This is a serious book, and it should be said at the outset, because most of what follows will complicate the compliment. V. V. Rymalov set out to describe 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, the widening gulf between the industrial centres and the primary-commodity producers. On a good deal of this he is right, and he is right where the mainstream economics of his day was wrong. A reader who comes to The World Capitalist Economy expecting a crude tract predicting capitalism's imminent collapse will be surprised by how much careful, quantitative, professionally cautious work is actually here. The trouble with the book is not that its author cannot see a crisis. It is which economy he is permitted to see one in.
What the book is, and when it was written. The spine says 1982 and the imprint code (016(01)-82) confirms Progress issued the English translation, by H. Campbell Creighton, that year. But the text has a slightly longer history, and Rymalov tells us so himself: "The Russian original appeared in 1978. In the present English edition the author has tried to continue analysis of the problems and trends studied, employing the latest data available to him." This is the opposite of the usual Progress lag, in which a glasnost jacket covers a Brezhnev-era manuscript. Here the English edition was revised forward: it carries the 1981 UNCTAD report, the Twenty-Sixth Congress of the CPSU (February 1981), OPEC receipts for "the early 80s," and forecasts running to 1990. The book reads its real date. It is an early-1980s text, and — this will matter — it was completed at the exact moment the Soviet economy was entering the stagnation that would define the last Brezhnev years. Rymalov was a Soviet specialist on the world economy and on decolonisation; the book leans on the collective work of the Academy of Sciences' Institute of World Economics and International Relations (IMEMO) and cites his own Russian monographs on the break-up of the colonial system. Beyond that the volume gives him no title, and I will not invent one.
Credit where it is due — and it is due at length. The strongest chapters are the empirical ones, and their strength is that they are built on the statistical apparatus of the international organisations rather than on assertion. Rymalov's sources are the UN's Multinational Corporations in World Development (1973), successive UNCTAD reports, ILO labour-force projections, the Economic Report of the President. When he argues that the postwar terms of trade moved secularly against the primary-commodity producers — "the secular trend in prices of primary commodities relative to prices of manufactured goods was downward from the latter part of the nineteenth century" — he is on the terrain later associated with Prebisch and Singer, and he documents it. His account of the transnational corporation, of intra-firm trade, of the "increasing internationalisation of production," is recognisably the same phenomenon Western scholarship was then beginning to name, and he treats it as structural rather than incidental.
Most striking, he diagnoses the stagflation of the 1970s precisely — without the word. Rymalov never writes "stagflation" (the term does not occur), but he states the mechanism exactly: "The measures that bourgeois governments take against inflation foster stagnation of production and growth of unemployment; what they do to contain the critical drop in production lends still greater momentum to inflation." That is the policy trap of the decade in one sentence, and it was a sentence most Keynesian economists could not yet bring themselves to write. He quotes the bourgeois economists against themselves to make the point — Galbraith on the causes of the 1974–75 crisis, Herman Kahn conceding at the end of 1974 that "we could be on the threshold" of an epochal transition. And he is honest enough to refuse the catastrophist conclusion his own frame invites. Reviewing the growth figures, he warns that "it would be wrong … to conclude … that we must expect protracted stagnation or complete obstruction of [capitalism's] productive forces," and projects that even on pessimistic assumptions capitalist output would stand some 80 per cent above its 1970 level by 1990. A Progress author declining to predict the breakdown of capitalism is worth noticing. On the economics of the West, this is honest work done under constraint, and a reader learns from it.
The vocabulary is the first tell. Notice, though, how Rymalov diagnoses the crisis. His categories are the Soviet ones: "the general crisis of capitalism" (seventeen times), "state-monopoly capitalism" (sixteen), the anarchy of production, overproduction, the cyclic alternation of boom and stagnation. What is missing is the analytic vocabulary that Western Marxists were developing for the very same events. There is no "falling rate of profit" turned on the actual data — the rate of profit appears once, and only inside a quotation from Engels on the law of its tendency to fall, never applied to the postwar numbers. There is no "long wave" and no mention of Kondratieff — an absence that is itself a fact, since long-wave theory was heterodox in the USSR and its author, N. D. Kondratiev, had been shot in 1938. There is no "Bretton Woods," no "Eurodollar," no "stagflation." The financial and monetary machinery of the crisis — the collapse of the dollar-gold standard in 1971, the recycling of petrodollars, the debt build-up — is genuinely thin here, mentioned only glancingly as "international financial" problems. Rymalov sees the crisis clearly; he sees it through a categorial apparatus that could describe its results but was ill-equipped to anatomise its mechanisms.
The citation test, which usually convicts these books of relaying their opponents at second hand, half-inverts here. Rymalov does read some Western economists in the original: Galbraith is quoted from an interview, Kahn from a 1974 statement, and the apologists of "post-industrial society" — Bell, Brzezinski, Galbraith's "new industrial society" — are named and engaged, if only to be dismissed. To that extent he does not merely relay. But look at where the apparatus thins, because the silence is the finding. The book covers, in detail, exactly the ground that the dependency and world-systems school was then ploughing — unequal terms of trade, the structural subordination of the raw-material producers, the international division of labour as a mechanism of exploitation. And André Gunder Frank, Samir Amin, Arghiri Emmanuel and the very concept of "unequal exchange" are absent — not mangled by the scanner, but genuinely nowhere in 108,000 words. The word "dependency" occurs sixty times, and every one of them is the ordinary Soviet usage — the dependence of the developing countries on imperialism — never the theory of that name. A Soviet economist writing on the North–South divide in 1978–82 who never once engages the Marxist theorists of that divide is telling you something about the boundaries of permitted conversation.
The sharpest instance is the one the book most needed and most conspicuously lacks. Ernest Mandel — the Fourth International's economist — does not appear. Late Capitalism (1972; English, Verso, 1975) and The Second Slump (1978) were the full-length Marxist analyses of precisely Rymalov's subject: the exhaustion of the postwar expansion and the return of generalised recession. Mandel's name occurs zero times; Late Capitalism zero times. This is not a criticism of Rymalov's manners. It is a measure of the wall between the two Marxisms. The Fourth International's economist and the IMEMO economist were studying the same world economy, in the same years, and reaching overlapping conclusions about its structural crisis — and the Soviet author was institutionally unable to acknowledge that the analysis existed.
The convergence is worth stating plainly, because it is the real point. In Intercontinental Press of 7 July 1975 — the same weeks Rymalov was watching the 1974–75 slump — Mandel described "the generalized recession of the international capitalist economy, which started at the beginning of autumn 1974." Seven years later, in the issue of 28 June 1982, contemporaneous with Rymalov's English edition, Mandel's "The second postwar world recession" set out the whole structure: "The long-term economic depression in which the world capitalist economy has sunk since 1967–68 is expressed primarily by a long-term decline in the average profit rate … The business cycle continues throughout the long wave of depression, just as it did during the long wave of expansion. We have gone through periods of economic recovery (1971–72, 1976–78) after phases of recession, as in 1970, or 1974–75 and 1980–82." Set that beside Rymalov and the agreement is real: both hold that the postwar boom is over, that the crisis is structural and not conjunctural, that the recessions are moments of a longer downturn. The Marxist diagnosis of the 1970s was better than the monetarist one, and Rymalov shares in that vindication. What separates the two men is not the conclusion but the instruments — Mandel reaches it through the falling rate of profit and the long wave, the two tools Rymalov's orthodoxy had placed off limits — and, decisively, the reflexive question that Mandel's framework could ask and Rymalov's could not.
Which brings us to the finding the whole book is arranged to prevent. Every category Rymalov deploys — crisis, stagnation, overaccumulation, the anarchy of production, unemployment, shortage, uneven development — is an instrument for diagnosing capitalism. Not one of them is ever turned on the economy Rymalov was writing from. "Stagnation" appears six times, all of it capitalism's. "Shortage" appears seven times — labour shortages in the industrial West, food shortages in the former colonial world — and never once the shortage economy that every Soviet citizen queued in. The socialist economy enters the book only as its serene opposite: planned, crisis-free, and racing ahead. "The countries belonging to CMEA are the most dynamically developing economic community in the world," he writes; "in 1968–79 alone the volume of the gross social product in the European members of CMEA increased more than fourfold, while that of all the developed capitalist countries increased by only 140 per cent."
Read the date on that sentence. It was published as the Soviet growth rate was collapsing toward zero, in the terminal stagnation of the Brezhnev years; Brezhnev himself died in November 1982, the year of this edition. And here is the book's most revealing moment — not a silence, but an admission instantly overridden. Quoting the Twenty-Sixth Congress report, Rymalov concedes: "The past few years have not been among the most favourable for the national economies of some socialist states. Still, in the past ten years the economic growth rates of the CMEA countries have been twice those of the developed capitalist countries. The CMEA members continued to be the most dynamically developing group of countries in the world." (I have corrected the scan's obvious slips here silently.) The mechanism is exact and it is worth naming, because it is the discriminating test for this whole series: error is admissible; the category is not. A Soviet economy may have a bad few years — that can be said. What can never be said is that the categories of crisis, stagnation and overaccumulation might apply to it. The admission is allowed; the diagnosis is forbidden. The analyst who could describe the stagflation trap in a single flawless sentence was structurally incapable of pointing the same instrument at the queues, the shortages and the falling growth rate outside his own window.
The answer this book needed was already in print, and from the tradition it could not name. The classical statement is Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936), whose chapters on the Soviet Thermidor and the growth of inequality supply exactly the reflexive analysis — the bureaucracy as a privileged stratum, the planned economy as a contradictory and crisis-prone formation rather than a serene one — that Rymalov's frame forbids. Nearer to his own moment, the same Intercontinental Press that carried Mandel's recession analyses was, through the 1970s and early 1980s, applying the categories of crisis to the "actually existing socialist" economies as readily as to the capitalist ones — the argument Rymalov's book is constructed to make unthinkable. And the deepest of the disagreements between the Marxisms was being fought out in these very years in the pages of Quatrième Internationale, where Mandel and Alec Nove argued over whether a planned economy could dispense with the market at all — a debate that presupposes, as its first premise, that the socialist economy is a proper object of economic analysis and not merely its triumphant subject. That premise is the one thing The World Capitalist Economy cannot grant.
None of this cancels the value of the book. Rymalov's account of the transnationals, the terms of trade and the structural crisis of the postwar order is real economics, and on the West he was frequently more accurate than the establishment he criticised. But the book is finally a document of a particular unfreedom. It shows an intelligent economist given a first-rate instrument and permitted to point it in one direction only. The instrument was sound. What the 1982 reader was not allowed to notice — and what the reader of 1991 could not miss — was that the economy seizing up fastest was the one standing behind the author's chair.