The World Capitalist Economy

A serious book on the structural transformation of the capitalist world economy across the postwar decades: the exhaustion of the long boom, the recessions of 1974-75 and 1979-82, chronic inflation, the oil shocks, the breakdown of the old international division of labour, the rise of the transnational corporation, and the widening gulf between the industrial centres and the primary-commodity producers.

On much of this Rymalov is right, and right where the mainstream economics of his day was wrong. A reader expecting a crude tract predicting imminent collapse will be surprised by how much careful, quantitative, professionally cautious work is here. The empirical chapters are the strongest, and they lean on the collective work of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations.

Unusually, this English edition was revised forward rather than reprinted stale. Rymalov says so himself: the Russian original appeared in 1978, and for the English he continued the analysis with the latest data available to him. It carries the 1981 UNCTAD report, the Twenty-Sixth Congress of February 1981, OPEC receipts for the early 1980s, and forecasts running to 1990.

Which places it precisely: an early-1980s text on the crisis of the Western economies, completed at the exact moment the Soviet economy was entering the stagnation that would define the last Brezhnev years.

Translated by H. Campbell Creighton.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on which economy the author was permitted to see a crisis in.