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- Herausgeber: Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
"Imperialism: The Final Stage of Capitalism" by Vladimir Lenin is a foundational Marxist text that explores the economic and political dynamics of imperialism in the early 20th century. Originally published in 1917, this work was a response to the global geopolitical landscape of the time and sought to analyze the nature of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalist development. Lenin argues that imperialism represents a new and advanced form of capitalism characterized by the domination of finance capital, the export of capital to foreign territories, the formation of monopolies, and the intensification of international rivalries. He contends that imperialist powers engage in the exploitation of colonies and less developed nations for resources and markets, leading to economic and political subjugation. The text also addresses the impact of imperialism on class relations and the working class movement. Lenin contends that imperialism intensifies the contradictions of capitalism, creating conditions ripe for proletarian revolution. "Imperialism" remains a significant Marxist analysis that has influenced subsequent discussions on global economics, geopolitics, and anti-colonial struggles. While primarily an economic and political treatise, Lenin's work provides key insights into the intersection of economic power, politics, and class struggle during the imperialist era.
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Vladimir Lenin
Imperialism: The Final Stage of Capitalism
Illustrated
"Imperialism: The Final Stage of Capitalism" by Vladimir Lenin is a foundational Marxist text that explores the economic and political dynamics of imperialism in the early 20th century. Originally published in 1917, this work was a response to the global geopolitical landscape of the time and sought to analyze the nature of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalist development.
Lenin argues that imperialism represents a new and advanced form of capitalism characterized by the domination of finance capital, the export of capital to foreign territories, the formation of monopolies, and the intensification of international rivalries. He contends that imperialist powers engage in the exploitation of colonies and less developed nations for resources and markets, leading to economic and political subjugation.
The text also addresses the impact of imperialism on class relations and the working class movement. Lenin contends that imperialism intensifies the contradictions of capitalism, creating conditions ripe for proletarian revolution.
"Imperialism" remains a significant Marxist analysis that has influenced subsequent discussions on global economics, geopolitics, and anti-colonial struggles. While primarily an economic and political treatise, Lenin's work provides key insights into the intersection of economic power, politics, and class struggle during the imperialist era.
CHAPTER I. CONCENTRATION OF PRODUCTION AND MONOPOLIES
The enormous growth of industry and the remarkably rapid process of concentration of production in ever-larger enterprises represent one of the most characteristic features of capitalism. Modern censuses of production give complete and exact information on this process.
In Germany, for example, for every 1,000 industrial enterprises, large enterprises, i.e., those employing more than 50 workers, numbered three in 1882; six in 1895; nine in 1907; and out of every 100 workers employed, this group of enterprises, on the dates mentioned, employed 22, 30 and 37 respectively. Concentration of production, however, is much more intense than the concentration of workers, since labor in the large enterprises is much more productive. This is shown by the figures available on steam and electric motors. If we take what in Germany is called industry in the broad sense of the term, that is, including commerce, transport, etc., we get the following picture: Large-scale enterprises: 30,588 out of a total of 3,265,623, that is to say, 0.9 per cent. These large-scale enterprises employ 5,700,000 workers out of a total of 14,400,000, that is, 39.4 per cent; they use 6,600,000 steam horse power out of a total of 8,800,000, that is, 75.3 per cent, and 1,200,000 kilowatts of electricity out of a total of 1,500,000, that is, 77.2 per cent.
Less than one-hundredth of the total enterprises utilize more than three-fourths of the steam and electric power! Two million nine hundred and seventy thousand small enterprises (employing up to five workers), representing 91 per cent of the total, utilize only 7 per cent of the steam and electric power. Tens of thousands of large-scale enterprises are everything; millions of small ones are nothing.
In 1907, there were in Germany 586 establishments employing one thousand and more workers. They employed nearly one-tenth (1,380,000) of the total number of workers employed in industry and utilized almost one-third (32 per cent) of the total steam and electric power employed. As we shall see, money capital and the banks made this superiority of a handful of the largest enterprises still more overwhelming, in the most literal sense of the word, since millions of small, medium, and even some big “masters” are in fact in complete subjection to some hundreds of millionaire financiers.
In another advanced country of modern capitalism, the United States, the growth of the concentration of production is still greater. Here statistics single out industry in the narrow sense of the word, and group enterprises according to the value of their annual output. In 1904 in the United States, large-scale enterprises with an annual output of one million dollars and over numbered 1,900 (out of 216,180, that is, 0.9 per cent). These employed 1,400,000 workers (out of 5,500,000, i.e., 25.6 per cent) and their combined annual output was valued at $5,600,000,000 (out of $14,800,000,000, i.e., 38 per cent). Five years later, in 1909, the corresponding figures were: Large-scale enterprises: 3,060 (out of 268,491, i.e., 1.1 per cent); employing: 2,000,000 workers (out of 6,600,000, i.e., 30.5 per cent); producing: $9,000,000,000 (out of $20,700,000,000, i.e., 43.8 per cent).
Almost half the total production of all the enterprises of the country was carried on by a hundredth part of those enterprises! These 3,000 giant enterprises embrace 268 branches of industry. From this it can be seen that, at a certain stage of its development, concentration itself, as it were, leads right to monopoly; for a score or so of giant enterprises can easily arrive at an agreement, while on the other hand the difficulty of competition and the tendency towards monopoly arise from the very dimensions of the enterprises. This transformation of competition into monopoly is one of the most important—if not the most important—phenomena of modern capitalist economy, and we must deal with it in greater detail. But first we must clear up one possible misunderstanding.
American statistics say: 3,000 giant enterprises in 250 branches of industry, as if there were only a dozen large-scale enterprises for each branch of industry.
But this is not the case. Not in every branch of industry are there large-scale enterprises; and, moreover, a very important feature of capitalism in its highest stage of development is the so-called combine, that is to say, the grouping in a single enterprise of different branches of industry, which either represent the consecutive stages in the working up of raw materials (for example, the smelting of iron ore into pig iron, the conversion of pig iron into steel, and then, perhaps, the manufacture of steel goods)—or are auxiliary to one another (for example, the utilization of waste or of by-products, the manufacture of packing materials, etc.).
“... Combination,” writes Hilferding, “levels out the fluctuations of trade and therefore assures to the combined enterprises a more stable rate of profit. Secondly, combination has the effect of eliminating trading. Thirdly, it has the effect of rendering possible technical improvements and, consequently, the acquisition of super-profits over and above those obtained by the ‘pure,’ i.e., non-combined, enterprises. Fourthly, it strengthens the position of the combined enterprises compared with that of ‘pure’ enterprises, it increases their competitive power in periods of serious depression when the fall in prices of raw materials does not keep pace with the fall in prices of manufactured articles.”
The German bourgeois economist, Heymann, who has written a book especially on “mixed,” that is, combined, enterprises in the German iron industry, says: “Non-combine enterprises perish, crushed by the high price of raw material and the low price of the finished product.” Thus we get the following picture:
“There remain, on the one hand, the great coal companies, producing millions of tons yearly, strongly organized in their coal syndicate, and closely connected with them the big steel plants and their steel syndicate; and these great enterprises, producing 400,000 tons of steel per annum, with correspondingly extensive coal, ore and blast furnace operations, as well as the manufacturing of finished goods, employing 10,000 workers quartered in company houses, sometimes owning their own wharves and railways, are today the standard type of German iron and steel plant. And concentration continues. Individual enterprises are becoming larger and larger. An ever increasing number of enterprises in one given industry, or in several different industries, join together in giant combines, backed up and controlled by half a dozen Berlin banks. In the German mining industry, the truth of the teachings of Karl Marx on the concentration of capital is definitely proved, at any rate in a country where it is protected by tariffs and freight rates. The German mining industry is ripe for expropriation.”
Such is the conclusion which a conscientious bourgeois economist, and such are exceptional, had to arrive at. It must be noted that he seems to place Germany in a special category because her industries are protected by high tariffs. But the concentration of industry and the formation of monopolist, manufacturers’ combines, cartels, syndicates, etc., could only be accelerated by these circumstances. It is extremely important to note that in free trade England, concentration also leads to monopoly, although somewhat later and perhaps in another form. Professor Hermann Levy, in his special investigation entitled Monopolies, Cartels and Trusts, based on data on British economic development, writes as follows:
“In Great Britain it is the size of the enterprise and its capacity which harbor a monopolist tendency. This, for one thing, is due to the fact that the great investment of capital per enterprise, once the concentration movement has commenced, gives rise to increasing demands for new capital for the new enterprises and thereby renders their launching more difficult. Moreover (and this seems to us to be the more important point), every new enterprise that wants to keep pace with the gigantic enterprises that have arisen on the basis of the process of concentration produces such an enormous quantity of surplus goods that it can only dispose of them either by being able to sell them profitably as a result of an enormous increase in demand or by immediately forcing down prices to a level that would be unprofitable both for itself and for the monopoly combines.”
In England, unlike other countries where the protective tariffs facilitate the formation of cartels, monopolist alliances of entrepreneurs, cartels and trusts, arise in the majority of cases only when the number of competing enterprises is reduced to a “couple of dozen or so.” “Here the influence of the concentration movement on the formation of large industrial monopolies in a whole sphere of industry stands out with crystal clarity.”
Fifty years ago, when Marx was writing Capital, free competition appeared to most economists to be a “natural law.” The official scientists tried, by a conspiracy of silence, to kill the works of Marx, which by a theoretical and historical analysis of capitalism showed that free competition gives rise to the concentration of production, which, in turn, at a certain stage of development, leads to monopoly. Today, monopoly has become a fact. The economists are writing mountains of books in which they describe the diverse manifestations of monopoly, and continue to declare in chorus that “Marxism is refuted.” But facts are stubborn things, as the English proverb says, and they have to be reckoned with, whether we like it or not. The facts show that differences between capitalist countries, e.g., in the matter of protection or free trade, only give rise to insignificant variations in the form of monopolies or in the moment of their appearance, and that the rise of monopolies, as the result of the concentration of production, is a general and fundamental law of the present stage of development of capitalism.
For Europe, the time when the new capitalism was definitely substituted for the old can be established fairly precisely: it was the beginning of the twentieth century. In one of the latest compilations on the history of the “formation of monopolies,” we read:
“A few isolated examples of capitalist monopoly could be cited from the period preceding 1860; in these could be discerned the embryo of the forms that are common today; but all undoubtedly represent pre-history. The real beginning of modern monopoly goes back, at the earliest, to the ‘sixties. The first important period of development of monopoly commenced with the international industrial depression of the ’seventies and lasted until the beginning of the ‘nineties.... If we examine the question on a European scale, we will find that the development of free competition reached its apex in the ’sixties and ’seventies. Then it was that England completed the construction of its old style capitalist organization. In Germany, this organization had entered into a decisive struggle with handicraft and domestic industry, and had begun to create for itself its own forms of existence....”
‘The great revolutionization commenced with the crash of 1873, or rather, the depression which followed it and which, with hardly discernible interruptions in the early ’eighties and the unusually violent, but short-lived boom about 1889, marks twenty-two years of European economic history. During the short boom of 1889-90, the system of cartels was widely resorted to in order to take advantage of the favorable business conditions. An ill-considered policy drove prices still higher than would have been the case otherwise and nearly all these cartels perished ingloriously in the smash. Another five-year period of bad trade and low prices followed, but a new spirit reigned in industry; the depression was no longer regarded as something to be taken for granted: it was regarded as nothing more than a pause before another boom.
“The cartel movement entered its second epoch. Instead of being a transitory phenomenon, the cartels became one of the foundations of economic life. They are winning one field after another, primarily, the raw materials industry. At the beginning of the ‘nineties the cartel system had already acquired—in the organization of the coke syndicate on the model of which the coal syndicate was later formed—a cartel technique which could hardly be improved. For the first time the great boom at the close of the nineteenth century and the crisis of 1900-03 occurred entirely—in the mining and iron industries at least—under the aegis of the cartels. And while at that time it appeared to be something novel, now the general public takes it for granted that large spheres of economy have been, as a general rule, systematically removed from the realm of free competition.”
Thus, the principal stages in the history of monopolies are the following: 1) 1860-70, the highest stage, the apex of development of free competition; monopoly is in the barely discernible, embryonic stage. 2) After the crisis of 1873, a wide zone of development of cartels; but they are still the exception. They are not yet durable. They are still a transitory phenomenon. 3) The boom at the end of the nineteenth century and the crisis of 1900-03. Cartels become one of the foundations of the whole of economic life. Capitalism has been transformed into imperialism.
Cartels come to agreement on the conditions of sale, terms of payment, etc. They divide the markets among themselves. They fix the quantity of goods to be produced. They fix prices. They divide the profits among the various enterprises, etc.
The number of cartels in Germany was estimated at about 250 in 1896 and at 385 in 1905, with about 12,000 firms participating. But it is generally recognized that these figures are underestimations. From the statistics of German industry for 1907 we quoted above, it is evident that even 12,000 large enterprises must certainly utilize more than half the steam and electric power used in the country. In the United States, the number of trusts in 1900 was 185, and in 1907, 250. American statistics divide all enterprises into three categories, according to whether they belong to individuals, to private firms or to corporations. These latter in 1904 comprised 23.6 per cent, and in 1909, 25.9 per cent (i.e., more than one-fourth of the total industrial enterprises in the country). These employed in 1904, 70.6 per cent, and in 1909, 75.6 per cent (i.e., more than three-fourths) of the total wage earners. Their output amounted at these two dates to $10,900,000,000 and to $16,300,000,000 respectively, i.e., to 73.7 per cent and to 79 per cent of the total.
Not infrequently, cartels and trusts concentrate in their hands seven or eight-tenths of the total output of a given branch of industry. The Rhine-Westphalian Coal Syndicate, at its foundation in 1893, controlled 86.7 per cent of the total coal output of the area. In 1910, it controlled 95.4 per cent. The monopoly so created ensures enormous profits, and leads to the formation of technical productive units of formidable magnitude. The famous Standard Oil Company in the United States was founded in 1900:
“It has an authorized capital of $150,000,000. It issued $100,000,000 worth of common shares and $106,000,000 worth of preferred shares. From 1900 to 1907 they earned the following dividends: 48, 48, 45, 44, 36, 40, 40, 40 per cent, in the respective years, i.e., in all, $367,000,000. From 1882 to 1907 the Standard Oil Company made clear profits to the amount of $889,000,000 of which $606,000,000 were distributed in dividends, and the rest went to reserve capital.... In 1907 the various enterprises of the United States Steel Corporation employed no less than 210,180 workers and other employees. The largest enterprise in the German mining industry, the Gelsenkirchen Mining Company (Gelsenkirchner Berg-werksgesellschaft ), employed, in 1908, 46,048 wage earners.”
In 1902, the United States Steel Corporation produced 9,000,000 tons of steel. Its output constituted, in 1901, 66.3 per cent, and in 1908, 56.1 per cent of the total output of steel in the United States. Its share of the output of mineral ore increased from 43.9 per cent to 46.3 per cent of the total output in the same period.
The report of the American government commission on trusts states:
“Their superiority over their competitors is due to the magnitude of their enterprises and their excellent technical equipment. Since its inception, the tobacco trust devoted all its efforts to the substitution of mechanical for manual labor on an extensive scale. With this end in view, it bought up all patents that had anything to do with the manufacture of tobacco and spent enormous sums for this purpose. Many of these patents at first proved to be of no use, and had to be modified by the engineers employed by the trust. At the end of 1906, two subsidiary companies were formed solely to acquire patents. With the same object in view, the trust built its own foundries, machine shops and repair shops. One of these establishments, that in Brooklyn, employs on the average 300 workers; there experiments are carried out on inventions concerning the manufacture of cigarettes, cheroots, snuff, tinfoil for packing, boxes, etc. Here, also, inventions are perfected.
“Other trusts employ so-called developing engineers whose business it is to devise new methods of production, think out new production processes and to test technical improvements. The United States Steel Corporation grants big bonuses to its workers and engineers for all inventions suitable for raising technical efficiency, for improving machinery or for reducing costs of production.”
In German large-scale industry, e.g., in the chemical industry, which has developed so enormously during these last few decades, the promotion of technical improvement is organized in the same way. In 1908, the process of concentration had already given rise to two main groups which, in their way, came close to being monopolies. First these groups represented “dual alliances” of two pairs of big factories, each having a capital of from twenty to twenty-one million marks: on the one hand, the former Meister Factory at Höchst and the Cas-sel Factory at Frankfurt-on-Main; and on the other hand, the aniline and soda factory at Ludwigshafen and the former Bayer Factory at Elberfeld. In 1905, one of these groups, and in 1908 the other group, each concluded a separate agreement with yet another factory. The result was the formation of two “triple alliances,” each with a capital of from forty to fifty million marks. And these “alliances” began to come “close” to one another, to reach “an understanding” about prices, etc.
Competition becomes transformed into monopoly. The result is immense progress in the socialization of production. In particular, the process of technical invention and improvement becomes socialized.
