The Socioeconomic Nature of Scientific-Technological Progress

Abstract

Scientific-technological progress is a dynamic aspect of production. It adequately reflects that stage in the latter's development to which the industrial revolution, having created the factory and the working class, gave birth, the stage that led to the beginning of the modern scientific-technological revolution. Today as well, we use the concept "scientific-technological progress" to describe the rich content of progress in production, even though the range of actual processes and relationships embraced by this term has changed significantly. Now that this term has become firmly entrenched in everyday parlance and is used not only in scientific inquiry and in the dissemination of knowledge, but also in the formulation of tasks of economic and social policy, we must define "scientific-technological progress" more precisely and move it from the category of self-evident concepts1 to the number of scientific categories that are used in social science, including political economy, with maximum scientific precision, with a practical aim. Accordingly, one can only support the efforts of the journal's editors to call the attention of participants in the discussion of the economic problems of scientific-technological progress (STP) to the more precise definition of the content and interrelationships of "scientific-technological progress," "scientific-technological revolution (STR)," "technological progress," etc.