p More than 150 years ago a crisis of overproduction developed for the first time within the young capitalism, seemingly endowed with unlimited forces, that largely determined the subsequent course of the economic evolution of capitalist society. Its epicentre was England, then the main industrial power of capitalism, which had already created a world market and was laying claim to world domination.

p Isolated phenomena of the cyclic development of capitalist production had already occurred in separate industries even before the first industrial overproduction crisis of 1825. But it was in the second quarter of the nineteenth century that the cyclicity of capitalism’s economic growth began to take on a general international character under the influence of the interconnections of the world market. Marx, attaching paramount importance to this fact, wrote:

p The commercial crises of the nineteenth century, and in particular the great crises of 1825 and 1836 [were] no longer a matter of single economic phenomena but of big storms on the world market, in which the antagonism of all elements in the bourgeois process of production explodes.  [179•1 

p From then on the world capitalist system, developing intensively in breadth and depth, began regularly to suffer overproduction crises. In the wake of a cyclic upswing there inevitably set in a time of an absolute fall in or marked slowing of the growth rales of production, international trade, and business in general. The crisis phase was succeeded by a depression, recovery, and a new upswing.

p Marx, pointing out the principal historical premises of the origin of the capitalist world cycle, stressed that it

p was only the period when machine industry, having sent down deep enough roots, exercised a preponderant influence on the whole national production; when, thanks to it, foreign commerce began to take precedence over home trade; when the world market successively annexed vast areas in the New World, Asia, and Australia; and finally when the industrial nations entering the lists had become sufficiently numerous; it was only from that period that the recurring cycles whose successive phases cover years, and which always end in a general crisis, the end of one cycle and the starting point of another.  [180•1 

p Study of the laws causing periodic slumps in production within the whole capitalist system and in its component parts, became a cardinal task of Marxist political economy that has retained its importance down to the present.

p Quite naturally capitalist economics in turn has paid increasing attention to this, for it, extremely important problem. Each current world economic cycle is analysed in detail, numerous facts are brought out leading to a lowering or a raising of growth rates in one country or another, and in separate industries, but, while performing a certain social job, capitalist economists as a rule willy-nilly try however they can to skirt around those prime causes of capitalism’s cyclic development that disclose its historically transitory character. Their starting point is that each economic crisis, taken separately, is the consequence of certain, even numerous, but wholly removable disturbances of the capitalist reproduction process caused in the main by the concrete market situation at any particular moment. Apart from its purely practical purposes, the work of these writers at the same time pursues a specific ideological aim, i.e. of refuting one of the most important conclusions of Marxist-Leninist political economy, which is that the main contradiction of 181 capitalism manifests itself with irresistible force in cyclic development, and that ’so long as the system lasts’, successive cyclic booms and slumps ’must be borne with, like the natural changes of the seasons’.  [181•1 

p How many times already has capitalist political economy tried to proclaim the advent of an era of crisis-free development and to give decisive battle to Marxism-Leninism in that connection. Efforts of that kind were intensified after World War II, given economic competition of the two world social systems. The specific features of the development of the world capitalist economy after the war, which accelerated the general growth rates of the productive forces compared with the interwar period, and a definite modification of the duration and depth of the phases of the cycle in the leading capitalist countries created fertile soil for reviving the idea, in the 50s and 60s, that there was a real possibility of capitalism’s achieving crisis-free, ‘harmonious’ growth of production.

p A broad propaganda campaign usually develops during upswings around the theories underlying this idea. During the next crisis phase capitalist economists again and again return to the thesis that it is to be explained solely by chance temporary ‘difficulties’ of one sort or another in the reproduction process having no inherent connection with one another (whose removal would subsequently enable the capitalist economy finally to rid itself of the negative consequences of cyclic development). In any case capitalist writers try to refute, or at least to throw doubt on, the general conclusion of Marxist theory that the business cycle is constitutionally inherent not only in national economies taken separately but also and chiefly in capitalism as a world socio-economic formation.  [181•2 

p At the same time a striving to avoid even the very posing of the most acute social problems of the cyclic character of capitalism’s development is beginning to be typical of general theoretical work. Characteristically, the commonest theories of recent decades of capitalism’s transformation under the impact of the present scientific and technical revolution into some sort of new social system—Bell’s ’ postindustrial society’, Galbraith’s ’new industrial society’ or ‘tcchnostructure’, Brzezinski’s ’technctronic society’, Dahrendorf’s ’post-capitalist society’, etc.—either ignore tbe principal problems of cyclic booms and crises altogether in practice, or push them far into the background.

p Karl Marx, having subjected the socio-economic foundation of capitalism to thorough scientific analysis, for the first time brought out the causal connection between the movement of the world cycle (and the cyclic development of its components) and the deep antagonisms of this mode of production. A sharp polemic develops in capitalist political economy and sociology around this Marxist tenet during each successive economic crisis. Many of their loading spokesmen, moreover, while not denying that economic cycles and crises used to be inherent in capitalism, base themselves on its having passed, since the war, to an allegedly fundamentally different stage of development, in which its former antagonisms are] losing their sharpness and may be successfully overcome by state capitalist programming and control.  [182•1 

In this connection a version has begun to be intensively disseminated in the Western literature that the specific features of the postwar’dynamics of capitalist production^(and to a decisive degree of industrial production) allegedly do not provide grounds for concluding that the patterns of its cyclic development disclosed by Marxist political economy continue’to operate. It is often stated, moreover, that if the movement of industrial cycles and crises can be observed within separate national economies, this cyclicity lias either 183 disappeared or begun to do so on a world scale since the war. Hence optimistic conclusions are drawn about capitalism’s growing over into some phase of ‘harmonious’ development. The three economic slumps suffered by world capitalism in the 70s and early 80s, it is true, led to a marked fall in this optimism. They again graphically demonstrated that the cyclic upheavals underlying crises of industrial production are irrevocable features of the postwar development of the whole socio-economic system of capitalism as previously. It lias become very obvious, moreover, that in spite of the present-day historical situation’s extremely essential differences from that established in the world economy at the start of the 30s, the menace of a repetition of all-embracing cyclic upheavals on the scale of the 1929-33 crisis has by no means disappeared. Furthermore, as the deep-seated contradictions of capitalism are aggravated, with ^timo this menace continues to grow. That fact has been more and more widely recognised in capitalist economic literature since the mid708.  [183•1