However strong the process of levelling the world, of levelling economic and living conditions in different countries may have been in the past decades as a result of the pressure of large scale industry, exchange and finance capital, great differences still remain; and even among the six powers we see, first, young capitalist powers (America, Germany, Japan) which progressed very rapidly; secondly, countries with an old capitalist development (France and Great Britain), which have made much slower progress of late than the previously mentioned countries, and thirdly, a country (Russia) which is economically most backward, in which modern capitalist imperialism is enmeshed, so to speak, in a thick web of pre capitalist relations.