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p A multitude of the most various factors in the concrete conditions of the separate countries have determined the specific nature of the changes in aggregate rates of economic growth in the postwar capitalist world compared with preceding stages, but when we look at this capitalist economy as an integral socio-economic system, the most essential of the bundle of long-term processes operating in it and reciprocally affecting each other can be distinguished. Those of them that decisively reflect the features of its present-day development and are at the same time furthering a deepening of its antagonistic contradictions are becoming of primary importance.

p These processes above all include the scientific and technical revolution, which, based on the major theoretical discoveries in science of recent decades, is objectively not the achievement of any one separate country or group of countries, but is the result of the creative activity of all mankind penetrating deeper and deeper into the innermost secrets of nature. The immense potentialities of this revolution can 78 only be most fully realised under socialism, in which science is being converted into a true productive force. State- monopoly capitalism in turn is striving in every way to put the results of the revolutionary changes in science and engineering at the service of its own class interests. As the report of the Central Committee of the CPSU to its 24th Congress stressed:

the monopolies have been making extensive use of scientific and technical achievements to fortify their positions, to enhance the efficiency and accelerate the pace of production, and to intensify the exploitation and oppression of the working people.  [78•1 

There is now, in fact, no major sphere of the capitalist economy that has not been directly or indirectly affected by this revolution.

p The taking up of the latest discoveries of science and advances of engineering, especially in industry, has considerably stimulated further growth of productivity in the whole economy, but the fruits of scientific and technical progress have been primarily realised in capitalism’s industrial centres. A graphic idea of this can be got from the following figures. Whereas the average growth rates of labour productivity in the industry of all countries in the 60s and 70s were roughly 3.2 per cent, they were 3.9 per cent in the developed countries and 1.5 per cent in the developing ones. It needs to be remembered, moreover, that this tendency did not develop in a straight line, but was very closely linked with the cyclic movement of capitalism. During the world economic crisis of the mid-70s, for instance, productivity growth rates fell in absolute terms in most capitalist countries and many developing ones.  [78•2  At the turn to the 80s, in the process of the next cyclic fall in production in the industrial centres there was another significant decline in the growth rates of productivity, and in a number of countries (the USA, Great Britain, etc.) it fell absolutely on a national scale.  [78•3 

p Capitalism’s postwar economic growth, of course, was not 79 simply due to the effect of the scientific and technical revolution. This stimulus was primarily felt in the most monopolised and economically powerful sectors of the industrial countries’ economies, so that this tendency inevitably went hand in hand with a marked intensification of the disproportionality and unevenness of development of the various countries and industries that brought with it an immense social explosive charge. The scientific and technical revolution, by furthering growth of the productive forces, is not only leading to reproduction on an ever greater scale, and to an ever greater acuteness of all the social antagonisms of the capitalism, but is also giving rise to new, unresolvable contradictions, including

p the contradiction between the unlimited possibilities opened up by the scientific and technological revolution and the roadblock raised by capitalism to their utilisation for the benefit of society as a whole. Capitalism squanders national wealth, allocating for war purposes a great proportion of scientific discoveries and immense material resources.  [79•1 

p The long-term development processes of the postwar world economy cannot be studied in isolation from the dynamics of the growth of manpower. The estimates deducible from the international statistics indicate that the size of the employable population (aged 15 to 64) had increased by nearly 500 million at the beginning of the 80s compared with the start of the 60s, which was governed ultimately by the dynamics of the growth of their human resources. The latter grew by more than 1,000 million over the same period.

p The drawing of considerable new manpower into the process of extended reproduction (even allowing for the permanent existence in the developed countries of a reserve army of unemployed, and the immense agrarian overpopulation of Third World countries) has been an important factor, in the last analysis, governing the forward movement of production in capitalist countries. The expansion of employment 80 in the sphere of material production has been mainly in industry, in which it rose by more than 60 per cent on the whole in the 60s and 70s (by roughly a quarter in the developed countries, and by double in the developing countries).  [80•1 

p The growth of manpower, and above all of the working class, is a natural process, analysis of which helps bring out the class essence of the results and perspectives of capitalism’s long development. At the beginning of the modem transitional period, Lenin, noting that in any period, however long, there were and would be ’various deviations from the average type and mean tempo of the movement’ in it and ’individual and partial movements, now forward now backward’, had written:

p We cannot know how rapidly and how successfully the various historical movements in a given epoch will develop, but wo can and do know which class stands at the hub of one epoch or another, determining its main content, the main direction of its development, the main characteristics of the historical situation in that epoch, etc.  [80•2 

p The development and expansion of the working class’s influence in society are preparing the objective conditions for growth of the class struggle both for radical socio-economic reforms in capitalist countries and for the moulding of a world system of truly equal, mutually beneficial, all-round economic, scientific, technical, and cultural co-operation of nations. All these processes can be traced particularly clearly in today’s situation.

p To return, however, to the problem of capitalism’s postwar growth of production, we must stress that it was due not so much to extensive expansion of the mass of labour as to a further rise in its effectiveness. More than threefifths of the increase in the aggregate GDP since the war has come from the increase in labour productivity. As follows from one of the most important tenets of Marxist-Leninist political economy, viz., that all society’s material goods are created by people and their labour, there is a definite functional dependence between the increase in the mass of labour, its productivity, and the growtli of production.

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p In other words, the GDP growth rates of world capitalism considered above are functions in the last analysis of two variables, namely, the growth rales of the mass of labour and the growtli of labour productivity.

p Any determination of the results of economic activity from society’s expenditure of labour over a certain length of time in such a big, heterogeneous, unstable system as the capitalist world economy is of course very arbitrary. Nevertheless il can not only provide some support for a retrospective analysis of the long-term line of development, but can also be used, in our view, as an approach to estimating the further growth of the GDP, since the scale of the increase of manpower and labour productivity both lend themselves, to some extent, to theoretically justified extrapolation.

p Today’s trends of long-term development cannot be evaluated fully enough without allowing for the postwar features and internationalisation of social production in the old colonial periphery. The processes developing there in recent decades have not only led to considerable shifts in the historically formed political structure of the world capitalist system but have also promoted the creation of important conditions for achieving new advances of the productive forces of former colonies and semi-colonies that had already then been drawn by expatriate capital into the maelstrom of world economic relations. The break-up of the colonial empires also had a marked effect on the rates and direction of economic growth in this system as a whole.

p The poor development of the statistical base of the period of colonial domination makes it extremely diflicnlt to compare the dynamics of the growth and internalionalisation of the developing countries in the postwar decades with their preceding development. Still, however, certain comparisons can be made.

p As the estimates of UN economists indicate, the annual growth of the gross product in those countries was extremely low in the interwar years and on the whole did not exceed 2 per cent.  [81•1  In the postwar decades there have been certain changes in this respect. The mean annual growth rates of the GDP for the whole group of developing countries we estimate to have been 5.6 per cent in the 60s to 70s, i.e. to 82 have been higher than the corresponding indicators for the whole world capitalist economy (4.3 per cent). In other words, growth of the GDP in developing countries was one of conspicuous factors of the ahove-mentioned postwar speeding up of the development of that economy’s potential. At the beginning of the 80s the share of the developing countries in the total volume of the gross product created by capitalism reached 20 per cent, or was more than 60 per cent of that of Western Europe.

p This line of accelerated development is traceable mainly in industry (for all the instability and extreme unevenness of these countries’ growth). On the whole their industrial output increased more than threefold from 1960 to 1981, and at the end of it was about 19 per cent of the aggregate industrial production of all non-socialist countries.  [82•1  At the same time there was also a tendency toward a certain, though not so marked, acceleration of the international trade of the developing countries as a group. The bulk of it, moreover, around 75 per cent in the early 80s, was as before with developed capitalist countries.  [82•2 

p The tendency toward an acceleration of the economic development of former colonies in the postwar period is undisputed. In spite of it, however, their position in the capitalist world economy continues to be hard. The economic gap built up between them and a comparatively small group of industrially developed capitalist countries during the undivided sway of imperialism and colonialism remains immense. Furthermore it has continued to widen according to several indicators (above all in per capita GDP). The tendency toward a relative decline in their share in world capitalist trade manifested in recent decades has also played a substantial role in this. Their weight in the total trade of non- socialist countries (which was around a third in the early 50s) 83 had fallen to a quarter on the eve of the 80s. If we exclude the data on the comparatively small group of oil exporting countries, this indicator was only around a seventh at the end of the period under review.  [83•1 

p The growth and internationalising of the productive forces of developing and industrialised capitalist countries are closely interconnected processes. There is thereby an aggravation of one of the main manifestations of the uneven development of the capitalist world, far-reaching in its social consequences, the predominant trends in which are leading today to further intensiiication of this unevenness.

p The probability of such a course of events does not mean that any real slowing down of the rates of economic growth already achieved by developing countries is inevitable over any lengthy period. Rather, on the contrary, the further development of processes unfavourabe for them will foster a strengthening of the most diverse factors stimulating their economic growth in the last analysis.

p Those factors refer primarily to the objectively inevitable growth of their peoples’ anti-imperialist struggle for a stepping up of socio-economic progress and ending of survivals of colonialism in both their own countries and the sphere of world economic relations.  [83•2 

p World socialism’s steady support of this struggle will continue to operate in the same direction.

p It is also impossible, in this case, to disregard the already 84 clearly distinguishable line of capitalism’s neocolonialist strategy aimed at speeding up development of its agrarian and primary commodity producing periphery as profitable markets, sources of raw materials, and spheres of capital investment.  [84•1 

p The crisis of the colonial structure of the world capitalist economy will also probably develop further on the background of operation of a general tendency toward a certain speeding up of the growth rates of the productive forces in the liberated countries, and this development may in turn be governed by the fact that the struggle for national liberation in many of these countries is growing in practice into a fight against exploiter relations in general. Several of them, though still within the sphere of action of the patterns of the capitalist economy, have already taken a line of building a socialist society in the long run and have begun to carry out radical socio-economic reforms. A very special situation is thus building up in developing countries. New possibilities of socio-economic progress along roads of noncapitalist development have opened up before their peoples, although they are still in a special position in the world economy.

p These possibilities could only arise because world capitalism is no longer a closed economic system, and because the rapid extension and consolidation of developing countries’ equal, mutually advantageous relations with world socialism have in fact finally broken the previously undivided sway of the imperialist powers directly within this economy. As a result, loss of their monopoly position in the capitalist economy has been converted in today’s conditions into one of the decisive factors in the progressive deepening of its crisis.

p This process is shaping fundamentally new prospects for accelerating the emancipated countries’ development, growth of the revolutionary struggle to abolish the domination of expatriate capital, establish a socio-political system suitable for them, and progressively limit and liquidate 85 imperialism’s world economic relations. Their peoples have got the chance to take an ever more active part, together with the other progressive forces of the world, in the fight to build a truly world economic system that corresponds to the urgent tasks of today.

Allowance for all these factors distinguishing the most general indicators of the results of postwar economic development in their interconnection and interaction is acquiring an essential role for evaluating the changes in the sectoral structure of the GDP. Comparative analysis of the dynamics of the main industries helps us clarify many of the specific features and long-term trends in the genesis of its decisive contradictions in recent years.