p Many features of the capitalist system today are connected with substantial shifts in the structure of its material production. We have tried in the previous chapters, to give a comprehensive description of the most common, mutually conditioned postwar changes in this system. This part is devoted to analysing the main capitalist industries, primarily manufacturing. The following facts indicate its role and significance. At the end of the 70s it was generating more than a quarter of the value of the GDP, three-fifths of the material production, and around six-sevenths of the total industrial production of the countries of the non-socialist world (around nine-tenths in the capitalist countries and three-quarters in the developing countries). More than 90 per cent of all the jobs in industry were concentrated in manufacturing in both groups of countries. The bulk of the goods entering international trade now are produced by it.

The postwar changes in manufacturing decisively affected the trend of development of the primary commodity industries, so that they have largely determined the most important features of today’s world market, the course of the internationalising of social production, and consequently the whole system of the capitalist international division of labour.