Integration, Economic Capitalist, the process of economic and political unification of the capitalist countries in the form of inter-state economic agreements aimed primarily at satisfying the interests of big and the largest monopolies. It may take various forms. The simplest is the free trade zone which dispenses with trade restrictions between the participating countries, above all customs duties. Another form is the customs union, which presupposes, alongside lifting foreign trade restrictions, the establishment of a single foreign trade tariff and a single foreign trade policy in relation to third countries. In both cases, inter-state agreements embrace only the sphere of exchange, creating formally equal conditions for the development of trade and financial accounting between the participating countries. A more complex form is the economic union, which supplements customs integration with agreements on common economic and currency policy. This form has reached its highest level with the European Economic Community. Lenin foresaw the possibility of agreements of this kind between capitalist states, saying as far back as 1915 that the economic division of the world can take place both through the establishment of international monopolies and through inter-state agreements (see V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 342). Capitalist integration is in fact a new form of the division of the world capitalist market between the largest monopolies. Today, it is influenced by two kinds of factors: 1) The development of the productive forces, the scientific and technological revolution, and the objective tendency towards the internationalisation of the economies of individual countries. Given the dominance of state-monopoly capitalism, this tendency produces the aspiration to establish a mechanism of international state-monopoly regulation, particularly within the Common Market framework. 2) The growing power of the world socialist economic system and its planned economy, and the upsurge of the national liberation movement against imperialism. The big monopoly bourgeoisie is trying through integration to reduce the negative consequences of the spontaneous development of the world capitalist economic system and ease its internal contradictions, to mobilise the economic and political forces of the capitalist countries for the preservation and strengthening of the foundations of capitalism, and to provide a material and technical base for aggressive political alliances. The Common Market’s activities prove once again that attempts by monopoly capital to use integration to “reconcile” the private capitalist form of economy with the productive forces that have grown beyond the national framework have not yielded the desired result. The economic mechanism of capitalist integration is based on the capitalist market, which generates and intensifies contradictions between individual countries and between various monopolies, classes and sectors of capitalist society.