Cycle, Capitalist, the movement of capitalist production through consecutively linked phases—crisis, recession, recovery, and boom. The cyclic nature is an intrinsic property of capitalist production. The economic crisis of overproduction is the main phase of the capitalist cycle. Consummating one cycle, it begins a new one, passing into the phase of recession, which is followed by recovery and then boom. The replacement of fixed capital is the material foundation of the cyclic development of the capitalist economy and the periodic crises of overproduction. This replacement is periodic because the life span of fixed assets is approximately 8 to 10 years. And so, ever since the industrial revolution, the capitalist world (individual countries and the entire system as a whole) has regularly found itself deep in the abyss of overproduction crises (1825, 1836, 1847, 1856, 1867, 1873, 1882, 1890). The epoch of imperialism brought with it a tendency towards more frequent and deeper production crises due to the acceleration of technical progress and of the obsolescence of fixed assets. Crises occurred in 1900 and 1907, the 1913-14 crisis was interrupted by World War I. Soon after the end of the war, the 1920-21 crisis began and was followed by the 1929-33 crisis—the most destructive in capitalist history. Four years later another (1937-38) crisis hit the capitalist system. It was cut short by the preparations of the capitalist powers for World War II. Soon after the war, the next (1948-49) crisis ensued, followed by the 1953-54, 1957-58, 1960-61, 1969-71, 1974-75 crises. The interdependence of developed capitalist countries has grown as a result of the Intel-nationalisation of economic life and the development of the international capitalist division of labour (see Division of Labour, Capitalist International) and the specialisation of production; their technological and economic development has levelled out to a certain extent. As a result, in 1974 these countries, for the first time since the war, entered the crisis phase simultaneously. The fact that the main phase of the capitalist cycle in the developed capitalist countries began synchronously is the key feature of the 1974-75 economic crisis. Scientific and technical progress, the heightened wofking-class struggle, the intensified economic activity of the bourgeois state to eliminate crisis phenomena and the attempts to overcome economic instability by state (government) regulation of the capitalist economy have influenced the cycle of modern capitalism in a definite way. The cyclic nature of production under capitalism testifies to the spontaneity of its development, to the intermittence of reproduction and, in the final analysis, to the transient character of the capitalist mode of production.