p The structural changes in the industries of any large economic system of any kind embrace an intricate bundle of extremely varied but inseparably linked phenomenon and processes. In summarised form they display many features of the main development trends of society’s productive powers in any one historical interval or another. Their generalised characteristic is a high degree of abstraction, necessary for scientific analysis, uniting the most diverse types of man’s productive activity in a single whole. As Marx wrote:

p Production in general is an abstraction, but a sensible abstraction in so far as it actually emphasises and defines the common aspects and thus avoids repetition. Yet this general concept, or the common aspect which has been brought to light by comparison, is itself a multifarious compound comprising divergent categories.  [103•1 

p The indicators mentioned in the preceding chapters of the resultant development trends in the postwar capitalist economy also reflect a high degree of generalisation. Nevertheless they are extremely important for a combined study of the real course of events. A scientific methodology for analysing broad social processes, including economic ones, requires us without fail ’to proceed from concrete realities, not from abstract postulates’.  [103•2 ,

p In this connection Marxism-Leninism has always attached paramount importance to developing methods of making qualitative, i.e. statistical, estimates of socio-economic processes. Lenin, stressing the need for a concrete approach to 104 study of the main forms of capitalism’s development in industry, wrote that one must examine the development of any particular form, after bringing out its essence and distinguishing features, by means of ‘properly compiled statistics’.  [104•1  He made the same demand in regard to agriculture, for study of which we needed ’a picture of the process as a whole, with all the trends taken into account and summed up in the form of a resultant’.  [104•2  Only in that way can the decisive tendencies of economic development be concretely determined and the main point in them separated from the chance and secondary.

p In his article ’Statistics and Sociology’, written in 1917, Lenin stressed that

p the most widely used, and most fallacious, method in the realm of social phenomena is to tear out individual minor facts and juggle with examples. Selecting chance examples presents no difficulty at all, but is of no value, or of purely negative value, for in each individual case everything hinges on the historically concrete situation. Facts, if we lake them in their entirety, in their interconnection, are not only stubborn things, but undoubtedly proof-bearing things. Minor facts, if taken out of their entirety, out of their interconnection, if they are arbitrarily selected and torn out of context, are merely things for juggling, or even worse.  [104•3 

p Hence a problem of vital interest for the study of social systems of any size, namely that of analysing the interaction of the whole and the part, inevitably arises, because the universal cannot exist otherwise than ’in the individual and through the individual’.  [104•4 

This problem becomes particularly acute when we are trying to elucidate the dynamics of the long-term tendencies in the distribution of the productive forces within such a broad system as the world capitalist economy. In it the ‘individual’ is not in fact simply the national economy of each country (in which the universal is also manifested 105 in an infinite variety of partial cases and specifically national features of development), but primarily embraces various groupings of these countries, the most important aspects of whose economies are united by the most essential common features into major sub-systems of the world economy. In the present historical situation these sub-systems include, first of all, the developed capitalist countries and the developing countries, i.e. the former colonies and semi-colonies that have thrown off foreign domination and taken the road, within that economy, of anti-imperialist struggle for independent national development. It would be logical to begin our description of the changes in the postwar distribution of the non-socialist world’s productive power with an analysis of the distribution of its main industries in the light of Lenin’s law of the uneven economic development of capitalism.