Imperialism and World Economy

World Economy and the Process of Internationalisation of Capital

World Economy Defined

i. Imperialism as a problem of world economy. 2. International division of labour as a case of social division of labour. 3. Natural and social prerequisites for international division of labour. 4. International exchange of commodities as a necessary and regular process. 5. The world market of commodities. 6. The world market of money capital. 7. World economy as a system of production relations. 8. Various forms of establishing production relations. 9. Social economy in general and world economy (subject of economic activity).

The struggle between “national” states, which is nothing but the struggle between the respective groups of the bourgeoisie, is not suspended in the air. One cannot picture this gigantic conflict as the conflict of two bodies in a vacuum. On the contrary, the very conflict is conditioned by the special medium in which the “national economic organisms” live and grow. The latter, however, have long ceased being a secluded whole, an “isolated economy” a la Fichte or Thunen. On the contrary, they are only parts of a much larger sphere, namely, world economy. Just as every individual enterprise is part of the “national” economy, so every one of these “national economies” is included in the system of world economy. This is why the struggle between modern “national economic bodies” must be regarded first of all as the struggle of various competing parts of world economy — just as we consider the struggle of individual enterprises to be one of the phenomena of socio-economic life. Thus the problem of studying imperialism, its economic characteristics, and its future, reduces itself to the problem of analysing the tendencies in the development of world economy, and of the probable changes in its inner structure. Before we approach this problem, however, we must, first of all, agree as to what we understand by the expression “ world economy.”