In January and February 1932 the Institute of Economics of the Leningrad branch of the Communist Academy held meetings on the Trotskyist Theory on Imperialism (already translated and published in RD in April 2016) and the Universal Crisis of Capitalism. Here we publish the contribution of L. Kasharsky in this conference in which the author evaluated the recently published book by E.A. Preobrazhensky ‘The Decline of Capitalism’ which had been published in Moscow in 1931. (An English translation of this book was published in 1985: E.A. Preobrazhensky, ‘The Decline of Capitalism’, translated and edited with an introduction by Richard B. Day, M. E. Sharpe, Inc. Armonk, New York). Kasharsky argues that Preobrazhensky breaks with Marx...

Presentation to the Stalin Society by Harpal Brar ---- Whereas in previous epochs, human beings died as a result of food shortage, in our epoch they die because there is too much food. Capitalism is the first system of production which brings society “face to face with the contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume because the consumers are wanting” (Engels, Anti-Dühring, p.387). Capitalism long ago became historically outmoded. There could be no better expression of the utter bankruptcy of this system than the fact that, in the midst of unprecedented wealth and unexampled productive power, it is unable to find the means to exploit a growing proportion of the working class, and is compelled to condemn tens of millions of...