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Workers Vanguard No. 1022
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19 April 2013
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TROTSKY
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LENIN
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Imperialism: Monopoly Capitalism
(Quote of the Week)
Writing during World War I, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin defined
imperialism as the most advanced stage of capitalist development, with the
industrial powers oppressing weaker states in their drive to reap ever more
profit. The ongoing crisis in the European Union and the rest of the capitalist
world demonstrates yet again that the only way out for the working class and the
oppressed is through socialist revolutions that expropriate the bourgeoisie’s
capital and establish an internationally planned socialist economy.
Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of
the fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general. But capitalism only
became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its
development, when certain of its fundamental characteristics began to change
into their opposites, when the features of the epoch of transition from
capitalism to a higher social and economic system had taken shape and revealed
themselves in all spheres. Economically, the main thing in this process is the
displacement of capitalist free competition by capitalist monopoly. Free
competition is the basic feature of capitalism, and of commodity production
generally; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen
the latter being transformed into monopoly before our eyes, creating large-scale
industry and forcing out small industry, replacing large-scale by still
larger-scale industry, and carrying concentration of production and capital to
the point where out of it has grown and is growing monopoly: cartels, syndicates
and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks, which
manipulate thousands of millions. At the same time the monopolies, which have
grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it
and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense
antagonisms, frictions and conflicts....
Without forgetting the conditional and relative value of all
definitions in general, which can never embrace all the concatenations of a
phenomenon in its full development, we must give a definition of imperialism
that will include the following five of its basic features:
(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.
Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of
monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital
has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the
international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the
globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
—V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
(1916)
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