‘‘The very fact that capitalism is rationalizing its technique and is producing a vast mass of goods which the market cannot absorb, this very fact tends to intensify the struggle within the imperialist camp for markets and for fields of capital export and leads to the creation of the conditions for a new war, for a new redivision of the world. Is it difficult to understand that the excessive growth of capitalism’s productive potentialities, coupled with the limited capacity of the world market and the stability of ‘‘spheres of influence,’’ intensifies the struggle for markets and deepens the crisis of capitalism? Capitalism could solve this crisis if it could increase the wages of the workers severalfold, if it could considerably improve the material conditions of the peasantry, if it could thereby considerably increase the purchasing power of the vast masses of the working people and enlarge the capacity of the home market. But if it did that, capitalism would not be capitalism. Precisely because capitalism cannot do that, precisely because capitalism uses its ‘‘incomes’’ not to raise the well-being of the majority of the working people, but to intensify their exploitation and to export capital to less-developed countries in order to obtain still larger ‘‘incomes’’ –– precisely for that reason, the struggle for markets and for fields of capital export gives rise to a desperate struggle for a new re-division of the world and of spheres of influence, a struggle which has already made a new imperialist war inevitable.’’
[Speech at the joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission of the CPSU(B)]
