ON the ground that conditions for the emergence of this future society have already matured in the womb of the present.

Capitalism itself has achieved tremendous developments in industry, agriculture, commerce and communications, as also in scientific, artistic and literary pursuits. So much so, that now for the first time in history it has become technically possible to satisfy almost all the material and cultural needs of every human being. But reality stands in crying contrast to this great possibility :

“In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it. The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.” (From Speech at the Anniversary of The People's Paper by Marx and Engels)

The root cause of this universal contradictoriness of our time is to be traced in the essential character of capitalism, in its strength and weakness. The strength lies in its advanced feature : continuous technical revolutionisation and socialisation of production. The latter means that in giant factories and big mechanised farms thousands of labourers and technicians pool together their enormous manual and mental labour power to produce huge quantities of high quality goods at low costs. But only part of the capacity is utilised. For, the individual owners of factories and farms produce only such goods and such quantities as can be sold at a profit for them; they would not care if people go without food and clothes but do not have the money to buy these. And this is what actually happens all the time because millions go unemployed or underemployed while most others do not have enough purchasing power, enough earnings required for buying goods and services. The practically unlimited potential of modern, i.e.. capitalist production, thus remains fettered. And by what? By capitalism's basic weakness, its retrograde feature private ownership (of lands, factories etc.) which gives the owners exclusive private rights to control production and appropriate the products. Socialism removes these fellers by socialising this ownership, this control, this appropriation. Capitalist private property, a relic of the past, which has now become superfluous, is abolished while the historical achievements of capitalism — constant technological upgradation and socialisation of production — is retained and allowed lo develop freely. In other words, the fundamental contradiction of capitalism — that between socialised production on the one hand and private ownership and appropriation on the other — is resolved and the two sides harmonised.

In place of a society dominated by capitalist exploiters is thus born a “society of associated producers” where the latter decide all questions relating lo production and appropriation in their collective interest, for satisfying needs of society as a whole.

That this positive transformation has become a crying need of our days is already manifested through certain indicators. To name a few : joint stock companies which bring about a restricted degree of socialisation of ownership by combining thousands of small shareholders, but under the domination of one or a few big capitalists; the state operating, on behalf of society, the railways, the postal departments, core industries, banking etc.; state planning and budgets; the multinational corporations which coalesce capital and labour from all parts of the planet and so on. These do not change the status of wage workers nor abolish capitalism. But they do constitute a solid de facto socialisation of economic life, and further prepare the ground for eventual transition to socialism.