Chapter 1: Concentration Of Production And Monopolies
There are several steps to to showing that we've reached the phase of imperialism, and Lenin begins by pointing out how rapidly the concentration of production and industry growth in large companies moves. By this, he means more and more production processes and smaller companies are getting bought out by larger companies at an accelerated rate.
We first look at Germany. Lenin observes how the number of employers that employ more than 50 people has drastically increased between 1882 and 1907, in a 25 year span. But utilities also play a role in this, as 1% of all companies in Germany were using 75% of the steam and electric power, showing how much is in control of so few enterprises. The other small enterprises use a whopping 7% of it. Looking at other great powers of the time, The United Kingdom, and The United States of America had the same trend running at the time. Large industry everywhere, under this concentration, will pop up, something Marx pointed to in Capital. Trades, railroads, and infrastructure get monopolized by smaller numbers of enterprises. In other words, with a free market, you eventually enter a monopoly state.
The enormous profits yielded by these massive industries made it easier to estimate production of resources within one state. Older stages of capitalism comprised of far smaller, weaker chains of capitalism before this concentration within certain states gave rise to superpowers. Thus, commodity production is still the basis of the economic life, but it changes form due to financial manipulation by fewer and fewer people. Marx talked about crises, and that's addressed here. As these crises natural to capitalism occur, it allows for companies and landlords with enough money to buy everything at a cheap price that most couldn't afford. Over time, it becomes more rapid and is ultimately what allows for this concentration of production under fewer. This leads right into the role of the banks.
Chapter 2: Banks And Their New Role
Banks had been established before this point in history, but the key word here is their new role. We all know that they were meant to serve as a middleman between purchaser and buyer of all sorts, but over time they've become a means of transforming inactive capital into active capital for the sake of making profits. On a small scale, maybe this goes unnoticed; as revenues are collected, the banks more and more work at the disposal of the capitalist class. Just like small businesses, small banks get absorbed by larger ones, almost moving parallel to how enterprises get concentrated. The ends result is a handful of monopolies, which we addressed in the last chapter, having a stronghold on the bank command, together giving complete control of the means of production to these monopolies within a country or a few countries.
At this point, our attention turns to a chart on German banks, to show the high levels of holdings by purchasing and exchanging shares with predatory loans, something that many of us are all too familiar with today. While invisible, stripping it down this way really shows the ridiculous nature of why so few are able to control everything based off of a man-made concept meant to keep so many poor. Massive loans are lent out for the aforementioned big operations from the huge enterprises, ultimately outgrowing this "middleman" role and being now an important tool for the capitalist class.
Once more, we look at Germany, with another chart to show this expansion with the large increase of branches within the largest banks from 1895 to 1911. Essentially, as Lenin puts it, the bank serves as an eternal bookkeeping mechanism to retain control over the "free" market. The stock market hardly holds the significance that it once did, and we finally look at America at the time. By the writing of this, Morgan and Rockefeller had control of about 11,000,000,000 marks worth of capital. As the bank gets more and more from the capitalists, industrial capital further relies on this role of the banks, which is why we have bank bailouts in a time of crisis for the capitalists. Without them, the economy and industry would absolutely tank. The inevitable is the merging of bank capital and industrial capital, expediting production to a new level for everyone with a stake in these two things to profit faster. Thus, the turn of the 20th century saw capitalism shifting from the dominance of capital, to what Lenin calls the dominance of finance capital.
Chapter 3: Finance Capital And The Financial Oligarchy
What exactly is finance capital, then? Lenin first refers to Rudolph Hilferding's (Federal Minister of Germany for Finance) definition as the term for capital that is controlled by bank capital that the industrial capitalists employ. Lenin, however, views this as incomplete, since it doesn't mention the concentration aspect leading to the monopoly stage that's discussed in chapter 1. Even a lot of capitalist apologists address this phenomenon in their writings, which gets cited here from time to time.
We now must look at shares. Owning 40% of a large enterprise's shares gives one person total domination over that enterprise, oftentimes being commodities that are essential for living or are in high demand. Small shareholders would never have enough time to direct the affairs of such a large company, which is what allows this dominance of the person who has so much finance capital at their disposal. This holding system creates oligarchs who hold a lot of power, letting them cheat the public due to the "free" market preventing parent companies from facing legal responsibilities within the daughter companies. Think of Coca-Cola, for example, and how many small companies they own. It's very good at hiding the fact that the "free" market that people love so much is only an illusion. Lenin looks at assets of Russian banks in 1912, showing this in the form of a chart.
The function of this finance capital is to issue bonds, which he then shows an example from France. Bonds are issued at 150%, letting the bank gain 50% on top of every franc, yielding enormous profits and more control in this merging of bank and industry capital. We see this more by observing what Marx calls "boom" and "bust" cycles. During the boom, profits are able to go up without hurting the living conditions of the workers. Inevitably, though, we'll hit a bust, as we always will in capitalism every decade or so. This is when oligarchs who got richer can buy up assets, property, and industry faster compared to before, since the ordinary worker couldn't come close to competing. The concentration gets higher and higher every time this cycle passes; think of the housing crises' in America in 2008, 2020, etc.
Unfortunately, this form of monopoly works its way into every sphere of life, allowing for the emergence of the aforementioned financial superpowers. At the time of writing, they were Great Britain, The United States, France, and Germany in that order. France and Great Britain had the largest amount of colonial territory due to how old their status was. Together, the four had 80% of the entire world's finance capital, making it pretty easy to understand why western European nations and the U.S. could develop far ahead of the other nations. Remember that next time someone tries to tell you that "third world countries did it to themselves." How they were able to do this was from the export of capital, a dependence needed for the network of capital.
Chapter 4: The Export Of Capital
Before diving into this part, we need to understand the difference between exporting commodities and exporting capital. The former was a normal aspect in the earlier ages of capitalism. The latter is what we have upon reaching the imperialist stage. As Marx says, a distinct feature of capitalism is that labor power itself is commodified, which is why we have uneven development between industries (and countries). England was capitalist before any other, allowing it to become a goods supplier to the world. This in turn allowed it to maintain a lot of raw materials, with the help of tariffs with neighboring nations. It now becomes easy to see that this type of monopoly causes a few rich countries to accumulate a massive surplus of capital (from all the extracted surplus value from its workers). What, then, do these countries do with that?
Exporting is the only option, since this surplus value cannot be used to satisfy the needs of the country's population; doing that would not be profitable. Instead, it's used to invest in export from colonies and other less-developed lands, preventing them from growing at all. England's capitalists can't simply invest overripe capital into agriculture and impoverished citizens; instead, this is the route it goes. So many former colonies still lag behind as a result; you can see this in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. I would also add eastern Europe, a region that got re-colonized in all but name after 1991, like the other examples.
Essentially, as Lenin puts it, finance capital "throws its net" all over the world to further enrich the exporting country and keep the colony underdeveloped for the sake of profit. Branches of banks will play a hand in this role. For example, in Britain in 1902, they had 50 colonial banks with 2,279 branches total. These capital exporting countries have essentially divided the world amongst themselves, taking a literal sense with finance capital.
Chapter 5: Division Of The World Among Capitalist Associates
Here is where we fully realize the workings of the imperialist phase, as the concentration of production in the form of monopoly spreads across the world. America and Germany, for example, managed to hold the largest control over electricity, especially as it was fairly new for the turn of the century. A small number of companies owned a large amount of smaller electric industry companies, and it's only gotten more obvious in the past hundred years. It was backed by a small amount of banks, and thus, no electric company could exist fully independent of either of these two countries. This capital could be exported elsewhere, whenever they wanted, same as we have seen and do see with oil.
Some have tried to argue that this was a way of keeping peace between nations, but instead it did the exact opposite. This caused for large competition between world powers, which is what would lead us to World War I, the first imperialist war. The class struggle still exists in the mother country and its colonies, doing the exact opposite of creating peace. The world is divided not because of intentional malice, but because this new type of class conflict is essential for capitalism at this stage to survive. Associations on different countries' division of the world is what determined who allied with who, and spheres of influence in the colonies also caused tensions.
Chapter 6: Division Of The World Among Great Powers
This is more or less an extension of chapter 5. Our attention is drawn to a chart showing the percentage of a few continents' lands that are colonies between 1876 and 1900. Africa alone goes from 10% to 90% (largely due to the Berlin Conference). This struggle for world dominance with monopoly capitalism utilizing finance capital brought us to World War I. Between 1886 and 1900, by territory, each power gained a significant sum of colonial land. Great Britain, though they got a lot of theirs before this, had accumulated 3,700,000 square miles; France got 3,600,000; Germany 1,000,000; Belgium 900,000, and Portugal 800,000.
This started with the British needing to expand their colonial reach to prevent civil war, due to the reasons gone over in chapter 4. Lenin notes that colonialism did exist prior to the capitalist mode of production, but only with military invasion, rather than the need to export for the sake of finance capital. The Roman Empire expanded with the mode of slavery, and the Mongol Empire built itself during the feudal period, both coming before the capitalist expansion phases.
These monopolies are established at the point when one enterprise can afford to buy up all of the raw materials to dominate production; it's why even today America needs to seize oil fields in west Asian countries, the point being that it never really stops even after the colonial period. The more capitalism struggles, the more everyone will feel the shortage of raw materials in their everyday lives, leading to more intense hunting of raw materials, and eventually imperialist war.
Finance capital is interested in sources of raw materials, mostly for when new methods of production rise. You'll see banks expedite special groups of engineers or agricultural experts, as Lenin gives for an example. Finance capital is strong enough to subject itself to independent states, once more pointing to how it still affects post-colony nations even today. We look at Argentina as an example, where they were independent in name, but their bourgeoisie class was in diplomatic connection to British finance capital, all but making them dependent. We refer to this as a "semi-colony." I say again, it shouldn't be surprising why many places are still underdeveloped at the hands of the United States and west Europe. These countries get no say in how their resources are extracted and allocated.
Chapter 7: Imperialism As A Special Stage
Right about now is where we start to sum things up. We look back and compile Lenin's five elaborate parts to imperialism.
1) The concentration of capital production has developed so high that it creates monopolies.
2) Bank capital merges with industrial capital to create finance capital.
3) The export of capital instead of the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance.
4) Formation of international monopoly capitalists that share the world amongst themselves takes place.
5) Territorial division of the world among the largest powers is created.
Understanding these factors is crucial to understand imperialism. We see Lenin's criticism of Kautsky reach high levels here, as well as that of other bourgeoisie economists. Finance capital and trusts cause a large imbalance in world development, something they all leave out. Nothing but war can come from this special stage of capitalism, due to these contradictions and disparities.
Chapter 8: Parasitism And Decay Of Capitalism
Parasitism is a bit of a side observation as a characteristic of imperialism, heavily looking at rentiers isolated from production processes that can grow. On a small scale, you could look at landlords living off of peoples rent as an example, but on a large scale this works in the form of predatory loans. Think of how Britain did this with Egypt, China, countries in South America, etc. to further understand how imperialism works outside of colonialism. Decayed capitalism with weaker chains pops up more easily, influencing socio-politically concerned countries in conjunction. It's also why you'll see immigration from the "backwards" underdeveloped nation to the mother country in search of higher wages; this is why someone from one of those nations might try to get to America, even if your conservative relatives try and say it's about "freedom."
Lenin also points out that Marx and Engels both noted opportunism on the rise, as smaller petty-bourgeoisie sects would form to hurt the interests of the working class. This was very evident in England, and the weaker chains of capitalism in say, Russia or China made it easier for revolution (something Stalin addresses later). We also see the emergence of social-chauvinism, a disliking of other ethnicities that ultimately have the same interests as you, but are painted to be the problem by the capitalist class. Boy, do we see a lot of that today in America.
Chapter 9: Critique Of Imperialism
With opportunists in mind, we get more criticism of Kautsky's talks on imperialism. Like with social-chauvinism, different attitudes will divide the working class up based on their personal general ideologies. Points like this are usually skipped by bourgeoisie writers on imperialism, and often times they try to criticize it without criticizing capitalism; we now know that that's quite impossible. It fits their narrative to talk about "world peace" without addressing what actually needs to change for that to happen. Kautsky specifically tries to argue that capitalism could develop without imperialism, something we also now know to be impossible due to the contradictions.
Chapter 10: The Place Of Imperialism In History
Lenin concludes with some history first by summing up the four principle types of monopolies: concentration of production, of raw materials, of bank capital, and colonial policy. Colonies existed before imperialism, but they grew into a new role separate from that of, say, Christopher Columbus. When only 1/10 of Africa was colonized, it was far easier to roam free for resources. Once it all got cut up and divided by Europe, inter-imperialist struggles began. Capitalists strove for domination of world markets, not freedom (despite what your patriotic uncle might think). What it all comes down to is being a transitional phase of capitalism; it's a step further from what Marx outlined fifty years earlier, but different only in form and phase, not concept.
My Afterwards:
Considering this was all written a century ago, we can see its ripple effects get worse since then. Decaying capitalism would shortly after this give rise to fascism, which combines traits of national chauvinism, monopoly domination, and the forceful breaking up of socialist resistance in violent forms. An entire second imperialist war known as World War II broke out following this, and not long after that, the Soviet Union was forced into the Cold War. Despite its name, it's more appropriate to call it a class war, as revolutions broke out all around the world due to imperialist contradiction. Fascist squads and U.S. backed military juntas would do all they can to stamp these out. Considering the edge that the large powers of the world since the end of World War I had on everything else, it only makes sense that imperialism would run rampant even into the post-colonial world. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, we would see the unipolar world of the U.S. as a world power dominate whatever it wanted, and only recently has this been challenged with a new, capitalist run Russia and a reformed China. I won't spend time going over the next century of imperialist destruction, but I find it somewhat important to note how everything we have seen recently reflects Lenin's work here. You can also now understand why China isn't imperialist; trading commodity production in exchange for technological advancements is not imperialism. Building infrastructure for underdeveloped nations without predatory loans is not imperialism. The unipolar world of U.S. policy, however, is. And if nothing else, it becomes far easier to understand why now, a century later, certain powers are still reign over the entire world.
For more on Imperialism in the 21st century, I recommend this work.
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