p The forming and rise of the capitalist mode of production was inseparable from the shaping of the capitalist world system of colonial oppression and unrestrained economic exploitation of some countries by others. The subsequent decline of the capitalist social system was intertwined in turn with the collapse of the colonial powers’ political domination, break-up of the colonial system, and the rapid development of a neocdlonial policy by the former metropolitan countries as the crisis of the world capitalist economy deepened.

p Relations of dominance and subordination on an international scale had long existed, of course, before the development of the capitalist social system, but the colonial policy of the successive exploiter formations was not identical in its essence and motives. It reflected the differences in principle of the socio-economic nature of the slave-owning, feudal, and capitalist systems. Under the slave-owning and feudal systems the conquest and colonisation of other countries did not in essence disrupt the economic basis of the life of their peoples, or the social structure of their society, and did not lead to any cardinal shifts in the structure of production in the conquered areas.

p The most important feature of the colonial expansion of the leading European powers, already when capitalism was being born and winning against feudalism, was a policy of breaking down and liquidating the economic independence of the colonised countries, converting them into economic appendages of the metropolitan countries. The capitalist class reorganised the world in its own image and likeness. The European powers’ colonial conquests, which were determined from the time of the great geographical discoveries by an ineradicable striving to capitalise profits, began to take on a new class content, and reflected the economic interests of the rising capitalist class.

p However the ideologists of capitalism now try to twist and idealise the reasons for its colonial policy, and to separate its centuries long history from that of the forming and development of the capitalist mode of production, they are unable to disprove the conclusionunimpeachably demonstrated by Marxist political economy that the system of the 31 enslavement and exploitation of some countries by others was the creation of capitalism itself. This system, which took shape during the struggle to build colonial empires, immensely promoted primitive accumulation of capital.  [31•1 

p The idea behind the capitalists’ colonial policy from the very start was that the material wealth expropriated and appropriated by them should he converted into capital only after it had been brought to the metropolis. For the pillaged countries it was nothing, in practice, but pure, uncompensated loss; not only was their economic organism bled white, but in many cases their productive forces were directly destroyed.

p The system of international economic relations thus built up favoured the rise of the capitalist mode of production in only relatively few countries at first. As a rule the expansionist policy of the capitalist class of the metropolitan countries entailed economic regression in other areas of the world, disruption of the normal course of historical development, and destruction of the shoots of the new relations of production that had arisen there before the coming of the colonialists. That was one of the objectively inevitable patterns of the dialectic of the forming of capitalism’s world economy as a system of exploitation of an immense mass of peoples backward in their social development by capitalist countries.  [31•2 

p The several centuries long process of the formation of the world economy was only completed at the turn of the 32 nineteenth and twentieth centuries when the whole world was shared out among a handful of capitalist countries. The simultaneity of the completion of the forming of this economy and the territorial carving up of the world (like the simultaneity of the birth of these processes) was quite natural and regular. But the coincidence in time is also due to a certain vagueness and confusion in the definition of the relation of such very important concepts as the ’colonial system’ and the ’world economy’.

p In a number of works by Soviet and other Marxist economists, especially in the 30s and 4Us, the world capitalist economy was not treated as a special category of political economy and object of special investigation. It was primarily studied as a consequence of the colonial policy of the imperialist powers. This approach was also reflected iu Soviet textbooks of the time, in which the term ’world capitalist economy’ was often employed mainly in connection with formulation of the territorial division of the world as one of the main economic attributes of imperialism (its main features usually being treated, moreover, in chapters, devoted to description of the colonial system).

p The collapse of the colonial system in the postwar decades graphically demonstrated the illegitimacy of such an approach. The world capitalist economy continued to exist as well with the break-up of the colonial empires, and to function as a mechanism of the economic exploitation of some countries by others, and as a system uniting the countries of the non-socialist world in a single economic organism in which the international relations of the capitalist mode of production prevailed. In the light of the new facts it naturally became necessary to get a thorough understanding, methodologically, of the interdependence and relationship of these categories. It was not fortuitous, therefore, that by the end of the 50s special sections and themes had already begun to appear in certain studies of the international economic problems of imperialism that treated the significance of the colonial system as one of the most important, but far from determinant, elements of the postwar capitalist economy.

p But because of the subsequent completion of the break-up of the colonial system evaluations of that kind also required amendment. The collapse of the last great colonial empire, the Portuguese, at the beginning of the 70s, signified that 33 the world capitalist economy had irrevocably lost one of its former colonial foundations. Its periphery now consists almost wholly of sovereign national states and no longer of rightless colonies and semi-colonies.

p As a result, the territorial (political) division of the world has now finally lost its former signiiicance. Its other characteristics, which ultimately governed the development of a broad system of neocolonial dependence of the emancipated countries on the former metropolises, has taken over the dominant role in imperialism’s expansionist policy. These characteristics include the struggle for an economic partition of the world and for the export of capital, which were directly linked with the inter-imperialist struggle for a territorial division of the world throughout the world capitalist economy’s preceding colonial history.

p Many of the forms and methods of neocolonialism stemming from the export of capital and the struggle of monopolistic alliances for an economic partition of the world by no means came about suddenly, and have not simply been the consequence of the hopeless crisis of monopoly capital’s traditional colonial policy after World War II. Their sources lie deep in the period when the strategy of territorial conquest and colonial expansion held undivided sway in world economics and politics. As this expansion developed the role of capital exports and of the imperialist struggle for an economic division of the world gradually rose. The significance of the system of political enslavement itself, moreover, as the cementing force uniting extremely heterogeneous countries and territories (as regards level of development), during the moulding of imperialism’s world economic relations into a single economic whole, did not remain static.

p The colonial system played a leading role in this respect, above all iu the early stages of the formation and development of these relations. But as more and more active forms of dependence of colonies and semi-colonies on the metropolitan countries, and on the whole of backward agrarian countries on industrially developed ones, built up thanks to it, those forms and methods of economic enslavement came to the fore that later also underlay imperialism’ s neocoloriialist strategy.

p In the concluding stage of the formation of the capitalist economy, when large-scale machine industry developed 34 rapidly within it, the colonial system began to perform a new function compared with the preceding stage, and fostered the drawing of the colonies and semi-colonies into the international division of labour built up by monopoly capital on the basis of this industry. The unprecedented extension in the scale of monopoly capital’s external economic expansion led to a final consolidation of both politically rightless countries and sovereign ones in the role of primary commodity appendages of its industrial centres. It was then that the conditions for the economic exploitation of agrarian countries and raw material suppliers, without their direct political enslavement, began to build up particularly rapidly. Under imperialism, Lenin stressed,

p economic ‘annexation’ is fully ‘achievable’ without political annexation and is widely practised.  [34•1 

p At the beginning of the twentieth century there were no more ‘free’ countries, i.e. lands not exploited by the handful of imperialist powers. In those conditions the inter- imperialist struggle for dependent and semi-colonial countries became extremely tense, and the greatest progress was made in it by the United States of America, the economically strongest capitalist power.  [34•2 

p The infinitely growing significance of the export of capital from the metropolitan countries to their primary commodity peripheries predetermined the development also of another feature most essential for a description of the world economy in its monopoly stage, and that was the tendency to an acceleration of the capitalist development in economically 35 backward countries. After World War II, as the hulk of the colonies and semi-colonies achieved national sovereignty, this tendency (as will he shown in the following chapters) acquired new, original forms.

The postwar break-up of the colonial empires had a substantial impact on the development of several of the decisive contradictions of the imperialist economy, lint one will by no means get a full idea of the specific nature of those contradictions if one does not take the colonial past into account. Analysis of the long-term trends in the reciprocally conditioned development of the capitalist mode of production, the world market, and the colonial system enables one better to understand and comprehensively evaluate the substance of the structural shifts that have taken place in the world economy, given the steady deepening of the general crisis of capitalism.