Socialist Society

The social formation that pursues the path of common prosperity by rapidly developing the productive forces, abolishing exploitation and eliminating polarization, characterized by public property in the means of production and distribution according to contribution, and by the people being the master in their own house.

Marx and Engels held that the socialist (or communist) society is a society in continuous development and revolution. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx clearly divided the future society into the first phase of communism and the higher phase of communism. For the first phase of communism, Marx said: “What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.” In this sense, Marx has analyzed its features in economic terms. On the basis of it, Lenin made a further generalization: “From capitalism mankind can pass directly only to socialism, that is, to the social ownership of means of production and to the distribution of products according to the amount of work performed by each individual.” In this sentence, Lenin expressed the first phase of communism as “socialism”. In his book The State and Revolution, Lenin, when explaining Marx’s thought of dividing Communist society into two phases, called the first phase (or lower phase) of communism “socialism” and the higher phase of communism “communism”. Later, when the word “socialism” expressed the connotation of economic formation of society, it referred specifically to the first phase or lower phase of communism.

The establishment and development of the socialist system in China has its own particularities. The socialist society in China is still in a specific historical phase, i.e., the primary phase of socialism. This is a phase that China must inevitably go through in building socialism given that the productive forces are backward and the commodity economy is undeveloped, and not a general reference to the initial phase that any country will go through when entering socialism. The implications are: (1) The Chinese society is already a socialist society, which must be uphold and not departed from. (2) The socialist society in China is still in a primary phase. In this phase, on the one hand, the socialist economic system based on the public property in the means of production and the socialist political system of the people’s democratic dictatorship have been already established, Marxism occupies a guiding position in the ideological sphere and Chinese society has already become a socialist society. On the other hand, since the socialist society in China emerged from the womb of a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society, the level of productive forces lagged far behind that of developed capitalist countries, it is also bound to realize industrialization and commercialization, socialization and modernization of production that many other countries have realized under capitalist conditions. The lag in productive forces manifests itself in that the level of mechanization and automation of production is still generally very low, and at the same time, the level of production technology is much uneven among different industries, regions and enterprises. Corresponding to the situation of the productive forces, in terms of relations of production, the socialization of production necessary for the development of socialist public property is still very low. The commodity economy and domestic market are underdeveloped, and natural economy and semi-natural economy account for a considerable proportion. The socialist economic system is still immature and imperfect, and private property economy of different scales is needed as a supplement to public property economy. In terms of superstructure, a set of ideological and cultural conditions required for building a high-level socialist democratic political system is far from adequate. The decadent ideas of feudalism and capitalism and the forces of the habits of small-scale production still have a wide influence in society, and often invade the cadres of the Party and the ranks of civil servants of the State. Therefore, this phase is different both from the transition period in which the socialist economic foundation has not yet been laid and from the phase in which socialist modernization has been realized. In this phase, although class struggle will exist for a long time to a certain extent, it is no longer the principal contradiction. The principal contradiction faced in this phase is the contradiction between people’s growing material and cultural needs and backward social production. In order to solve this contradiction, we should vigorously develop the commodity economy, improve the productivity of labor, gradually realize the modernization of industry, agriculture, national defense and science and technology, and to this end, reform the relations of production and the parts of superstructure which do not correspond to the development of the productive forces.