The author deals with the character of influence exerted by the economic relations upon the technical progress and arrives at the following conclusions:

1. The social needs are the decisive factor determining technical development, but these needs as such are a manifestation of the social relations, as the relations between people are necessarily expressed also as the relations of these people with material things and at the same time are mediated by these things.

2. The issue is that a certain social relation creates its own material base through a material activity of

subjects engaged in this relation. This process of confirming the subject is a process of appropriation (of nature). But the subject, in order to appropriate, must enter into productive relations and must actively affect other objects. In the course of such a process the very active subject reproduces itself as an owner. The economic relations are thus an expression of the appropriative, productive and ownership relations in their unity and gradual evolution. They characterize the way in which the social form affects the nature as well as the mode of reproduction of the interdependence between the subjects of production and the way of reproduction of the subjects engaged in this relation.

3. These economic relations reproduce themselves and become independent in the form of organizational-technical, organizational-economic and socio-economic relations. The economic relation develops at the same time from the production of material things to the production of humans and from the reproduction of humans to the reproduction of material things. The process of development of an economic relation thus proceeds through the development of a material base of this relation, through gradual development of the structure of productive forces, starting with the very organization of production, over the objects and means of labour the technology) and science to the social factor.

4. The ownership relations are in reality manifested in the organization of production, which at a certain level of its development stimulates the origination of a new technology. The technical progress is an outcome if the materialization of the contradictive evolution of economic relations. The economic relations are converted into technical relations.

5. Each technical novelty has at the beginning its source in the evolution of contradictions inherent in the economic relations, their structured reproduction and their personification in the subjects of production. Then it exists as an idea in a human brain in the form of subjective mediation and resolution of these contradictions. Only after this it takes on its material form of invention, innovation and their extension. Therefore each revolution in the field of productive forces starts as an ideological revolution and is followed by the revolution in natural sciences, technology, communications, agriculture and demography.