes, the emergence of new industries and the changing proportions within individual industries. This is all the more important since the socialist division of labour has now crossed national boundaries, and specialisation and the dissemination of advanced production experience are conducted on an international basis.
All this means that under the scientific and technological revolution the traditional notion of labour productivity has changed. The effectiveness of labour inputs is now being increasingly measured not by the labour intensity of a unit of production, but rather by aggregate, overall labour inputs including the expenditure of past labour materialised in the instruments and objects of labour, research and development, as well as the labour intensity of the product in question, and by labour inputs into the running, repair and maintenance of equipment.
In these conditions personal incomes become more dependent on the efficiency of social production as a whole, as well as on individual input.
SOCIALIST INTEGRATION
The scientific and technological revolution results in a higher degree of production socialisation leading to a more complex pattern of inter-relationships between the various economic sectors which in the past had a considerable measure of autonomy. The economy is rapidly becoming a closely integrated and infinitely complex system. Soviet Academician V. V. Novozhilov has estimated the number of possible alternative versions of the economic development plan in the USSR as being in excess of 10^^500^^; this is the number of atoms in the visible part of the Universe, which until recently was considered the greatest concrete number known to man. Thus, the economy is hardly less complicated a system than the Universe. This circumstance complicates the business of
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management and increases the importance of the individual component. On the other hand, a steadily improving science-based economic management offers incalculable benefits which can accrue without extra expenditures of labour through the establishment of optimal proportions and a search for the best possible economic solutions.
The increased socialisation of labour is exemplified in the fact that now industrial products are increasingly the result of collective labour expenditures at a string of industries and enterprises whose number is constantly growing.
Today the economy can no longer be built up as a system of individual plants, factories, state farms, institutes, design bureaus, etc. The autonomy of these components complicates the management of the economic mechanism as a single system. Production can no longer be squeezed into the framework of old established economic units. As the number of links in the production chain grows, and economic inter-relationship become more complex, it is becoming more difficult to establish and co-ordinate links among thousands of administratively independent but technologically interlocking factories, plants and institutes.
The 25th CPSU Congress noted that economic activity must above all be aimed at the end economic results determined by the total volume of the output of consume* goods and modern means of labour, as well as the share of the national income that can be used for current consumption and the construction of housing and cultural facilities.
The end results in their turn are becoming increasingly dependent on many intermediate links, i.e. on the performance of various enterprises and industries. The final, aggregate effect can be undermined by the inadequacy of some intermediate link, e.g. the inadequate production of dyes and finishing materials in the clothing industry or the low quality of hides in the shoe industry.
The Soviet Union is therefore setting up bodies to manage interrelated industries, such as fuel and power, agricultural-industrial or engineering.
The primary link of the Soviet economy is also chang-
THE STR IN THE USSR
93ing in substance. Earlier this was a factory, plant, mine, electric power station or some other economic unit specialising in one stage of the production cycle. By the end of the tenth five-year plan period the role of the basic, primary link will be played, as a rule, by large associations, both industrial, scientific-industrial and agricultural-industrial. In 1976, 2,300 of these associations produced 24 per cent of all industrial goods.
The new management structure makes it possible to eliminate the multi-stage management of individual industries. Now most of the questions relating to economic activity are decided at the factories, combines and production associations concerned, which are directly subordinate to an appropriate ministry or ail-Union ( republican) industrial association integrating all enterprises within the subindustry in question.
Under the new management system, production concentration goes up. Economic complexes comprise, apart from industrial enterprises, research and development and design organisations. This enables them to carry out the ``research-application'' cycle from start to finish. A production association differs from a conventional-type industrial enterprise in that it represents a complete and relatively autonomous system of co-operating plants and research institutes. The automated control system of a small or medium-size enterprise is often ineffective as everything it does is dependent for success on the cooperation of related enterprises over which it has no control. Relationships which in the case of the individual factory, state farm or research institute are of an external character become an internal matter within a production associtaion and are co-ordinated from a single centre.
A production association is not only a scientific, technological and organisational cell of a new type, it is also this in an economic sense. It can be placed on a fully self-sustained basis. An individual enterprise cannot be placed on such a basis as it lacks requisite finance and its production structure is subject to frequent changes as productoin starts on new items. Often the addition of a single new item to the product range of a small plant can cause its economic performance to change drastically.
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95Production associations are capable of using raw materials in a comprehensive way and are better equipped to ensure environmental protection. The individual enterprise often tries to destroy or dump its waste products since their recycling does not fit in with its narrow production orientation.
Finally, a production association, as a large associated producer, is a social cell of a new type being able to meet more fully the many different social, cultural and everyday needs of its work force as it maintains special centres for the training of the requisite personnel, medical institutions, sports facilities and recreation and holiday centres. A production association offers better opportunities for promotion since it provides a large variety of jobs to suit every taste and inclination. Within such an association an apprentice may work himself up to the preeminence of a doctor of science. A production association can offer suitable jobs to most members of one's family, though they may have been trained in the humanities or as medical personnel, and even if some of them are physically handicapped. It is also important that a production association can and does set up branches in other cities and towns and in the countryside. A more intensive migration of workers within such an amalgamation helps reduce the turnover of personnel.
At present the division of labour and economic cooperation among the Union Republics is being given greater depth.
Between 1961 and 1975 the RSFSR's proportion of the Soviet population fell from 56 to 53 per cent and that of the Central Asian Republics, Kazakhstan and the Transcaucasus increased from 16 to 20 per cent. This was caused by differences in birth-rate and migration. Over the 15 years the population of Central Asia, Kazakhstan and the Transcaucasus went up 47 per cent, while in the RSFSR, Byelorussia, the Baltic Republics and the Ukraine it only grew 12 per cent. According to plan, therefore, industry is developing faster in the southern regions of the USSR. Between 1966 and 1974 the number of industrial workers went up 22 per cent in the USSR as a whole, while it skyrocketed 36 per
cent in Uzbekistan, 39 per cent in Tajikistan, 53 per cent in Armenia, 55 per cent in Kirghizia, and 66 per cent in Moldavia.
Soviet foreign economic ties are playing a greater role. On the one hand, they are of considerable political importance because they strengthen the might and cohesion of the socialist community, help restructure the developing countries economically and socially on the basis of progressive principles and expand the material base for peaceful coexistence with the capitalist countries. On the other hand, the international division of labour means time saved and production made more efficient by using science and technology from all over the world. Moreover, environmental protection, exploring the World Ocean and space, eliminating the most dangerous and widespread diseases and solving the raw material, energy and other global problems are only possible on an international scale.
Between 1970 and 1975 Soviet foreign trade grew from 22,000 million to 51,000 million rubles, i.e., 130 per cent. The three-fifths were complete sets of equipment for almost 2,000 projects in the chemical, automobile, light, food and other industries, while the rest were consumer goods and raw materials for their production. Soviet exports include raw materials (oil, gas, iron, manganese and chromium ores, asbestos, timber), furs, atomic reactors, electric generators, aircraft, machine-tools, tractors, automobiles and plant for metallurgical, glassmaking and other works. The USSR's major trade partners are the socialist countries (the CMEA countries account for more than half the Soviet trade turnover), and West Germany, Japan, the USA, France, Finland, and Italy.
The economies of the socialist countires are rapidly becoming integrated. Further steps involve a transition from traditional trade to jointly elaborating and implementing long-range target programmes. In particular, this concerns the joint exploitation of natural resources, the construction of large industrial complexes and the drafting of long-term plans for co-operation between enterprises and whole industries. Examples include the
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97Ust-Ilim timber and Orenburg gas complexes and the phosphorite combine in Kinguisepp. Programmes for producing polyethelene, olephene, etc. have been jointly undertaken by the USSR, the GDR and Hungary. The CMEA member-countries have built 3,000-kilometre gas pipeline to the western frontier of the USSR.
A pattern of cooperation is meant which begins with the joint elaboration of long-term plans and the conduct of research rather than at a stage where the products in question have been put out. This pattern of integration is intended to create conditions favourable to the organisation in each co-operating country of the mass production of a previously agreed range of parts, components and whole items to meet the needs of all the co-operating countries. This makes it possible for each socialist country, big and small, to develop up-to-date automated production complexes.
International production and science-cum-production associations have been functioning for some time, including the Interchem, Intermetal, and Interatominstrument organisations. International scientific and technical information centre, computer centres, and research institutes for advanced studies in the latest areas of research have been set up. Socialist integration creates the most rational and efficient units to manage socialist economy under the scientific and technological revolution.
The scientific and technological revolution has also made possible economic co-operation on a world scale. More efficient foreign trade with the capitalist countries requires a gradual transition to the export of processed raw materials (sawn timber instead of logs, oil products instead of oil, etc.), increased exports of competitive and high-quality machines and instruments and the sale of licences.
International detente has enabled a switch to be made from traditional trade to compensation agreements under which foreign firms grant credits, equipment and licences and in return receive a portion of the goods manufactured at the enterprises they helped to build. These provisions underlie the contracts the USSR signed with leading chemical concerns in Italy, France, West Ger-
many, Britain and Japan. Equipment is paid for by supplies of power-intensive semi-finished and finished goods produced on the basis of oil and gas. An example of the mutual utilisation of natural resources is the contract whereby the USA delivers one million tons of superphosphate acid to the USSR (i.e., five million tons of phosphorous fertilisers) in exchange for ammonia, calcium, chloride and carbamide. West Germany is helping to build the electrometallurgical combine which will use ore from the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly. Under a longterm contract Japan is helping to explore and develop natural wealth in the South of Yakutia and on the shelf around Sakhalin.
THE COMPLETION OF INDUSTRIALISATION THROUGHOUT THE ECONOMY
An important prerequisite of a revolution in production is the complete industrialisation of the whole economy to make industrialised production the principal form of production in general. * This primarily concerns agriculture, which employs about a fourth of the total work force in the USSR. The industrialisation of agriculture includes its comprehensive mechanisation, complete electrification, the widespread use of mineral fertilisers and the application of chemical substances, land reclamation and land improvement. Apart from integration between agriculture and industry and inter-collective-farm co-- operation agriculture is changing from a technologically isolated sector, where the land is the chief means of production and where the processes of nature are the chief technology, into an integral part of a single, closely integrated production system run on a scientific basis.
* ``Industrialisation'' is generally taken to mean the creation and subsequent development of large-scale industry.
Under the current scientific and technological revolution, however, the term ``industrialisation'' is also used to mean the transition to machine production in every area of the economy, a final stage of industrialisation to which it is only possible to pass with the present scientific and technological revolution. The term ``industrialisation'' is used in this broader sense here.
7-054
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99The 25th Congress of the CPSU decided that during the tenth five-year plan the growing of grain and beetroot crops will be fully mechanised. There will be a rapid transition from the mechanisation of individual processes to comprehensively automated enterprises in the production of fodder and early vegetables, in raising poultry for eggs and in pig and cattle breeding. By 1980 these items will be produced by several thousand agricultural-industrial enterprises controlled by computers which will decide the optimal processes, fodder and crop structure, etc. Work in many of these enterprises will become like that in industry; production will not depend on the season or weather, but only on man himself. Scientifically regulated production will change the way of life in the countryside with the length of the working day and leisure time being determined by law rather than the season.
The electrification of Soviet agriculture meant laying power lines for hundreds of thousands of kilometres in barely accessible regions. Supplying all production premises and houses in the countryside with electricity was only completed by 1975. The power-to-man ratio for rural labour has risen sharply and continues to grow (1.5 hp in 1940, 8.5 hp in 1965, 17 hp in 1975, and 28 hp in the 1980 according to plan), and is approximating that in industry.
The chemicalisation of agriculture involves the wide use of fertilisers (in 1975 the USSR led the world in fertiliser production), herbicides, pesticides, insecticides, medicines to control plant and animal diseases, synthetic fodder, enzymes, antibiotics, etc. In the new five-year period it is planned to increase supplies of mineral fertilisers and combined feeds by more than 50 per cent.
Under the scientific and technological revolution Soviet agriculture is switching more and more from using chemicals which pollute the environment to biological ( genetic, selectionist, hydrobiological, microbiological), ecological, phenological, ethological and other scientific methods of controlling the water and temperature regimes, soil composition, plant varieties, animal strains, etc.
Phenological forecasting was first used in the YavanObikin irrigation system in Tadjikistan. This meant that the time the cotton ripened and pests appeared was worked out precisely and the quantity of chemicals applied was considerably reduced.
The southern regions of the USSR often suffer from draught and the northern regions from excess moisture. Land improvement is therefore especially important and involves the scientific control of several processes affecting plant growth on the basis of related engineering, chemical and biological factors. Between 1976 and 1980 it is planned to increase the area of irrigated and drained lands from 25 to 34 million hectares. This particularly concerns the non-black earth zone, the Volga area, Kazakhstan, Central Asia and the Transcaucasus. Moreover, 37.6 million hectares of desert, semi-desert and mountain pastures will be irrigated.
Land reclamation in the USSR started before the tenth five-year plan (thus, some nine million hectares were reclaimed during the ninth five-year plan period alone, from 1971 to 1975). But a comprehensive nationwide programme could only be worked out on the basis of industrial methods and scientific achievements peculiar to the age of the scientific and technological revolution. Tentative estimates have shown the best regions for reclamation to be the Volga area, Central Asian Republics, Kazakhstan, North Caucasus, the non-black earth zone, etc., and have indicated the most profitable crops in each particular region (grain, rice, cotton, soy-beans, vegetables near big cities, etc.). It is planned that the social infrastructure in the new areas should be developed, those working on land reclamation be trained and their qualifications improved, and the enrolment of students in the appropriate departments increased. This comprehensive, programmatic approach is becoming the basis for setting up the agriculture-cum-industry complex.
The industrialisation of agriculture involves a radical improvement in personnel qualifications. By 1975 practically all collective and state farm managers had received specialised education. The current task is to improve the training of medium-level managers, section, team and
7*