When Lenin talks about colonial and semi-colonial countries in his work "Imperialism, the highest phase of capitalism" he is talking about colonies in 1916. As always Lenin analyzes the deep causes which are economic, and therefore objective and rigorous, of colonialism as part of the highest phase of capitalism, imperialism. It is a fundamental principle of Marxism-Leninism, that is, scientific socialism, that the causes of great global and human phenomena, of political power and class struggle, have as their root the economy and not the moral subjectivity of individuals.
Naturally, the colonialism that Lenin speaks of is not the same as the Roman Empire having militarily conquered all of Europe and the Asian and African Mediterranean region. A simple way to explain the difference between the colonization of Africa by the British Empire and the colonization of Europe by the Roman Empire is to say that the Roman Empire aimed, say, at enlarging the Roman country, encompassing a country as advanced as ancient Greece and countries backwards like Portugal (which did not yet exist and was a collection of tribal people). Colonialism in the capitalist phase and in particular in the imperialist phase of capitalism, with the British empire being its greatest representative ever, did not aim to enlarge England but rather to externalize the great economic power of the English imperialist power outside the borders of England. . Traces and conclusive evidence of what we are talking about is knowing that there were slaves in Rome and throughout the Roman Empire, the economic and class structure of colonialism in the ancient slave empires simply expanded the borders of the country with all its economic characteristics. Let's look at the Portuguese empire, since feudal times the Portuguese empire "externalized" its economic power to the colonies. The extraction of raw materials and processed products (coffee and sugar, for example) from Portuguese colonies in Africa and Brazil was combined with the massive exploitation of African slaves. Despite the abolition of slavery and the independence of Brazil, the same mechanism of exploitation of the colonies remained in Portugal's African colonies until the end of the Portuguese "colonial war" in 1974. The same mechanism is to plunder natural resources and exploit labor who is just not a "slave" in formal terms within the racist and segregationist system that is colonialism. Another aspect of the "externalization" of the economy within capitalist colonialism is that there was never a large black African population in Portugal throughout the history of Portuguese colonialism. It did not exist because the economic power was in the colonies and not in Portugal. Note that the United States was one of the last countries in the world to abolish slavery and even needed a civil war (dividing the country between north and south) to finally "formally" abolish slavery - precisely because the economic power of the United States United as a capitalist power was never in the colonies but within that same vast country.
We talk about the "externalization" of the economy to the colonies to talk about the importance of the center of gravity of work and natural resources in the economic process of class societies and in particular of imperialist capitalism. We must also mention that the colonies in the capitalist-imperialist era had the characteristic of being a system of world power - let us remember how Africa came to be completely dominated by colonial empires of European capitalist powers. The same happened in almost the entire world outside of Europe: the Americas (from north to south), almost all of Asia and throughout Oceania. We must also talk about how colonialism generally kept the colonies in an almost frozen or very delayed process of capitalist development. This freeze included maintaining the colonies with broad characteristics of the slave and feudal phase of development while capitalism developed in the colonial metropolis. For example, in Latin America it was only after the independence of the Hispanic colonies at the beginning of the 19th century that slavery was abolished in Latin American countries.
Another characteristic aspect of capitalist colonialism is that there was no impediment, except the capacity for military control, to creating colonies in gigantic territories. Examples: colonial India, which was divided after independence into India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, North America colonized by the British (which would include the United States and Canada), etc. On the contrary, it was beneficial for the colonizing capitalist power to dominate the largest possible territories.
It is worth noting that from the end of the world colonial system, when in 1974 the last European capitalist power ceased to dominate colonies in Africa - that is Portugal - but above all after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 the tendency for the existence of large territories in colonized countries reverses towards a trend of more and more partitions and divisions into independent States (in Latin America, Africa, Asia and also in Eastern Europe where capitalism has been restored), which make these States increasingly weaker . This phenomenon gains a particularly illuminating name when it is called "Balkanization", as the division of Yugoslavia serves as a model for what imperialist powers do today: dividing states and promoting civil wars, particularly in the Middle East and Africa, but also in Eastern Europe after the counter-revolution (Syria, Libya, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, Cyprus, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine).
Colonialism joined and expanded territories in the possession of a colonial capitalist power. Current imperialism, after the end of the world colonial system, actually does the opposite: it divides States that were former colonies to make them weak as capitalist competitors in the "world market".
What I am saying is that in general the civil wars and divisions of countries fomented by imperialist powers have a defined objective of weakening countries, for example in the Middle East and North Africa, this has the objective of buying oil and gas cheaper natural resources, destroying the price negotiation power of countries destroyed by civil wars.
On the contrary, Israel, proving to be an exception in today's world, is approaching 20th century colonialism by expanding its borders until it eliminates Palestine and the Palestinians.
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