Publication Details

Abstract

The author of the paper finds out that the notion of responsibility elaborated until now by our theoreticians of civil law is too narrow for comporting the phenomenon of responsibility, which appears distinctly especially when responsibility is related to such a collective subject as the communist party is. The notion of responsibility formulated by the juristic theory does not comprise in itself besides the legal responsibility also the moral and political ones while not taking into account the specificity of the latter which is, however, not negligible at creating the notion of responsibility. After having separated the objective and subjective preconditions of responsibility the author of the paper separates the factors that make the potential responsibility real. After having analyzed the phenomenon of the sense of responsibility and of the responsibility in the form of penal sanction the author analyzes the punishment itself and he does it, on the one hand,, from the point of view of the motivation of the act followed by punishment and, on the other hand, from the point-of-view of the function of this punishment in relation to the personal component of the punished. He distinguishes here the educational function and the re-educational one, the function preventing the practical manifestation of personal view of values of the punished. By distinguishing the function of moral re-education and the ideological-political function of punishment the author reaches the analysis of political responsibility and of the responsibility of a political party. Special attention is paid to the specific responsibility of the communist party, i. e., on the one hand, to the responsibility that this party requires in the relations among its separate articles and members on the other hand, to the responsibility of this party in relation to the working class and to other working people of the country as well as to the international communist and, generally, progressive movement. In this connection the author of the paper deals with the so called historical responsibility and with the attitude of the communists to this phenomenon.