Communist world to be overrun-Western Europe or Asia-the rest of the free world would be immensely weakened . . . in economic and military strength . . . " 53
It was necessary, in other words, to turn vast amounts of value into means of destruction-not in order to obtain more value but to hold onto that already possessed. Such was the logic of capitalist competition applied to the relations between states. So the Cold War amounted to a new inter-imperialist conflict of the sort described by Bukharin, and it soon overshadowed the old imperialist conflicts between the West European powers.
Decolonisation and developmentalism in the Global South
Eighty five percent of humanity lived outside the advanced industrial countries. Their experience of the "golden age" was very far from golden. The great majority still lived in the countryside, and there was little change in the poverty that plagued their daily lives.
One important political change did, however, take place. The West European powers were forced, bit by bit, to abandon direct colonial rule, a process starting with a weakened Britain ending its 190 year old empire in India in 1947 and ending with Portugal handing over power to liberation movements in Africa in 1975. The US replaced Western European influence in some regions. It took control of South Vietnam when the French withdrew in 1954-until it too was forced to withdraw after the most bitter of wars in the mid-1970s. It became the dominant influence in most of the Middle East and parts of Africa. But, like the European powers, it retreated from formal colonisation, granting independence to the Philippines and keeping direct control only over Puerto Rico.
This retreat from direct colonisation had as a direct corollary the end of the old clashes between the Western powers over the partitioning of the rest of the world. The drive to war between them seemed to have gone once and for all. It was also accompanied, as we have seen, by something else unexpected by the classic theories of imperialism-losing their colonies did not stop Western economies participating in the long boom and conceding regular rises in living standards to their workers. And the advanced countries without any colonies-West Germany, Japan and Italy-had the economies which expanded fastest of all. Meanwhile, for the first two post-war decades, exports of capital stayed down at the very low levels they had sunk to in the great slump of the 1930s. As Mike Kidron pointed out in 1962:
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