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p It is becoming of paramount importance for analysis of the historical future of capitalism to investigate the longterm outlook of its cyclic development. It is therefore not fortuitous that this study is engaging the close attention of both Marxist and capitalist economists. The ideological struggle between them in this field is developing mainly around the fundamental causes of business cycles, especially around whether or not it is possible to eliminate sharp cyclic fluctuations of the economy within the framework of this mode of production, rather than in the sphere of estimating the scale and duration of already past cycles.

p Since the facts of the past speak for themselves, capitalist economists and sociologists always make great efforts to refute the Marxist-Leninist theory of cycles and crises at least when projected into the future. Their aim is to question, by any means whatever, the legitimacy of employing this theory to analyse any subsequent stage of the development of capitalism. Given the economic rivalry of the two world social systems, many present-day capitalist economists have begun to place special hopes on state-monopoly methods of counter-crisis policy. The compilers of President Kennedy’s economic report to^Congress, attaching decisive importance to these methods, remarked, for example, in 1962 that ’the business cycle does not have the inevitability of the 215 calendar’ for the United States.  [215•1  The same idea was also put forward in his next report. But such statements are clearly at .variance with all the facts of the past^and with the postwar trends of the economies of the USA [and other capitalist countries.  [215•2 

p As we have already remarked, there is a tendency in the Western literature, especially in publications that do not have very great confidence in the traditional postulates of capitalist political economy, to recognise the inevitability, in one way or another, of the cyclic development of the capitalist economy and its regularly alternating slumps and booms. But they combine attempts to examine the objective causes of the cyclicity with a steady striving to explain them each time by concrete spontaneous processes of one sort or another of the economic situation without reference to the general socio-economic patterns of the functioning of the capitalist mode of production.

p As Karl Marx pointed out in his day, students of capitalism’s cyclic development

p treat every new crisis as an insulated phenomenon, appearing for the first time in the social horizon, and, therefore, to be accounted for by incidents, movements and agencies altogether ^peculiar, or presumed to be peculiar, to the one period just elapsed between the penultimate and the ultimate revulsion. If natural philosophers had proceeded by the same puerile method, the world would be taken by surprise on the reappearance even of a comet.  [215•3 

p The same methodological approach continues to dominate capitalist economics today. The well-known American economist J. K. Galbraith, for instance, characterising the causes of the 1974-75 crisis in an interview entitled ’Why the Economy Is in a Mess—and What to Do about It’, said: 216

The recession was a matter of policy. I would attribute most of it to the use of tight money—-to the use of high interest rates to curb bank lending and thus to reduce inflation. There was, additionally, some overflow effect from the high oil prices.  [216•1 

Another American sociologist, Herman Kahn, Director of the Hudson Institute, declared at the end of 1974:

p My feeling is that we are going through a transition that could make the 1970s a turning point in the history of the world. In other words, we could be on the threshold of a long period of orderly and si/stained growth which will solve many of the problems everybody is worrying about today__ In fact, our studies at Hudson Institute suggest that what we’re actually going through now are mostly the growing pains of success and some elementary mismanagement.  [216•2 

p In addition, one often finds the idea in the postwar Western literature that capitalism will have to reckon in the future on the inevitability of disruptive consequences from future cyclic crises. The spokesmen of capitalist ruling circles are caused special disquiet by the fact that any ordinary economic crisis may he fraught, in a situation of an orgy of inflationary chaos, mounting instability of world capitalism’s monetary and financial system, and of sharp aggravation of its energy problems, etc., with far-reaching social upheavals. They naturally see the prime cause of such a danger, of course, not in the nature of capitalist production itself, or in its unresolved contradictions, but in the probability of individual statesmen pursuing ‘shortsighted’, ‘incompatible’ economic policies, or in serious disturbances of the machinery of world economic relations like the energy crisis, etc.

p When, for example, the world capitalist economy began, after the brief boom of 1972-73, to slide again into a recession, the British weekly The Economist wrote:

Britain may bo heading for its worst slump since the interwar years, because of an undeliberated repetition of the mistakes of 1970-71 on five times the scale.  [216•3 

About the same time David Rockefeller, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, warned in New York that the energy crisis ‘could’ precipitate a world depression.  [216•4 

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p During the 1074-75 world crisis the forecasts of economists in several capitalist countries began to foresee the probability of the onset of a subsequent business crisis.  [217•1 

p Such forecasts are very symptomatic, and reflect recognition of the fact thai state-monopoly capitalism’s many counter-crisis measures do not yield the expected effect, that the ultimately unmanageable chaos of capitalist economy engenders the cyclic character of its development and objectively carries within it a destructive potential of considerable force. For instance, a number of leading capitalist theoreticians of government counter-crisis policy had already been bitterly forced in the 60s to recognise its feebleness.  [217•2 

p When attempts are made in the capitalist economic literature to peer into the future movement of the world capitalist cycle, they do not usually pursue the goal of an, in any way long-term, forecast, but are limited to evaluating the immediate prospects, and as a rule are made in conditions when the main economic indicators of several countries have already pointed to the approach of another cyclic crisis.

p A very important place is assigned here, moreover, to modern computers. A writer in The New York Times, being ironic in this connection about economists’ lack of any theoretical developed conception of the cyclic movement of political economy, wrote after the world crisis of the 70s:

p Contemporary economics employs, for soothsaying, the most impressive black magic of all: science, out of the bowels of computer.... It will yield quantitative outputs when you feed it quantitative inputs.  [217•3 

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p But can the periodicity of world cycles embracing all the main groups of countries and industries of the capitalist economy, with the boundless specific character of the trends of development of each of them, in general be forecast on a more or less long-term basis? In contrast to capitalist political economy Marxist political economy gives an affirmative answer to that question. An infinite number of ’vectors of force’ operate during each national cycle, and even more of each world one, and not only vectors of an economic order. A considerable number of them are not amenable at all to precise accounting and theoretically substantiated prediction.

p Just the same Karl Marx managed in his day to create a scientific methodology for approaching long-term forecasting of the cyclic development of’capitalism as a socio- economic system linked into a single economic organism by the world market.

In the attempt at laying bare the laws by which crises of the market of the world are governed, not only their periodical character, but the exact dates of that periodicity must be accounted for. The distinctive features, moreover, peculiar to every new commercial crisis, must not bo allowed to overshadow the aspects common to all of them.  [218•1 

In the course of these crises, moreover, in which, as Marx noted, the contradictions of all the elements of the capitalist process of production were reflected, the consequences could, in turn, become causes, and phenomena not originally regular, but apparently haphazard, later begin to have an increasing influence on the periodicity of the succession of the world cycle’s phases.

p Developing these propositions in subsequent work on the French edition of the first volume of Capital, Marx stressed:

p So far the periodic length of these cycles is ten or eleven years, but there is no reason to think that figure constant. On the contrary, one may infer from the laws of capitalist production, such as we have just developed them, that it is variable and that the period of the cycles will gradually shorten.  [218•2 

p These deductions, confirmed by incontestable historical facts, provide the initial methodological basis for analysing 219 not only the past and current lines of development of the world capitalist cycle, but also of its prospective ones. As the productive forces have grown and been internationalised their time scale has in fact acquired a tendency to shrink in which is reflected, in particular, the deepening of the main contradiction of this mode of production.

p Long-term analysis of the postwar cyclic fluctuations of production and international trade allows us to consider the onset of the world crises in the 70s to have been a completely natural phenomenon. In a situation of mounting inflation, acute aggravation of the monetary and financial, energy, raw material, and other world economic problems of capitalism, it was also not fortuitous that they affected the overwhelming majority of industrially developed countries and many developing ones. These crises, in which all the main contradictions of modern capitalism were manifested, in fact completed the ordinary world business cycles of the 70s, and laid the material basis for the next effect of the cyclic development of production in world business.

p It is impossible, of course, to determine in advance, with the necessary reliability, just how this process will develop in the 80s, let alone the 90s, whether the regular cyclic crises will^become more destructive or shallower compared with the corresponding phases of preceding cycles, and whether it will be expressed in an absolute decline in the main annual indices for the whole world economy, or in only a sharp relative fall of them. All that will depend on the concrete combination of the most varied factors, including whether the various countries and spheres of the world economy enter the crisis simultaneously or separately, at what time in one calendar year or another the boom phase will be completed and the fall in production growth rates begin in the main cycle-forming industries. That will also depend on the further effect on their course of development of such crisis processes of a non-cyclic character as the primary commodity, energy, and foreign exchange crises, unchecked inflation, etc. The influence and dynamics of the growth of socio-political contradictions, and of the most important trends in the evolution of the international situation, will also affect the shaping of the features of the next world cycles.

p But, allowing for all these factors, one thing is certain: 220 new cyclic explosions of the world capitalist economy are quite to be expected and inevitable. Modern capitalism, though employing the whole arsenal of state-monopoly measures, is unable to avoid them.

p The postwar development trends reviewed above allow us to suggest that the world economic cycle of the second half of the 70s will in all probability be completed at the turn of the decade by a new crisis phase, which will probably mark capitalism’s entry into the next cycle, which can be expected to last, judging by the trends considered above, until the middle or the early second half of the 80s.

p The threat of even more powerful economic upheavals than the 1974-75 crisis will continue in the future. In any case the now rapidly increasing instability of the capitalist economy, and especially of the system of world economic relations, in the present stage of the general crisis of capitalism is more and more extending the objective premises for the probability of such upheavals with serious repercussions on the living standards of peoples and therefore fraught with serious social consequences for the capitalist social system.

p Study of the patterns of postwar cyclic movement in no way excludes, of course, the need for a systematic investigation of the concrete phenomena and inner logic of this movement in individual countries and industries in the context of the world cycle, but on the contrary presupposes it. But a truly all-embracing idea of the beginning of the next world cycle and of the timing of the succession of one phase by another, can mainly be got by a combined, interlocked analysis both of the long-term economic processes in capitalist countries and of the system of world economic relations as a whole in the given concrete situation.  [220•1 

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p This kind of analysis is particularly urgent today when the internationalisation of production and level of the international division of labour have reached unprecedented heights. The patterns of the dynamics and periodicity of the cyclic fluctuations of any country’s economy taken separately are now almost impossible to appreciate and comprehend simply from studying its internal trends of development, leaving aside their interaction with similar tendencies in other countries, and so with the long-term patterns and current peculiarities of the movement of the capitalist cycle in general. It has hardly been justified, moreover, to limit this interaction in recent years simply to the context of the industrial centres, leaving out of account the peculiarities of the effect of the break-up of the colonial system on the world cycle and the specific features of the postwar cyclic development of the periphery stemming from that.

p The statistics cited above indicate that the acceleration of developing countries’ industrial growth rates has so far, as a rule, encouraged a certain smoothing out of the depth of world recessions of production. During the whole cyclic development of capitalism since World War II their annual rate of industrial production, and of the GDP as a whole, has not once fallen in absolute terms below the level of the preceding years, although the range of fluctuations of their growth rates between the high and the low of each world cycle has been very considerable. The expanding markets of the developing countries at the same time favoured a shortening of the passage from the crisis phase to the boom phase.

p This influence of the consequences of the break-up of the colonial system on the course of the contemporary world cycle may probably be maintained to some extent in the immediate future as well, but it is most likely to prove passing. Given further intensification of the immanent laws of the capitalist mode of production in developing countries, their economic development may already be transformed in the distant future from a smoothing factor to one consistently aggravating world capitalism’s cyclic fluctuations.

p The development trends of the fundamentally new industries whose origin is directly linked with the advances of the scientific and technical revolution, and in no small degree 222 with the unprecedented increase on that basis of militarisation of the economies of many capitalist countries, will in all probability operate in the same direction. The new chemical and manufacturing industries (electronics, aerospace, most branches of military production largely based on budget appropriations and government orders, etc.) played a damping role in one way or another in the first postwar decades, and still do so, in the cyclic production recessions of the industrial centres, but in recent years this role has not been so strong, and has naturally begun to decline.

p The development of the technically more advanced industries, also subject to the operation of the objective laws of the functioning of capitalist production, ultimately leads to further growth of its inner contradictions that govern the dynamics and scale of world business cycles. The facts of the absolute decline in the level of production during the crisis of the mid-70s in the technically more perfected and newer industries that had continued to show quite high growth rates during the preceding postwar overproduction crises points to that. There are solid grounds for suggesting a heightened role of industries of this kind in the cyclic phases of the economy of modern capitalism.

p When we make a comprehensive study of all these trends so important for understanding the structural shifts being considered and the crisis processes in the world capitalist economy, it would be wrong, however, to ignore the gradually appearing prospect of limiting the sphere of operation of trends of this kind on the world capitalist cycle within the context of the world economy because of the probable extension in coming decades of the objective premises for consolidating a mutually advantageous and stable division of labour between socialist countries and the countries of the nonsocialist world. The acuteness of the cyclic production crises may apparently be attenuated to some extent for those capitalist and developing countries that take the road of strengthening comprehensive economic and technical cooperation with countries with planned economies in every way possible. The patterns of the socialist mode of production and its international relations will inevitably have an increasing effect on world economic relations in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

As the effect of socialism and the scientific and technical revolution on the growth and internationalisation of social 223 production increases on a world scale, the task of studying the cardinal problems of the cyclic development of the capitalist system as a whole, and of its component parts, will undoubtedly become more complicated and broadened. And so long as this system exists these tasks will remain of paramount importance for study of its antagonistic contradictions, which are graphically manifested in world cyclic crises of overproduction.