Once this stage is reached, competition between the giant corporations is no longer based simply-or even mainly-on the old purely market methods. Taking control of raw materials so that rivals cannot get them, blocking rivals' access to transport facilities, selling goods at a loss so as to drive rivals out of business denying them access to credit, are all methods used. "Monopolies bring with them everywhere monopolist principles: the utilisation of 'connections' for profitable deals takes the place of competition in the open market".31
The capitalist powers had partitioned the world between them, building rival colonial empires, on the basis of "a calculation of the strength of the participants, their general economic, financial, military and other strength. " But "the relative strength of these participants is not changing uniformly, for under capitalism there cannot be an equal development of different undertakings, trusts, branches of industry or countries" . A partition of the world that corresponded to the relative strength of the great powers at one point no longer did so a couple of decades later. The partitioning of the world gives way to struggles over the repartitioning of the world:
Peaceful alliances prepared the ground for wars and in their turn grow out of wars. One is the condition for the other, giving rise to alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle on one and the same basis, that of imperialist connections and interrelations of world economics and world politics. 32
The epoch of the latest stage of capitalism shows us that certain relations between capitalist associations grow up, based on the economic division of the world; while parallel to and in connection with it, certain relations grow up between political alliances, between states, on the basis of the territorial division of the world, of the struggle for colonies, of the "struggle for spheres of influence" .33
Britain and France had been able to build great empires, dividing Africa and much of Asia between them. The Netherlands and
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Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond