PART 8: IMPERIALISM: THE HIGHEST STAGE OF CAPITALISM

This thread is summarizing a book of the same name by Vladimir Lenin. I would recommend reading it. It's 162 pages so not hugely long, and if you want it for free you can find the link here:
https://b-ok.cc/book/5938572/91b424
So, we'll start first with how free market capitalism will *always* create monopoly and oligopoly. Lenin makes the case that the crises that are inherent to capitalism, especially market crises, always result in a further concentration because...
...the largest industrial enterprises survive whilst smaller ones are crushed beneath the weight of the crisis. This causes further concentration of capital into fewer and fewer hands.
However, there is also a very important role that has come to distinguish imperialist capitalism from previous iterations of it (or free market capitalism, as Lenin calls it), and that's the role of the banks.
In imperialist capitalism, the banks' role goes from being a mere intermediate party handling cash and transfers to that of being an accelerant in the concentration of capital, the expansion of monopoly and the driving of imperialist practices and policies.
Banks under imperialist capitalism become the foremost powers in the industrialised nations. They begin to dominate industrial capital, by being the holders of lines of credit that can sink or keep afloat various industrial enterprises.
When market crises hit, the banks expand their power and monopoly by offering lines of credit or bailouts to industrial enterprises that are particularly advantageous to them. They expand their control in that enterprise through buying up shares that have plummeted in price...
And then installing oftentimes the very people who run the banks on the boards of these industrial enterprises. In addition to this, they then begin to buy subsidiary companies under the ownership of the larger industrial monopolies...
...With multiple different companies seemingly "competing" whilst all being owned by a few banks. However, there remains only so much profit that can be made in a single market - this is then where the imperialism comes in
Banks begin to export capital to, when Lenin was writing, the colonies, now would be the post-colonial nations. This then creates dependency on banks in the industrialised nations, whilst the banks extract profit from the natural resources in the Global South.
Both in the industrialised nations as in the Global South, the banks will solidify monopoly over the primary industries - industries that extract and work with raw materials. When the Global South seeks credit from banks in the imperial powers, the banks profit twofold:
1) They profit off of the interest on the loan.

2) They profit from the fact that they are giving money to these nations to then buy materials or industrial goods from industrial enterprises in the North that the same banks own.
You can see where finance capital dominates, and dominates both industrial capital and markets abroad. Favourable conditions are secured by the banks through their connections that they have with Government ministers and the like.
This tilts the entire system in favour of the banks, and eradicates what "free" competition there was (the free competition in the first place being what caused market crises, and thus the concentration of capital and the rise of monopolies in the first place)
There is no dream of returning to a "real" capitalism where free competition reigns and the best enterprises flourish. No, because recessions, crises of production and the like will always drown the small enterprises
and allow the large industrial ones, already at the mercy of the banks, to dominate the market further and further.

Now, capitalism requires constant expansion and accumulation of capital...
...and when the banks and industrial cartels have partitioned the world down into agreements wherein they each take a slice of the world as their own dominated market, the only way then to acquire new expansion...is war.
Keep in mind - Lenin was writing this in 1916, a period when the great imperial empires (Great Britain, France, Germany and the US a year later) were in a vicious war. And most importantly, an imperialist war.
This was not a war in the same vein of the Second World War - there was no great villain to defeat. This was a war of empires, vying for imperial domination, at the cost of an entire generation of lives. A war driven by imperialist capitalism; by profit.
Because all the world is claimed, the only way new markets can be acquired is through a re-divisioning of the world's boundaries. Through this constant pursuit of profit, imperialist capitalism is an engine of war and strife.
Through imperialist efforts, the bourgeoisie in the industrialised nations split the working class and create opportunists amongst them using the wealth afforded by imperialist exploits.
They corrupt the working class with the illusion that they are in a more powerful position with higher pay or an infectious mindset that they are superior to other workers, be it their neighbours or those in the Global South.
We live in an age where capitalism is unavoidably imperialistic, and where capitalism develops anywhere it will inevitably evolve into monopoly, and then into its imperialist stage
These processes are unavoidable, and in the book Lenin shows this happening with lots of citations and tables showing precisely the accumulation and concentration of capital into fewer and fewer hands
And we can see these monopolies in the modern day: Microsoft owns 75% of the software market; Facebook has 54.2% of the social media market; Alphabet (Google's parent co.) own 90% of the search engine market;
Amazon owns 49% of the E-Commerce market in the US. Amazon and Microsoft combined own 51% of the cloud services market (31% and 20% respectively); Proctor and Gamble and Unilever together own more than 90% of the US healthy and beauty products market;
Disney owns 33% of the US box office market. These are just a few examples of monopoly in the US - there are many more.[...]

This is not a failure of capitalism; this is an inevitable end result of it.
Anti-trust laws and the like are the equivalent of collecting rainwater in a bucket to tip it down the drain. I would heavily recommend reading the book for yourself, as well as 'Lenin's Imperialism in the 21st Century'.
Here is the beginning of these series of threads: https://twitter.com/HasBezosDecided/status/1155636395236634624?s=20
Everyone has seen it before but its always good to show it again:
Thank you as well to @Eli_Edwards who proofread this thread and provided very good feedback :)
You can follow @HasBezosDecided.
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