ABSTRACT
THE best proof that the crisis now raging in every capitalist country is not the usual periodical crisis, that is to say a temporary and transitory one, but is a crisis of the whole capitalist system and the beginning of the end of capitalism, is not merely its depth, but also the width of its embrace. This time the crisis is not confined to the sphere of economics and material production. With the decay of the economic basis the whole social and political system of capitalism begins to break up. No less clear signs and symptoms of decay are also to be found in the sphere of bourgeois ideology. Pessimism, the growth of a reactionary temper, the prevalence of idealism, the rebirth of mysticism, the renunciation of science and scientific methods and the call for a return to the methods of medireval scholasticism, all these facts are evidence of the unusual depths of the process of ideological collapse and degeneration among the bourgeOISie. If the economic crisis has thrown back production for generations in the capitalist countries, then the crisis experienced by bourgeois ideology and particularly by bourgeois science, has thrown the latter back for hundreds of years.
