Lenin’s book written in 1916 and published in 1917, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, became a canonical Marxist-Leninist text, not least because of the central role Lenin played as the first leader of the Soviet Union and the related Communist movement. John Kenneth Galbraith wrote disparagingly of Lenin’s book, “Not even a committed disciple could think it an impressive document, although many have risen to the challenge. It is assertive and contentious, and, though short, it is very tedious. Nor is it original.” (1)
Despite that grumpy characterization, the point in itself isn’t that controversial from the economic viewpoint. Its historical significance is more in its political conclusions in that critical moment. Much of the Lenin’s analysis of the evolution of industrial capitalism into a “finance capital” form had been elaborated at length by a leading Austrian Social Democrat, Rudolf Hilferding, in his 1910 book, Finance Capital. (2)
Hilferding would later serve as Germany’s Finance Minister for just under two months in August-October 1923, where he had the thankless task of dealing with the hyperinflation, which was in reality was a nasty consequent of the ill-conceived Treaty of Versailles in its treatment of Germany. He was a member of the German Reichstag and served again as Finance Minister in 1928-29.
In Finance Capital, he had written:
The progress of industrial concentration has been accompanied by an increasing coalescence between bank and industrial capital. This makes it imperative to undertake a study of the processes of concentration and the direction of their development, and particularly their culmination in cartels and trusts. The hopes for the `regulation of production', and hence for the continuance of the capitalist system, to which the growth of monopolies has given rise, and to which some people attribute great significance in connection with the problem of the trade cycle, require an analysis of crises and their causes. (3)The period of 1870-1900 is widely recognized as a period of dramatic concentration of power and wealth in which large companies and major banks achieved a theretofore unprecedented consolidation of wealth and power. That is remembered in the US as the Gilded Age, where Jesse James and his gang could become popular heroes for robbing trains, the railroad companies having become a major symbol of this new concentrated power. Nob Hill in San Francisco is to this day a kind of monument to the robber barons of the Gilded Age.
1936 Thomas Hart Benton painting of a Jesse James train robbery
PBS has a two-hour documentary of that period: (4)
The economist Thorstein Veblen memorably depicted and mocked the pretentions of the Gilded Age upper class in The Theory Of The Leisure Class (1899).
Lenin presumably labeled finance capital as the “highest stage of capitalism” because it was the latest one, and the more militant Social Democrats hoped and expected that the capitalist social and economic structure would soon be overthrown. The ZEITGeschichte sketch of Lenin’s theory notes:
The war in which the world is sinking right now [he wrote] is the "great imperialist" one for him. Lenin [in the book] works his way through "tsarism" in his native Russia, which afterward would strive to plunder Germany, Austria and Turkey and to defeat England in Asia. The Tsar wanted to subjugate the Balkans and "conquer Galicia [now part of Ukraine], … in order to hold down the Ukrainian people". The way out, Lenin wrote at the end of 1916, was a "civil war of the working class for socialism."Galbraith found it very understandable historically that the Great Imperialist War – then known as the Great War, now as the First World War – brought nationalist tensions to a head in the Russian Empire of the time.
[W]e think of the years following World War II as the time when the colonial empires came to an end. This is another vanity of our day [1977]. It was in Eastern Europe after World War I that the great retreat from imperialism began. …The brief sketches of Rosa Luxemburg and MLK, Jr. focus on some of the wider factors leading to imperialist wars and actions. The Lenin and Hilferding theories certainly see the need in the “finance capital” era for capitalist economies to seek greater profits as a causal factor pushing their countries to engage in overseas expansion and armed competition with each other. That factor was very obviously at work in the late 19th century and the pre-World War I years. This could be understood in a deterministic way in which “finance capital” and “imperialism” are equivalent. Luxemburg also saw the importance of the economic changes at that time and wrote about them in her Accumulation of Capital (1913).
Out of [the various empires’ fear of an imminent war] had come the alliances. Austria [the Habsburgs’ Austro-Hungarian Empire] had turned to Germany for the industrial support and the disciplined, reliable military force that Germany could provide. On her side, she offered her large, though excessively diversified, supply of military manpower. Russia reached out to France for financial and engineering help in building her railroads and industry. France and Britain saw in Russia a vast reserve of armed manpower. This manpower, in the early days of World War I, led to the innumerable references to the Russian steamroller. It was meant to roll inexorably over Germany. Instead it rolled back on Russia herself. [p. 136, my emphasis]
But obviously there are people who make actual decisions about wars and are selecting among options when they do so. The ZEITGeschichte sketch of Luxemburg noted that she was prominent in the debates among the German Social Democrats (SPD) about supporting war credits for Germany, which she opposed but for which a majority of SPD parliamentarians voted in favor even though they had formally considered capitalist-imperialist wars as drastically opposed to the class interests of workers. But that is a reminder that patriotism and nationalism are powerful drugs that influence war policies along with more rational or pecuniary motivations.
The sketch of Martin Luther King, Jr. notes his outspoken criticisms of the Vietnam War and cites his famous statement:
We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.King expressed his support of human rights and his opposition to imperialism in terms of Christian, humanistic, and democratic values and not explicitly in social-democratic terms as Luxemburg and Lenin did. But morality is also an important factor in decisions to go to war as well as in decision to stop them.
In his famous speech of April 1967 on the Vietnam War, He said:
Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the [civil rights] struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. (5)
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