SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS AND THE CHANGING NATURE AND CONTENT OF LABOR UNDER SOCIALISM

E. I. SVIRIDOVA

(Presented by the scientific seminar of the Department of Political Economy)

The scientific and technological revolution, which is significantly accelerating all social processes, including the process of changing the nature and content of labor, imposes special requirements on its study. Under socialism this is all the more necessary for the competent regulation and scientific forecasting of the paths and directions of all social progress.

First of all, it is necessary to distinguish between the concepts “nature of labor” and “content of labor,” which are not identical. In economic literature, and still more often in teaching practice, both of these concepts are used in an identical sense. Thus, for example, the authors of the book Technology, Labor, Man¹ believe that these categories cannot be separated. Otherwise, such a separation allegedly may lead to inaccurate notions, as though with the transition from capitalism to socialism only the nature of labor changes, that is, its social aspect, while the content of labor remains unchanged, since the technical equipment of production in socialist countries is at the same level as in the developed capitalist countries.

Indeed, the nature of labor, unlike the content of the labor process, is a social concept. In our view, the nature of labor is the totality of the stable features of social labor that depend on the social conditions in which this labor manifests itself². The social conditions of the functioning

relations of labor are determined by existing production relations, and therefore the character of labor always depends on the latter.

Since production relations are the less dynamic element of the mode of production, changes in the character of labor are manifested most expressively in the transition from one socioeconomic formation to another. Thus, the establishment of socialist property radically changed the character of labor:

a) labor acquired a truly free character;

b) a direct dependence arose between the labor of each person and the labor of society as a whole, in connection with the change in the worker’s relation to the means of production;

c) the degree of socialization of labor increased; labor became directly socialized labor;

d) the degree of correspondence increased between the level of development of the productive forces and the methods of dividing labor in society.

In the course of socialist construction, changes in the character of labor have an evolutionary character and are manifested above all through changes in the content of labor.

The “content of labor” is a concept more dynamic in nature than the “character of labor.” It includes the totality of the worker’s labor functions depending on the technical basis of production. And since the technical basis of modern industry is revolutionary, this also gives rise to constant changes “in the functions of workers and in the social combinations of the labor process.”³

The content of labor reflects the level of development of the productive forces; it is characterized by the ratio of mechanical and creative functions in human labor, conditioned by technology, the organization of production, the object of labor, and the qualifications of the worker himself.

A change in the content of labor is possible as a result of a qualitative transformation of the technical basis. The general tendency in this change consists in the fact that, in people’s production activity, the share of functions of heavy physical and manual labor decreases, while the share of mechanized, complex, highly skilled labor with a predominance of elements of the worker’s mental activity increases.

A change in the content of labor is characteristic of modern socialist and capitalist production. In a society based on the exploitation of man by man, all the benefits from changes in the content of labor are placed at the service of capital, of the large monopolies. Only socialism, having proclaimed the principle “everything for the good of man,” uses both the change in the content of the labor process for its realization.

However, under socialism too there exist real obstacles to the implementation of the above-mentioned tendency in the change of the content of labor. First of all, these obstacles appear in the form of the preservation of the differentiation of labor into physical and mental labor. Such a division of labor is materially conditioned by the existing productive forces and is therefore compelled. The compulsory character of the division of labor into mental and physical labor is conditioned by the characteristic form of labor under socialism, based on a three-link system of machines: engine—transmission mechanism—working machine. Owing to the inevitable, under the three-link—

within the system of machines of the division of labor, a contradiction arises between the existing division of labor and the harmonious development of the personality as the goal of communism. In our view, it is wrong to seek a way out of this contradiction by means of various kinds of amateur pursuits, for the basis of this contradiction is the real relation between progressive socialist relations of production and a technical base that is not fully adequate to them. This contradiction cannot be ignored, since otherwise one would have to admit that communism is possible while the division of labor into physical and mental labor is preserved, or that it is possible to eliminate this division within the framework of the “three-link” system of production. It is therefore clear that the issue is not the search for amateur pursuits, but the improvement of the existing productive forces of socialism.

The further progress of production necessarily requires a qualitative change in the technical base, the creation of a fundamentally new system of machines combining the advantages of mass flow production and of a flexible technological process. It is precisely such a combination that is characteristic of the so-called automatic system of machines, in which the fourth link is the controlling cybernetic mechanism.

Thanks to the creation of such a system, the very content of the concept of automation changes radically. It is necessary to dwell on the explanation of this point in greater detail.

The point is that in bourgeois economic literature speculations appear ever more often to the effect that, under conditions of automated production, the instruments of labor supposedly come to the fore, while human labor is increasingly devalued. The social thrust of such “ideas” is quite obvious, since reducing all the problems of social labor to the purely technical side of production automatically removes questions concerning labor relations among people and the irresolvable contradictions between labor and capital.

Apologists of bourgeois society, under conditions of the scientific and technological revolution, strive not only to advertise widely the replacement of people by automata in the process of production, but also to develop a model of the future human society. This concerns representatives of the “theory of convergence.” Thus, in the opinion of one of the representatives of this theory, the American economist J. Galbraith, in the contemporary world there is supposedly “a broad convergence of different industrial systems. The requirements dictated by technology and the organization of production, and not ideological symbols—this is what determines the appearance of economic society”^4.

Hence the thesis, “convenient” for the apologists of capitalism, about the degradation of man, who supposedly, because of his natural limitations, is incapable of meeting the extremely high demands of modern technology. They do not wish to notice that the content of the labor process in general and the effectiveness of human labor as the principal productive force are determined not only by the level of development of technology, but also by the character and consequences of its application. The role and place of man, the significance of living labor in the process of production under the influence of technical progress, and especially of automation, do indeed change. But technical pro-

^4 J. Galbraith, The New Industrial State. Progress Publishers, 1969, p. 42.

the process causes the displacement not of labor in general, but only of human manual labor. “The more technology develops,” wrote V. I. Lenin, “the more human manual labor is displaced, being replaced by a series of increasingly complex machines...”³ However, no machine, even the most advanced electronic one, can make the initial, basic logical decisions in the field of restructuring or rationalizing the production process. In this connection, the statements of a number of authors that under conditions of automated production man will not perform “control-managerial and logical functions directly supplementing the work of machines and mechanisms”⁴ appear erroneous.

Automation, no matter how high a stage it may reach, cannot eliminate the functions of human management and control over the production process. The logical functions of man change in the direction of a deeper comprehension of the processes taking place, of their regulation and rationalization. This is what K. Marx wrote about the change in the character of the worker’s labor under conditions of automated production: “Labor no longer appears so much as included in the production process; rather, man relates to the production process as its supervisor and regulator.

“The worker is no longer the same as he was when he inserted the modified object of nature as an intermediary link between himself and the object of labor; now he inserts the natural process, which he transforms into an industrial one, between himself and inorganic nature, over which he gains mastery. He stands alongside the production process, instead of being its chief agent. In this transformation, it is not the direct labor performed by man himself, nor the time during which he works, but the appropriation of his own universal productive force, his understanding of nature and his mastery of it by virtue of his existence as a social body—in a word, the development of the social individual—that appears as the main foundation of production and wealth.”⁵

From the quoted statement by K. Marx it is clearly evident that man will always act as the supervisor and regulator of the production process. Naturally, the very concept of supervision and control also changes. This is no longer the ordinary control of a machine-tool operator, but control with a different qualitative content. Automated production draws the worker’s attention and thought out of the narrow confines of a single operation and shifts a person’s mental work to the entire technological process carried out by the automatic line. Servicing such a line is directly dependent on a person’s ability to set up, monitor, and regulate the operation of automatic machines. Thus, automation not only does not replace human labor in general, but requires its improvement and development.

The socio-economic meaning of automation lies in the fact that it represents the greatest technical revolution,

which began in an epoch when capitalism is completing its historical path and is giving way to a new, communist mode of production, in which, in the words of K. Marx, “the development of the social individual appears as the main foundation of production.”

With the introduction into the system of machines of a regulating or control link, a change in the character of labor is achieved. The social division of labor presupposes different contents of labor, a different ratio of mechanical and creative functions depending on a person’s place in the system of production. His release from the sphere of material production proper means that the mechanical functions of labor generally cease to be functions of the human being. Labor, in its content, becomes genuinely human and creative. At the same time, this means overcoming the existing differences between mental and physical labor.

It is necessary to dwell especially on one further aspect of the change in the character of labor under the influence of scientific and technological progress. This concerns the process by which the social character of socialist labor is deepened.

The development of the social character of labor finds its expression in socialization, the content of which is the unification of labor into a single collective process for the production of a product satisfying the needs of the whole of society. It is quite clear that the socialization of labor is stronger the more developed the social division of labor is, the higher the technical level and concentration of production, and also the more intensive the processes of industrialization of labor, including in agricultural production.

On the basis of private property, the socialization of labor reaches its highest development under capitalism. Having brought large-scale machine production into being, capitalism brought about significant changes in the labor process itself. V. I. Lenin noted that “the progressive historical role of capitalism may be summarized in two brief propositions: the increase in the productive forces of social labor and its socialization”^8).

Capitalist socialization of labor does not alter the very character of capitalist relations, as relations of exploitation of wage labor.

V. I. Lenin noted that the socialization of labor under capitalism consists in the concentration of production and the centralization of capital, is accompanied by the specialization of social labor, by a reduction in the number of capitalists in each given branch, by an increase in the number of branches in the national economy, and in the fact that “many fragmented processes of production merge into one social process of production.... This means that the social bond among producers becomes deeper and deeper, that producers are welded together into a single whole”^9).

Capitalist socialization is an internally contradictory process. On the one hand, the growth of the social division of labor, of the technical level, and of the concentration of production means an intensification of the degree of socialization of labor; on the other hand, private capitalist ownership of the means of production and its re-

^8) V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 597.
^9) V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 177.

the results contradict the developing socialization of labor. As a result, the capitalist socialization of labor leads to a further deepening and sharpening of the basic contradiction of capitalism.

Social ownership of the means of production, by eliminating the contradiction between the social character of the process of production and the private-capitalist form of appropriation, characterizes a qualitatively new stage in the socialization of labor on the basis of the development of large-scale machine production. Socialist socialization is the further development of forms of joint production and the subordination of these forms to the interests of the associated producers. Formally, such subordination is achieved already as a result of the nationalization of the means of production, since the proletariat, having taken political power into its own hands, obtains the juridical, political, and economic basis for organizing social production in a planned manner in the interests of the whole society.

In fact, this subordination is limited by an objectively existing contradiction: the means of production are socialized on the scale of the whole society, while the process of production is separate on the scale of the individual enterprise. Moreover, this separateness is not technical but economic in character, and it determines the complexity of the processes of socialization under socialism. In the present article there is no possibility of examining in detail the nature and forms of manifestation of economic separateness. We shall only point out that, in our view, economic separateness is a manifestation of actually existing production relations, whose roots lie in the level and character of the productive forces of socialist society”⁶. A distinctive feature of socialist socialization is also that, under certain historical conditions, it presupposes a cooperative form of ownership existing in parallel with state ownership.

The cooperative form of socialist socialization is historically conditioned by the considerable development of petty commodity production in agriculture. Unlike industry, where the socialist revolution finds highly concentrated machine production, agriculture, as a rule, is characterized by the fragmentation of the means of production among small proprietors and by a relatively low level of labor productivity. Therefore the working class cannot nationalize all means of production, and during the years of the transitional period industry and agriculture, in terms of their social content, prove to be of different types. At the present time both industry and agriculture are spheres of the socialist type. But differences still remain and are manifested in the different level of socialization of the process of production and labor in industry and in agriculture.

Speaking of overcoming the differences between the two forms of property, it must be noted that the very process of overcoming these differences is conditioned to a greater degree by technological progress, by the ever greater industrialization of all kinds of labor, including in agricultural production. Connected with this process is an increase, in any production, in the share of labor expenditures of the whole of society, which sharply increases the social character of labor.

Let us consider how this process unfolds using the example of the mechanization of agricultural production—especially since, under present conditions, technological progress there is realized above all through processes of mechanizing labor. It should be noted, however, that the term “mechanization of labor” itself is not entirely precise. Labor is a purposeful form of activity specific only to human beings. What is mechanized is the production process, not human labor¹. Labor is replaced by the action of a machine, but the actions of a machine are not labor.

Thus, let us consider the process of mechanization of agricultural labor. By outward appearances, no changes occur in the relations between society and the collective farm. The collective farm, as before, produces output with its own means of production and itself markets this output. But behind this external aspect of the matter one can see changes of a profound nature, consisting in the fact that, as mechanization unfolds, the share of the labor of society begins to grow ever larger in the expenditures per unit of the product produced. And this is natural. For in order to renew production, the collective farm must have the necessary means of production. To obtain them, it must sell part of its output to society and, with the money received, buy from society the machinery it needs. The value of this machinery, embodying the labor of the whole of society, is transferred to the collective-farm product. As the technical equipment of agricultural production increases, the share of this transferred value per unit of output grows. This internal process signifies the growth of the socialization of production and the development of the social character of labor.

1. Social Problems of Labor and Production, Mysl’ Publishing House, Moscow and Warsaw, 1969, p. 305. ↩↩

2. For example: the private nature of labor, the social nature of labor, directly social labor, the free nature of labor, compulsory labor. ↩

3. V. I. Lenin. Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 100. ↩↩

4. A. Rubin, S. Shukhardin. “The Communist,” 1964, No. 16, p. 61. See also: The Use of Modern Technology. Automation of Production and Industrial Electronics, vol. 1, Moscow, 1962, p. 20. ↩

5. “From the Unpublished Manuscripts of K. Marx.” Bolshevik, 1939, No. 11–12, p. 62. ↩

6. At present, for the majority of economists, precisely such an approach to the analysis of the nature of economic separateness under socialism is characteristic. See: V. N. Cherkovets. Planned Character of Socialist Production. Moscow, 1965, ch. II, §§ 4, 5; see also the works of A. Pokrytan, V. Shkredov, and others. ↩