p The vast majority of mental workers, intellectuals, have served the ruling classes for centuries and helped to oppress the working people, the manual workers. This further deepened the age-old antithesis between manual and mental labour. Socialism has abolished this antithesis as well. Soviet intellectuals are working for the good of their socialist country hand in hand with the manual workers, the workers and the peasants. Under socialism, however, essential distinctions between manual and brain workers still remain: the cultural and technical level of the workers and peasants still lags behind the cultural level and the technical knowledge of the intelligentsia. To obliterate this distinction it is necessary to raise the culture and technical education of the workers and peasants to the level of the intelligentsia. This task is being accomplished in the period of full-scale communist construction.

p The main means of solving this problem is technical progress and the attendant change in the nature of labour itself. Technological progress, the introduction of new complex and highly efficient machines, automation and complete electrification of production, the use of atomic energy and the wide application of the achievements of chemistry and other sciences demand not only a great number of special technical skills from the workers, but also an advanced general education and knowledge of the fundamentals of science. Technical progress is indissolubly bound up with the general cultural and technical advance of the workers and peasants. It is primarily in the process of labour, the main sphere of human activity, that a member of communist society, an all-round developed individual will be moulded.

p The system of public education also plays its part in eliminating the distinctions between mental and physical labour. This system is developing and improving, and establishing still closer ties with productive labour in order to enhance the education of the rising generation and the training of specialists for all the branches of the economy. The Soviet Union is broadening the network of correspondence and evening higher and secondary specialised educational institutions, general education schools, various schools of innovators, courses for agronomists and livestock specialists, and schools for farm-machinery operators so that an ever increasing number of workers and peasants will be able to enhance their professional qualifications and cultural standards. It was not by chance that of the total number of people employed in the national economy in 1977 more than 75 per cent had a higher or secondary (either complete or incomplete) education. The transition to universal secondary education has been completed in the main.

p The Communist Party and the Soviet Government have taken .care to give the people the free time necessary for gaining more knowledge and raising their cultural level. Measures for reducing the working day are being carried out In 1967 it was decreed that industrial and office workers in the USSR should have two days off a week, a 41-hour working week retained.

When communism is built there will no longer be any 263 essential distinctions between mental and manual labour. Both the narrow, specialised mental labour and the purely manual labour will disappear in communist society. A qualitatively new type of labour will arise in which the physical and mental activity of the members of communist society, people of all-round development, will be harmoniously blended.