p The decades since the war have been marked by extremely far-reaching changes of world historical significance in all spheres of human affairs. Never before has society experienced such substantial transformations in its socio- economic and political structure in so short a time. Taking them globally, two dialectically linked trends attract attention first of all.

p One is the forming and rapid growth of a world system of socialism through the revolutionary replacement of capitalist and pre-capitalist social relations by socialist ones in a number of countries. The other is the steady deepening of capitalism’s contradictions within the contracting limits of the non-socialist world. Both these processes provide objective prerequisites for further development of the general crisis of capitalism, an inherent, decisive factor of which is the crisis of the world capitalist ^’economy.

p Since World War! II there have been very substantial changes in this economy compared with earlier stages that have affected very important aspects of the economic affairs and international relations of all the countries of the nonsocialist world that comprise it, though by no means to the same extent. Most of them are occurring directly or indirectly under the influence of comparatively new trends in the economic competition of the two world social systems. These trends in turn inevitably reflect the long-term consequences of the break-up of the colonial system, the ever increasing, extremely contradictory influences of the scientific and technical revolution on the productive forces and structure of social production of the various groups of countries, qualitatively new phenomena as regards internationalisation of their social production and the international division of 6 labour, the mounting struggle of the emancipated countries against neocolonial exploitation, for real equality in international economic relations.

p The economic and social instability of the world capitalist system became unusually intense at the end of the period we study, especially as a result of the marked sharpening in the 70s of the energy, raw material, inflation, cyclic, international financial, and other major problems of world capitalist economy. These crisis processes, which had a logical continuation and development in the years following, developed in a complicated, eventful situation of intense struggle between two lines in world politics, viz., on the one hand, that of curbing the arms race, consolidating peace and detente, and defending the sovereign rights and freedoms of nations pursued by world socialism and the whole peaceloving mankind, and, on the other hand, the imperialist line of undermining detente and stepping up the arms race, and policy of threats and interference in others’ affairs and suppression of the national liberation struggle.

p Capitalism, as was stressed at the 26th Congress of the CPSU, has not, of course, congealed in the present conditions of its general crisis; from the beginning of the 70s through to the early 80s alone, it has experienced three economic recessions in spite of capitalist governments’ counter-crisis measures and all their efforts to prevent new slumps in production. Inflation has attained an unprecedented scale in these countries. As the Central Committee’s report to the Congress noted:

p It is more than obvious that slate regulation of the capitalist economy is ineffective. The measures that bourgeois governments take against inflation foster stagnation of production and growth of unemployment; what they do to contain the critical drop in production lends still greater momentum to inflation.  [6•1 

p The more that facts are accumulated revealing critical trends in, and specific features of, the growth of the productive forces in the economies of the main groups of countries of world capitalism, the more pressing is it becoming to systematise, generalise, and interpret them in the aggregate and in their inter-relationship. A problem of fundamental 7 importance is arising, viz., whether a complex approach to the tackling of such a broad task is possible at all. For the aggregate of facts on the economic activity of all countries and of all the industries of world capitalism (in their dynamics and interconditioning, and their repeatedly intersecting national and international connections) embraces a truly immense range of matters, each of which plays a far from identical role in the development both of the national states, and the industries and spheres of their economies, taken separately, and of the world economy as a whole.

p The answer to this question was first given by Marxism; and it consisted not so much in the discovery of some allembracing method for summarising a vast number of facts and trends as in its bringing out the theoretical and methodological premises of a systems approach to analysis of the inner logic and patterns of the capitalist system’s functioning at the various concrete stages of its ‘self-movement’. Lenin stressed, when speaking of the changes constantly occurring in the capitalist world economy, that the sumtotal of these changes in all their ramifications in the capitalist world economy could not bo grasped even by seventy Marxes. The most important thing is that the laws of these changes have been discovered, that the objective logic of these changes and of their historical development has in its chief and basic features been disclosed.  [7•1  It is its understanding of the objective laws of social development that has enabled Marxist-Leninist economic science to tackle elaboration of the principles of a scientific methodology for analysing capitalism as a world economic system.

p The characteristics of the most important stages of the long forming and evolution of this system taken together with the genesis of the capitalist mode of production, the world market, and the aims and methods of colonial exploitation of some countries by others, constitute the main substance of Part I of this book, in which special attention is paid to defining the object of study and the internal contradictions and long-term trends of its development that shape the basic causes of the rise and inevitable deepening of the crisis of the world capitalist economy today. The data adduced will provide the necessary theoretical foundation for bringing ont the themes of the succeeding chapters.

p The general results and decisive trends of the development of the postwar world capitalist economy are examined in Part II, above all the ecanomic factors and social consequences of the long-term shifts in the structure and dynamics of both the social production and the consumption of all the countries of this economy taken together. Then follows a detailed comparison of two groups of countries (viz., capitalist and developing) in order to bring out the specific character of their postwar development, including the impact of the scientific and technical revolution and break-up of the colonial system on their economies. The trends in the growth of population and manpower have been analysed from the same standpoint, and also the productivity of social labour in the main geographical regions of the non-socialist world. All this has enabled us to attempt a more circumstantial and detailed estimate of the changes that have come to light in the regional structure of the distribution of the leading sectors of social production in both the industrial centres and the agrarian and primary producer periphery of capitalism. The problem of the cyclic movement of the postwar world capitalist economy has a place of fundamental importance in the book. Analysis of it helps clarify many features of the regular intensification in recent decades of the uneven economic growth and structural instability of modern capitalism’s international business relations.

p The main lines of the intertwining development of the industrial and agrarian and raw material base of the postwar world capitalist economy are analysed in Part III. Study of the changes in the manufacturing industries in capitalist and developing countries that are most significant as regards their socio-economic consequences occupy the foreground. Then the long-term shifts in the dynamics, volume and structure of the production of raw materials and in the movement of prices of industrial items, farm produce and raw materials on the world capitalist market are examined. On that basis a number of objectively operating trends are brought out, in which the essential features of the present stage of the crisis of the imperialist system of international division of labour are being more and more clearly manifested within the framework of the world economic relations of recent years.

p It would not be legitimate to appraise all the trends studied in isolation from the decisive patterns of the world 9 revolutionary process of modern times. As Leonid Brezhnev stressed at the 25th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union:

p This is an epoch of radical social change. Socialism’s positions arc expanding and growing stronger. The victories of the national liberation movement are opening up now horizons for countries that have won independence. The class struggle of the working people against monopoly oppression, against the exploiting order, is gaining in intensity. The scale of the revolutionary-democratic, anti-imperialist movement is steadily growing. Taken as a whole, this signifies development of the world revolutionary process.  [9•1 

p This book does not claim, of course, to be an exhaustive analysis of the problems posed; many of them certainly need further study, tidying up, and concretisation. Because of the inadequacy or scrappiness of reliable statistics and general economic data, separate propositions of the themes are reviewed in outline or are advanced tentatively. When the conclusions are based on published work or well-known data the exposition has been compressed to a resume, and references are given to the sources containing the detailed argumentation.

The Russian original appeared in 1978. In the present English edition the author has tried to continue analysis of the problems and trends studied, employing the latest data available to him. On that basis certain amendments have been made, and the conclusions and estimates of the probable outlook for the development of the world capitalist economy have been elaborated and broadened.