The overwhelming majority of countries in the semicolonial world remain dominated by the world capitalist market and oppressed by the imperialist system. Most are saddled with neocolonial governments that represent domestic exploiting classes subservient to varying degrees to imperialism. The operation of the law of value, combined with the policies of finance capital and its various state powers, have maintained and reinforced the division of the capitalist world--first called attention to by Lenin, and later by the Communist International--into a handful of imperialist countries and the great majority of oppressed and exploited countries.

Since World War II there has been an expansion of manufacturing in the semicolonial countries and a substantial differentiation in rates of development, including significant industrialization in a few cases. Despite these changes, not a single one of the semicolonial countries has crossed the bridge into the ranks of the industrialized imperialist states, even as a junior partner....

Throughout the semicolonial world two processes intermesh. Millions of toilers are still being drawn out of precapitalist social relations on the land into the capitalist rents and mortgages system and rural wage labor. At the same time, millions of others are being driven off the land into swollen slums where they join a growing urban proletariat, and from which many migrate in search of work to more economically advanced semicolonial countries or one of the imperialist centers.

The expansion of industry and commerce in many of these countries has also created a growing employed urban proletariat. Workers--whose average wages and conditions are well below those of workers in any of the imperialist countries--have formed unions; many have become seasoned fighters in labor and political struggles.

While layers of capitalists in parts of the Third World have been able to break into the international capitalist market for manufactured goods--not only for light consumer items and durables, but also steel, automobiles, trucks, computers, and ships--not a single one of these countries has seen the growth of a home market sufficient to absorb a significant portion of what the domestic industrialists produce.

The majority, usually a big majority, of workers and peasants simply have such a low standard of living that the consumer market among the bourgeoisie and relatively small middle classes cannot even approach making up for it. The majority of toilers are often not part of the modern sectors of the economy, not fully part of a modern class structure.

Unlike the imperialist powers, most countries with semicolonial economic structures do not even have a single wholesale market price for most agricultural commodities, nor a single average rate of industrial profit of domestic capitalists.

Stock and securities markets, to the degree they exist, have not taken on the function described by Engels of centralizing the accumulation and redeployment of domestic agricultural, industrial, and commercial capital. This is a barrier to the mobilization of the various local pockets of national capital on a substantial enough scale to contribute to sustained economic development comparable to that in the advanced capitalist countries.

A great deal of attention has been focused by the big-business press on a handful of semicolonial countries in Latin America and Asia--Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore--that have managed to increase their share in world industrial production by a few percentage points in the more than forty years since the end of World War II. For the rest of the semicolonial countries, however, the total share in world industrial output has fallen over this same period. Moreover, even in the so-called newly industrializing countries, the economic and social conditions of working people drastically limit the home market.  
 
Dispossession of the peasantry
The proliferating U.S. and other imperialist-owned assembly plants (maquiladoras) that are allegedly "developing" northern Mexico, for example, pay workers $3 to $5 per day. In Brazil and South Korea average wages of workers employed in manufacturing are well below $1.50 an hour.¹ The expansion of manufacturing in these countries has been predicated on dispossession of the peasantry and superexploitation of the growing proletariat, which has driven down average real wages, not on developing a broad working class capable of purchasing a wide range of consumer goods and durables.

In none of the cases where neocolonial governments have carried out what have been billed as "land reforms" has the result been a thoroughgoing land distribution and state provision of cheap credit. As a result, nowhere in these countries has there developed a broad, modern class of small farmers whose income and living standards on average are equal to that of skilled workers. Instead, a thin layer of well-off farmers has been created and the superexploitation, dispossession, and pauperization of the toiling rural majority has increased.

This lack of a broad home market puts the capitalists in these countries at a severe disadvantage in the intensifying trade competition, on the world market. It makes the economies of these countries particularly vulnerable to inflation, recessions, monetary fluctuations, trade restrictions, and other factors that slash demand for imports in the capitalist world. Imperialism, nonetheless, continues to accelerate the export-orientation of agriculture and industry, both native and foreign-owned. The semicolonial countries, most of them originally with substantial acreage of rich soil and plentiful forests and water resources, have been transformed into importers of food, clothing, and other basic necessities.
 

1. As a result of a wave of hard-fought strikes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, industrial wages in South Korea increased more than 55 percent between 1987 and 1991, while industrial wages in Brazil continued to decline, ending the 1980s lower than at the beginning of the decade. Wage increases slowed by 1993 in South Korea, and industrial strikes in 1994 have been at the lowest level since 1987.  
 
 
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