50 SOCIAL SCIENTIST reserve army of labour, both as a condition and as a consequence of the accumulation process. There are two major directions in which the analysis must now be developed. First, only passing references were made so far to ^crises' which^ in the capitalist mode of production, mean interruption in the process of reproduction of social capital. The immediate manifestation of all capitalist economic crises is the accumulation of large quantities of unsold stocks of all important commodities in the hands of sellers. But while the manifestation is this, the roots of capitalist crises lie elsewhere. In essence such crises are the products of certain fundamental contradictions of the capitalist accumulation process. To discover these, one must go deeper into the implications of the tendencies of capitalist accumulation which have been outlined above. The sphere of circulation, left out so far, ought to come into this analysis. Secondly, the process of centralization of capital is extremely important in that it leads to the development of monopoly from competition. The generalization of this process gives rise to the monopoly stage of the capitalist mode of production. Lenin has shown the politico-economic implications on a global scale of this logical development of monopoly capitalism from competitive capitalism in his work. Imperialism, Further development of the analysis calls for a study of imperialism, which Lenin identified as the product of the monopoly stage of the capitalist mode of production. The question of capitalist crises will be taken up next, to be followed by the Marxist-Leninist understanding of imperialism. A V BALU (To be continued) 1 Karl Marx, Capital, Moscow 1967, vol I, p 620. 2 Ibid., p 618. 8 Ibid., p 638, exclamation within parantheses added. 4 Ibid., p 628. 5 Ibid., pp 625-6. 6 Ibid., p 626. 7 Ibid., p 627. 8 VI Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism; See also N I Bukharin^ Imperialism and World Economy, Monthly Review, 1972 and P M Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development, Monthly Review, 1942. 9 Capital, vol III, p 436. 10 Ibid., p 439. n Ibid., p 438. i2 Capital, vol I, pp 631-2. 1^ Ibid., p 632. i4 Ibid., p 633. i-'1 Ibid., p 639. is Ibid., p 64.4. 17 Ibid., p 645. 18 Ibid.,