A reader who opens this book expecting a document of the glasnost year will be puzzled within twenty pages, and the puzzle is worth solving, because the answer tells you more about the Soviet Union in 1988 than the book's contents do.
Capitalism at the End of the Century carries a 1988 imprint. It is a collective volume — Progress describes it on the back cover as the work of "a collection by well-known Soviet economists, philosophers, historians, sociologists, and journalists" — running to some 171,000 words across fifteen chapters and an essay "In Lieu of an Introduction". Its footnotes identify the milieu precisely, even though no contributor list survives in this text: the estimates come from the Institute of World Economics and International Relations (IMEMO) and the Institute of the United States and Canada of the USSR Academy of Sciences. These were the two elite research institutes of the late Soviet state, the places where people whose job was to know what was actually happening in the capitalist world went to work. This is not a book by apparatus hacks. It is a book by professionals.
It is also not a book of 1988.
Set aside the spine and follow the evidence. The book's argumentative spine is Gorbachev's Political Report to the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the CPSU, held in February and March 1986; the Congress is cited nineteen times and the Political Report is the volume's most-quoted single source, more authoritative in these pages than Marx. The disarmament chapter turns on Gorbachev's statement of 15 January 1986, and on the Reykjavik summit of October 1986, reported as the live diplomatic situation. The most recent Western source cited is Fortune for August 1986. The most recent Soviet statistical source is the yearbook for 1986. The chapters were evidently finished in 1986 or 1987 — the latest volume of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels cited is volume 29, of 1987 — and the Russian original will have gone to press around then, with the English translation following in 1988 in the ordinary Progress manner.
There is exactly one sentence in 171,000 words that knows about anything after 1986, and it reads like what it is:
Developments since 1985 are evidence of the feasibility of disarmament measures. The Soviet-American INF Treaty was signed during the visit of Mikhail Gorbachev to the USA in December 1987. In June 1988 the sides exchanged instruments of ratification.
That is a stop-press paragraph, dropped into Chapter Five at proof stage — June 1988 is the very last moment at which it could have been added — to keep the book's one genuinely current argument current. Nothing else in the volume was updated. So the honest description is: a 1986–87 text in a 1988 jacket, with a single 1988 patch on the disarmament chapter.
One anomaly can be cleared away at the outset. A reader scanning this book will find years as late as 1995 and 1996 in a volume dated 1988, and might reasonably wonder whether the text has been silently revised later. It has not. Every one of these is a forecast, and they are worth listing because they are a good sample of the book's method: Japanese expectations that a fifth-generation computer's vocabulary would "top 10,000 words" by 1990; industrial-robot sales rising to $10 billion by 1990 and US sales to $3 billion by 1995; American "teleworkers" increasing to ten million by 1990; developing-country cereal imports reaching 226 million tons by 2000; UN demographic projections for 1995–2000. The single non-forecast is the book's report that at Reykjavik "Gorbachev and Reagan agreed that such weapons belonging to the Soviet Union and the United States must be completely eliminated by 1996" — a 1986 event described by its 1996 target date. There is no dating anomaly. A book about capitalism's future is full of dates in the future.
This series has learned to ask the question directly, because Progress imprints routinely conceal texts a decade older than their jackets. Here the answer is unusual and more interesting than a simple verdict: the book is split. Its foreign-policy chapters are absolutely of their moment. Its domestic vocabulary is not merely dated — it is absent.
The greps are stark. In 171,000 words, the word perestroika appears zero times. Glasnost: zero. Administrative-command, the term Soviet economists were by then using for their own system: zero. Brezhnev: zero. Khrushchev: zero. The English word "restructuring" occurs twenty-four times, and one might expect it to be the translator's rendering of perestroika — Progress often used it that way. It is not. Every single occurrence refers either to the restructuring of the capitalist economy or, in the disarmament chapters, to "the restructuring of political thinking". The Soviet domestic reform does not appear in this book under any name at all.
Nor does any Soviet economic difficulty. The book admits none. There is no sentence anywhere in it acknowledging that the USSR had a growth problem, a technology problem, or an agricultural problem. The nearest approach is oblique and comes wrapped as a task rather than a confession — of which more below.
Set that against what was actually happening in the year of the imprint. The Law on the State Enterprise came into force on 1 January 1988; the Law on Cooperatives legalised private enterprise in May; the Nineteenth Party Conference met at the end of June and put competitive elections and the rule of law on the agenda; the Memorial society was taking shape around the demand that the victims of the Terror be counted and named; and the mass-circulation press was publishing the history of collectivisation and the purges to an audience of millions. None of this is in this book. It could not be: the book was written before most of it.
And then there is the silence that is not explained by the date at all. Stalin appears zero times in this volume. Trotsky, zero. Collectivisation, zero. Cult of personality, zero. The word "repression" occurs twice, and on both occasions it describes capitalism. A 171,000-word survey of the twentieth century, published by the Soviet state's export house in the year the Terror became a matter of open public discussion in Moscow, does not mention Stalin once. When the book wants an authority on the appeal of communism in the capitalist countries, it reaches past the entire Soviet experience to Ernst Thälmann — the German Communist leader murdered at Buchenwald in 1944, whose party's catastrophe in 1933 was a direct product of the Comintern policy this book's tradition still would not discuss — and reports that his words about "the victorious advance of socialism in the Soviet Union" being the Communists' strongest argument "now have a new ring". (The extracted text OCRs the name as "Thaiman".) That sentence could have been written in 1938. It is the tell: on its own history, this book is not late, not early, but silent, and the silence is a choice its authors did not make in 1988 but inherited and declined to break.
The doctrine of the "general crisis of capitalism" — the claim, formalised in Comintern usage in the 1920s and never abandoned, that capitalism entered a terminal historical decline in 1917 and has been in it ever since — is still asserted here, thirty-four times. It structures the whole book. Chapter One is titled "In the Labyrinths of the General Crisis". The introduction calls the twentieth century "a century of the comprehensive and deepening crisis of capitalism, which continues to bring mankind wars, suffering, starvation and spiritual emptiness."
But the same sentence continues: "Its crisis is evident, but the system still retains resources for survival."
That clause is the book's real subject, and the second section of Chapter One — "The Reserves of Capitalism" — is the most intellectually alive thing in the volume. It is a substantial, and by Soviet standards nervy, retreat. It licenses itself with a formula from the Twenty-Seventh Congress, quoted here as authority:
the present stage of the general crisis does not lead to any absolute stagnation of capitalism and does not rule out the possibilities for economic growth, and the mastering of new scientific and technical fields.
Having obtained that licence, the chapter uses it. It divides the postwar capitalist economy into three periods — reconstruction to the mid-1950s, relative stability to the 1970s, and then the slowdown — and concedes that for "nearly three decades after the end of the war the upward phases of the capitalist cycle were, as a rule, longer and more intensive, while the crises of general overproduction were not as deep or as long." It lists the new industries by name: "radioelectronics and microelectronics, missiles and aerospace, lasers, nuclear energy, new lines in chemistry, biotechnology and genetic engineering". It insists — against the whole thrust of the doctrine it is defending — that state-monopoly regulation and scientific-technical progress are not temporary expedients: "It would be wrong, in principle, to assume that these were short-term factors and that they have not become intrinsic to present-day capitalism."
And then, in a single sentence, it concedes the thing that would destroy the Soviet Union within three years: "In the most developed countries, it still has some advantages stemming from the higher level of social labour productivity."
The concession is immediately converted into a task — "The CPSU Programme formulates the vital task of attaining the world's highest level of social labour productivity and efficiency of production, so depriving capitalism of this advantage" — and the subject is dropped. But it is there, in print, from IMEMO, in 1987: the West is more productive, and that is capitalism's reserve.
Readers should know that Soviet economists had been punished for saying less. Yevgeny Varga — cited respectfully in this book's Chapter Six — argued after 1945 that capitalism had acquired durable new capacities for regulating itself and would not shortly collapse. His institute was broken up and he was compelled to recant. The "Reserves of Capitalism" chapter is Varga's argument, made forty years later, by people who could finally make it. That history is not in this book either, but it is the reason the chapter reads as cautiously as it does.
The house rule of this series is that a reader told everything is worthless learns nothing, and here the rule has real work to do, because a good deal of this book is simply competent applied economics that has aged better than what replaced it.
The analysis of the falling rate of profit in Chapter Six is done from official US statistics rather than from doctrine, and correctly identifies the compression of profitability in the later 1960s as the thing that preceded and caused the investment slowdown — arriving at the conclusion that "the slowdown in economic development was not caused by the alleged deceleration of scientific and technical progress, but by the capitalist relations, which prevent the introduction" of what was available. Whatever one makes of the last clause, the sequencing is right and was not obvious at the time.
Chapter Seven's "three centres" framework — the United States, Western Europe and Japan as rival imperialist poles rather than a single bloc — was better than the Western commentary that treated the Atlantic alliance as permanent, and the book states the consequence plainly: "Labour productivity and product quality in these countries are often higher than they are in the United States." It notes that the United States crossed into net external debtor status in mid-1985, which is correct and was then still news.
Chapter Eight on the Third World is the strongest in the book. The debt figures are sound and the interpretation is sounder: developing-country external debt rising by almost $500 billion between 1980 and 1985, debt service consuming close to a quarter of export earnings, primary commodity prices at a quarter-century low, and the whole mechanism read as a transfer of the costs of Northern economic restructuring onto the South. That is what the 1980s debt crisis was, and it took mainstream economics a further decade to say so. The chapters on the transnational corporations are likewise serious, and notably unwilling to cheat: the book concedes that the TNCs "have been boosting labour productivity and advancing technical progress, even if in a contradictory manner."
None of this is an accident. It is what the Academy institutes were for, and it survives the collapse of the framework it was written inside. Against the triumphalism of 1989–91 — the end of history, the permanent great moderation — a reader would have been better served by Chapter Six than by most of what was published in the West in those years.
Two things give the volume away.
The first is the militarism chapter, where the New Political Thinking does something the book does not acknowledge it is doing. To justify disarmament diplomacy with a capitalist adversary, Chapter Five must detach war from the nature of capitalism, and it does, explicitly: "Rabid militarism is not inherent in capitalism as a natural and everlasting necessity... The link is rather of a political nature." Whatever one thinks of the conclusion, this is the abandonment of the Leninist theory of imperialism, performed silently, in a book whose other chapters continue to invoke that theory as settled. The volume never notices the contradiction, because noticing it would require the kind of open theoretical argument that Soviet publishing still did not permit in 1987, even as it permitted the substance.
The second is the productivity concession, and this is where the anti-Stalinist Marxist tradition has the better of the argument by fifty years. The book treats the West's productivity advantage as an embarrassing residue to be eliminated by exhortation. Trotsky had made it the central diagnostic category of Soviet society in the mid-1930s. In "Russia and the World Proletariat", written on 14 September 1935, he put it as directly as it can be put:
This decisive fact – the low productivity of labour power in the Soviet Union – provides the key that puts us in a position to open up all the other secrets.
The argument is developed at length in The Revolution Betrayed (1936): that a nationalised economy which cannot outproduce capitalism cannot defend itself against capitalism, that the bureaucracy's privileges are a function of scarcity rather than a temporary blemish, and that the regime's refusal to submit its own economic performance to open measurement and criticism was itself a cause of the shortfall. Fifty-one years later, IMEMO's economists conceded the fact and could not discuss the cause. The book's readers in 1988 were three years from finding out which analysis had been right.
Ernest Mandel's work supplies the other half of the reply. Where this book explains the postwar boom as a set of capitalist "reserves" temporarily masking a general crisis, Mandel's long-wave account — Late Capitalism (1972; English edition 1975) and Long Waves of Capitalist Development (1980) — treated the 1948–73 expansion and the depressive wave that followed as regular features of capitalist accumulation, needing no doctrine of terminal decline to explain them and offering no comfort about capitalism's imminent collapse. That framework has held up. The "general crisis", asserted here thirty-four times, has not.
The title page gives the editor as A. M. Yakovlev. He is not Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, Gorbachev's Politburo ally and the architect of glasnost, who — confusingly — had himself directed IMEMO from 1983 to 1985. The initials differ and nothing in this text supports the identification. Readers and cataloguers should resist a conflation that would make this book look far more reformist than it is.
Progress commissioned this volume for export, and the back cover names the audience: "social science lecturers and students of the social sciences" outside the USSR. It was ammunition — an authoritative, up-to-date, statistically furnished account of the capitalist world that a Western Communist Party lecturer could use, refreshed to carry the new Gorbachev foreign policy and the Twenty-Seventh Congress line.
It is worth reading now for two things it did not intend. The first is the economics, which is honest work done under constraint and which deserves the credit given above. The second is the shape of the silence: a book that could rethink war, security and the balance of forces in six months, and could not say the word Stalin, or the word perestroika, or admit a single Soviet difficulty, in 171,000 words. The system was capable of revising its analysis of the enemy at speed. What it could not do, three years before it ceased to exist, was talk about itself. That, and not the general crisis of capitalism, is the crisis this book is a document of.