Formally and legally independent states whose national capitals are nevertheless valorized on the basis of one or two primary export industries. The state acts as a redistributor of profits within the national capital, ensuring demand for the rest of the productive sectors, which necessarily play a subordinate role.
The general picture of the semicolonial world is that of an export sector that subsidizes the rest of investment through the state, a permanent tendency towards devaluation and monetary storms caused by the capital flight and currency hoarding that inevitably result from the lack of domestic investment outlets. And, as a consequence, difficulty in retaining and attracting foreign capital, and periodic crises of the public accounts.
Bases and consequences of the semicolonial economy
Historically, these are national capitals that arrived relatively late in global capitalist competition. In them, when capitalism was already entering its imperialist phase, a national industry was only just beginning to emerge. When it finally did, the domestic non-capitalist markets -craftsmen, independent peasantry, etc.- did not have the weight to generate sufficient demand for all the value that the export sector produced.
That is to say, they are national capitals that were born already with a pressing need to win foreign markets. In the countries of older capitalisms, this hunger for markets -and for outlets for the capital accumulated in each cycle- translated into militarism and a violent struggle for colonies, into a brutal increase in the centralization and concentration of capital that would end in the monopolies and the state capitalism of today, and into two world wars.
But these then young national capitals came from colonial economies. Apparently they had no shortage of buyers. The same imperialist powers that were savaging each other, sending millions of workers to die on the fields of honor to secure their profits, supplied themselves with raw materials of every kind, buying from them in massive quantities. Logically, the national capital concentrated even more in these export industries.
The paradox was that those who apparently had no problems exporting did not easily achieve the mass industrialization that had characterized ascendant capitalism either. The reason is understandable. The primary sector does not increase its productivity at the same speed as industry and services. It will soon find a limit to the placement of capital. Moreover, international demand will sooner or later hit a ceiling or fall. And what is even worse: international prices will vary with the conjuncture and, as the capital of the buyers becomes concentrated in large monopolies, these will exercise more and more power over margins.
As a result, the accumulated profits of the primary sector will, at a certain point, have difficulty finding placement within the sector itself. And outside it... there is little or nothing. The situation of these countries had gone from colonial to... semicolonial.
How will the national capital try to get out of the impasse? By developing a particular form of state capitalism that we find today from Argentina and Chile to Cuba and Mexico, but also in a large part of Africa and Asia:
The state will load the primary sector with double-digit export taxes and with that will maintain a consumption base and an industry protected by tariffs and, in many cases, directly subsidized. That is to say, the state guarantees the realization of the surplus value that the market by itself could not realize, on the basis of the levy on the export of a couple of products on the international market.
In periods of commercial peace and rising prices for what they export -such as wars between great powers-, the aim of governments will be to strengthen the national capital by closing off imports and trying to create a domestic consumption base capable of serving as demand for industry.
This is the whole secret of the cyclical South American miracles: the rate of profit rises in those periods, capital reproduces itself happily and the state has room to sell its demand-strengthening policies as productive revolutions. They are temporary joys. The Venezuelan case is paradigmatic. The Bolivian one even more so. The Argentine one, even though starting from a much more developed national capital, has followed the script. South Africa and Turkey too.
But there is more: the lack of a domestic market in which to sell new products leaves the national capital with an endemic lack of opportunities for placement. That is why the balance of payments deficit -capital inflows minus outflows- is endemic. The national capital of the semicolonial countries has always been bleeding out. And it does so not because of the supposedly stateless nature of the national capital or because of the betrayal of a creole bourgeoisie sold out to imperialism. It does so precisely because semicolonial capitalism is imperialist.
Lacking markets to which to export industrial goods and services, it exports capital. And those exports, which in moments of global crisis turn into massive flights, are what produce a permanent tendency towards inflation and currency crisis.
That in many cases the particular geographic and economic conditions do not allow expansionism does not deny the daily game of pressures and alliances, nor the economic reality as a whole. Imperialism, under semicolonial conditions, is exactly what we see in the semicolonial countries. Turkey and South Africa, so similar to other peaceful semicolonial countries but in different neighborhoods, show that the militarist and expansionist temptation beats within the general conditions of imperialism and manifests itself... when there is an opportunity.