Restructuring through crises
Global capitalism in the last quarter of the 20th century was marked once again by many of the features Marx had described. There were recurrent economic crises, and the restructuring through crisis of capitals, big and small, privately owned and state owned.
All the major industrial economies sufered at least three real recessions, except for France and Canada which each experienced one "growth recession" and two real recessions, and Japan which avoided a real recession for nearly 20 years after the crisis of the mid-1970s, only then to enter a 13-year period of near stagnation after 1 992.
In the former Soviet bloc countries recessionary tendencies of the late 1 980s now turned into slumps. But soon different paths emerged. The former USSR (CIS in the graph below) suffered an enormous economic contraction, and output in 2000, even after two years of recovery, was only 70 percent of the 1990s figure. The picture was similarly miserable for Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and the bulk of former Yugoslavia. By contrast, the central European economies (CSB in the graph) only contracted to a little over 80 percent of the 1990s figure and recovered to begin to surpass it in 1 998-although this figure was still hardly greater than that for 1980.113
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Capitalism in the 20th Century