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 6 into Socialist relations was not doubted in the least. The Bolsheviks advanced the postulate of the last, imperialist phase of capitalism, of the centralisation and concentration of capital having reached a sufficient stage, of the special organisational forms of capitalism (finance capital, capitalist monopoly, banking consortiums, etc.), and regard the very fact of the world imperialist war as evidence of the ripeness of capitalist relations—for the imperialist war in itself was nothing more or less than an expression of the gigantic conflict between the growth of the forces of production and their capitalist shell which has already become too tight to permit the further normal development of these forces of production.

Of course, in appraising world capitalism, the Bolsheviks did not start out with the assertion that capitalism was wholly and thoroughly ripe and they did not assume that at every point of the globe, the degree of concentration and centralisation of capitalism and the concentration of the working class, etc., was the same and equally adequate for the transition to Socialism. On the contrary, in the person of Lenin the Bolsheviks advanced the postulate of the so-called "law of unequal capitalist development." The law has its foundation, in the differences in the structure of capitalism in the various countries. This law draws a strict distinction between the centres of capitalist economy and the colonial periphery of capitalist economy. It lays down that the maturity of capitalism as a whole, as world capitalism, by no means pre-supposes an absolutely equal degree of capitalist development, or an equal rate of development in all countries. Lenin's law of unequal capitalist development was the theoretical basis of the Bolshevik approach to the question of the maturity of world capitalist