4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST some of the views here presented I have held since 1976: it was then that I first essayed a study of the 'contradictions of socialist society* for a speech at a condolence meeting for Mao Tse-tung. I In Marxist theory socialism is a stage of society which follows the overthrow of capitalism. The classics have defined three important features of a socialist society: (a) All means of production are 'socialised', that is, brought under public or cooperative ownership. Since capitalists and landlords have been expropriated, there is no private profit and rent; and what was previously the product of 'surplus labour' of the workers, which provided these exploitative incomes, becomes available for (1) distribution among workers as additions to their wages or for social services; (2) replacement and enlargement of the means of production; and (3) costs of administration, which is essential for both (1) and (2). (See especially Marx: 'Critique of the Gotha Programme' in Karl Marx and Frederick Engds, Selected Works, II, Moscow, 1949, pp. 19-21). (b) Socialist society replaces 'anarchy in social production* by 'conscious organisation on a planned basis' and eliminates the 'waste' of productive forces, inescapable in capitalist production, the waste reaching 'its zenith in (periodic) crises' (Engels, Anti-Duhring, Moscow, 1947, pp. 419-20). (c) Socialism continuously expands production at a much higher rate than would be possible for capitalism. This is implicit in many passages in Marx's and Engels's writings, and fairly explicit in Engels's speech at Marx's graveside (1883), when he presented the perspective of an increase, 'under socialism', of 'the social productive forces and their yield by planned operation of the whole production in an ever increasing measure' (Marx and Engels, Selected Works, II, p. 151). Such a process is necessary for reaching the higher state of Communism, where ^t last there would be an abundance of goods, for every one to be provided with 'his needs' ('Critique of the Cotha Programme*: ibid, II p. 23). One of the common assumptions in Marxist theoretical analyses of the economics of a socialist society have been that (a) above must inevitably lead to (b) and (c). This is found to be particularly the case with Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, Moscow, 1952. Here, on p. 45, 'the basic law of socialism' is defined as 'the securing of the maximum satisfaction of the constantly rising material and cultural requirements of the whole of society through the continuous expansion and perfection of socialist production on the basis of higher techniques'.