The Crisis of Capitalism and the Condition of the Working People

A title that makes a promise in two halves, and the join between them is where the interest lies: from a diagnosis of the Western economy to an account of what that economy does to the people living inside it.

Chernikov was an economist of the Soviet academic establishment, writing out of the world built by the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, and when he stays close to the statistical record of the capitalist slump of the mid-1970s he is precise, often useful, and easy to check. The material on unemployment, real wages, inflation, industrial output and the condition of the working class in the major capitalist economies is drawn from Western official sources and set out so that it can be verified.

The book is addressed over the head of the general reader to the Communist parties of the West. Its worked examples come from the Twenty-Second Congress of the French Communist Party, the Bonn congress of the German party, and the Italian and Belgian party press; its closing chapters are a detente-era brief arguing that the Western parties should press for trade with the East and an easing of Cold War tension. This is export literature for the Eurocommunist years.

For once the dating is clean. The evidence runs hard through 1977 and into 1978 - steel output, OECD growth forecasts, the order books of the shipyards - and ventures a forecast for 1979 and 1980. It is a book of 1979 in a 1980 jacket.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.