Socialism: Utopia or Science?

"Practice is the criterion of truth." "Labor productivity is ultimately of the utmost importance for the victory of the new social order." These banal verities must be the basis for evaluating the economic development of the USSR during the seventy-five years that have elapsed since V.I. Lenin said at a session of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies on October 25, 1917: "We must now build a proletarian socialist state in Russia"; during the sixty-five years that have passed since the task of overtaking and surpassing the leading capitalist countries in a very short time was advanced at the Fifteenth Congress of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks); during the thirty-plus years following the Twenty-second Congress which adopted the CPSU program that stated: "The Soviet Union will surpass the most powerful and richest capitalist countryâthe United Statesâ in per capita production in the next decade (1961-70)."