4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST By the time of the outbreak of the imperialist war of 1914, the contradictions within the nation States had grown to such enormous proportions that the existing set of State institutions and the normal pattern of utilising them were unequal to the task of containing and suppressing the former. The war not only brought a temporary relief to the capitalist States but taught their ruling classes a very important lesson. They had experienced during the war how large-scale State demand and State control of money, credit, commerce and trade had managed to suppress the tensions within the nation States. At the end of the war, when the capitalist States realised the prospect of facing the same pre-war problems increased many-fold, the lessons of the war proved most educative and useful. The institutions of the ruling classes develop through periods of trials and errors—rejecting the unsuited ones and retaining the useful. Thus while the war went, the institutions remained. In fact, in spite of all the nostalgia of many sections of the ruling classes, none of the capitalist countries came back anywhere near ihe pre-war level of government expenditure and freedom of trade, commerce and credit from government regulations. In most countries, notably in Britain among them, just as the war-time practice of a smaller inner Cabinet continued in the post-war priod, so also did the war-time economic practices. Lloyd George had promised his electors of Wolverhampton in November 1918, that slums should be swept away, agriculture revitalised, the people brought back to the land and that "inhuman conditions and wretchedness must surrender like the German fleet".1 The experience of handling things in war proved so congenial that even in the rhetorics of the statesmen the war lived. The fact of the matter was that capitalism had entered a state of permanent crisis—an observable counterpart of this permanent crisis being the necessity of major innovations in the manner of functioning of the system. Maintaining the system of capitalist nation States and their -imperialist world order became impossible within the existing superstructure erected on the basis of a more progressive and less moribund capitalism. The development of capitalism into monopoly capitalism itself was the outcome of the series of crises through which capitalism had earlier passed. With the onset of the permanent crisis, there came the other development, a most significant one in our time—that of the development into State monopoly capitalism. It is best in this context to quote Lenin's brief description: World capitalism, which in the sixties and the seventies of the last century was an advanced and progressive force of free competition, and which at the beginning of the twentieth century grew into monopoly capitalism, i e., imperialism, took a big step forward during the war, not only towards greater concentration of finance capital, but aho lov\aids trnrr-formation into State capitalism.2