Scientific and Technological Progress and Its Impact on Processes of Socialization under Capitalism and Socialism

E. I. Sviridova

In the report of the Central Committee of the CPSU to the Twenty-Fourth Congress, the most important task was formulated of combining the demands of scientific and technological progress with the advantages of the socialist system of economy, especially at the stage of developed socialism. In this respect, it is urgently necessary to study the state and development of socialist socialization conditioned by scientific and technological progress.

Marxist-Leninist economic theory invests the concept of socialization with a quite definite meaning, namely: the process of creating and developing a joint community of people, an economic system in which individual forms of production are linked into a single economic complex. V. I. Lenin regarded the content of socialization as a situation in which “...many fragmented processes of production merge into one social process of production,” as a result of which “...the social bond among producers is strengthened, the producers are welded together into one whole.”¹ By “one whole” he understood such social production in which a system of social interrelations functions. V. I. Lenin contrasted this “whole” with the mass of small, fragmented enterprises.

In the economic literature, with respect to the problem of socialization, there exists a terminological diversity.² It is due to the fact that the concept of socialization includes an entire system of various processes, and therefore each term reflects some part of this complex totality of relations. At the same time, all of them, in V. I. Lenin’s words, reflect one fact—the fact of the joint labor of people.

The process of socialization must be considered both from the standpoint of production relations and from the standpoint of the productive forces. These two aspects of socialization exist in unity. But unity does not exclude their certain independence. Therefore, a differentiated analysis of both aspects is not only possible but also practically necessary. In this way a more precise range of questions under investigation is delineated. In the present article we shall attempt to examine certain questions relating to the correlation of the processes

of socialization and its material basis. Hence it is clear that the categories to be considered will be those connected with socialization at the level of the productive forces—the “socialization” of labor and of production.

The material basis of socialist socialization depends in many respects on the degree of maturity of socialization under capitalism, which prepares the material preconditions of socialism.

The elementary form of joint production in general is the cooperation of labor, found “...at the threshold of the history of all civilized peoples”³. Cooperative labor here represented the initial form of socialization. Its characteristic feature was that people were united by their weakness before the forces of nature and by primitive technology. Subsequently, despite the development of the social division of labor, simple cooperation did not generate a system of interconnections among producers, since the labor process on the basis of manual technology may be to some extent collective, but in the main it is individual. Therefore cooperation, as a form of joint labor, was in those conditions applied sporadically. The unity of action of the cooperating labor forces was predominantly formal in character.

The organic unity of the functions of the direct producers arises on the basis of manufacture and especially at the stage of machine production. K. Marx emphasizes that in manufacture unity arises among workers not because all perform one and the same work; on the contrary, the division of labor within the workshop separates the various kinds of labor, splits up the homogeneous production process, turns the worker into a partial worker, and the result of individual labor into a part of the final product. However, the division and combination of labor in manufacture has a subjective character, for there is as yet no material basis for organic unity. The narrow technical basis of manufacture came into contradiction with its own newly created needs of production⁴. Only in large-scale machine production, in the system of machines, “...large-scale industry possesses a fully objective production organism...”⁵. The necessity of the unity of purposive actions, which arose in simple cooperation, receives a material basis in the system of machines and is dictated by technical necessity. K. Marx observes that “machines... function only in the hands of directly socialized or collective labor”⁶. The more developed the system of machines, the greater the need for the development of joint forms of production both within the given production process and beyond its limits. Machine technology requires a significant increase in the scale of production. But, on the other hand, it excludes the individual use of the instruments of labor, the individual form of the production process, and marks the final victory of large-scale production over small. The quantitative distinction between large-scale and small-scale production also determines many qualitative modifications within large-scale production. The point is that machine production, on the basis of which large enterprises exist and develop, is accompanied by a previously unprecedented specialization, facilitating the emergence of numerous branches of specialized production complexes and the separation of individual types and subtypes of production. Machines divide the production process in accordance with its technological sequence, creating conditions both for object-specific and for

³ K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 23, p. 88.
⁴ Ibid., p. 381.
⁵ Ibid., p. 397.
⁶ Ibid.

part and technological specialization. At the same time, the development of machine production is accompanied by the emergence of the mass production of homogeneous products. All this contributes, to an enormous degree, to the development and strengthening of interconnections between branches and within them. The production of material goods is transformed into a social process functioning as a single whole, the various elements of which condition and presuppose one another. The development of large-scale machine industry is, consequently, the material basis for the socialization of the processes of labor and production. All the elements of these processes acquire a new quality: labor power, the instruments and objects of labor, and labor itself become, by their very nature, increasingly social. Their combination in the labor process represents a new stage—possible under capitalism—in raising the productivity of social labor, since it dictates the need for a higher organization of labor and the application of elements of planning and regulation of production. All the benefits of the increased productive power of labor are appropriated by the capitalist class. Therefore, if “...the capitalist mode of production, on the one hand, is a historical necessity for the transformation of the labor process into a social process, then, on the other hand, this social form of the labor process is a method employed by capital to exploit this process more profitably by increasing its productive power”^7.

In this duality of capitalist production there is manifested the contradiction of capitalism between the social character of the production process and the capitalist form of its functioning, which is private in its essence. At a certain stage in the development of capitalism this contradiction finds a partial resolution in the forms of associated capital. F. Engels pointed to these forms when he characterized the stages of capitalist socialization. He noted, in particular, that “the partial recognition of the social character of the productive forces—a recognition forced upon the capitalists themselves. The transformation of large organisms of production and communication—first into the property of joint-stock companies, later of trusts, and then also of the state”^8.

State-monopoly capitalism, as a system of the merger of the state and monopolies, at present in the developed capitalist states constitutes the dominant form of bourgeois relations of production. Its existence is conditioned by the objective growth of the processes of socialization, as a result of which the capitalists, in V. I. Lenin’s words, are “dragged,” against their will and consciousness, into a new order, transitional from free competition to complete socialization. Naturally, V. I. Lenin understands complete socialization in the sense of what is maximally possible under the conditions of capitalism.

The necessity of state-monopoly methods of influencing the course of capitalist production is also conditioned by the needs of scientific and technological progress. The gigantic scale of scientific research work and the high capital intensity of scientific institutions require such significant capital investments that they prove beyond the capacity even of the most powerful monopolies.

In addition, it must be noted that scientific and technological progress is accompanied, as is known, by a rise in the organic composition of capital—

^6 K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 19, p. 229.
^7 K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 23, p. 347.

…in connection with which the factors determining the fall in the rate of profit continue to operate. In order to prevent a decline in the mass of profit, the rate of growth of capital must outstrip the rate at which the rate of profit declines.³ Thus, under conditions of technological progress, the accumulation of capital must proceed faster than the growth of its organic composition. Under these conditions it is necessary to find such sources of accumulation as would ensure the continuity of capitalist reproduction. Such a source is the national income, the resources of which are redistributed by the bourgeois state through the state budget in the interests of the monopolies. Nevertheless, this fact indicates that the development of processes of socialization objectively requires the centralization of the accumulation fund and its use in the interests of society as a whole. However, state-monopoly capitalism cannot go beyond the bounds of private-capitalist relations. It represents only an attempt to fit socialization into the framework of capitalist appropriation. In this is manifested the peculiar violence of capitalism against the social character of production, which can be removed only by violent means as well—by socialist revolution. Sometimes one may encounter in the literature the assertion that elements of socialism arise in the depths of capitalism. Reference is made here to the high degree of socialization of production, the developed organizational forms of centralized regulation of economic processes, the expansion of the boundaries of planning, and so forth.⁴ Yet these are not ready-made elements of socialism, but only the material prerequisites for their emergence. It follows from this that the development of the socialist socialization of production has special socio-economic prerequisites and a fundamentally different initial form of socialization.

The prerequisite for socialist socialization is the conquest of political power, the proletarian revolution. The expropriation of the bourgeoisie’s means of production and their transfer into social ownership marks the beginning of the socialist socialization of the means of production. Thus, the initial form of the socialization of socialist production is the socialization of the means of production in the form of public ownership of the means of production. Historically, the socialist socialization of the means of production is carried out in two ways: by the nationalization of the basic means of production and by the cooperation of small producers. Nationalization and the cooperation of the means of production are the general law-governed process of the formation of socialist relations of production, of the creation of public ownership. Between these two modes of socialization there are differences conditioned by the state of the productive forces. Nationalization, as a rule, is accomplished on the basis of more or less developed socialized labor; its object is factories, plants, banks, i.e., such economic forms in which the social character of the labor process is already developed.

The cooperation of small commodity producers socializes not only the means of production but, above all, labor. As a result of cooperation there arises a form of economy that passes through the cooperative and manufactory stages and the development of machine production on the basis of public ownership.

In assessing nationalization, one must not lose sight of the fact that the socialization of production, whose function is planning, is not

is exhausted by one of its forms—in the present case, the socialization of the means of production. Since nationalization does not affect other forms of socialization—the socialization of the labor process and of the production process—it therefore does not mean a change in the entire aggregate of forms of socialization, of the whole process as a whole. We therefore emphasize Lenin’s proposition that nationalization creates only the formal socialization of the means of production. But without this formal socialization, the development of a unified national-economic complex on the scale of the whole society and in the interests of the association of working people is impossible.

Recently the literature has often referred to socialization from the point of view of the relationship between the formal and the real. The delimitation of the process of socialization according to this principle, as has already been mentioned, was made by V. I. Lenin.

Thus, L. Leontiev believes that the real socialization of production is exhausted by such processes as the nationalization of industry and the cooperation of small peasant farming⁵.

V. A. Grimalyuk approaches this problem differently. He writes: “By the formal socialization of labor we understand those changes in the character of labor that are directly caused by the establishment of the social form of ownership and its further development; and by the real, those changes that take place directly on the basis of the construction of a material and technical base adequate to the new form of ownership and the establishment of the corresponding organization of social labor”⁶. This proposition seems insufficiently complete for understanding real socialization, since it reduces it to changes in only one aspect of socialization—in the productive forces. Proceeding from Lenin’s proposition on “socialization in practice,” one should speak of overcoming formal socialization as the economic content of social ownership of the means of production develops. At the same time, real socialization has not been completed on the side of the productive forces either. The level of development of the latter must show to what extent directly socialized labor has become a technical necessity⁷.

Indicators of the technical equipment of production in the economic literature are recognized as either the absolute size of production assets or energy capacities. However, in order to reflect the level of socialization, these indicators are insufficient; they must be calculated per worker by branch. As a result, we obtain indicators of capital-labor ratio, energy- and electric-power equipment of labor, the dynamics of which should show the movement of socially organized labor. The rates of growth of these indicators are in many respects predetermined by the state of scientific and technological progress. As its development accelerates, society is increasingly drawn into the production process in one or another link of the national economy. In the total labor expenditures per unit of output, the share of social labor increases, which testifies to the deepening of the social character of labor and production. At the same time, this also testifies to the development of the processes of socialization, considered for the time being from the side of the productive forces. Since the development of the latter, as well as their improvement, is by its nature an infinite process, the process of socialization is therefore also unlimited.

1. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 159. ↩

2. Even K. Marx, in Capital, uses such terms as “socialization of the labor process,” “socialization of the production process,” “socialization of the means of production,” “socialization of capital” (social, associated capital). ↩

3. K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 25, part I, p. 245. ↩

4. See: collection V. I. Lenin’s Teaching on Imperialism and the Present Day, Moscow, 1967, p. 195. ↩

5. See: L. Leontiev, F. Engels and the Economic Doctrine of Marxism. Moscow, 1966, p. 417. ↩

6. V. A. Grimalyuk, “The Socialization of the Labor Process and the Basic Production Relation of Socialism.” See collection Collectivity—the Basis of Socialist Production. Moscow, 1969, p. 54. ↩

7. See: K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 23, p. 397. ↩