Theory & History
powerful think-tanks, lobbying groups, and the means to influence government through secret meetings and backdoor deals. Finally, monopolies limit and subordinate technological innovation and key advances to the narrow goal of the production of profit, often burying true innovative projects that would benefit humanity (particularly in the field of public health and environmental justice) in order to protect their existing products and marketing strategies. 2. The Role of the Banks and Finance Capital Banks played and continue to play a key role in the constitution of big industrial trusts and monopolies. While initially banks were only intermediaries in financial operations, by the end of the 19th century, and with the beginning of the process of concentration, they become directly involved in industrial production. Because large monopolies require huge quantities of capital to operate, they become more heavily dependent on banks. Banks, on the other hand, also utilized a similar process of concentration, which enabled them to accumulate large amounts of capital to finance the big industrial giants, mainly in the oil, infrastructure and manufacturing industries in the early 20th century. However, a qualitative change occurred through the combination of these concentration dynamics in the two main areas of capitalist economy: commodity production and banks. The process of concentration of banks led to the emergence of giant financial entities that began to buy shares of the industrial trusts they lent money to, so they could better control their operations and “obtain fuller and more detailed information about the economic position of its client.” The result of this process is, as Lenin pointed out, “that the industrial capitalist becomes more completely dependent on the bank.”. This fusion of monetary and industrial capital is what Lenin calls “financial capital,” which is the byproduct of this mutation of capitalism. Financial capital, the defining feature of imperialism, structures a capitalist market economy dominated by large monopolies, which in return are controlled by giant banks and financiers. Lenin remarked that “a personal linkup, so to speak, is established between the banks and the biggest industrial and commercial enterprises, the merging of one with another through the acquisition of shares, through the appointment of bank directors to the Supervisory Boards (or Boards of Directors) of industrial and commercial enterprises, and vice versa.” A century later, this defining feature of imperialism in the early 20th century is more true than ever. A 2011 study by Swiss researchers that analyzed 43,000 transnational corporations, found that 147 of today’s corporations (less than 1% of the total surveyed) control 40% of the total global wealth. The study also shows that 75% of those companies are financial corporations (J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, BNP, HSBC or Credit Suisse being at the top)4. And of these top 200 corporations, 122 are located in 5 imperialist countries (or rather, we call these countries imperialist because these are the homelands of those powerful corporations that control the national states and the world market).
3. Imperialism: More than Wars Imperialism is a phase of capitalism that is intrinsically linked to wars. Big corporations are in constant need of increasing their profits and thereby expand markets and find new resources to exploit. This pressure to “expand” and make more profits, is the same pressure that led to the early 19th century wave of industrialized-led colonization and appropriation of land and human labor by European and U.S. financial capital. It also led to major wars between the European Empires over control of key regions, as was the case with WWI, a conflict that left between 9 and 11 million casualties. However, wars, population displacement, and phases of colonisation existed before the emergence of imperialism at the end of the 19th century (e.g. the genocide of Native American peoples and the enslavement of Black slaves in the Caribbean and U.S. South). This process of dispossession and accumulation was the economic precondition for the emergence of industrial capitalism in Western Europe. The fact that it was driven by a different stage of capitalism, a capitalist economy still in formation, does not make it any less terrible or morally reproachable. Imperialism cannot be reduced to violence, wars and domination. These have been features of every class society and necessities for the emergence of industrial capitalism in Europe and the United States. But this cannot lead us to conclude that war and violence are a constant of human nature, like the liberal economist Joseph Schumpeter asserted in 1918, right after WWI, qualifying “imperialism” as “atavism”, and the manifestation of a “will to war,” a sort of “aggressiveness in itself” which was either a pre-capitalist “heirloom of the monarchical state”, of the warrior-like characteristic of the nobility, or simply a trait of human nature.5 World's eight richest people have same wealth as poorest 50%. As this recent article from The Guardian shows, income inequality and the excessive concentration of global wealth into the hands of a few families, conveniently located in imperialist countries, is still a defining feature of our society, perhaps this is the most visible symptom of the decaying nature of the capitalist system: “The world’s eight richest billionaires control the same wealth between them as the poorest half of the globe’s population, according to a charity warning of an ever-increasing and dangerous concentration of wealth.In a report published to coincide with the start of the week-long World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Oxfam said it was “beyond grotesque” that a handful of rich men headed by the Microsoft founder Bill Gates are worth $426bn (£350bn), equivalent to the wealth of 3.6 billion people [...]Last year, Oxfam said the world’s 62 richest billionaires were as wealthy as half the world’s population. However, the number has dropped to eight in 2017 because new information shows that poverty in China and India is worse than previously thought, making the bottom 50% even worse off and widening the gap between rich and poor.” https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/jan/16/worlds-eight-richest-peoplehave-same-wealth-as-poorest-50 Workers' Voice | 33