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p The Marxist theory of the socio-economic formation has great significance both for philosophy and for other social sciences.

p In all the diversity of historical events and 79 phenomena, this theory made it possible to reveal the unity ot world history.

p The process of the evolution of human society is extremely varied. Peoples and countries each go their own way, differing in many respects from each other. But the concept "socio-economic formation" has made it possible to reveal similarities and a recurrence of essential features and to understand the unity of the historical process. A capitalist country in East Asia, for example, may differ in many ways from European capitalist countries like France and Great Britain. But their very essence, the feature which makes all of them capitalist countries, is the same: private ownership of the means of production, exploitation of wage labour by capitalists, the anti-popular nature of the capitalist state, etc. They all belong to the same socio-economic formation- capitalism.

p The primitive-communal system is the earliest social formation. For the overwhelming majority of peoples it was replaced by a class society. In the long run all peoples will arrive at communism. This is the general path of the development of mankind. However, specific historical conditions can considerably change the social process from country to country. Throughout history there has been interaction between countries and between peoples which have led, and those which have lagged behind in their economic development. 80 This is why some peoples rniss out certain class socio-economic formations in their evolution. For example, the Slavs, Mongols and several other peoples bypassed the slave-owning formation. At present many peoples which have not gone through the capitalist formation have opted for non-capitalist development and are engaged in a gradual transition to socialism. Today, when socialism has taken root in many countries, it is possible for many peoples to miss out the capitalist socio-economic formation and move towards building socialism.

p When comparing successive socio-economic formations, we see that they are rungs on the ladder of historical progress. Each new socio- economic formation surpasses the previous one in the development level of the productive forces and culture, in the degree of freedom, etc.

p The socio-economic formation serves as a unit of the scientific periodisation of the historical process for all social sciences. In studying the history of any country (and world history as well), one should first of all single out the socio-economic formations through which it has passed.

p The concept "historical epoch" has been introduced to characterise periods of world history in accordance with their leading trends.

p A socio-economic formation is always connected with a historical epoch. However, they are not identical. Each social formation is qualita- 81 lively different from the others. The epoch is the historical period of time during which a certain stage of social development takes place and events occur. The epoch can be a stage in the development of a socio-economic formation, or the formation as a whole. For example, there was the epoch of slavery and the epoch of feudalism. Then came the epoch of the establishment of the capitalist formation and early bourgeois, anti- feudal revolutions, followed by the epoch of the height of capitalism. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, capitalism moved into its highest and final stage-imperialism. Thus came the epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolutions. There are epochs of transition from one socioeconomic formation to another. We are at present in a transitional epoch in world development, moving from capitalism to socialism and communism. This transition embodies the chief trend, the main content of the contemporary epoch, which is characterised by the struggle between two opposing social systems, by socialist and national liberation revolutions, the downfall of imperialism, the collapse of the colonial system, the shift towards socialism by more and more peoples, and by the triumph of socialism and communism the world over.

p Lenin wrote that in order to discover the content of an epoch one has to know which class is central to it, "determining its main content, the

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82 main direction of its development, the main characteristics of the historical situation in that epoch, etc.”   [82•1 

p Central to the modern epoch is the international working class and the world system of socialism.

The essence of the present epoch is closely related to its main contradiction, between socialism and capitalism. It demonstrates on a global scale the contradictions existing between labour and capital. In one part of the world (the world socialist system) the workers dominate led by the working class, while the other part of the world (the world capitalist system) embodies the domination of the bourgeoisie.