КЛАССЫ СОЦИАЛЬНЫЕ

Classes (social)

"Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the mode and dimensions of acquiring the share of social wealth of which they dispose. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy" (Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. 3, p. 248).

The existence of Classes is associated only with definite periods in the development of social production. The emergence of Classes is determined by the development of the social division of labour and the appearance of private ownership of the means of production. In every class society, besides the basic Classes—slave-owners and slaves in slave society, landowners and serfs under feudalism, capitalists and proletarians in bourgeois society—there also exist nonbasic Classes; the latter are associated either with remnants of the old mode of production (in bourgeois society, the peasantry) or with the emergence of a new mode (the bourgeoisie which arose in feudal society).

Abolition of society's division into Classes becomes possible only as a result of the socialist revolution, the overthrow of the rule of the exploiting Classes, abolition of their private ownership of the means of production, and its replacement by public ownership. The victory of socialism radically changes the character of the working class and draws the workers and peasants nearer to each other.

Under socialism the working class can no longer be called the proletariat; it is free of exploitation and, together with the entire people, owns the means of production and does not sell its labour power. From a class deprived of all means of production and oppressed as it was under capitalism, the proletariat is transformed into the working class, the full master of the country, which works for itself, for the whole of society. As the most advanced and most organised class connected with public property, it leads the other sections of the population.

Under socialism the peasantry does away for ever with farming based on private property, with disunity inherited from capitalism and renounces backward and primitive implements and farming methods. It farms on the basis of collective socialist ownership (see State and Collective-Farm and Co-operative Forms of Property).

The intelligentsia, the social stratum of intellectual workers, has also radically changed. The intelligentsia has never been, nor could it be, a separate class, since it does not hold an independent position in the system of social production. As a social stratum it is incapable of pursuing an independent policy, its activity is determined by the interests of the classes it serves. After the victory of the socialist revolution, the working class is confronted with the problem of utilising the old and developing a new intelligentsia. Together with the workers and peasants, the intelligentsia actively participates in the building of communist society.

The distinctions between the workers, peasants, and intelligentsia are effaced in the course of building communism. This process is based on the gradual obliteration of the essential distinctions between town and country, between physical and mental labour. The socio-political and ideological unity of the people achieved under socialism is consolidated and the social homogeneity of society is extended. The further strengthening of the alliance of the working class and the collective-farm peasantry, the leading role of the working class, are of decisive political and socio-economic significance for the building of communism in the USSR. The division of society into Classes and social strata will vanish completely with the victory of communism.