Philip’s Reviews > Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism > Status Update

IV. EXPORT OF CAPITAL

While the old capitalism exported finished goods, finance capitalism exports capital. While the old capitalism divided markets, finance capitalism divides the world, and the countries that receive this exported capital are then subjects to the metropole and later need to give concessions on trading rights, ports, rail, or arms purchases.

The few big monopolies benefit with the issuance of small stock companies as they can simply buy 50% - or as low as 40% given many companies' small owners cannot actually vote - of their capital and control them, thus controlling far more capital than they actually need to spend.

The XX century is when capital in general became finance capital.

III. Finance Capital and the Financial Oligarchy

The banks are the ultimate monopolists as they hold the capital of their clients and know all about them, thus making their large industrialist clients all the more dependent on them.

II. BANKS AND THEIR NEW ROLE

Banks are intermediaries of inactive capital into profit-making capital, and thus they're the interconnecting web of capitalism, and just like the rest of capitalism banks are consolidating into a few large monopolies.

These large monopolistic cartel enterprises engage in numerous tactics to keep their monopolies, and the bourgeois economist of course does everything it can to justify them.

The rise of monopoly-capitalism can be broadly characterized in 3 stages.
1860-1873 The embryonic stage where monopolies were starting to take shape.
1873-1903 Crisis hits, cartels form to ensure their profits.
1903-Present(1917) Monopoly capitalism has arrived in full force.

The largest enterprises, while only 1% or less of the total number of them, consume over three-fourths of all the steam and electric power.

PREFACE

This text has been written with Tsarist censorship in mind, so it must remain a theoretical and largely economic examination of Imperialism. Tho I do not doubt the reader will be easily able to replace 'Japan' with 'Russia' and 'Korea' with 'Finland, Ukraine, Poland, Central Asia, Estonia, Courland'.

We must oppose reformist, opportunist, and bourgeois elements like Kautskyism or the German SPD.

X. The Place of Imperialism in History.

Imperialism - monopolist capitalism - stands as the current latest stage of capitalism. The foreign domination of people through finance capital as you grow more and more dependent on foreign labour as you become just a usurer country. This also creates the conditions for its own downfall. Hopefully this current stage ends, and is replaced by a non-capitalist system.

The End.