p Technical progress, as we have seen, led to qualitative changes on a tremendous scale in the growth and complexification of large-scale machine production in the third phase of its development. But this process also produced tangible internal contradictions within machine production itself,’ and also provided the material conditions making it posr sible to resolve these contradictions and so to ensure the advance of machine production to the next and higher stage;

p The contradictions arose in energetics, in the instruments and objects of labour, and in the organisation and management of machine production as a whole.

p In the energy field, these contradictions sprang from the fact that with the tremendous and continuing growth of requirements in energy, its production has up to now been limited to the availability and location of primary energy resources: mineral fuels and sources of hydroenergy. Apart from the limited nature of these resources, their location on the globe as a whole, and on the territory of the USSR,= in particular, does not at all coincide with the location of energy consumers. This necessitates the building of costly transmission lines to carry power over large distances, and frequently induces the use of very costly and inefficient sources of energy or stimulates the building of enterprises^ users in remote areas with a hard terrain where the energy sources are located, and this sharply increases the capital intensiveness of production. In addition, the contemporary techniques in the use of energy, notably the generation of electric power, has a very low efficiency and entails very great losses of energy resources.

p One of the most pressing problems now is to provide the necessary quantity of energy and to make it possible to generate it in the areas where it is used. An acute need has arisen for new sources of energy which could help to solve this problem.

p In the instruments of labour, these contradictions were expressed in the fact that the technical potentialities of working machines—production and other equipment—their speeds, the capability of working at critical regimes, the complexity and precision of their operations, and also their 82 multi-tool character and complex rigging, etc., have run into contradiction with man’s limited physiological potentialities, so sharply reducing the use of the potentialities latent in modern equipment. The use in production of an ever wider range of radioactive materials has produced a number of production areas where man cannot be present at all.

p The choice of the optimal, technological processes and regimes for the whole process of production now tends to become the most vital problem. At the same time, the very definition of optimal conditions and regimes tends to become an ever more intricate problem requiring the receipt and very fast processing of a vast volume of information. The solution of this problem, for its part, is constrained by man’s limited potentialities and the traditional methods of management.

p Thus, the solution of these problems was increasingly incompatible with the potentialities of the working people and the traditional mid-19th century technology with which they were equipped (and largely still are).

p This produced the urgent need for fundamentally new means of labour to solve the ever more complicated problems in developing production, while making up for man’s inherent limitations as the chief subject of material production.

p The advance of large-scale machine production also produced serious contradictions connected with the limited potentialities of natural materials (both in terms of properties and technical characteristics, and in terms of available quantities and the scale on which they were extracted).

p Unprecedented speeds, and the intense and critical regimes of operation of jet engines, high-parameter turbines, and heat engines operating in complex temperature conditions produced the problem of developing super-high strength materials capable of resisting fluidity, creepage, and high and low temperatures, materials with a heightened chemical stability, radiation resistance, etc. New demands on the quality characteristics of materials come from the atomic energy and the space industry.

p As the work loads of current-carrying communications steadily increase, there arises the need to develop coatings for the wires and cables of electric machines and transmissions with heightened thermal and dielectric characteristics.

p There has also been a marked increase in the requirements 83 for materials to make consumer manufactures (fibres for fabrics, leather for footwear and leather goods, etc.) and for food raw materials. Finally, the need for structural materials has grown on a tremendous scale.

p The limited potentialities of natural materials have been an ever more critical constraint on the solution of materials problem.

p Exceptional importance has been attached to the problem of developing materials through the use of accessible and virtually unlimited sources (taking into account the size of that input into production) of raw waterials and simultaneously of materials which do not depend on the properties of natural raw materials and have preset properties.

p Important contradictions have also been growing in the whole process of organisation and management of presentday production.

p The increasingly multi-operational character of technological processes and the progressing intersectoral, intrasectoral and interoperational division of labour and specialisation of production have made intersectoral, intrasectoral and intraproduction ties ever more multifaceted and important, while it was becoming ever more difficult to take these into account in the organisation and management of production, and while the economic importance of each technical and production-organisation decision tended to multiply. Working in the same direction is the complexification of technology, and their ever closer ties with the results of research, a fact which tends to diversify the possible technical solutions for one and the same production problem. At the same time, the adoption of an economically warranted decision implies the processing of a vast amount of information accumulated and processed in the course of R& D, and design, preparation, organisation and management of production. Finally, this information is also processed in the establishments servicing intra- and intersectoral ties: supply, financial, accounting and planning agencies.

p Information has been intensely converted into an "object of labour" for the millions of people engaged in collecting and processing it in production and elsewhere.

p The volume of the required information and the labourintensity of its collection and processing increasingly tended to outgrow the potentialities of the number of these people and their traditional technology.

p There arose the need to introduce modern and sufficiently efficient technology for the collection, processing and transmission of information and the technical equipment of the processes of organisation and management of production.

p Such are the basic contradictions engendered by the inner logic of the development of production and technical progress.

The current STR, while being a natural consequence of the progress of technology and production, is also a condition for resolving the mature contradictions described above. The development of the elements of this revolution determines the advance of large-scale machine production to a qualitatively new and higher phase.