37

p Scientific and technical progress as a whole, and the STR in particular, are closely connected with society’s socio- economic development, and with the state and dynamics of the relations of production.

p The STR is now in progress both in the socialist and in the capitalist countries, and it is highly important, therefore, to analyse the influence of each of the social systems on the development and the socio-economic consequences of scientific and technical progress and the STR, and also the impact of the latter on the fortunes of each of the social formations.

p In considering the socialist system and its interaction with the STR. one should note at least the following of its characteristic features:

38

p —the domination of social property in the means of production and the absence, in consequence, of any contradictions between the social character of production and the private form of appropriation;

p —the balanced organisation of the whole process of expanded socialist reproduction;

p —the absence of exploitation and a fundamentally different goal in production than the one under capitalism, namely, the ever fuller satisfaction of the people’s material and cultural requirements;

p —practice of the principle of payment in accordance with the quantity and quality of work;

p •—involvement of millions of working people in culture, science and knowledge, a steady rise in the cultural standards of the whole population, the broad spread of technical knowledge, and in a remoter future—under communism— elimination of any essential distinctions between mental and manual work, and of other social distinctions between men, which is one of the key goals of society;

p —the preservation of commodity-money relations and commodity-money forms of connection between the units of the economy, production collectives, etc., under a planned economy and with socialist property in the means of production;

p —harmony of the vital interests of society, production collectives and every member of society.

p Among the specific features and advantages of the socialist economic system is the elimination—in the early 1930s—of unemployment and, for that reason, freedom from any fear of unemployment among the working people of the USSR. Because most of the property in the USSR belongs to the whole people (and in agriculture, there is large-scale collective-farm and cooperative property) there is no rivalry, and no enterprise can go bankrupt. In the USSR, the heads of enterprises are not faced with the danger of going bankrupt. These obvious social advantages of the Soviet system also eliminate automatic incentives for speeding up technical progress like competition and the danger of going bankrupt. Accordingly, there arises the complicated task of setting up an economic mechanism that would shape the material and moral incentives for accelerated 39 development and introduction of technical progress that would simultaneously absorb the Soviet people’s tremendous social gains.

p The countries of victorious socialism face the task of solving one of the most important problems in further developing their productive forces and successfully fulfilling the socio-economic tasks of the socialist society, the problem of replacing the relentless incentives arising from rivalry and the existence of a chronic reserve labour by a system of incentives that would be equivalent and even more effective but that would safeguard the great human rights written into the Constitution of the USSR, above all, the right to work, incentives ensuring the exercise of one of the chief principles of socialism: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his work.”

p These features determine a number of peculiarities of the development of technical progress and its social consequences and the methods used in influencing and controlling it.

p Socialism creates the possibility for centralised state planning and financing of all the echelons of scientific and technical progress: extensive development of general education and culture in society, training of scientific, engineering and technical personnel and skilled workers, establishment of a network of research, design, development and engineering institutions, development of experimental facilities for applied and basic research, material backup and balanced realisation of progressive technical policies, etc.

p The following data show the realisation of these potentialities in the postwar period:

p Number of persons (ths.) graduated from
secondary (general and special) education schools
higher educational establishments

p 1918-1940
3,829
1,208

1941-1950
3,652

954

p 1956-1960
13,738
2,619

p 1961-1970
22,853
4,350

p 1971-1977
28,745
4,952

40

p Only in the past 17 years, 51.6 million persons in the USSR received a full secondary education, 9.3 million, a higher education, and 15.0 million, a secondary special education. Such is the scale of the first echelon of scientific and technical progress—the training of cadres of educated men and women, the subjects of progress in science, technology and production.

p The following data give an idea of the grand scale of the achievements of the socialist system. The number of persons enrolled in higher schools increased from 127,000 in the pre-revolutionary 1914/15 academic year to 5.0 million in the 1977/78 academic year; in secondary special schools, from 54,000 to 4.7 million; and in primary, incomplete secondary and secondary schools, from 9.7 million to 45.4 million.

p The number of scientific personnel (including teachers and researchers at higher schools) increased from 162,500 in 1950 to 1,262,000 in 1977. In the same period, the number of persons engaged in scientific and scientific-service establishments went up from 714,000 to 3,970,000. The expenditures on science went up from 1 billion rubles in 1950 to 3.9 billion in 1960, 11.7 billion in 1970, and 18.3 billion in 1977, or 4.5 per cent of the USSR national income.

p At every stage of communist construction, the socialist state takes account of the attained level of economic development, science and technology and the emerging requirements of society, and takes steps to shape a balanced sectoral structure in material production, giving preference to the development of the high technology industries and lines of production which determine rapid progress in the basic and applied sciences, acceleration of technical progress and the growth of efficiency in social production.

p From 1950 to 1977, industrial output multiplied 11.05- fold, while generation of electric energy increased 15.6-fold, output in engineering and metal-working, 27.4-fold, and in the chemical and petrochemical industries, 26-fold. Advanced sectors of engineering like the making of fine instruments and computers have been developing at a sharply stepped up pace. From 1950 to 1977, their output increased, respectively, 66 times and 5,047 times, including from 1950 to 1965, respectively, 16.1 and 122.5 times, and from 1965 to 1977, 4.1 and 41.2 times, reaching in 1977 4.1 billion and 2.8 billion rubles a year, respectively.

41

p Socialist production and scientific and technical progress are geared to the attainment of the main goal: improvement of the people’s wellbeing and fulfilment of the basic social tasks of communist construction. That is why the contradictions which arise in the realisation of scientific and technical achievements are not antagonistic, as they so palpably are in the capitalist countries.

p Even under socialism, the effort to realise in production and in the socio-economic sphere the potentialities of the STR gives rise to the highly complicated problem of the interrelation between the three interconnected complexes:

p —STR-induced R & D, and fthe potentialities they create for improving every element of material production and the non-production sphere;

p —the logic and momentum of the development of largescale machine production, above all, of its existing production facilities;

p —the socio-economic consequences of the STR, which are closely bound up with the chief social goals and tasks of the given social system.

p Each of these three complexes, for all their organic interconnection, has its own logic of development, and their interaction in time is fairly complicated.

p First of all, the nature of each of these determines the time sequence. A scientific discovery is followed by a technical solution, after which the potentialities created by the STR may be gradually realised in material production. Thus, the second complex can develop only after the first. Apart from this, substantial distinctions may exist within the structure of the first two complexes. For all their interdependence, the development of science and technology and of material production are subordinate to their own inner logic. That is why the structure and trends of scientific discoveries and technical solutions not always coincide in a straightforward manner with the direction in which material production develops. This situation also produces substantial distinctions between simultaneously running stages of the STR and stages in the development of large-scale machine production.

p The STR’s ideological achievements apart, its economic effect and social potentialities may become manifest only after the new technological solutions are broadly applied 42 in material production and the non-production sphere, i.e., after the second complex is realised.

p But one could say that this is an ideal picture. The use of the STR’s results in production and realisation of its social consequences does not run along a free and smooth highway. It inevitably and naturally comes up against impediments which are organic to the nature of each of these complexes. This is expressed above all in the fact that with the close functional interconnections between stages of the STR and the simultaneously running stages of the development of material production, there are considerable time gaps, which is only a different and wider expression of the problem of realising and applying scientific and technical achievements to production.

p The first cause of such time gaps springs from the existence of the production facilities created earlier and reflecting previous stages in technical development of the production apparatus, a vast inertial mass of which largely determines the main characteristics of the corresponding stage in the development of material production.

p In early 1978, fixed assets in the USSR economy were valued at 934 billion rubles. The annual output of the elements of fixed assets is many times smaller than the assets themselves, so that there is a need for sufficiently long periods to effect a truly radical renewal of the production apparatus. Thus, in the Soviet Union the fleet of metalcutting machine-tools is over 20 times larger than their annual output. The inertial processes are also intensified by the fact that a sizable part of the production apparatus continues to turn out traditional machinery, so maintaining a great share of it in the years ahead. This determines a considerable gap between the potentialities of the given stage in the STR and the technical level of the production apparatus.

p The second cause springs from the economic efficiency of new technical solutions and the efficiency of material production itself. The new technologies produced by the STR must themselves go through a number of stages of “maturing” so as to achieve the necessary economic effect by offsetting the initial inputs into R & D. But the problem also consists in the fact that a sizable part of the production apparatus (especially the younger part) turns out to be far from fully depreciated. Accordingly, society is forced either 43 to postpone the introduction of new technology and to await the completion of depreciation (and recoupment) or to incur the losses arising from the pre-scheduled removal of technology, or, finally, to move the threshold of efficiency to the point at which the effect would compensate for the losses.

p The third cause springs from the considerable time gaps between the various stages of scientific and technical progress: from the scientific discovery to the realisation of its results in production. These time gaps are of objective nature, and are also compounded by many technical and organisational factors. Apart from the constraints arising from the available resources, notably investment resources, in some concrete conditions such time gaps may be produced by prolonged periods of construction and mastering of new production facilities.

p In the 20th century, especially in the second half of it, the renewal of the key elements of production has been sharply accelerated. When these amount to decades, we complain about their length and frequently fail to recall that not very long ago similar shifts lasted for centuries.

p Scientific discovery—technical solution—pilot production—first batch—application in production constitute the interconnected stages of scientific and technical progress. One of the main goals of the socialist state’s economic, technical and structural policy is to reduce to the utmost the time gaps between them. This requires consistent solution of the most important strategic problems of the single state technical policy: the machinery and the technological solutions adopted must be up to the level of achievements (solved in scientific and technical terms) and the potentialities of the STR, naturally, with an eye to the economic effectiveness. Otherwise, serious obstacles will arise in the way of realising the potentialities of the current STR.

p Substantial problems also arise in the realisation of the third complex, the STR’s socio-economic consequences. Their realisation goes under definite social conditions, and on the basis of definite relations of production, which also determine the social nature of the STR’s consequences. Although socialism does on the whole create favourable conditions for realising the STR’s potentialities, even in the socialist society realisation of the STR’s social effect does not at all occur automatically. It requires persevering 44 and consistent social orientation of all technical and many scientific solutions. The social effect is a benefit for the people, for which the socialist society is prepared to pay in the form of resource allocation. This refers to the content of labour itself, and so also to the corresponding features of technology, and to the technical equipment of the sphere shaping the people’s material and cultural standards.

p However, for all their undoubted difficulties, these problems can be solved through the balanced activity of planning and economic bodies.

p Let us recall the complicated and difficult ecological consequences produced by the STR in the developed capitalist countries. Soil erosion, pollution of water and air, a global threat to the World Ocean and all living beings in it, all these are facts characterising these processes as reported in the world press. The attempts by some governments to safeguard the national interests against the damage being inflicted by the self-seeking interests of the monopolies do not always yield the desired results.

p The socialist countries naturally face environmental problems as well. The advantages of the socialist mode of production make it possible to solve this problem purposefully, on the scale of society as a whole, and for its benefit. In the USSR and other socialist community countries, protection of the environment is state policy.

p In the economic competition with capitalism, the USSR is in a position not to repeat the stages of technical development which in the developed capitalist countries in practice resulted in negative ecological consequences, and the development of motor transport provides a fitting example.

p The USSR decided broadly to develop automobile and other types of public transport, such as buses and coaches, trolleybuses, tramcars and the underground. The massive character of these types of transport, the low fares (it costs 3 kopeks to travel any distance by tramcar, 4 kopeks by trolley, and 5 kopeks by metro and urban bus) make for their extensive use by the population.

p Here are some data on the development of public transport in the USSR.

p The carriage of passengers by these types of public transport increased from 8.5 billion persons in 1940, to 7.8 billion in 1950, 23.3 billion in 1960, 43.7 billion in 1970 and 57.8 billion in 1976. These highly impressive totals
•
45

Types of public transport

1940 1950 1960 1970 1976

p Buses
Passengers carried, bin.

p 1. urban

p 20.5

p 27.8

p 2. suburban

p 0.6

p 1.0

p 10.8

p 5.4

p 8.1

p 3. interurban

p 0.05

p 0.53

p 1.5

p 1.95

p Total

p 0.6

p 1.05

p 11.3

p 27.3

p 37.9

p Urban rolling stock

p 1. vehicles, ths.

p a) tramcars

p 11.4

p 10.7

p 17.1

p 22.1

p 20.2

p b) trolleys

p 0.8

p 1.8

p 5.4

p 15.8

p 21.3

p c) metrocars

p 0.3

p 0.5

p 1.2

p 2.5

p 3.7

p Total

p 12.5

p 13.0

p 23.7

p 40.4

p 45.7

p 2. Passengers carried, mln.

p a) by tram

p 7,283

p 5,157

p 7,842

p 7,962

p 8,343

p b) by trolley c) by metro

p 294 377

p 945 629

p 3,055 1,148

p 6,122 2,294

p 8,345 3,229

p Total

p 7,954

p 6,731

p 12,045

p 16,378

19,917

•
and pace of growth will evidently enable the USSR in the foreseeable future not to increase the number jjof petroldriven cars to 125 million, the US figure, and to switch more swiftly to the making of electrocars.

p The organic connection between the STR and socialism is expressed in the fact that socialism is capable of making extensive use of the whole spectrum of the STR’s potentialities. Here, scientific and technical progress not only multiplies human requirements but also makes it possible more fully to satisfy them. Socialism opens up before mankind the prospect which Marx called the "humanisation of requirements"; science and technology exert an influence on the shaping of the socialist way of life which is characterised not only by a steady growth of material living standards but also by high and rising levels in man’s spiritual and intellectual world. Under socialism, "the scientific, technical and cultural revolutions are interlinked organically. This makes it possible to achieve a new level in the development of revolutionary practice as a process in which the 46 transformation of tlie world and the change of man himself coincide. This level of practice will help to gain a deeper understanding of the earlier stages in society’s development, age-old problems and the contradictions and limitations of the capitalist social formation.”  [46•1 

p In the socialist society, scientific and technical progress is the crucial factor for attaining the main and ultimate goal of social progress, the building of a communist society. Over the long term, the inexhaustible potentialities for the development of production arising from the STR create the conditions for achieving an abundance of goods and services. At the same time, the fundamental revolutionary changes in the nature of the productive forces provide the material basis for eliminating the existing social distinctions.

p Since the triumph of the socialist relations of production, the solution of subsequent social problems in communist construction has been most importantly connected with changes in man’s position,, with the elimination of the social distinctions between men in terms of their work and status in the process of actual production. This also applies to such important problems as the conversion of agricultural labour into a sort of industrial labour, the elimination of the everyday and cultural distinctions between town and country, and the organic fusion of manual and mental work in men’s production activity.

p The solution of all these tasks implies a social orientation in advancing scientific and technical progress, and this naturally also implies definite changes in men’s cultural standards, and so on.

p The STR, working revolutionary changes in science and technology, gradually moving into production and remodelling the very structure of the productive forces and the organisation of social production, at the same time works a radical change in the content of men’s work and the nature and level of their skiHs, so helping to shape the harmoniously developed man and work adequate to his requirements.

p The advantages of socialism in using the STR’s potentialities are also connected with the economic integration of the 47 Socialist-community countries, which provides extensive potentialities for improving the specialisation and cooperation of production and all-round exchanges of scientific and technical experience among the socialist countries.

p A number of intergovernmental organisations have already been set up by the socialist countries, and these help to accelerate scientific and technical progress and make it more effective.

p Among these organisations is the Central Controller’s Office for the Integrated Energy Grids of Bulgaria, Hungary, the GDR, Poland, Romania, the USSR and Czechoslovakia. The socialist countries have carried out joint R & D projects in atomic energy, notably, the design of new types of reactors and other plant; and work is in progress to draw up joint plans for developing production facilities for atomic engineering.

p In 1964, they set up their Organisation for Cooperation in the Roller Bearings Industry, Intermetall, an organisation for cooperation in ferrous metallurgy, and Agromash, which coordinates the development and manufacture of farming machinery for fruit, vegetable and vine-growing. In 1972, they set up Inter atominstrument, an international economic association, Interetalonpribor, a research and production association; in 1973, Interatomenergo, and in 1974, Interchimvolokno. In 1972, they set up Intersputnik, an international organisation for space communications whose purpose is to extend cooperation and coordinate efforts in the design, development and operation of space communications systems.

p The first joint space flight by a Soviet and a Czechoslovak cosmonaut (Vladimir Remek) was held in 1978, and this was followed by joint flights staged by the USSR and the GDR, and the USSR and Poland and so on. Preparations are in progress for joint flights with other socialist countries.

p The International Centre for Scientific and Technical Information, set up in 1970, has a great part to play in accelerating STR processes.

p Integration has been gaining in depth. Addressing the 24th Session of CMEA, the Chairman of the USSR Council 48 of Ministers pointed out the need further to intensify the division of labour, and specialisation and cooperation of production, especially in engineering.

p The decisions of the 25th Congress of the GPSU set the task of ensuring ever closer coordination and pooling the efforts of the USSR and other GMEA countries in tackling the tasks of scientific and technical progress.

p In contrast to socialism, capitalism has definite limitations in using STR achievements, and these stem from the self-seeking interests of the exploiter classes.

p The limitations which present-day capitalism imposes on the STR and the way it distorts its socio-economic consequences are described in the Main Document adopted by the International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties in June 1969. It says: "... capitalism,- is using the scientific and technological revolution to increase its profits and intensify the exploitation of the working people.

p “The scientific and technological revolution accelerates the socialisation of the economy; under monopoly domination this leads to the reproduction of social antagonisms on a growing scale and in a sharper form. Not only have the longstanding contradictions of capitalism been aggravated, but new ones have arisen as well. This applies, in particular, to the contradiction between the unlimited possibilities opened up by the scientific and technological revolution and the roadblocks raised by capitalism to their utilisation for the benefit of society as a whole. Capitalism squanders national wealth, allocating for war purposes a great proportion of scientific discoveries and immense material resources. This is the contradiction between the social character of present-day production and the statemonopoly nature of its regulation. This is not only the growth of the contradiction between capital and labour, but also the deepening of the antagonism between the interests of the overwhelming majority of the nation and those of the financial oligarchy.”  [48•1 

p The apologists of capitalism claim that the STR tends to change the nature of capitalism and just about automatically solves all of its social problems.

49

p Theorists in the United States and Western Europe who have undertaken this thankless task try to paper up the contradictions and cracks in the facade of present-day capitalism by presenting scientific and technical progress as the progress of capitalism, which they have designated as the "new industrial society" and the "post-industrial society”.

p They insist that it is not property relations and the class structure of a society that are its chief characteristics but the technological level and that of scientific organisation of production, and this subterfuge allegedly shows, that progress in technology and organisation of production is identical with society’s social progress.

p They refer to some purely superficial changes in what could be called the fagade of the social formation. There is the depersonalised management of the big corporations; the emergence of a stratum of executives who are not owners but who efficiently do the will of big business; and profitsharing, all of which are depicted as the withering away of capitalism and its gradual transformation into a developed "industrial society". In this way, ,the various purely technical phenomena and organisational and managerial measures used by capital are artificially separated from their social-class basis and are presented as premises for some new "industrial society" without classes and class contradictions.

p “Any industrial society as such," writes Raymond Aron, "has the purpose of controlling nature and men, and the inevitable consequence of this is men’s domination of men, together with it also a multiplication of wealth and goods.”  [49•1 

p The suggestion here is that the "multiplication of wealth and goods" should compensate for "men’s domination of men", a highly typical scale of values.

p According to the same recipe, STR processes are used to justify the theory of the "post-industrial society" which is to be a substitute for the Marxist theory of the succession of social formations and transition from capitalism to socialism. The inventors of this theory assert that the capitalists cease to be the protagonists in the capitalist system and give way to a scientific and technical elite which help to 50 transform the political system, with theoretical knowledge playing the j, central role.

p Among those who seek to cover up the class content of all the processes in the development of the capitalist economy is Zbigniew Brzezinski, who declares: "Knowledge becomes a tool of power, and the effective mobilisation of talent an important way for acquiring power.”  [50•1  Referring to "the technotronic civilisation" he says that the main task will be to find the effective methods to use resourceful people rationally.

p In this way, the advocates of the capitalist system now seek to embellish its facade, camouflage private property, class contradictions and capitalist relations of production. They make no secret of their effort to ignore and bypass the problem of property and class struggle. Peter Drucker, the US management expert, claims that the class struggle has been done away with, first, with [the help of new technology, which created a new, more productive and better paid labour and second, with the help of education, which opened the possibility for the ever growing number of the poor background children to tear themselves away from the class, to which they were fastened by the Marxist ideology.

p Drucker uses the past tense to show that all of this has actually occurred, but official statistics in various countries, notably, the United States, blast these optimistic claims.

p The Statistical Abstract of the United States published by the Bureau of the Census contains the following data.  [50•2 

p In 1974, 22.8 per cent of persons of 25 years and over had only gone through primary school. For the same group of black people, the figure was 36.6 per cent.

p Discrimination against non-whites continues to be commonplace. According to the same source, in 1974, 3.5 per cent of whites had less than 5 years of schooling; while the figure among Ghicanos was 26.5 per cent, and Puerto-Ricans, 17.6 per cent.

51

p According to 1970 data, among the population ol 14 years of age and over there were nearly 1.5 million illiterates, of whom 0.7 per cent were whites, and 3.6 per cent blacks.

p All these facts testify to a naked urge to perpetuate the present state of things: the existence of rich people possessing all the material and cultural benefits, and the rest who create all these benefits but use only a small part of them. x\ron shows this very clearly when he says: "...society is not and cannot be ruled by scientists." Further on he puts it more bluntly: "...some groups will continue to feel shut off from higher culture by the very nature of the work they do... On this hypothesis, it has seemed probable that the demand for equality would be individual rather than collective.”  [51•1 

p This is a frank call for perpetuating a high-culture elite on the one hand, and the bulk of the population, "second class citizens", on the other, who will even be unable to unite in their urge for equality.

p Actually, the class nature of the capitalist society is not changed in any way despite the fact that capitalism makes use of the STR to boost the productive forces and certainly creates the material prerequisites for building socialism (after a socialist revolution) and despite the fact that capitalist governments increasingly intervene in the development of science and technology and use scientists on a national scale.

p The collection of articles by a group of Soviet and Czechoslovak scientists says that the sharp rise in science and technology has not and could not in itself ensure the elimination of injustice in the distribution of the social wealth. The theory of "equal opportunities" cannot conceal the fact that class contradictions and the consequent social inequality continue to be the hallmarks of the capitalist society".  [51•2 

p An analysis of the facts shows that the STR may provide the basis for a radical solution of social problems and elimination of social distinctions between men only when the cardinal social problem—the problem of property, which constitutes 52 the basis of the relations of production—is solved, and solved in favour of socialism.

p Let us note that the STR also tends to intrude into this sphere within the framework of capitalism. It stimulates a much higher degree of socialisation of production, because the major scientific and technical projects frequently have a larger framework than the biggest corporations, which is why they have to be carried out on a national or even international level. But this does not at all signify the elimination of private property in the means of production or, consequently, do away with the chief contradiction of capitalism.

p Under capitalism, scientific and technical progress is contradictory. In the developed countries (and this is especially evident in the United States) the capitalist state finances the development of basic and applied research on a considerable scale, and provides these with the material base. As a result of the operation of the law of value, the mechanism of profit and competition (and in the cases directly or indirectly connected with arms manufacture, government appropriations as well) induces the necessary changes in the sectoral structure of production.

p The radical changes in the nature of labour brought about by scientific and technical progress run into deep contradiction with the nature of capitalism, and sharpen and expose the antagonism between the interests of the working class and the other working people, on the one hand, and the ruling elite which has the means of production and which appropriates the surplus-value created by wagelabour, on the other.

p Here are some statistical data to bear out this conclusion. In the 24 years from 1954 to 1977, US industrial output increased 2.5-fold, and the number of workers employed in manufacturing and extracting dropped from 14,921,000 to 14,795,00, i.e., by 0.8 per cent. In the USSR, from 1950 to 1977, industrial output increased 10.9-fold, and the number of workers from 12.2 million to 28.5 million, or 134 per cent. It is essential to note here that labour productivity in USSR industry in that period increased by 370 per cent, and in US industry by 157 per cent. Meanwhile, the USSR does not just have no unemployment, but has in fact a large labour shortage, while the United States has a stable and growing army of unemployed. This means 53 that even with the much lower rate of labour productivity growth (3.4 per cent a year in the United States as compared with 6 per cent in the USSR), capitalist relations of production cannot ensure a growth of employment in industry.

p In the 1950s, the number of officially unemployed fluctuated between 1.8 million and 4.6 million, in the 1960s, from 2.8 million to 4.7 million, and from 1971 to 1977, from 4.3 million to 7.8 million; besides, from 1975 to 1977, it did not drop below 6.2 million, and reached 8.6 million.

p These data demonstrate the fundamental distinctions between the social consequences of scientific and technical progress under capitalism and under socialism. The growth of labour productivity under capitalism induced by technical progress and intensification of labour runs into contradiction with the limited rates of growth in production. And this naturally has an effect on the employment dynamic.

p Thus, only in 8 industries in the USA (mining, food, textiles, timber and woodworking, oil refining, leather and footwear, metallurgy and transport engineering) the number of employed workers in the 24 years from 1954 to 1977 dropped by over 1.2 million. These were miners from the Appalachians, textile workers from New England, steel workers from Pennsylvania and Ohio, engineering workers from Detroit, and so on, among them the inhabitants of so-called ghost towns which even official US agencies designate as " hardship areas”.

p Let us note that even the fastest growing industries connected with the realisation of STR achievements cannot make use of those made redundant^in other industries. Indeed, there is an excess of labour-power in some of the new industries as well.

p Take the aerospace industry. With a 26 per cent growth of output from 1953 to 1975, the number of persons employed in the industry dropped from 586,000 to 243,000, i.e., by 343,000 persons, or 59 per cent. Incidentally, this largely refutes the “compensation” theory which many US economists present in an effort to show that the high technology industries allegedly take up the labour slack resulting in other industries.

54

p We find a very similar situation in agriculture.

p From 1950 to 1974, farm produce in the USSR increased by 144 per cent, and labour productivity by 275 per cent, with the result that the number of persons employed in agriculture dropped by 15.4 per cent, but this contingent was fully absorbed by the rapidly growing non-agricultural industries.

p In US agriculture things were different. As a result of intensive technical re-equipment, labour productivity in this sector in the same period increased by roughly 270 per cent, while output went up by only 53 per cent, while employment in US agriculture dropped by 5.78 million persons.

p US economists seek in every way to minimise the effect of the processes in which those employed in the sphere of material production are being made redundant by technical progress. They refer to the marked growth of employment in the nonproduction sphere. Employment in this sphere, including trade, (from 1950 to 1975) actually went up from 22.7 million to 52.2 million, that is, by 29.5 million persons, or 130.5 per cent, but this growth was much lower than the increase in the population of working age in the same period (51.9 million persons). As a result, the number of officially registered unemployed (which falls far short of the whole contingent) came to 5 million in 1971, to 8.2 million in early 1975, and to an average of 7.0 million in 1977.

p All these processes naturally sharpen the social contradictions in the country, one of whose manifestations is the growth of the strike struggle.

p According to the US Department of Labour, the number of man-days lost through industrial actions in’the ten years from 1968 to 1977 came to 412 million, as compared with 277 million for the preceding 10 years between 1958 and 1967, i.e., an increase of 50 per cent.

p Let us also bear in mind that according to the evidence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the war in Vietnam, presentday capitalism has repeatedly demonstrated the use of the vast potentialities of the STR mostly for destructive purposes.

p One characteristic fact in this contextlis that the Federal Budget outlays on R & D for military purposes came to 8.7 billion dollars in 1974, qr nearly 40 per cent more 55 than the Johnson Administration spent in five years on its so-called war on poverty. This kind of use of scientific and technical progress naturally leads to cutbacks in public welfare programme.

p Those are some of the facts which incontrovertibly prove that under capitalism today the STR results not only in a growth and development of the productive forces, but also in a sharpening of the class struggle.

Consequently, although historically the STR is also proceeding in the developed capitalist countries, it is by its very nature and potentialities adequate only to socialism. It alone is capable of realising fully and for the benefit of mankind all the potentialities of the STR. In complete accord with the Marxist theory of the development of the productive forces and the relations of production, the theory of the succession of social formations, the current STR quite naturally characterises the new stage in the development of the material productive forces which fully meet the requirements of the developed socialist society today, and is capable of ensuring the buildup of the material and technical basis of communism over the long term.