II. The fundamental characteristics
of the new stage of capitalism
The closing years of the 19th century and the opening years of the
20th had been marked by a succession of wars — between China and Japan in 1894,
Spain and the USA in 1898, Britain and the Boer republic in South Africa in
1899, Japan and Russia in 1904, Italy and Turkey in 1911, the Balkan states and
Turkey in 1912, and between the Balkan states themselves in 1913. This
ascending wave of wars culminated in outbreak of the first world war in 1914.
The “Great War” of 1914-18 brought into stark view a significant
quality that had marked, on a growing scale, the wars of the “age of
imperialism” — the struggle between the “Great Powers” for hegemony of the
world and the control of its economic resources, actual and potential. It
constituted concrete evidence that, as Lenin put it in his 1920 preface to his Imperialism:
Capitalism has grown into a world system
of colonial oppression and financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority
of the people of the world by a handful of “advanced” countries. And this “booty”
is shared between two or three powerful 10 Imperialism, the
Highest Stage of Capitalism
world
plunderers armed to the teeth (America, Great Britain, Japan), who are drawing
the whole world into their war over the division of their booty.
Imperialism was therefore not to be explained as merely a change
in the foreign policies of the governments of the “advanced” countries,
but as a change in the nature of capitalist relations of production.
While cautioning that it was necessary not to forget “the conditional and
relative value of all definitions in general, which can never embrace all the
concatenations of a phenomenon in its full development”, Lenin pointed out that
if it were necessary to “give the briefest possible definition of imperialism
we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism”.
Such a definition, he added, “would include what is most important, for, on the
one hand, finance capital is the bank capital [i.e., the money capital] of a
few big monopolist banks, merged with the capital of the monopolist
associations of industrialists; and, on the other hand, the division of the
world is the transition from a colonial policy which has extended without
hindrance to territories unseized by any capitalist power, to a colonial policy
of monopolist possession of the territory of the world, which has been
completely divided up”.
Lenin noted “five basic features” as the imperialist stage of
capitalism:
(1) the concentration of production and
capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which
play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with
industrial capital, and the creation on the basis of this “finance capital”, of
a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the
export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of
international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among
themselves; and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the
biggest capitalist powers is completed.
Taken separately each of these phenomena shows a degree of
becoming a difference in kind. But in their totality, they represent a transformation
of quantity into quality — a qualitatively new stage in the development of
capitalism. Taken as a whole, their central characteristic is the
transformation of free competition into its opposite, into monopoly.
This indicates that the distinguishing features of imperialism are not to be
dismissed as superficial or temporary aberrations, accidentally modifying the
“normal course” of capitalism. They indicate that the essential production
relations of capitalism have developed all the potentialities latent
within their primary antagonism (socialisation of the productive process and
private appropriation of the results of this process), and that before any
further development of the social relations of production is possible the
antagonism itself must be eliminated. This can be seen most clearly if Imperialism,
the Highest Stage of Capitalism 11 we examine
in succession each of the five basic features of imperialism distinguished
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