A collective volume by the two elite research institutes of the late Soviet state - the Institute of World Economy and International Relations and the Institute of the United States and Canada - on where capitalism stood as the century closed.
Fifteen chapters and some 171,000 words, described on the jacket as the work of well-known Soviet economists, philosophers, historians, sociologists and journalists. The footnotes identify the milieu precisely even though no contributor list survives in the text: these were the places where people whose job was to know what was actually happening in the capitalist world went to work. Not a book by apparatus hacks.
Its subjects are the ones those institutes were built to follow: the structural changes in the developed economies, the new technologies and their social consequences, the transnational corporations, the debt crisis and the developing world, militarism and the arms economy, and the prospects for disarmament.
Its argumentative spine is Gorbachev's Political Report to the Twenty-Seventh Congress, cited nineteen times and quoted more often than Marx - which also dates the book. The disarmament chapter turns on the statement of 15 January 1986 and on the Reykjavik summit of that October, reported as the live diplomatic situation; the most recent Western source is from August 1986.
So the chapters were finished in 1986 or 1987. This is the new thinking applied to the capitalist world at the moment it was first formulated, rather than a document of the year on the spine.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
