Stable Systolic Category of Manifolds and the Cup-length

It follows from a theorem of Gromov that the stable systolic category of a closed manifold is bounded from below by the rational cup-length of the manifold. In the paper we study the inequality in the opposite direction. In particular, combining our results with Gromov's theorem, we prove the equality of stable systolic category and rational cup-length for simply connected manifolds of dimension less than 8.