identification of the productive forces with a conventionally established equivalent. Capital, and the concentration of Capital in the social offices to which the productive activity is estranged. The expansion of Capital has always entailed an expanded reproduction of a historical form of social relations. Unlike the imperialism of Rome, the imperialism of Capital does not consist of a colonization which plunders the treasuries of vanquished potentates, levies taxes on peasants, and enslaves some of the colonized; it consists of the transformation of the daily activity of pre-capitalist societies into the reproduction of estranged labor and its personification. Capital. The last stage of capitalist development is the stage when the social relations of estranged labor and Capital are universalized. It is the period of Capital's last expansion, the period when all the productive forces for which there is room in this social order are developed.
The last stage of capitalist expansion does not coincide with colonization. The identification of the imperialism of Capital with colonization has a historical importance of its own, and will be treated later. The actual expansion of the social relations of estranged labor and Capital coincided with colonization only during early stages of capitalist development. Colonization, like religion, the family and the State, is a pre-capitalist social form, a survival from earlier days, which capitalism adapted to its own purposes, not only during the last stage of capitalist expansion but also during the first. Piracy, enclosures and trading companies do not make their historical appearance for the first time in the late nineteenth century; these forms of empire building make their historical debut as much as four centuries earlier, during a period none would call the last stage of capitalist development, when they do in fact serve as instruments for the geographical expansion of the social relations of Capital. By the end of the nineteenth century colonization no longer coincided with the expansion of the social relations of estranged labor and Capital. Like the State, only much earlier, colonization became dislodged from the historical tasks for which capitalism initially used it, acquired an ahistorical dynamic of its own, and became an obstruction, a fetter to the further development of Capital.
During the early stages of capitalist development, the peasants of England and western Europe were forcefully deprived of their previous social activity, their form of human existence, and transformed into sources of primitive accumulation of Capital. However, the colonized peasants were not left suspended in this Limbo, this in-between condition when they are no longer what they were but are not yet what they've started to become. During this early period, colonization served its capitalist purpose. The process was completed. Primitive accumulation gave way to proper Capital accumulation. Limbo gave way to a new social order. The colonized became wage laborers who estranged their living activity in productive forces, and some among them became officials who personified the estranged productive power. The col-
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