Contradictions in the Development of Socialism as a Social System

Abstract

Scientific communism and Marxist-Leninist teaching on socialism is guided by materialist dialectics as its methodology; and, as we know, the study of contradictions is the nucleus of dialectics. "Dialectics in the proper sense," V. I. Lenin wrote, "is the study of contradiction in the very essence of objects." ¹ When science applies dialectics to the analysis of the new society and approaches the problem of contradictions of socialism as a social system, it enters an area in which it discovers not the results that are obtained in the course of social development, but the development itself, its inner impulses and driving forces, and the collision between opposing tendencies and nonidentical social aspirations.