During the senile period of capitalism, when one-time forms of accumulation of Capital lose their initial historical function, champions of the colonized appear among officials of the ideological establishment and among aspirants to modern forms of personified power. Economists, philosophers, policemen, managers, as well as aspirants to all these offices, become servants and spokesmen of the colonized. Unlike the feudal champions of the bourgeoisie, the modern champions of the colonized consider themselves members of the oppressed class. In order to do this they find it necessary to overturn capitalist forms of social status and to reintroduce class distinctions based on social origin. Capitalism had abolished such distinctions and had replaced them with class distinctions based on social activity, on one's relation to the productive forces. It becomes necessary to overturn the capitalist standard if such social categories as "working class intellectuals" and "proletarian generals" are to become meaningful again. These progressive sectors of modern society grant the colonized the right to the products of their labor and the principle that the producers control the forces of production. In addition to these political rights, the colonized acquire economic development. They cease to be perpetual sources of primitive accumulation and at last become proper sources of accumulation of Capital, industrial laborers. The process which was initiated by colonization moves to its completion. Its modern agency is the State.
Imperialism, the last stage of capitalist development, the expansion of the social relations of estranged labor and Capital to every part of the world, is initiated by the seizure of State power in regions where colonization had blocked the further development of productive forces. The original historical sequence of this form of development of productive forces is reversed. Originally the capitalist form had not sprung into existence fully armed at the historical moment when the vanguard of the capitalist class seized State power. Direct control of the State, the central personification of social Capital, did not become historically possible until the capitalist class had established its power over the rest of society. However, the more developed the State apparatus becomes in the regions where the accumulation of Capital originated, the less the historical sequence of development of these regions needs to be recapitulated, and the more the last phase in the original regions becomes the first phase in the new regions. It becomes possible to institute the central relations of Capital accumulation directly by means of State power, without recapitulating the historical development of capitalism, just as, after the development of mechanized agriculture, it becomes possible to plough virgin lands with tractors, without recapitulating the historical development of agriculture. The State becomes the historical agency through which the colonized are liberated from the Limbo of perpetual primitive accumulation. Through the mediation of the State, the daily activity of formerly colonized populations at last acquires the social form of estranged labor. The
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