Capitalist desire for imperialist expansion, as the expression of its highest maturity in the last period of its life, has the economic tendency to change the whole world into capitalistically producing nations, to sweep away all superannuated, pre-capitalistic methods of production and society, to subjugate all the riches of the earth and all means of production to capital, to turn the laboring masses of all zones into wage slaves. In Africa and in Asia, from the most northern regions to the southernmost point of South America and the South Seas, the remnants of old communistic social groups, of feudal society, of patriarchal systems, and of ancient handicraft production are destroyed and stamped out by capitalism. Whole peoples are destroyed, ancient civilizations are leveled to the ground, and in their place profiteering in its most modern forms is being established.
(…) To capitalist economists and politicians, railroads, matches, sewerage systems, and warehouses are progress and culture. Of themselves such works, grafted upon primitive conditions are neither culture nor progress, for they too dearly paid for with the sudden economic and cultural ruin of the peoples who must drink down the bitter cup of misery and horror of two social orders, of traditional agricultural landlordism, of super-modern, super-refined capitalist exploitation, at one and the same time
