290

p The deepening of irreconcilable contradictions in the primary commodity sphere reflects many of the essential features of the current development stage of world capitalism, including its whole established international price system. The increasing instability of world prices is an objective process analysis of which provides the key to understanding a number of complicated, specific phenomena in the capitalist economy as a whole.

p The consistent intensifying of this instability has found concentrated expression in feverish commodity price fluctuations and jumps on the world capitalist market. In the 70s these prices rose roughly fivefold on the whole, and those of minerals eightfold. At the same time the price level of manufactures almost trebled. The price rise for primary commodities was thus much higher on the whole in that decade than for manufactures.

p The rise was not, however, steady. Under the impact of the world cyclic crisis of the mid-70s, for instance, the prices of most primary commodities fell slightly while those of manufactures, mainly from the developed capitalist countries, maintained their previous rising trend, though not so strongly as before.

There is an organic dependence between world prices and price formation within countries engaged in international trade. This comes out particularly graphically under the ’galloping inflation’ that has gripped the economies of most capitalist and developing countries today. It is by no means, however, a direct relationship, and in recent years has been reflected at different times and in an extremely varied way in the movement of the prices for various goods and groups of commodities in international trade (see Table 37).

291 Table 3? Growth Rates oi World Export Prices by Basic Commodity Groups Annual rates j_n [icrcontages of the previous year Commodity group 1970* 1974" 1975 197(i 1977 1978 1979 198° All groups 1.5 19 8 2 9 10 19 19 Manufactured goods 2 33 12 0 9 15 14 11 Primary com- modities 1 33 —2 0 10 2 29 47 minerals 1 48 4 5 9 1 40 68 agricultural primary com- modities —0.5 22 -13 12 11 6 21 5 food 1.5 23 —6 5 14 1 12 17 Sources: calculated from UN Statistical Yearbook 1978 (United Nations, New York, 1979); UN Monthly Bulletin of Statistics, 1982, 2,

p There has never been such a dynamics and variation of world commodity prices, except during world wars. It has also been unusual since the war.  [291•1  The rise in primary commodity prices, especially of energy sources, in the 70s and at the beginning of the 80s, unprecedented in scale and economic consequences, has become particularly important in this connection.

Was it a short-term phenomenon, or a long-term one? In other words, was it simply the consequence of the current situation in international trade? Or was it the result of deep (i.e. qualitative) shifts in the established price-forming process on the world market? It is important to pose this question, in our view, especially in order to clarify the outlook for the development of essential elements in the structural crisis of the commodity sphere.