The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism

Lenin was therefore right in describing monopoly capitalism as the “highest stage of capitalism.” But, optimistically, he thought that this first long crisis would be the last, with the socialist revolution getting on the agenda. History later proved that capitalism was able to overcome this crisis (at the cost of two world wars and by adapting to the setbacks imposed on it by the Russian and Chinese socialist revolutions and national liberation in Asia and Africa). But after the short period of monopoly capitalism’s revival (1945–1975), there followed a second, long structural crisis of the system, starting in the 1970s. Capital reacted to this renewed challenge by a qualitatively new transformation that took the form of what I have described as “generalized monopoly capitalism.”