Ownership, the relations of people to each other with regard to the appropriation of the means of production and of the material wealth created therewith. Ownership is viewed only as the relation of man to property by bourgeois scholars, while Marxism-Leninism sees the ownership of the means of production as relations between people, social classes, which change along with the changing social and economic situation. The chief role in appropriating material wealth is played by the ownership of tools and other means of production, which determines the nature of the social system. The nature of production, distribution, exchange and consumption in a society depends on who owns the means of production. Each state and stage of development of the productive forces has its own specific form of ownership related to it. This can either encourage or delay the development of the productive forces. The primitive- communal mode of production, with its extremely low development of productive forces, required communal, collective ownership of the primitive tools and products of labour. As communal ownership declined new economic relations emerged—- private ownership of the means of production and its output, as well as of the labourer, who becomes the property of another person, is turned into a slave. Private ownership of the means of production meant the exploitation of man by man, the appropriation of the product by individual property-holders, and the division of society into the class of exploiters and the class of the exploited. The framework of slave-holding society based on the labour of slaves unconcerned with the growth and improvement of production became fetters limiting the productive forces to develop further. Slavery was replaced by feudalism. In feudal society, private ownership moves a step further in its development, because the labourer is somewhat interested in increasing production. Private ownership of the means of production reaches the peak of its development under capitalism. As bourgeois society developed further, most of the tools and means of production, along with the products of labour, became concentrated as the property of the capitalists. Working people, free by law, have to sell their labour power to the owners of the means of production 262 and are subjected to ruthless exploitation. At the stage of imperialism, huge amounts of capital are concentrated in the hands of the major capitalist monopolies dominating industry, banking, agriculture, transport and commerce. The further development under capitalism of the modern productive forces, which are becoming increasingly socialised, is contained by the limitations of capitalist private ownership. Anarchy and the spontaneous character of capitalist production, the fierce competition between enterprise owners in the race for maximum profits, economic crises of overproduction, the relatively low level of consumption by the working people, and mass unemployment alongside chronic undercapacity production, all clearly indicate that a social system based on private capitalist ownership has become outdated, and is a brake on the development of society and its productive forces. It has to make way for the new social system—socialism, where exploitation of man by man is eliminated, and the way is cleared for progress in the economy, technology, science and culture, as well as in improving the well-being of all members of society. The most essential feature of relations within socialist ownership of means of production is that all members of society are placed economically on an equal footing as co-functioning, collective masters of production. They are all interested in multiplying social property as a foundation of the economic strength of the state, and of the steadily rising living standards of the population. The economic foundation of the USSR is state socialist property (belonging to all the people), and collective farm-and- cooperative property. The property of trade unions and other social organisations necessary for performing their statutory functions is also socialist property. The state protects socialist property, and ensures that it expands. Members of socialist society are obliged to preserve and enhance it, combat the plunder and waste of property, and to be economical with public wealth. Personal property also exists under socialism. In the perspective the two forms of socialist social property will merge into one, that of the whole people. This finds its expression in the agro-industrial integration and in the development of intercollective farm and collective farm- andstate farm associations.