11

p The economic content of historical progress is extremely broad and many-sided, but at all stages of mankind’s development it has ultimately been determined by the objective needs of increasing the productive forces of society. The growth of production and deepening of the social division of labour stimulated by these needs provide the necessary material preconditions for passing from lower to higher socio-economic formations, and for the succession of one historical epoch by another. As Karl Marx wrote in the preface to the first German edition of Capital, from his standpoint the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history.  [11•1 

p That fundamental theoretical proposition, which made it possible for the first time to put study of the inner logic of social development on a sound scientific basis, was the outcome of the investigation and generalisation of a truly gigantic amount of factual material. Horizons new in principle were thereby opened up for the social sciences, political economy included. At the same time this inference by no means implied denial of the significance of subjective factors for society’s progressive movement. It followed that the sole real possibility of a scientific understanding of the role and place of subjective factors in mankind’s material and spiritual affairs arises only from study of the objective patterns of the movement of social production. As Marx indicated:

p My standpoint ... can less than any other make thn individual responsible for relations whose creature lie socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.  [11•2 

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p The most important of the tasks facing Marx in his investigation of the then dominant historical formation was study of the laws of capitalist production operating and materialised, as he put it, with iron necessity. By characterising a law as an inner and necessary connection between phenomena, he demonstrated in detail that only the disclosure of that kind of inter-relation, manifested in the form of a tendency, leads to understanding of the objective processes of social development. That conception in turn has to serve as the point of departure for man’s mastery of the laws of this development, and for his conscious, purposeful activity. Social activity, moreover, as the founders of MarxismLeninism demonstrated in detail, is decisively mediated by the interaction and struggle of the classes that arise and develop on the basis of the material conditions already created at any given period.

p The Marxian principles of appraising the mainsprings of the historical process have a universal character. In other words, they are the initial socio-economic premises of a theoretical analysis of the patterns of social development both of countries taken separately and of mankind as a whole. The fundamental nature of these principles is coming out now with extraordinary clarity, when the world socialist system, and the scientific and technical revolution developing within the context of the productive forces of society as a whole, are having an ever increasing effect on growth of mankind’s production capability, and on extension and consolidation of both the economic and the scientific and technical interconnections of the world economy of the present transitional period.  [12•1 

p It was the discovery and investigation of the patterns of development of social production that first placed study of the productive forces, and of the socio-economic structure of society, on a genuine scientific basis, and made it possible to bring out the inner causes of this development as a process of natural history.

p Only the reduction of social relations to production relations and of the latter to the level of the productive forces (Lenin stressed), provided a firm basis for the conception that the 13 development of formations of society is a process of natural history. And it goes without saying thai without such a view there can be no social science.  [13•1 

p Clarification of the ways capitalism took shape as a world system is an integral component of Marxist-Leninist political economy. Marx, who attached the greatest importance to this system’s international economic interconnections, proposed to complete his fundamental work on the anatomy of capitalist society with a comprehensive analysis of matters embracing the international relations of capitalist production and the world market, including world economic crises. In his scheme for subsequent work on Capital, he wrote:

p The disposition of material has evidently to he made in such a way that [section] one comprises general abstract definitions, which therefore appertain in some measure to all social formations, but in the sense set forth earlier. Two, the categories which constitute the internal structure of bourgeois society and on which the principal classes are based. Capital, wage-labour, landed property, and their relations to one another. Town and country. The three large social classes; exchange between them. Circulation. The (private) credit system. Three, the State as the epitome of bourgeois society. Analysis of its relations to itself. The ‘unproductive’ classes. Taxes. National debt. Public-credit. Population. Colonies. Emigration. Four, international conditions of production. International division of labour. International exchange. Export and import. Rate of exchange. Five, world market and crises.  [13•2 

p This task, titanic in its conception, was not completed, especially its concluding points. Nevertheless, in the volumes of Capital already written, and in a number of other works, Marx succeeded in comprehending and defining the initial theoretical premises of the investigation of many decisive aspects of the problems behind the forming of capitalism’s world economic connections. Otherwise it would have been impossible to define the place of this formation in sufficient detail in the series of successive exploiter formations. Study of the patterns of these relations makes it possible to analyse the causes of their rise, development, 14 and flourishing more deeply, and also to bring out with sufficient scientific reliability the irreconcilable contradictions of the capitalist mode of production that predetermine its historically transitional character.

p The rapidity of the forming of a world system of capitalism in the last decades of the nineteenth century made it more and more necessary to continue the systems analysis begun by Marx of the interaction of the indissolubly linked domestic and international relations of production. Such an analysis was also essential because of the rise of qualitatively new phenomena in the capitalist system through the change in it from free competition to the domination of monopolies, and the growing over of capitalism into a new, imperialist stage.

p At the time, too, political division of the world was completed. A period was established in world politics of the omnipotence of the monopoly capital of the colonial powers, between whom a fierce struggle developed for world hegemony and to redivide the already shared out colonies, semi- colonies, and spheres of influence. As a result even the most economically backward countries, in which various forms of precapitalist social relations still predominated, were drawn into the maelstrom of the international interconnections of capitalist production.

p By the beginning of the twentieth century capital had completed the formation of a world economic system. Investigation of it became a most pressing task of the social sciences, above all of political economy. There arose a need for further development of Marxist economic theory in the light of the new facts; and it is not fortuitous that an all- embracing description of this economic system in its monopoly stage in fact became the cornerstone of Lenin’s theory of imperialism.

p In the foreword to his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, written already after the October Socialist Revolution in Russia, Lenin specially stressed that

p the main purpose of the book was, and remains, to present, on the basis of the"summarised returns of irrefutable bourgeois statistics, and the admissions of bourgeois scholars of all countries, a composite picture of the world capitalist system in its international relationships at the beginning of the twentieth century— on the eve of the first world imperialist war.  [14•1 

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p There was then no broader and more complicated object of study in the economic sciences, and could not be. Its study is comparable, at the very least, to analysis of an object consisting of a host of sub-systems each of which in turn includes a countless number of ‘cells’ that are in constant change and motion.

p Any of the sub-systems of the world capitalist economy, or of its component‘cells’, can and undoubtedly should bo examined separately, taking into account in the main only the inner stimuli of its motion, abstracting from its interaction with the whole. This approach is justified and makes it possible to bring out both the specific features of the given part’s development and certain of the concrete manifestations of the general patterns. As regards the capitalist world economy, however, and in general any other macro-economic system, it does not make it possible to characterise the whole object of study as a unity with any, in any way adequate, fullness, and it can lead, moreover, to a garbled representation of its patterns even when one and the same phenomenon is observed in various countries or sectors of the economy.

p In studying the capitalist world economy the investigator is faced, in all its acuteness, with the need to single out from a boundless sea of facts and intersecting processes those real tendencies that in their aggregate and interconnection actually determine the whole picture of its development in a given historical situation, and that enable him to judge the main directions of the movement of the world economy, and not partial or superficial events and phenomena, or those specific to the economic situation of separate countries, the diversity of which cannot be taken into consideration by any theory. Lenin drew special attention in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism to the point that, in order to characterise the objective economic position of the whole system of capitalism and its international relations,

p one must not take examples or isolated data (in view of the extreme complexity of the phenomena of social life it is always possible to select any number of examples or separate data lo prove any proposition), but all the data on the basis of economic life in all the belligerent countries and the whole world.  [15•1 

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p The key to theoretical study of the aggregate of the processes that characterise the main trends of development of the capitalist economic system was Marx’s discovery of the paramount importance of production. It is in concrete study of the patterns of the movement of social production, and of its class character and inseparable unity with the realm of market relations and of distribution and consumption, that the living soul of Marxist-Leninist political economy consists.

p Any economic theory remains sterile or still-born if it is not based on detailed analysis of the facts and arises in isolation from them. It will not be able to explain the real tendencies and, consequently, to discover the objective course of social development. At the same time the concreteness of the study of any economic system, however wide, and even more of such a many-sided one as the capitalist world economy, certainly presupposes clarification and systematisation of the most essential processes in their dynamics, and determination of their hierarchical interdependence. In other words, coucreteness presupposes in this case the need to employ the method of scientific abstraction, i.e. abstraction which, in Lenin’s words, reflects nature ’more deeply, truly and completely’.  [16•1  In this connection definition of initial premises of the methodology of a study of the comprehensive development of real economic trends becomes very important.

p It is typical of capitalist economics, in contrast to Marxist, to try and put markets and market relations at the centre of its analysis and not production and the class relations immanently inherent in it. The former are looked upon as determinant or self-sufficing, allegedly developing of themselves and exerting a dominant influence on the production process. The idea of the primariness of the sphere of circulation, with very substantial differences in the evaluation of the main moments of the functioning of economic systems of any scale, has dominated capitalist economics throughout its history. True, its original theoretical postulates are now being criticised more and more often by many leading Western economists, people like Samuelson, Galbraith, Myrdal, Erhard, Leontief, Balassa, and Tinbergen.

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p Still, tliis idea has continued in fact to permeate capitalist literature in one form or another since World War 11, whether it deals witJi capitalism’s internal or world economic problems. In their detailed work on the growth of the international economy, Kenwood and Lougheed declare the central sphere of their study to be that of circulation, since, as they write:

the exchange ol goods and services is the means through which independent economic units enter into economic relations with one another and become part of local or national economic community. An exchange passes beyond a country’s boundaries, national economic systems become parts of broader regional, continental or world economy.  [17•1 

Prof. P. T. Ellsworth stresses, in his textbook, which was widely used in the United States and Great Britain in the 50s and 60s, that the very term ’international economies’ indicates ’that it concerns itself with the economic relations between nations’.  [17•2  Such a posing of the matter is quite typical of present-day Western economic literature.

p When investigating capitalism’s world economic problems, capitalist economists do not, of course, ignore theoretical analysis of the international aspects of the production process, and study many of them very thoroughly, particularly the dynamics of its productive forces, comparations of the level of economic development of various countries and regions, problems of the international division of labour, capital exports, production and technological competition, integrational processes within the various international economic groupings, migration of labour, and so on.

p All these processes, however, arc willy-nilly analysed from ideological positions that pursue definite class interests of the capitalists. The world economy is studied mainly from the standpoint of the determining effect of the trends of world supply and demand on production, and of opportunities for effective employment of the market mechanism of state monopoly methods of regulating international economic relations. Objectively the main job of this approach is 18 to conceal the antagonistic essence of the international relations of production under capitalism. Capitalist economists’ endeavour to survey the world capitalist economy out of the context of its organic link with the patterns of development of the corresponding exploiter relations of production, and to represent it simply as a mechanically formed aggregate of national markets within the context of the international exchange of goods and services, also serves the same purpose. On this basis capitalist political economy has time and again exerted great efforts to revive the gimcrack idea whose essence is that modern capitalism is still ahle to generate adequate conditions for future ‘harmonious’ development of the world economy and in the long run to eradicate its deepest inherent defects and contradictions.

p Marxist-Leninist economics considers this matter from fundamentally different theoretical positions. It substantiates in detail the proposition that the world capitalist economy, like a commodity economy of any scale (whether local, regional, or national), includes such inseparably interconnected and jointly subordinated elements as production, markets, and a system of socio-economic relations arising from a corresponding division of labour between economic units and producers. Although market factors of exchange and distribution figure primarily on the surface in capitalism’s international economic interconnections, it is not they, however, but the social relations in the production process, that play the basic role when the antagonistic, class nature and decisive trends of development of capitalism’s world economic system are investigated.

The capitalist mode of production (Marx wrote) is ... a historical means of developing the material forces of production and creating an appropriate world market and is, at the same time, a continual conflict uetwcen this its historical task and its own corresponding relations of social production.  [18•1 

This conclusion has acquired special methodological significance for analysing the deep-seated crisis processes in the modern world capitalist market. It provides an opportunity for a scientific systematising and comprehensive investigation of the objectively operating patterns and irreconcilable 19 contradictions of capitalism’s international market relations, which stem from the socio-economic nature of this mode of production.