p The history of the world economic system oi capitalism is inseparable from that of its conversion into a dominant economic formation whose structure is considered by Marxist-Leninist economics as a living, constantly developing organism and not as something mechanically interlocked and therefore admitting of all kinds of arbitrary combinations of the individual social elements. Study of its current trends of development and of its antagonistic contradictions necessarily calls for a determination (albeit very cursory) of the main stages of the passage of international capitalist relations of production from one qualitative state to another.

The objective preconditions of the deepening crisis and decline of the previously all-embracing system of the world capitalist economy were built into the ’genetic code’ of capitalism itself. The detailed theoretical analysis of them made in their day by the founders of Marxist-Leninist political economy helps bring out both the general patterns and the specilic features of its long-term line of development in recent decades.