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p Every new mode of production replacing a preceding one regularly creates broader opportunities for further growtli of the productive forces. The capitalist system made a great stride forward compared with feudalism opening up hitherto unprecedented perspective for the development and internationalisation of social production. The decisive factor marking the start of the capitalist epoch was the decomposition of feudal relations of production and the rise in several 37 European countries from the middle of the sixteenth century of the foundations of capitalist production in the form of various types of manufacture. As a result an economic community of separate countries took shape, and a system of division of labour developed on a national and an international scale, home markets were formed, and exchange grew between them.

p The gradual consolidation of the economic positions of capitalism (international ones included) prepared the material, and consequently the socio-political, conditions for bourgeois revolutions in a number of countries in Western Europe. These revolutions, by overthrowing the political superstructure, in turn accelerated the replacement of feudal relations by capitalist ones; at the same time they cleared the road for steady external economic expansion of the European capitalist class.

p The thirst to enrich themselves at the expense of other nations constitutionally inherent in all exploiter formations became an urgent economic need in the course of rapidly developing commodity production. It determined the capitalists’ need to open up trade routes from Europe to Asia, Africa, and America. The great geographical discoveries were the natural consequence of the unprecedented growth of commodity and money relations in European countries evoked by the development of capitalist production and the corresponding expansion of the national and world markets.

p The merchant capitalists had a paramount role in all those processes. The East India Companies—the Dutch (1602- 1798), English (1600-1858) and French (1664-1770, 1785- 1793)—wrote bloody pages in the history of capitalism. These great joint-stock trading organisations, with a capital very considerable for their day, promoted the drawing of colonised countries into international trade in every possible way, and converted them into economic appendages of the metropolitan countries.

p The formation of capitalism’s world socio-economic system thus took two main directions from the very beginning: (1) along the line of development ’in depth’, i.e. through the growth of capitalist production and national markets in a comparatively small number of economically advanced countries; (2) along the line of development ’in breadth’, above all through expansion of a handful of capitalist countries’ colonial domination to newer and newer countries 38 and territories, and the forging of stronger interconnections in the world market.

p Capitalism, being a natural stage of historical progress, and raising labour productivity to a higher level, thus inevitably broke up relations of production based on personal dependence. But the capitalist society growing from the womb of feudalism did not eliminate class contradictions; on the contrary, it fostered their further exacerbation both within separate countries and on the international arena. Capitalist production only replaced old classes, old conditions of oppression, and old forms of struggle with new ones. As capitalist manufacture grew an urgent need matured to pass to a larger scale, factory production, which ultimately led to the industrial revolution. Developing in the second half of the eighteenth century, first in Great Britain and later embracing a number of other countries, this revolution was completed about the middle of the nineteenth century. The genesis of the factory system of production employing machine technology, and the vast extension on that basis of the international sphere of the capitalists’ class omnipotence through colonial expansion, also meant confirmation of capitalism as the prevailing mode of production.  [38•1 

p The changes taking place in the productive forces of that time under the action of capitalism were really impressive. In England between 1800 and 1850 industrial consumption of cotton rose more than 14-fold, the mining of coal over fivefold, the smelting of iron by around 12-fold. In France, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century alone, output of coal almost trebled, and the production of iron doubled. The production of industrial goods increased at unprecedented rates in Germany, the USA, and certain other countries. At the same time capitalism’s international 39 commercial and industrial relations developed rapidly. Because of the application of steam engines in transport there were qualitative shifts in the international lines of communication that linked the overwhelming majority of countries together at that time. World trade rose by nearly 180 per cent in the first half of the nineteenth century.

p These changes, however, so impressive for their contemporaries, now seem quite modest. In fact they only prepared the ground for a subsequent rapid increase of capitalist production.  [39•1 

p Yet it was the transition from manufacture to largescale mechanised industry, accompanied with the development of fundamentally new industries, and the drawing of additional manpower and material resources into production, that ultimately led to formation of the material and technical basis of pre-monopoly capitalism. The essence of the process was succinctly characterised by Lenin:

The progressive historical role of capitalism may be summed up in two brief propositions: increase in the productive forces of social labour, and the socialisation of that labour.  [39•2 

Capital could not perform that historical function without internationalising the productive forces and without a struggle to mould a corresponding world economic system. The building of that system, which caused a gradual economic convergence of nations, and a strengthening of their economic relations and of the international division of labour, was an inevitable manifestation of the natural.process of capital’s socialisation of labour.

p That process, however, did not simply lead to consolidation of the bourgeoisie’s class position; its most important consequence was that it objectively prepared the national and international socio-economic conditions for the inevitable transition from capitalism to the next, more advanced social formation which by completely abolishing exploiter relations would open up unlimited scope for a further increase of humanity’s productive powers.

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p Together with growth of capitalism in separate countries, and extensioji of its international influence on the world arena, the working class came forward as the main driving force of further historical progress. As Marx wrote:

p The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of tho new world—on the one hand universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind, and the means of that intercourse; on the other hand the development of the productive powers of man and tho transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies. Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth.  [40•1 

p The growth rates of capitalism’s productive forces on the basis of large-scale production increased markedly in its main centres in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1880 the volume of industrial production had almost trebled for the whole world compared with 1850. Important shifts had occurred, or were in the bud, in the very structure of capitalist production as a result of faster growth of the main branches of heavy industry. Iron and steel, mechanical engineering, and the chemical industry began to bo converted into the leading branches of the economy. The system of international division of labour continued to expand rapidly. And the development of transport, in which fundamentally new technique was intensively introduced, played a very essential role in cementing capitalism into a single economic whole.

Pre-monopoly capitalism reached its highest stage by the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Then a stormy process of the rise and growth of monopoly enterprises of a jointstock type—cartels, trusts, and syndicates—began in its main centres. Capitalism began to grow over, as a world social system, into its highest and last stage of historical development.