Europe's colonizing powers obstinately refused to grant independence and fought their last colonial war with excessive violence to retain their multistate formations. Spreading civilization was the used as the justification for seeking gains abroad. The ongoing yoke of Western dominance then took shape in a political economy of neo-imperialism. The new course of claimed benevolence targeted nation-states in the third world. The mission of developmentalism was to spread capitalism worldwide and could be discarded when this objective was seen as accomplished at the end of the twentieth century. Firm denial of the social question was essential to the management of the colonial question, and that rationale has endured in the postcolonial era. Both capital and labour have become footloose worldwide - but in divergent ways, cascading in a spiral of accumulation versus dispossession. Predatory capitalism continues to flourish within a frame of institutionalized racism, denying equality and justice to humanity at large.