1 Capitalist industrialisation and the law of combined and uneven development

Modern industrial capitalism was born in Great Britain. During the Nineteenth Century it spread progressively to most West and Central European countries, as well as to the United States, and later to Japan. The existence of some already industrialised countries did not seem to prevent the successive penetration and extension of industrial capitalism into a series of countries in the process of industrialisation.

It is true that the pre-industrial forms of production in the latter (craft workers and cottage industry) were pitilessly destroyed by the cheap products of British, Belgian and French industry. But British, Belgian and French capital still had ample fields of investment open to them in their own countries. Therefore it was generally a modern national industry which increasingly substituted itself for the artisans ruined by the competition of the cheap foreign goods. In particular, this was the case with textile production in Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Austria, Bohemia, Czarist Russia (including Poland) and the Netherlands, etc.

This situation changed completely with the coming of the era of imperialism and monopoly capitalism. Thenceforth the functioning of the world capitalist market no longer facilitated but on the contrary held back ‘normal’ capitalist development, and in particular the thoroughgoing industrialisation of the under-developed countries. Marx’s formula, according to which each advanced country provides a less developed country with the image of its own future, lost the validity which it had held throughout the era of free competitive capitalism.

Three essential factors (and many supplementary factors not mentioned here) determined this fundamental change in the functioning of the international capitalist economy:
 (a) The volume of the mass production of many products by the imperialist countries meant that they secured such an advantage in productivity and retail price over the initial industrial production in the under–developed countries that the latter could no longer take off on a large scale, could no longer seriously sustain competition with foreign products. Increasingly it was Western industry (and later Japanese as well) which would thenceforth profit from the progressive ruin of the artisans, of cottage industry, and of manufacturing in the countries of Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa.
 

(b) The surplus of capital, now more or less permanent in the industrialised capitalist countries and progressively under the control of the monopolies, unleashed a vast movement to export capital to the under-developed countries, developing areas of production there which are complementary and not competitive in relation to Western industry. Thus it is the domination of foreign capital over the economy of these countries which makes them specialise in the production of foodstuffs. Moreover, as these countries assume bit by bit the standing of colonial or semi-colonial countries, the state defends above all the interests of foreign capital. It does not, therefore, take even modest measures to protect emerging industries against the competition of imported goods.

(c) The domination of the economies of dependent countries by foreign capital creates an economic and social situation in which the state maintains and consolidates the interests of the old ruling classes, linking them to those of imperialist capital, rather than eliminating them radically as was the case with the great bourgeois-democratic revolutions in Western Europe and the United States.

This new evolution of the international capitalist economy in the imperialist epoch can be summed up in the law of combined and uneven development. In the backward countries – or at least in most of them – the social and economic structure is not, in its fundamental features, that of a typical feudal society nor that of a typical capitalist society. Under the impact of the domination of imperialist capital it combines feudal, semi-feudal, semi-capitalist and capitalist features in an exceptional manner.

The dominant social force is that of capital – but this is normally foreign capital. The native bourgeoisie does not, therefore, exercise political power. The population is not mainly composed of wage-earners, nor in most cases of serfs, but of peasants subjected in varying degrees to the exactions of semi-feudal, semi-capitalist landowners, usurers, mer- chants, and tax-collectors. Although living to a certain extent away from commercial production and even from monetary production, this great mass still suffers the disastrous effects of fluctuations in the price of raw materials on the world imperialist market, through the intermediary of the global effects that these fluctuations exercise on the national economy.

2 The exploitation of colonial and semi-colonial countries by imperialist capital

During successive decades the pouring of foreign capital into dependent, colonial or semi-colonial countries led to the pillage, exploitation and oppression of more than one thousand million human beings by imperialist capital. This represents one of the principal crimes for which the capitalist system has been responsible throughout its history. If, as Marx said, capitalism appeared on earth dripping blood and sweat from all its pores, nowhere is this definition justified so literally as in the dependent countries.

The imperialist epoch is above all characterised by colonial conquest. Colonialism does, of course, pre-date imperialism. The Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores had already burnt their bloody way across the Canary Isles and Cape Verde islands, as well as the countries of Central and South America, exterminating everywhere a large part, if not all, of the native population. The white colons hardly behaved in a more humane manner towards the Indians of North America. The conquest of the Indian Empire by Great Britain was accompanied by a whole host of atrocities, as was that of Algeria by France. The horrors of the slave-trade and the large-scale use of slavery in the Americas were one of the main sources of the primitive accumulation of capital.

With the arrival of the imperialist era these atrocities extended to a great part of Africa, Asia and Oceania. Large scale massacres, deportations, expulsions of peasants from their lands, the introduction of forced labour, if not defacto slavery, all took place one after another. Racism ‘justifies’ these inhuman practices by affirming the superiority and the ‘historic civilising mission’ of the white race. This same racism subtly deprives the colonised peoples of their own past, at the same time as snatching away their national wealth and a large part of the fruits of their labour.

If the colonial slaves dare to rebel against their depriva- tion they are repressed with unspeakable cruelty. Indian women and children massacred in the Indian wars in the United States; ‘mutinous’ Hindus placed in front of firing cannons; tribes in the Middle East spitilessly bombarded by the RAF; tens of thousands of Algerian civilians massacred ‘in retaliation’ for the national insurrec- tion of May 1945: all this foreshadows or else faithfully repeats the most savage cruelties of Nazism, including pure and simple genocide. If the European and American bourgeoisie were so up-in-arms about Hitler, it was because he committed this outrage against the white race, subjecting the peoples of Europe to that which the peoples of Asia, America and Africa had suffered at the hands of world imperialism for several centuries.

Every part of the economy of the dependent countries is subordinated to the interests and dictates of foreign capital. In many of these countries the railways link the centres of export production to the ports but do not link the principal urban centres to each other. The secure infrastructure is that serving the import-export activities; in contrast, the school, hospital and cultural systems are appallingly under- developed. The majority of the population languishes in illiteracy, ignorance and poverty.

Of course, the penetration of foreign capital also allows a certain development of the productive forces, gives birth to a few large industrial towns, develops a more or less important proletarian embryo in the ports, the mines, the plantations, the railways and public administration. But one can say without exaggeration that, during the three-quarters of a century between the start of the movement towards the colonisation of the entire under-developed world and the victory of the Chinese revolution, the standard of living of the average population of Asia, Africa and Latin America (apart from a few privileged countries) has stagnated or fallen. It has even fallen catastrophically in some important countries. Periodic famines have swept away literally tens of millions of Indians and Chinese. 

3 The ‘bloc of classes’ in power in semi-colonial countries

In order to understand more completely the way in which imperialist domination has ‘frozen’ the development of the colonial and semi-colonial countries and has prevented normal development of the Western capitalist type, one has to understand the nature of the ‘bloc of social classes’ which was in power in these countries during the era of ‘classical’ imperialism, and the consequences of this ‘bloc’ on economic and social evolution.

When foreign capital penetrates massively into the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the local ruling class is generally composed of landowners (semi-feudal and semi-capitalist, in varying proportions according to the country under examination) allied to merchant and banking or usurer’s capital. In the most backward countries, such as those of black Africa, it usually encounters tribal societies, in process of decomposition brought about by the prolonged effects of the slave-trade.

Foreign capital generally allies itself to these ruling classes, using them as intermediaries in the exploitation of the indigenous peasants and workers, and consolidating their relations of exploitation with their own peoples. Sometimes it even substantially extends the degree of the pre-capitalist form of exploitation, at the same time combining it with the introduction of new forms of capitalist exploitation. British colonialism transformed the zamindari in Bengal, who were once just tax-collectors in the service of the Mogul emperors, into straightforward proprietors of the lands from which they extracted the taxes.

Thus three hybrid social classes appear in the society of under-developed countries, setting their seal on the blocking of economic and social development: 

The compradore bourgeoisie, a native bourgeoisie, at first simply the appointed agents of the foreign import-export houses, who acquire wealth and slowly become independent businessmen. But their businesses are essentially confined to the commercial sphere (and ‘services’). Their profits are usually invested in commerce, usury, the acquisition of land, and real estate speculation. 

The class of merchants and usurers. The slow penetration of money economy dislocates the self-help mechanisms within the village community. Social differentiation pitilessly progresses in the village with the succession of good and bad harvests, on fertile and less fertile lands. Rich and poor peasants separate into two camps, with the latter depending more and more on the former. When the harvest is not sufficient to provide for even their most elementary needs, the poor peasants are obliged to take on debts in order to buy seeds and necessities. They become dependent on the merchant-money lenders, rich peasants, who, little by little, expropriate their fields and subject them to innumerable exactions.

The rural semi-proletariat (later extended to the urban ‘fringes’). The ruined peasants who have been evicted from their lands find no work in industry, given its under- development. They are obliged to remain in the countryside and have to hire out their labour to the big peasants, or rent patches of land to scrape out a miserable existence for a ground rent (or, in the share-cropping system, in exchange for part of the harvest). This rent becomes more and more exorbitant. The more severe their misery and their lack of employment, the higher the rent they are prepared to pay for the lease of a field. The higher the ground rent is, the less it is in the interests of the owners of capital to invest in industry. Instead they use their capital to buy land. The greater the poverty of the mass of peasants, the more restricted is the interior market in consumer goods, which in turn retards industrialisation. And the more backward industry’s development, the higher the level of under-development.

Underdevelopment is not, therefore, the result of an absolute lack of capital or of resources. On the contrary, in the backward countries the social surplus product often represents a higher percentage of the national income than in the industrialised countries. Under-development is the result of a social and economic structure flowing from imperialist domination, which means that the accumulation of money capital is not principally directed towards industrialisation or even towards productive investment, which in turn leads to an immense under-employment (both quantitative and qualitative) in relation to the imperialist countries. 

4 The national liberation movement

In the long term it was inevitable that hundreds of millions of human beings would not passively submit to a system of exploitation and oppression imposed upon them by a handful of big capitalists in the imperialist countries, together with the administrative and repressive apparatus at their disposal. A national liberation movement progressively takes root in the young intelligentsia of the Latin American, Asian and African countries. They take up the bourgeois-democratic and even socialist or semi-socialist ideas of the West in order to challenge the foreign domination of their countries. The nationalism of the dependent countries, which has an anti-imperialist orientation, expresses the different interests of three social forces:

– Above all, it is taken up by the young industrial, national bourgeoisie wherever they already possess a real material base which allows their interests to compete with those of the predominant imperialist power. The most typical case is that of the Indian Congress Party, led by Gandhi and heavily supported by the large Indian industrial groups.

– Due to the influence of the Russian Revolution it can be taken up by the emerging workers movement, which will use it above all as an instrument to mobilise the urban and village masses against the established power. The most typical examples are that of the Chinese Communist Party from the 1920s, and that of the Indochinese Communist Party in the following decades.
 – It can promote the explosion of revolts by the urban petty bourgeoisie and especially the peasantry, taking the political form of nationalist populism. The Mexican revolution of 1910 is the best example of this form of anti-imperialist movement.
 In general terms, the growing crisis of the imperialist system, marked by successive internal upheavals – the defeat of Czarist Russia in the 1904-5 war against Japan; the 1905 Russian Revolution; the First World War; the 1917 Russian Revolution; the arrival on the scene of the Indian and Chinese mass movements; the 1929-32 economic crisis; the Second World War; the defeats suffered by Western imperialism at the hands of Japanese imperialism in 1941-42; the defeat of Japanese imperialism in 1945 – forcefully stimulated the national liberation movement in the dependent countries. It received its major boost from the victory of the Chinese revolution in 1949. 

The tactical and strategic problems for the international workers movement (and the indigenous mass movement in the dependent countries) which flow from the appearance of national liberation movements in the colonial and semi- colonial countries are treated in more detail in Chapter 11, point 4, and Chapter 13, point 4. Let us just underline here the particular duty of the workers movement in the imperialist countries to give unconditional support to every movement and every effective mass action in the colonial and semi-colonial countries against the exploitation and oppression to which they are subjected by the imperialist powers. This duty includes that of clearly distinguishing between inter-imperialist wars – reactionary wars – and wars of national liberation which, independent of the political force which leads the oppressed people at any particular stage of the struggle, are just wars, in which the world proletariat should work for the victory of the oppressed peoples.

5 Neo-colonialism

The upsurge of the national liberation movement in the aftermath of the Second World War led imperialism to modify its forms of domination in the backward countries. Direct domination gave way to indirect domi- nation. The number of colonies in the true sense of the word, directly administered by the colonial power, has fallen sharply. In the space of two decades their number has fallen from about 70 to a final handful. The Italian, Dutch, British, French, Belgian and finally Portuguese and Spanish colonial empires have almost entirely collapsed.

Of course, the disappearance of the colonial empires was not unaccompanied by the counter-revolutionary resistance of important sectors of imperialist capital: the bloody colonial wars led by Dutch imperialism in Indonesia, by British imperialism in Malaysia and Kenya, by French imperialism in Algeria and Indochina, as well as the shorter but no less bloody ‘expeditions’ such as the Suez expedition against Egypt in 1956. But, historically, these sinister undertakings seem to be rear-guard actions. Direct colonialism lies well and truly condemned.

Its disappearance in no way implies the disintegration of the world imperialist system. This continues to exist, though in modified forms. The great majority of semi-colonial countries remain confined to the export of raw materials. They continue to suffer all the unfavourable consequences of unequal, exploitative exchange. The gap between their degree of development and that of the imperialist countries continues to increase, and not to decrease. The difference between the per capita income and the level of well-being of the population in the ‘northern’ and ‘southern’ parts of the globe is even greater now than it was in the past.

However, the transformation from direct to indirect imperialist domination in the under-developed countries implies a stronger identification of the ‘national’ industrial bourgeoisie with the exploitation of the working masses of these countries, as well as a certain acceleration of the process of industrialisation. This flows both from the changed balance of political forces (that is, it represents an inevitable concession by the system to the growing pressure of the masses), and from a modification of the fundamental interests of the principal imperialist groups themselves.

There has in fact been an important alteration in the type of exports from the imperialist countries. The ‘machines, equipment and transport goods’ category now occupies the dominant position which used to be taken up by ‘consumer goods and steel’. It is, of course, impossible for the principal monopolistic trusts to export more and more machines to the  dependent countries without stimulating certain forms of industrialisation there (in general, this is restricted to the consumer goods industry).

Moreover, within the context of their world strategy, the multinational companies have an interest in implanting themselves in a certain number of dependent countries so that, given the future expansion of sales that they foresee, they are in there right from the start. Thus the practice of joint ventures between imperialist capital, ‘national’ industrial capital, private capital, and state capital is generalised in these countries. This is characteristic of the neo-colonial structure. Because of this fact, the weight of the working class in the society grows.

This structure remains within a restricting and exploitative imperialist context. Industrialisation remains limited, and its ‘home market’ rarely exceeds 20-25 per cent of the population – the well-to-do classes, the new middle classes, and the rich peasantry. The poverty of the masses is just as great as before. The social contradictions increase rather than diminish – from this comes the continuing potential for successive revolutionary explosions in these countries.

In these conditions a new social layer takes on importance: the state bureaucracy, which usually controls an important nationalised sector, and sets itself up as representing national interests to foreign nations while in fact profiting from its leadership monopoly to indulge in large scale private accumulation. A new ‘ruling power bloc’ emerges, allying foreign monopolies, ‘national’ industrialists and this state bureaucracy (often represented by the army). The weight of the classical oligarchy of landowners and ‘compradores’ declines.