This book was first published in French as an analysis of the roots of the previous world capitalist recession of 1974-75, and it predicted the imminent recurrence of economic decline as the author saw it happening. These crises of the 1970s are popularly presented in terms of the West,s growing dependence on Third World resources, notably oil, and of a consequent shift in the global balance of forces. In this book however, the authors show this impression to be fundamentally lopsided where the lines of demarcation exists not just between the west and the underdeveloped world, but also within the West itself. The central theme of this book is the new economic warfare which the USA has been waging in its attempts to re-establish its dominance over European and Japanese capitalism. The ultimate losers, of course, are the workers and peasants of the Third World. This struggle of the US capitalism, basically in decline, to protect itself from Japan and Western Europe is analysed in a number of inter-related spheres. The authors use a mass of empirical material in all these spheres to put together a portrait of late imperialism today such that the world ceased to be a term of abuse and take on a concrete institutional meaning. In doing so, the structural root of the world economic crisis becomes clearer.