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p It is hardly possible to ignore the radical changes taking place in the life of nations and states. It is evident that our world has undergone fundamental change. All continents are contributing to this general development. Never has history advanced at so rapid a rate as today. The hurricane of change has swept over all spheres of human life: the economy, engineering, politics, social relations, intellectual culture, and way of life. In these conditions, issues pertaining to mankind’s future naturally merit keen attention. Hence one of the most urgent problems facing social science is 259 that of the general direction of the historical process. Whither is mankind moving? Is it moving forward to ever more improved and sensible forms of the life of society, or backward to degradation? Is the new society-providing freedom and allround development for all- already taking shape in the present or is a "future shock" in store for mankind, as some bourgeois theoreticians would have us believe, and it will be gripped by a mass crisis? In other words, is history making progress or is progress unnatural? And, for that matter, what is social progress?

p The correct answers to all these questions are found exclusively through the materialist approach to history. Marxism-Leninism counterposes the scientifically substantiated conclusion about the objective and regular character of social progress to all sorts of bourgeois reactionary Utopian views on historical development. Historical materialism draws on real historical experience to prove that the substance of contemporary social progress consists in the revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism on a global scale.

p The idea of improving human nature and society had been aired long before Marxism originated. Prominent thinkers of the Renaissance wrote of mankind’s radiant future and resolutely opposed the religious fable of paradise beyond the grave. Even stronger and more convincing 260 sounded the idea of progress, belief in reason and a future just society advanced by the 17th- and 18th-century Enlighteners. These philosophers, who were expressing the interests of the then progressive capitalist class, sought to substantiate the idea of progress. Their views reflected the optimism of the rising bourgeoisie, its desire to eliminate the feudal pillars of society, and its belief that freedom, equality, and justice will triumph.

p French thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau linked the potential and necessity of progress to man’s ability of improving himself which is inherent in human nature. Rousseau stressed that this ability is practically limitless, and, coupled with advanced age, gradually elevates man from his primitive state; it stimulates growth of knowledge as well as of delusions, vices, and virtues; it makes man a tyrant over himself and over nature.

p Rousseau linked mankind’s progress with the progress of man’s reason. He held that the great overturn had taken place due to the invention of two arts-metal processing and land cultivation.

p Another French theoretician, Condorcet, known for his Esquisse fun tableau historigue des progres de fesprit humain (Sketch of a Historical Picture of the Progress of Human Reason], characterised progress as the development of man’s natural ability to perceive the world, recognise the essential and significant in what he perceives, to retain, iden- 261 tify, and combine what he perceives, etc. Like Rousseau, Condorcet linked social progress to the human consciousness, reason, and the ability to cognise; improvements in the state of humankind Condorcet associated with eliminating inequality between nations, the progress of equality between various classes of one nation, and the genuine improvement of man.

p German philosopher Hegel was well ahead of his predecessors in understanding progress. Hegel undertook to prove the objective character and to substantiate the content of human progress. Social development is complex and contradictory, he stressed, and world history is not an arena of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in world history, for they are periods of harmony and of an absence of struggle of opposites.   [261•1 

p Being an idealist philosopher, Hegel associated progress with the struggle of opposites in the realm of the consciousness and defined it as the self-development of the world (in the final account, divine) spirit. A champion of progress, Hegel nevertheless limited it to certain historical boundaries. For him, the acme of historical progress was the world of German Christendom, the Prussian monarchy.

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p The ideologists of rising capitalism believed in, and called for, progress, and tried to substantiate the need for it by associating it with the advancement of reason, science and education, whereas bourgeois theoreticians of the 19th and early 20th centuries took an opposite view. Capitalism’s period of bloom was in the main completed by then, and the world entered the era of imperialism and proletarian revolutions. That posed a real threat to the bourgeois social system. And (as had happened many times in history), the threat to the survival of the exploiter class was identified by its ideologists as a crisis of human civilisation. Social pessimism replaced ideas of progress. Wails over an allegedly imminent crisis replaced forecasts of forms of social progress.

p The proletariat, which had by then entered the historical arena, assumed the historical mission of the struggle for progress, launching a battle against the exploitation of man by man. The theoreticians of proletarian struggle critically reassessed the views of preceding thinkers on progress and developed them on a new and genuinely scientific basis into a logical philosophical theory.

p Lenin held that the chief flaw of all the theories of social progress preceding Marxism was their abstract idealist character. Aspiring to universality, these theories were nevertheless unable to explain the real process of social development. 263 Lenin wrote: "The gigantic step forward taken by Marx in this respect consisted precisely in that he discarded all ... arguments about society and progress in general and produced a scientifi. analysis of one society and of on. progress-capitalist.”   [263•1 

p The Marxist-Leninist understanding of progress is based on the dialectico-materialist conception of history. Social progress is a regular, rising, forward movement of human society from the lower to the higher forms. The idea of social progress signifies rejection in principle of any attempts to perpetuate any social system. This idea recognises the fact that human society changes and develops, and considers history as an essentially conditioned process of social development.

p Historical materialism says that man’s rising to higher forms of the life of society cannot be ascribed first of all to the autonomous activity of reason. Progress is an objective historical result of the creative effort of the popular masses - primarily in the sphere of material production (economy), and on its basis - in the sphere of intellectual culture. Materialism does not deny the power of the human intellect, without which creative effort is not possible in any sphere. Materialist science asserts, though, that the mind is a 264 product of historical development and that its content reflects the outer, objective world.

p The substance of social progress includes change of one mode of production, one social system, for another.

p In their productive activity, people constantly and on an increasing scale change their environment, adapting it to their needs. They change the environment to satisfy their interests, they improve the methods of assimilating nature and advance their material culture.

p When acting upon nature and improving instruments of labour and the means of production, people change themselves and develop their abilities. By improving their culture and satisfying some of their requirements, people create material and intellectual preconditions for the emergence of other requirements and, therefore, for assimilating new cultural values. The result is an unbroken chain of improvements on human requirements, which means that cultural progress is a method of mastering nature.

p Naturally, social progress is not confined to the material, economic sphere. One of its inalienable elements is mankind’s ascent to more intricate and more rapidly developing social and political structures, to higher and more substantive historical types of social consciousness and intellectual culture as a whole. Using the widespread term ‘civilisation’, one might say that social progress is 265 mankind’s ascent to higher forms of civilisation. And the higher it ascends, the fuller is revealed man’s creative essence and universal nature as the subject of material and intellectual activity. From primitive stone tools to computers and spaceships, from myths about the surrounding world to the heights of scientific thought, from ancient forms of contact based on blood kinship and immediate links in the struggle for a livelihood to diverse inter-personal, intra-collcctive, inter-collective, class, national, and international relations, and from primitive man, a grain of sand in the ocean of elements that governed his life, to the omnipotent intelligent being that man is today are the seven-league steps of human progress.

p Historical materialism identifies the steps of social progress as socio-economic formations. Science judges of the stages of development by the successive formations. They are the only objective criteria for breaking up world history into periods.

p Progress is the powerful stream of history that results from the merging of numerous rivulets embodying the efforts by many millions of people and many generations living in different ages. Its general law is acceleration.

p We know from history that at certain times, and even during whole epochs, society either progressed slowly or did not progress at all. Yet

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266 regress during a certain time could not alter the general historical course of humanity, that of consistent progress. Low rates of progress were characteristic of primitive communal, slave, and, to a considerable extent, feudal societies. For millennia, man was content with the same sources of power (draught animals, wind). Centuries passed without a single major discovery or improvement. Capitalism vastly accelerated the rate of development, first of all of industrial growth, illustrated, among other things, by the spectacularly rapid growth of the urban population.

Progress is far quicker at present. Socialist and national liberation revolutions caused major social changes in short periods. The world has literally changed in the lifetime of just one generation : the socialist world system came into being, colonialism collapsed, many countries and peoples embarked on independent development.