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

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.

Free market competition leads to monopoly, and poor countries are kept subservient to rich ones through high interest loans, so the rich country profits from the interest payments and from the loan itself as it is used to purchase materiel from the rich country so the poor one can industrialise.

Developed countries become parasites of developing countries, relying on them for production, while they become renter countries doing little but exploit other's labour.

VI. Division of the World Among the Great Powers.

By 1914 the European colonial powers have taken 65 million square kilometres with 523,4 million people.

What makes this imperialism special is that it's driven by the exponential growth of finance capital and the consumption of the domestic markets, so it must find new worlds to expand to.

Export of capital is done to subjugate developing countries to the creditor countries through loans tied to opening the economy to exploitation or through conditioning loans on purchases of products like war materials. The big imperialist powers - US, UK, France, Germany - now take to carving up the world between them for capital dominance.