26

p Capitalism is a terminally-diseased social system, and the disease has been diagnosed by Marxists as general crisis. It is not a casual crisis or a short-term zigzag of history, nor a result of mistakes or miscalculations by bourgeois statesmen; “Moscow” or "world communism" have had no hand in it. Life, after all, does not run in accordance with good intentions, but with the laws of social development. The history of any society is a law-governed process running in a given direction, and is never a mere aggregation of accidental events. The deep and all-embracing crisis which has gripped the last system based on class antagonisms is an inexorable and permanent process, which expresses in a concentrated form the decay of the capitalist system and which is the logical result of irreconcilable contradictions immanent in this formation. The recent 10-15 years have provided numerous confirmations of the deepening of capitalism’s general crisis. Because capitalism lacks positive aims and orientations, capable of expressing the interests of the working masses, the Political Report of the CPSU Central Committee to the 27th Party Congress emphasises, it faces more social and other impasses than it has ever known before in all the centuries of its development, and has now to cope with the unprecedented interlacing and exacerbation of all of its contradictions. Among the first to grow more acute are the contradictions between labour and capital; between monopolies and the overwhelming majority of the population in the capitalist countries; between transnational corporations and the national-state form of political organisation of society; between imperialist states; between the main centres of today’s imperialism; between imperialism and the less developed countries and peoples; and, finally, the global contradictions cutting at the very roots of our civilisation.

p There is ever wider international recognition of the MarxistLeninist conclusion that the sphere of imperialist domination has been inexorably shrinking, so making it perfectly obvious that it is a historically doomed system. Even the avowed advocates of 27 capitalism tend to be pessimistic, sceptical, nervous and despondent, as will be seen, for instance, from some of the headlines in the most popular Western periodicals. A West German magazine asks: "Is it still possible to rescue capitalism?”  [27•1  A US magazine puts it this way: "Can capitalism survive?", "Is capitalism working well enough?" "Can it be repaired or is it fatally flawed?".  [27•2  While the answers to these questions are far from being cut and dried, Stern admits that most FRG citizens are inclined to believe that the system no longer has a chance. The French Nouvelle observateur also says that there is no way out within the framework of the existing system. None of that, of course, signifies an acceptance of the socialist alternative. Indeed, new and variously designated scenarios are being spun out with all the trappings of capitalist private property.

p Nor is it just one country, a group of countries or a coalition of states, but the whole of world capitalism that is in general crisis from top to bottom: its basis and superstructure, its economy and social relations, its politics and state system, its ideology and culture, its morality and way of life, and every aspect of interstate relations. Capital as a system of social relations, the basis of the capitalist mode of production, is in the throes of this general crisis. "It would be impossible to put an end to the rule of capitalism if the whole course of economic development in the capitalist countries did not lead up to it," says Lenin.  [27•3  The ideological and political crisis—the crisis of bourgeois democracy—tends to erode the elementary rules of morality, corrupt the political machine of capital’s domination and overwhelm the institutions of power and bourgeois political parties. There are ever more obvious signs of runaway corruption and money-grubbing even in the top echelons of the state machine. Traditional forms of conservatism give way to authoritarian trends.

p Objective and subjective prerequisites for the collapse of capitalism and its replacement by a higher economic and social system lie in its own bosom, and have not been introduced from outside. The 27th Congress of the CPSU noted that the problems and crises in the capitalist world originate within its own entrails, and emphasised the relevance of the Marxist tenet that capitalism negates itself as it develops. It is a process which does nothing to remove the organic antagonisms of the system, but keeps generating new antagonisms, some of which are even sharper and more profound. It is a process which keeps producing ever greater constraints on the solution of the global problems facing mankind at the end of the century, including the paramount problem of mankind’s survival. Finally, capitalist development inevitably builds up the material base for the communist formation that is coming to replace capitalism. Technical progress and the vast growth of capital and the banks, says Lenin, have caused capitalism to become "mature and overmature", 28 turning it into the "most reactionary hindrance to human progress". That is why "it has outlived itself".  [28•1  Never before has this “overmaturity” of capitalism and the conversion of bourgeois relations of production into heavy fetters on social development been so obvious and explicit as they are today. The crisis of world capitalism has proceeded as an objective and irreversible process in which the economic, social and political foundations of the bourgeoisie are being eroded, the sphere of its domination reduced, its monopoly in international affairs limited and undermined, and its influence on developments on the globe curbed. Imperialism has lost its erstwhile power over the bulk of mankind for good.

p This is a tempestuous, complicated and socially revolutionary century, without parallel in speed of development, sharpness of social conflict, and rapidity and scope of revolutionary transformations.

p One of the most remarkable facts in the history of science and the society is Lenin’s discovery in 1916 of the economic and political substance of imperialism, and his subsequent conclusion that the socialist revolution was initially able to triumph in one, individual country, or in several countries; indeed, he went on to assert that it could not be victorious simultaneously in all or most of the states; within a year, his conclusion was brilliantly confirmed: the revolution which broke out in Russia began as a bourgeois-democratic revolution that soon developed into a socialist revolution. Seventy years later, we find socialism firmly established over a sizable part of the globe. The revolutionary renewal of mankind and its advance to the true history of world civilisation is a process that has continued to run successfully.

p Relations between states belonging to the two systems or economic and social formations involve a group of contradictions—the most fateful from the standpoint of mankind’s destiny—in the modern world, a world which is highly diverse and dynamic and riddled with contending trends and the most intricate alternatives. These systems take fundamentally different views of the present and of the world’s social perspective. Compared with socialism, capitalism turns out to be ever less able and ready to comprehend new problems and, most importantly, to find common-sense solutions to them. That is why "more and more nations are losing their confidence in capitalism; they do not wish to associate their prospects of development with it and are persistently searching for and finding ways of socialist transformation of their countries".  [28•2 

p The edifice of world imperialism is shaking under powerful pressure from such leading motive forces of social development as world socialism, the international working-class and communist movement, the forces of national liberation, and the mass democratic movements, whose steady growth and interaction determine the key features, lines, periods and stages of the general crisis of 29 capitalism and cause cardinal quantitative and qualitative shifts in the world balance of forces between socialism and capitalism in favour of socialism, and between the national liberation movement and imperialism—in favour of the forces of national liberation (see the table). The class struggle in the capitalist countries is gaining in depth, the economic instability of capitalism is growing, the old internal and external contradictions are sharpening, and new ones are emerging. The high-conflict rivalry between the main centres of imperialism (United States—Western Europe—Japan) is now the main inter-imperialist contradiction.

p Economic, Political and Social Picture of the World (% of world total)

Territory

1919 1940 1970 1985 1917 1940 1970 1985 1917 1940 1970 1985 1961- 1985

p Socialist countries

p 16.0
16.5
25.9
26.2
7.7
7.8
33.6
32.1

p under 3.0 10.0

p about 38.0 over 40.0

p Developed capitalist countries 84.0*’ 83.5* 15.4 12.2 92.3* 92.2* 19.5 16.7

p over 97.0* 90.0* 54.0 about 50.0

p Less
developed countries

p 58.7 61.6

p Population

p 46.9 51.2

p Industrial output

p 7.0 7.0

p Annual growth (%)

p national income industrial output agricultural output

p 5.5 6.9 3.5

p 3.7 3.9 1.8

p 5.2 4.6 2.8

p * The whole capitalist world, including the colonies and dependent countries. Calculated from USSR Economy in 1980. Statistical Yearbook, Moscow, 1981, pp. 56-57; USSR Economy, 1922-1982, Anniversary Statistical Yearbook, Moscow, 1982, p. 89; USSR Economy in 1986. Statistical Yearbook, Moscow, 1986, pp. 578-81 (all in Russian).

Among the multi-faceted manifestations of the deepening general crisis of capitalism at the present stage are: the falling away of more and more countries from capitalism; the sharpening of the contradictions of imperialism with the development of state-monopoly capitalism and the unprecedented growth of militarism; the ever greater internal instability of the capitalist economy expressed in capitalism’s increasing incapacity to make full and rational use of the productive forces (falling rates of production growth, ever more frequent periodical and acute structural crises, and constant underloading of production capacities, chronic mass unemployment and the crisis in the use of Nature); the glaring inefficiency of the 30 state-monopoly regulation of the economy; the ceaseless inflation and the bloated state debts; the mounting struggle between labour and capital; the marked sharpening of the contradictions within the world capitalist economy; the growing political reaction along every line; the offensive against constitutional rights and liberties; the establishment of tyrannical regimes in some countries; and the profound crisis of the bourgeois way of life. All of these manifestations have been profoundly studied, given new Marxist-Leninist insights and summed up in the CC CPSU Political Report to the Party’s 27th Congress and the new edition of the CPSU Programme.