A characteristic feature of the modern era is the growing role of the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America that have freed themselves from colonial and semi-colonial dependence. One of the factors contributing to the strengthening of their anti-imperialist potential is the profound changes in urban-rural relations taking place on the periphery of the capitalist system. These changes have two closely related aspects: international and domestic. From the international point of view, colonial and dependent countries in the international division of labor that determined their economic development played the role of the countryside, which provided raw materials for the industry of the cities of industrially developed capitalist powers. In other words, these countries served as agricultural and raw materials appendages of the capitalistically developed world. "The bourgeoisie," the Communist Manifesto emphasizes, " has subordinated the countryside to the rule of the city... Just as it has made the countryside dependent on the city, so it has made the barbarian and semi - barbarian countries dependent on the civilized countries, the peasant peoples on the bourgeois peoples, and the East on the West." 1 This dependence was a form of manifestation on a global scale of contradictions between the city and the countryside, which, with the development of the world capitalist market, outgrew the framework of bourgeois states. Naturally, these contradictions had a great impact on the relations between the city and the countryside and in the developing countries themselves, contributing, in particular, to the preservation of the political dominance of large farmers, on whom the colonialists relied. In the modern era of the world-historical transition from capitalism to socialism, the old urban-rural relations are breaking down in the zone of national liberation revolutions. "The capitalist' periphery 'ceases to be only an agrarian and raw material appendage of the 'center' ... Read more