5. Forces of development

The new society will be based not on exchange but on natural self-sufficing economy. Between production and consumption of products there will not be the market, buying and selling, but consciously and systematically organised distribution.

The new self-sufficing economy will be different from the old primitive communism, for instance, in that it will embrace not a large or a small community, but the whole of society, composed of hundreds of millions of people, and later of the whole of humanity.

In exchange societies the forces of development are “relative over-population,” competition, class struggle, i.e., in reality the inherent contradictions of social life. In the self-sufficing societies referred to above, tribal and feudal societies, &c., the forces of development are based upon “relative over-population,” i.e., the outward contradictions between nature and society, between the demands for the means of life arising out of the growth of the population and the sum of these means which nature in a given society can supply.

In the new self-sufficing society the forces of development will also lie in the outward contradictions between society and nature, in the very process of struggle between society and nature. Here the slow process of over-population will not be required to induce man still further to perfect his labour and knowledge: the needs of humanity will increase in the very process of labour and experience. Each new victory over nature and its mysteries will raise new problems in the highly-organised mentality of the new man, sensitive to the slightest disturbance and contradiction. Power over nature means the continual accumulation of the energy of society acquired by it from external nature. This accumulated energy will seek an outlet and will find it in the creation of new forces of labour and knowledge.

It is true that accumulated energy does not always lead to creativeness; it may lead to degeneration. The parasitic classes of modern, as of former, societies accumulate energy at the expense of the labour of others and seek an outlet for it not in creativeness but in debauchery, luxury, perversity, and refinement. This leads to the weakening of the mentality and to the decline of these classes. But these are only parasites; they do not live in the sphere of socially useful labour, but almost entirely in the sphere of consumption. Naturally they seek new forms of indulgence in this sphere and find them in perversity and subtle refinements. But socialist society does not know of such parasites. In it all are workers, and they will satisfy their desire for creativeness arising out of the excess of energy in the sphere of labour. They will perfect technique and consequently perfect themselves.

The new forces of development arising out of the struggle with nature and of the labour experience of man operate the more strongly and rapidly the wider and more complex and diverse this experience is. For this reason, in the new society with its colossally wide and complex system of labour, with its numerous ties uniting the experience of the most diverse (although equally developed) human individualities, the forces of development must create such rapid progress as we in our day can hardly imagine. The harmonious progress of future society will be much more intensive than the semi-spontaneous progress, fluctuating between contradictions, of our epoch.

All economic obstacles to development will be abolished under the new system. Thus, the application of machinery, which under capitalism is determined by considerations of profit, under the new system will depend entirely upon productivity. As we have seen, machinery which may be very useful for saving labour is very frequently useless from the standpoint of capitalist profits. In socialist society such a point of view will not prevail and there will therefore be no obstacles to the application of labour-saving machinery.

The forces of development which will dominate at this stage will not be new forces; they will have operated previously. In the natural self-sufficing system, however, these forces were suppressed by the general conservatism prevailing in it; under capitalism they are suppressed by virtue of the fact that the classes which take for themselves the product of surplus labour, i.e., the main source of the forces of development of society, do not participate in the direct struggle with nature, do not conduct industry personally, but through others, and consequently remain outside the influence of the forces created in the struggle.

Under socialism, however, the sum total of surplus labour will be employed by the whole of society and every member will directly participate in the struggle against nature. Consequently the main and greatest driving force of progress will act unhindered and at top speed, not through a select minority, but through the whole of humanity, and the sphere of development must increase unceasingly.

Thus the general characteristics of the socialist system, the highest stage of society we can conceive, are: power over nature, organisation, socialness, freedom, and progress.