Scientific Direction of of Communist Construction - Socialism, a Consciously Directed Society
Socialist society, as we have seen, is a complex social organism, a mobile, dynamic system with a multitude of various elements. It embraces a versatile economy (industry, agriculture, transport, communications, and so on) and a host of enterprises (factories, mills, collective and state farms, and so forth); people united in classes and social groups and in labour and other collectives; economic, class, ethical and other relations among people; and spiritual life with its diverse manifestations. All these elements are closely interrelated, and in their unity and interaction they form socialist society as an object of direction. In its turn, each individual element of society is likewise an integral system that lends itself to guidance. Every factory, office, institute, school and other establishment consists of subdivisions in which people are united.
Thus, guidance over society is guidance over people, things, relations and spiritual life, but mainly over people. This can well be appreciated because by their labour people create values, which they use in their work and life; people have different relations with each other; they possess intelligence and ideas and, in addition to material values, they create cultural values. Naturally, guidance over things, relations and ideas largely depends upon how correctly and how scientifically the guidance over people is organised. Essentially, social development is shaped from the activities, of millions upon millions of people; hence the extraordinary complexity and responsibility involved in directing their affairs and, through this, social processes as a whole.
It should be emphasised that in socialist society guidance over people is not the function of exploiter supervision over the people as is the case in capitalist society. Under socialism, direction is primarily a function of organising the people’s economic life, their social activities, and their upbringing in the spirit of communist ideals. Naturally, administration is preserved as a specific variety of work, but it is exercised by the people themselves through elective organs of power and also directly through a system of mass organisations. This is a democratic administration because being the solo owners of the means of production and the sovereign custodians of political power, the people play the decisive role in directing the economy and all social processes.
The fundamental reason that socialism makes it possible to govern such a huge number of people and direct such a diversity of social processes and society as a whole is that its economy is founded on public ownership, which unites people and rules out anarchy, competition and chaotic markets. The law of planned, proportionate development, which operates on the basis of public ownership, opens the road to planned, centralised direction of the economy and all social processes and creates the possibility for coordinating the diverse links of the social system and directing their movement towards a single, planned objective.
When people speak of scientific direction they frequently have the direction of society’s economic life in mind. Nobody will deny that the economy plays the determining role in social development. The nature of socialist society is such that it allows not only the economy but all the other spheres of social life to be directed consciously and scientifically.
This is easily seen if we turn to the history of the Soviet Union and of the Communist Party, and to the milestones of the Party’s conscious direction of the development of Soviet society. Lenin’s plan for the country’s electrification (1920), for example, was not only and not simply an economic plan but a programme of far-reaching qualitative changes of the whole of society, of the entire system of social relations. Being a plan for the creation of the material and technical basis of socialism on the foundation of electrification, it was designed to strengthen the leading role played by the working class in society, consolidate the alliance between it and the peasants and promote proletarian democracy. “Electrification as the basis of democracy,” Lenin noted down in his draft for a report to the 8th All Russia Congress of Soviets. Calling the electrification plan the second Party Programme, Lenin made it plain that the Party had to direct all social processes. His formula that communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country speaks of the intrinsic unity between the direction of economy and the direction of social life.
The New Economic Policy, industrialization and collectivization were likewise designed to effect radical changes in social relations. The forecasting and direction of the process of building up the economy, shaping communist social relations and bringing up the new man comprise the substance of the Party Programme adopted at the 22nd Congress of the C.P.S.U.
Thus, the scientific direction and the planned, proportionate development of socialist society embrace the sum total of social processes. In this connection, planned, proportionate development is not only an economic but also a sociological law operating in all spheres of socialist social life.
Socialist society is governed by objective laws, which can be cognised and utilised in the interests of the people. The fact that these laws do not automatically ensure society’s development in the direction required by man makes it all the more important to know and utilise them. Take, for example, the law of planned, proportionate development. By itself this law does not remove elements of spontaneity in development and does not ensure harmony and planned proportion between the different links of the social system. It only creates the possibility for this, and in order to turn this possibility into reality the law must be understood and skilfully utilised. This is where subjective factors come in, namely, the purposeful, conscious activity of people led by the Party and the government. The development of socialist society is thus an intricate intermingling and interaction of objective laws and subjective factors, with the latter playing a steadily bigger role in proportion to society’s onward movement thanks to an ever deeper knowledge of objective laws.
In socialist society subjective factors play an incomparably bigger role than in other social systems. Socialism successfully advances only when people have mastered objective laws and skilfully applied them to regulate social processes. Moreover, the people aspire to know and apply these laws because they fully conform with their vital interests.
In directing social processes scientifically, the main task is to bring the subjective activities of the people into line with the requirements of objective laws. To direct society scientifically means to use cognised objective laws, bring to light the progressive trends in social development or in individual links of this development, guide and regulate society’s advance in accordance with these trends, show what obstacles hinder the achievement of one goal or another and opportunely remove these obstacles. In other words, this means to pursue a correct, realistic policy, which takes objective potentialities and the correlation of social forces into account, a policy intimately bound up with the economy, with economic development.
The practical work of directing social processes necessarily presupposes a theoretical elaboration of problems of administration. This is one of the principal tasks of the theory of scientific communism.
It goes without saying that the problems linked up with directing society scientifically cannot be resolved solely by representatives of scientific communism. They have to be resolved by the collective effort of philosophers, sociologists, economists, statisticians, cyberneticists, mathematicians, jurists, psychologists, engineers, executives and the broad masses. A scientific system of directing society can be evolved, and successfully applied in specific spheres of social life, and concrete forms, ways and means of administration conforming to present-day requirements worked out only through the joint efforts of specialists in the most diverse fields. A solid foundation for resolving these problems is provided by Marxism-Leninism, by Leninist principles of directing social processes and the building of communism.
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