Planned and Balanced Development of the Socialist Economy, objective economic form of the functioning of socialist production which expresses its immediate social regulation for the purpose of the fullest possible satisfaction of the material and cultural requirements of society. Planned and balanced economic development expresses the objective need for coordinated management on the scale of society as a whole and the resultant centralised economic planning. Planned and balanced economic development means a constant, consciously maintained correspondence (proportionality) of all structural links of the economy. Lenin wrote: "Constant, deliberately maintained proportion would, indeed, signify the existence of planning...” (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 3, p. 617). All aspects of the economic life of socialist society, of relationships and links between economic sectors, trends in and rates of production, the location of the productive forces, etc., are determined directly by society. Balanced development is an inherent feature of public ownership of the means of production. Being the owner of the key means of production, socialist society in the person of the state takes account of its aggregate requirements and existing labour and material resources. In this way it can directly organise the utilisation of the production factors, and distribute them among the economic regions, industries and enterprises in the proportions necessary for the best possible satisfaction of social requirements. As the universal form of the economic links between producers, planning ensures the rational functioning of social production. That is why, after winning power and nationalising the means of production, the working class must establish a complex network of new organisational relations embracing the planned production and distribution of goods. The material conditions for planning are created during the emergence and development of large-scale mechanised production. Planned regulation of production is made necessary by the social character of production typical of large-scale industry. However, planned and balanced economic development is only possible as a result of abolishing capitalist ownership of the means of production and establishing socialist ownership. "The essence of bourgeois society,” wrote Marx, "consists precisely in this, that a priori there is no conscious social regulation of production" (Marx, Engels, Selected Correspondence, p. 197). Public ownership makes it necessary to ensure the unity of the working people’s actions, and creates the conditions for scientific prevision of the directions of technical progress and the development of requirements. Anarchy in social production is abolished, and economic crises of overproduction become a thing of the past. Under socialism, the level of planned development depends on the level which ownership of the means of production has attained (on the differences between state, i. e., belonging to all the people, and collective farm-and-cooperative property) and on the existence, alongside labour that has been socialised on the national economic scale, of labour socialised largely on collective farm and cooperative enterprises and of labour on the personal subsidiary small holding of a collective farmer. At the stage of mature socialism, the development of relations of production and of the scientific and technological revolution makes the social character of production more pronounced. The economic structure undergoes progressive changes, and the links in the integral national economic complex become increasingly varied and involved. This tends to heighten the level of regular links and to expand their scope. It also 274 strengthens centralised planned management of social production through increasing the role of long-term state plans and, above all, the five-year plans as an important instrument in implementing the economic policy of the CPSU, in ensuring that the plans are balanced and that they are oriented towards dealing with social tasks, towards the implementation of state target programmes, and towards increasing the efficiency of social production and the quality of work, towards the fuller satisfaction of the growing social and personal requirements. The highest, communist stage of planning is achieved through the building of the material and technical base of communism, the development of state socialist property (belonging to all the people), the strengthening of its ties with collective farm-and-cooperative property, and their gradual convergence and subsequent merger into one kind of communist property (see Law of Planned, Balanced Development of the Economy; Economic Planning; Long-Term Planning) .