p . The major feature distinguishing social life from living and non-living nature is the fact that the protagonists here are conscious beings who set definite goals and try to reach them. Nothing similar is met in nature, where changes do not result from the fulfilment of conscious aims, but are due to the interplay of material bodies or the collision of an infinite number of diverse spontaneous forces and trends.

p Bearing this in mind, many pre-Marxian sociologists, while conceding the existence of an objective necessity or a definite regularity in the development of natural phenomena, nevertheless rejected it on the historical plane, in social life. According to them, society is not governed by any laws or necessity, since it develops on the basis of people’s free will, or their free creative activity.

p Marx and Engels proved that these ideas do not reflect the real state of affairs. Though there are acting, conscious beings in society, who are trying to reach definite aims, this does not exclude historical necessity or regularity which are brought about by these actions, determining the inevitability of results occurring independently of people’s consciousness or will.

p Indeed, although every person acts consciously and according to his will, the aims people set conflict with each other, and prove unattainable either in substance or due to a lack of means for realising them. On the other hand, even if these aims are to some extent attained, they do not ultimately lead to the desired results. For example, when people worked to create the steam engine, their only concern was to raise productivity in some industries. They had no idea that they were creating the instrument which more than any other was to revolutionise social relations throughout he world. They had no idea that this would, by concentrating wealth in the hands of the minority and turning the overwhelming majority of the population into proletarians, give the bourgeoisie social and political domination at first, and then cause a class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which must inevitably result in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of all class antagonisms.  [302•1 

p Take another example. When people interact with each other by selling or buying goods, 303 employing or hiring, they are pursuing some definite aims, giving little thought to what relations form as a result and what the social changes are caused by these relations. When a peasant, for instance, sells his grain and thus comes into contact with world grain producers on the world market, he is not conscious of this nor is he conscious of the kind of social relations that are formed on the basis of exchange.  [303•1 

p Furthermore, the wealthy citizens of ancient Rome, while buying up plots of land from poorer landowners, simply wanted to increase their wealth, and could not possibly have foreseen let alone wished that the latifundia would destroy the republic.

p Thus, an individual in society pursues his own deliberately set aims, while the total outcome of a host of individual actions, undertaken with diverse aims in mind, does not depend on the will and consciousness of individuals, but merely expresses some necessary trend, determined by these individuals’ material living conditions and activities.

p Clashes of innumerable intentions and actions lead, in history, to a state similar to that in nature, which is deprived of any consciousness: intrinsic necessity and regularity manage to find their way through the mass of diverse accidental interactions, links and relations, and the objective laws of motion come to the surface.

p Thus, despite the highly specific nature of 304 society, its functioning and development are subject to objective laws expressing the necessity of dejnite historical events and of the law-governed pattern of the historical process.

p But how can the inevitability of some events be combined with man’s freedom of action?

p Some critics of Marxism hold that historical necessity contradicts the freedom of human behaviour and that the inevitability of the historical ^process excludes any freedom. In fact, people’s ^uninhibited activity, far from contradicting objective necessity, js based on it.

p True, man can act freely only when he has cognised the objective laws, necessary linkages and jnterrelations inherent in a particular sphere and lakes them into acount in his actions. If, on the other hand, he does not know these laws and necessary linkages, he cannot be free in taking his decisions relating to the given sphere. Then he acts at random and, naturally, is carried away by spontaneous forces based on intrinsic laws, which deprive his behaviour of any genuine freedom. Thus, freedom lies not in independence from any necessity and the laws of reality, but rather in their cognition and “in the possibility ... of systematically making them [the laws of natureA. S.] work towards definite ends”. Freedom is nothing but “the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject".  [304•1 

This applies not only to man’s actions relating to changes in natural phenomena, but also to those 305 aimed at changing social phenomena, i.e. not only to his control over the processes of nature, but also to his regulation of processes in social life. Freedom of action in the social sphere, however, is attained only when society makes the transition to socialism and then to communism, since only socialism creates the objective conditions for the conscious application of the laws ot social activity and for the conscious use of historical necessity. It is only from this moment on that people start to create history consciously, in accordance with its objective laws and its intrinsic necessity. As tor antagonistic systems, due to the domination of private ownership over the means of production and the exploitation of man by man, the necessary conditions do not exist for the balanced and conscious utilisation of the laws of social development, and this results in these laws opposing man “as laws of nature foreign to, and dominating him"  [305•1  and excluding genuine freedom of man’s historical creativity.