There are three broad social formation may be identified,they are,
1. Pre-Capitalist
2. Neo –colonial capitalist and
3. Transitional socialist formation
The main pre-capitalist social formation in Africa,,Asia and Latin America consisted of transitional from communal,through different combination of intermediate slaves and Asiatic mode down to the feudal social formation.Their dominant features were,first,natural and communal production before simple commodity production for largely local and unintegrated markets,with some long distance trade among different communities.Then their surplus extraction was based on extra economic means like the political and ideological instances,with producers still owing their means of production.These pre-capitalist social formation of the third world existed largely in isolation without the formal integration typified by the international capitalist system until about the end of the 18th century.
The transition of these pre-capitalist third world social formation into colonial and neo-colonial capitalist formation or their transition to peripheral capitalist formations,consists the dominant form of social development in these countries.Since the mid 18th century.The transition of these social formation in to neo-colonial capitalis is based on the combination or the articulation of different modes of production with the capitalist mode being dominant.
This arise from the historical development of these neo-colonial capital formation in two phases of their capitalist penetrations.The first coincided essentially with the colonial aggression,with European capitalist penetration through merchant capital ,commodity export and later ,capital export..The primitive accumulation of merchant capital under Spanish,Portuguese,English,French and Dutch colonialismresulted in the alienation of land ,creation of forms of lended property and new production relations with wage labour in mines and plantations,for the exploitation of the pre-dominantly “non-capitalist sectors for the benefit of Europe.This was the era of the free trade imperialism after the industrial revolution in Englend.The monetorisation of the colonial economies into commodity economies was a dominant feature of this stage,with the commercialization of the agriculture ,compulsory crops,creation of the inadequate reservations to force peasants in to wage employment ,forced labour and so on .This laid the foundation of agrarian capitalism in the Third World.
Almost simultaneously,with this commercialization,foreign trade,with the commodity exports of the products of imperialist industries of the industrial revolution,was imposed on third world.This led to the ruin of local crafts and cottage industries such as cloth making,smithing and so on.The third world was forced to produce primary products and buy the products of imperialist industries in the capitalist international division of labour.
The second phase in the transition of social formation of the third world is that of neo-colonial capitalism.The major mechanisms in this neo-colonial phase of satellite economic dependence were foreign commodity trade and export of capital supported by so called foreign aid,military assistance and intervention as well as political pressure.
Sami Amin has identified American,Asian,Arab and African social formation in this transitions to peripheral capitalism.The transition of social formations in the third world has not stopped at the capitalist stage.In Africa,South East Asia and Latin America,new socialist formations have been established in such countries as Guinea ,Congo and Angola in Africa ,to Cuba and Nicaragua in Latin America and Vietnam and North Korea in South East Asia.They have been established through three types of revolutions,
i. Anti-colonial armed liberation struggle as in Algeria,Angola,Zimbabve and so on.
ii. Insurrection against neo-colonial dictator ship as in Cuba,Benin,Vietnam and so on.and,
iii. Anti-fuedal revolution as in Ethopia in 1974.In all such cases ,the socialist revolution arrested the evelopment of neo-colonial capitalism.
These transitions to socialist formations also exhibit two critical features.One is the serious effort at structural disengagement from the exploitative international capitalist system,and towards the cooperation with other socialist countries.The other decisive feature of this transitional socialist societies in the effort to make the socialist system of production dominant in the new articulation.
