ABSTRACT
Today’s tempo of economic development and the accompanying continual change in vocational structure go back to the beginnings of capitalist production. In the precapitalist world, both the change in the vocational structure and the increase in labor productivity were so insignificant — compared to today — that the economic development of that period may, from the viewpoint of our study, be equated with stagnation. In our search for the driving forces of today’s high development tempo, we face the obvious question of what it was exactly that precapitalist society lacked for a more rapid development; it certainly was not a subjective lack (for capitalism brought no happiness to the majority of the people, even plunging them into deep misery at the beginning), but a lack of a mainspring of development. In other words, we are looking for the element of change, for a factor that had to change to put an end to the almost complete stagnation, to get the rapid upswing going and to keep it going.
