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p The current STR is expressed in the revolutionary changes occurring in the fundamentals of material production and its key component elements: energy, the instruments and objects of labour, techniques, and the organisation and management of production.

p However, this revolution in the technical foundations of production differs substantially from all earlier technical revolutions.

p Such revolutions increased mankind’s mastery of the forces of nature and assured it of more productive instruments of labour (with the transition from manual tools in the epoch of manufacture to the system of large-scale factory production), more powerful and convenient sources of energy (with the transition from steam power to electric power) and more efficient materials (the use of iron instead of bronze). However, this involved the use of the available natural materials, without any radical change in the inner structure of the substance, and with the use of natural reactions developed earlier. Of course, even then technical progress rested on the use of achievements in the natural sciences—physics, notably mechanics, and also chemistry. But it did not necessitate any revolutionary changes in the natural sciences themselves.

p The requirements of large-scale machine production which emerged in the 20th century, and which in the 1930s and 1940s became most acute, were much more radical, going to the very structure of substance, the basic principles on which technological processes were based, and the nature 86 and principles on which the instruments of labour acted on the objects of labour. Fundamentally new methods of research were required to solve such problems.

p Only a revolution in the natural sciences could evidently provide the starting basis for such a technical revolution. The imperative need for a revolution in the technical foundations of production could be effected only as a scientific and technical revolution. Marx wrote: "Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.”  [86•1 

p This is clearly borne out by the revolution in the natural sciences which began in the first half of the 20th century and which is still on. It was simultaneously the starting point and a component of the current STR. The revolution in the natural sciences causes revolutionary changes in technology and production, while the results of the latter, for their part, becoming powerful instruments of modern science, stimulate and accelerate the revolutionary processes in the natural sciences.

p In the light of these complex and diverse, direct and feedback connections, I shall try in this Chapter to analyse in more concrete terms the processes arising from the revolution in the natural sciences, and in the following chapter, from the revolution in technology and the basic elements of production. But before getting down to this analysis, I must give a general description of the basic features and substance of the current STR as a whole, or its global structure, and of the conditions which determined the necessity and possibility for its origination.

p The STR has been characterised from various angles. Interesting ideas about the substance and phases of the current STR have been expressed by Academician Bonifatsy Kedrov in series of articles entitled "About Scientific Revolutions".  [86•2  In one of his articles he wrote: "One could assume that it was in the mid-20th century that the preparation for the STR was completed, and the development of the STR proper, the fourth type of scientific revolution, began.”  [86•3 

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p He believes that the main feature of the STR is above all the overcoming of the lag in the development of natural science and the development of technology and production. "Another new element in the mid-20th century was the beginning of the clearly faster pace of development of modern science.... Science appeared to be blazing the key routes for future production practice. It enabled the latter to master lines whose realisation would have been altogether impossible without preliminary wide research into the whole new sphere of nature which was just being involved in the circle of man’s cognitive and practical activity.”  [87•1  Accordingly, Kedrov assumes that the essence of the STR "can be correctly understood only by tracing its orientation upon the complete destruction of the old barriers separating the scientific discovery (cognition of nature and its laws), the technical invention (technical mastery of that which has been cognised by science) and the practical application of scientific and technical achievements to mass production. It is the fusion of all these three elements, their unity, that is perhaps the most important feature of the fourth type of the scientific revolution.”  [87•2 

p This attempt to characterise the STR in terms of the relationship between science, technology and production is useful and interesting, but it is only one aspect of the problem. There is also a need to characterise the STR in terms of the nature of the processes going forward in science, technology and production. That is the aspect that is of especial importance for elaborating and solving the problems arising in the construction of the material and technical basis of communism.

p Some authors have proposed something like a set of slogans to define the STR: "the atomic age", "the computer age", "the age of electronics", "the age of automation", "the polymer age", "the space age", and so on.

p One fairly popular view is based on the characterisation of the STR as transition from the mechanical action of the objects of labour by cutting to new—beam, electronic, blast and other—methods.

p I think that neither of the two approaches reflects the crux of the matter. In the former instance, an attempt 88 is made to characterise a multidimensional object by means of only a few of its parameters. The choice of the definitions quoted above shows that the STR is multidimensional and has diverse aspects, and that it is multipolar. It also shows that these definitions do not fully take into account the complexity and multidimensional nature of the STR. At the same time, such definitions fail to show what is common to all these manifestations of the current STR and what it is that characterises its essence and specific features.

p In the latter instance, the method of action by the instruments of labour on the objects of labour is regarded as the chief and definitive characteristic of the phase in the development of machine production, something that one cannot, of course, accept, because such a definition does not in any way cover all (or even the main) characteristics of the STR. Besides, beam and ultrasonic action is also mechanical action, for only chemical and biological action is radically different.

p • In an effort to characterise the essence of the current STR, one should always take into account two of its organically connected aspects: the material and technical aspect, and the social aspect. Its material potentialities create the conditions and prerequisites for solving the vital social problems facing society, while the processes connected with the STR—its directions, content and use of its potentialities—have an important socio-economic aspect. In every phase of its formation, development and realisation in social practice, man continues to be the subject of the STR, as the collective worker existing and acting under definite relations of production. These relations of production which are dominant in a given society have an effect on the goals and tasks the subject sets himself in developing science, technology and production, and they determine the lines along which society realises its production and non- production resources.

p The predominant social relations can either act as an impediment, as they do under capitalism, or promote rapid and boundless development and realisation of the STR’s material and technical potentialities, as they do under socialism.

p In the light of the methodological remarks made above, let us now consider the STR itself.

p There is no doubt that the current STR tends to introduce 89 fundamentally new changes into every element of material production and has key definitive characteristics with respect to each of these elements.

p Each of these characteristics determines the situation in its sphere, but cannot lay claim to generalisation, to a unifying position in all the elements of production, and does not bring out the specific ffeatures of the STR as a whole.

p I think that the essence and specific features of the STR lie in the radical change in mankind’s relations with its environment. While continuing what is an essentially endless process of analysis and explanation of the world, mankind rises to a higher stage, increasingly adding synthesis to analysis, control to explanation, with a tremendous growth in productivity and a radical change in the content and character of labour, a radical change in man’s functions in the process of production, and a change in the nature of information and spatial and temporal connections between man and his environment. That is characteristic of all the elements of production.

p These specific features are of cardinal socio-economic importance. At the same time, the revolution in production connected with the realisation of the STR’s potentialities makes the need for markedly raising the level of socialisation and concentration of production absolutely imperative. This trend, which is naturally realised under socialism, also partially makes headway under capitalism, and there it entails tremendous difficulties and a sharp aggravation of social contradictions.

p In more concrete terms, the essence and specific features of the STR are expressed in a combination of the analysis and explanation of the structure of matter, substances, the nature of reactions and processes going on in the surrounding world, the structure of the processes of organic life, and the practical operation of mechanisms and machine influence on labour processes, with fundamentally different processes, like the following:

p —directed influence on the structure of matter;

p —the synthesis of substances with preset properties;

p —artificial development and control of reactions in the fission and fusion of the nuclei of heavy and light elements;

p —the elaboration and practical use of the theory of information, and the theory and practice of automatic control of machine systems;

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p —the development of automatic information-processing systems, and systems for the automatic and automated control of sophisticated technico-production and socio-economic complexes;

p —increasingly trained influence on the processes of organic life.

p These characteristics of the material and technical content of the current STR and the resultant radical changes in man’s relations with the surrounding world determine the social characteristics of the revolution. It not only changes technology but also creates the conditions for a radical change in the character and content of human labour. It works a radical change in man’s role and in the role of science itself within the productive-forces system.

p In contrast to all the earlier technical and industrial revolutions, which multiplied only man’s physical capabilities as the subject of the production process, the current STR creates diverse prerequisites for enhancing man’s intellectual potentialities that are radical in scale and qualitative significance. For its part, this peculiarity of the STR turns out to be a most powerful accelerator and stimulator of its own development. From direct participation in the production cycle, man increasingly switches to control of the whole process of production, to its preparation, design, programming and functioning within the given parameters.

p One highly important social effect of the STR is that it simultaneously paves the way for a marked increase in non-working and truly free time, and this, for its part, is a prerequisite for a growth in the educational and skill standards of men and women. Radical changes are also taking place in men’s intellectual life: there is an immense growth in the volume and scope of information; modern means of transport and communication unprecedentedly increase man’s opportunities for taking part in the most diverse events occurring in different places and at different times; a radical change occurs in the content of the habitual sets of consumer goods and services; the very nature of human requirements tends to change, etc. All these changes are greatly dynamic. In the life-time of a single generation most of the key components shaping men’s way of life and living standards are changed repeatedly. The STR exerts a tremendous influence on men’s spiritual, emotional and other aspects of life.

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p Consequently, the STR shapes the material prerequisites for a development of the productive forces, for a growth in society’s scientific, technical and intellectual potential, for a development of the objective prerequisites for progress in production and advance of the subjective factor—the social working person—that makes it possible to formulate and fulfil the basic socio-economic tasks of the communist mode of production. The use of the STR’s potentialities has created the conditions for building the material and technical basis of socialism and of the material and technical basis of communism in a short historical period.

p Another and equally very important feature of the STR is the fundamental change in the content, role and position of science and research. The scientific revolution blends with the technical revolution, with the former playing the leading role and developing faster. It begins to play the leading role in the science—technology—production complex. Science begins to develop into a direct productive force, as production becomes more science-intensive. At the same time, science and research, which require more and more manpower and material resources, are transformed into a powerful faster-growing and independent element of social production.

p Another highly important and largely definitive feature, and in many senses a prerequisite of the current STR is the fact that the basic uniformities of the structure, transformation and development of matter, the emergence and progress of reactions, the interconnection between the structure of matter and its physical, chemical or other properties are increasingly given an ever more precise quantitative evaluation.

p The conditions which determined the need for the new STR combined with the conditions which created the prerequisites for making this revolution possible.

p The revolution in the natural sciences stimulated in-depth shifts in research technology, and these, for their part, stimulated and accelerated scientific discoveries.

p Thus, the new and formerly inconceivable technical facilities for astronomic research have recently led to discoveries in the Universe of a type of once unknown objects: active nuclei of galactics, quasars, etc. Academician V. A. Ambartsumyan writes: "Attempts to describe these within the framework of the fundamental theories of modern physics have come up against tremendous and possibly insuperable difficulties. This means that natural science 92 is on its way to recognising the inevitability of an ever stranger world.”  [92•1 

p The new and ever more powerful elementary-particle accelerators—proton synchrotrons—have led to more and more discoveries, as a result of which the existing fundamental theories prove to be unsatisfactory, and there arises the need to elaborate totally new theories of elementary particles and the most general fundamental theories of modern physics. Another and exceptionally important prerequisite of the revolution in natural science is the intrusion of mathematics and mathematical methods into every area of the natural sciences. Mathematics has become the basis for formulating the key uniformities in physics, chemistry and biology; it is being increasingly used in the social sciences as well. The “mathematisation” of all the sciences has deep roots in the basic trends in the development of science, while being a powerful catalyst of this development.

p I have already said that one of the key features of the current STR is the transition from qualitative analysis to a quantitatively-definitive influence, to synthesis and control of processes. In order to control a process, to reproduce it, to create substances or change their structure and properties, there is a need to determine the quantitative proportions of the actual structures and the quantitative parameters of processes, to find the quantitatively definitive connections between the characteristics of the structure of substances and processes and their properties and results, and this cannot be done without the use of mathematics. The need to use ever more intricate mathematical formalism is also connected with the appearance of the objects of scientific research which frequently lie beyond conventional notions.

p Thus, modern physics explores objects like stellar associations, quasars, etc., which have a mass that is many times greater than the mass of the Sun, with metagalactical distances measured in tens of billions of trillions (10²⁷) kilometres, with periods of time coming to 10¹⁷ seconds, or to tens of billions of years. Both in physics and in biology there is a study of micro-objects with intervals of 10 ¹⁶ cm and 10 ²⁶ second.

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p The interpretation of such objects, phenomena and events evidently calls for an unusually intricate mathematical formalism, and new images and concepts.

p There is brilliant confirmation of the idea which Lenin expressed at the very beginning of this revolution in natural science, when he said: "Human thought goes endlessly deeper from appearance to essence, from essence of the first order, as it were, to essence of the second order, and so on without end”.  [93•1 

p An ever greater number of phenomena and processes in theoretical physics, chemistry, biology, mechanics, technology, economics, sociology and medicine require the use of the theory of probability and other mathematical methods. The mass involvement of mathematics in research has stimulated radical changes in mathematics itself, and here we also have a kind of chain reaction.

p Here is a description of this process by Academician B. V. Gnedenko: "One must say that the recent period has contributed especially much not only to the development of mathematics in breadth and increase of its connections with other scientific .disciplines, but also to bringing out the in-depth inner connections between the branches of mathematics itself, which not so long ago were regarded as totally different mathematical sciences. It has also been invariably established that the broader approach, the consideration of a big generalised conception as a rule leads to a more economical mode of reasoning. And this happens not only because many results can be obtained at one go but also because the deep logical analysis of concepts with which one has to deal makes it possible more swiftly to discover the desired interconnection.”  [93•2 

p Further shall deal with the problems arising from the use of electronic computers. At this point let me note merely that one of the expressions of the chain reaction between the development of mathematics and the revolution in the natural sciences has been the creation, rapid improvement and introduction into every branch of science and the economy of electronic computing (and also modelling) facilities. Computers have tremendously expanded the possibilities for 94 using mathematics, while promoting progress in some mathematical sciences.

p Below I shall try to give an idea of the material content of these revolutionary processes going on in the natural sciences and already exerting a visible (or foreseeable) direct or indirect influence on technology, material production, and the economy as a whole.

Within the framework of this book it is impossible to consider the whole natural-science complex, which is why I have selected four groups of fundamental sciences: a) physics, b) chemistry, c) biology and e) processes of control and cybernetics. I intend to consider these sciences in the light of their influence on the economy and the socio-economic processes in the life of society.