Private investment in the Third World is increasingly creating the conditions for the disappearance of imperialism as a system of economic inequality between nations of the capitalist world system, and . . . there are no limits, in principle, to this process.78
This led him to make a prediction that would soon be put to the test-and proved dramatically wrong:
As for future prospects, the World Bank's view is that the majority of countries in the 1970s will, as in the 1 960s, remain free of debt servicing problems . . . The first three years of the 1970s strongly suggest that this will be the case. 79
Warren had taken the crude account by Gunder Frank and Baran that had maintained development was an impossibility of and simply turned it upside down. Lacking was any sense of the chaotic, unpredictable character of economic growth for the weaker sections of the world system that Trotsky insisted on when recognising that capitalism does not always lead to stagnation:
By drawing countries economically closer to one another and levelling out their stages of development, capitalism operates by methods of its own, that is to say, by anarchistic methods which constantly undermine its own work, set one country against another, one branch of industry against another, developing some parts of the world economy while hampering and throwing back the development of others . . . Imperialism . . . attains this "goal" by such antagonistic methods, such tiger leaps and such raids upon backward countries and areas that the unification and levelling of world economy which it has effected is upset by it even more violently and convulsively than in the preceding epoch. 80
It was a truth that would affect the lives of many hundreds of millions of people over the next four decades.
In the Global South, as in the West, Japan and the Eastern bloc, variants of what Lenin and Bukharin had called "state capitalism" did permit a long period of economic growth. But those who extrapolated from that to see a smooth, crisis-free future were soon to be proved wrong.
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Capitalism in the 20th Century