50 SOCIAL SCIENTIST ^ With the increasing interconnection of economic, political and spiritual spheres of social life, there has developed an objective growth in the role of the bourgeois state as an agent of government. In place of earlier paternalistic efforts by individual members of ruling class to take a pragmatic approach to the problem of governing men, the state has now come to the fore: besides exercising political domination, it has become a vehicle for ideological pressure on the masses. This has enabled the bourgeoisie to make its social and political manoeuvring more subtle and to combine violence and repression with demagogic social policies. The ruling classes formerly possessed only limited means for directly influencing the masses. Today the technical potentialities for exercising their ideological and psychological conditioning have considerably expanded. New instruments for ceaseless systematic conditioning of the minds of the working people have been provided by the modern mass media—the press, radio, television, and the cinema, which are increasingly concentrated in the hands of monopolies and the state. This method of purposeful ideological and psychological conditioning of the people is described as "manipulation" of the masses. Bourgeois philosophers, sociologists, psychologists and politicians have frequently referred to the term "manipulation." They describe it as a recent social phenomenon resulting from the impact of the current epoch of "mass civilisation" on the people. This impact, they say, levels out and makes uniform spiritual life of man. Some of these theorists regard manipulation as a fruitful, as well as natural, way of governing man's thinking and behaviour in a "mass society," and seek to justify it. Others, on the contrary, are concerned about the anti-humanistic effect of the tendency towards levelling out the personality in the modern bourgeois world, and have been searching for ways to overcome this process. These sociologists believe that mass consumption, resulting from technological progress, is a factor behind the emergence of manipulated man. These theorists allege that consumer man is an easy target for suggestion and that he believes everything projected by the mass media; "mass man5", they state, is only capable of "chaotic impulses", and thus has to be acted upon by means of suggestion and manipulation of his thinking. Another factor, they say, is that the organisation of modern society" along rational and technical lines gives rise to the"manipulated individual.^ Man, in their opinion, becomes a mere appendage of the huge technical and bureaucratic machine, and reacts only to some particular stimuli pertaining to his immediate functions. Man's limited use and conformism provide the basis for manipulation of his thinking and behaviour. Some of the consequences of the consumer way of life are discussed in the writings of Herbert Marcuse, an exponent of petty-bourgeois radicalism. In social essence his concept is as far removed from Marxism as he himself is from the working class. Suffice it to say that Marcuse draws no distinction between capitalism and socialism, regarding both as varie-