p In the increasingly complicated set of modern capitalism’s economic contradictions, those in the primary commodity sphere have taken on a very marked role. The break-up of the colonial system and the considerable strengthening since the war of the dependence of capitalism’s industrial centres on imports of many types of industrial raw materials (especially of energy resources), and the rapidly expanding demand for primary commodities by developing countries’ industry, the acute food shortage in most regions of the former colonial world, and the unprecedented jump (in peacetime) of world market prices for raw materials and foodstuffs are all evidence of serious disturbances of the established system of the international division of labour.

p The crisis processes in this system, which are being made particularly acute by mounting inflation, more frequent cyclic slumps of industrial production in capitalist countries, the stiffening competition of international monopolies, and inter-imperialist rivalry, attained an unusual scale in the 70s for the postwar period.

p The unparalleled aggravation’of capitalism’s primary products problems,’ especially of the energy problem, have played an important role in the development of thesejprocesses, the main causes of which have been analysed in detail in the reports of the 24th, 25th, and 26th Congresses of the CPSU, and other documents of the international communist and workers’ movement.? The effective measures taken by many of the oil-producing^countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in their fight against expatriate monopolies’ domination of their economies revealed convincingly the instability of the existing system of modern capitalism’s primary commodity relations. The three slumps it 268 experienced in the 70s and early 80s have further intensified tlieir instability.

p In this situation there is a growing drive in Western eco nomic (especially propagandist) literature to explain the extraordinary acuteness of the contradictions in this sphere mainly by political and economic actions of one kind or another by developing countries. The latter’s fight to establish real control over their own natural wealth and resources, and to achieve real national sovereignty and a radical break-up of international relations based on imperialist principles of inequality and exploitation, is in fact largely the reason for the further deepening of the crisis phenomena in and instability of the world capitalist economy of recent years.

It is not, however, just a matter of the political and socioeconomic consequences of the breakdown of the colonial system. The roots of the process go deeper. The capitalist mode of production itself inevitably engendered, and is giving rise to, the very acute international economic issues that face imperialism today.