Publication Details

Abstract

The author in his paper starts from the 14 th Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and from the document The Development, Contemporary State and Tasks of the Social Sciences in the ČSSR. At the same time he emphasizes the November plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia of the last year, which demands from the workers in social sciences to elaborate creatively and concretely the character of the contemporary stage of building-up socialism in the ČSSR. In ,the first part he analyzes the categories of materialist dialectics as „universal methods“, by means of which we can deeply and concretely penetrate into the complicated and contradictory phenomena of the development of our advanced socialist society. Dialectics as „the method of revolutionary thinking and deed“ contains, on a higher level, also the categories of „system analysis“ and „system thinking“. In the second part the author analyzes the Marxist and non-Marxist and undialectic attempts at replacing the Marxist-Leninist notion of development (the materialist conception of history and development of society! with the terms „change“ and „function“. These are, „in essence“, neo-positivist, functionalist and structuralist theories that comprehend „change“ only as a destruction of „the stable social system“ (capitalism). In conclusion the author emphasizes that in the solution of the problems of the developed socialist society (and in historical dialectics in general) it is, first of all, the economic, productive-technological, social and political processes that are the matter. Namely the political act and political decision become the key problem of the political, economic and cultural theory and practice and those of production and of the party. A higher grade of freedom, morale and humanity is materialized only through the organized (political) power of the class, that provides for an unhampered developm-nt of the forces of production by means of forming new relations of production. This is the sense and mission of the working class in history and it is in this that the dialectics of the development of our socialist society consists.