shortened version

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels explain the internationalization of capitalism in its earliest stage as follows:

“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.”¹

Today it is a very small number of international imperialist monopolies that put their stamp on capitalist society and that determine the international economic course. This stage of capitalism causes us Marxist-Leninists to analyze the problem in an updated and detailed way. The imperialist phase of capitalism cannot be reduced to some few imperialist countries from 100 years ago and cannot be analyzed as it was back then. We have to incorporate new developments in our theory and determine our strategy and tactics for the realization of the international socialist revolution in the light of the newly developing social phenomena.

Imperialism is a phenomenon that is inherent to capitalism. In the same way that free competition corresponds to a certain (first) stage of the capitalist economy, imperialism is, in Lenin’s words, a “higher stage” of capitalism. In other words: Imperialism is not a phenomenon that is brought about voluntarily by the bourgeoisie, but is directly connected to the development of the capitalist economy and is the highest stage of capitalism.

The objective dialectics of the capitalist economy, independent of the wishes of the individual, transported capitalism to the stage of monopoly, that is to the imperialist stage. For this reason Lenin said that “imperialism is the eve of the social revolution of the proletariat”, and this was confirmed by the socialist revolutions. The period of free competition of capitalism has long passed. And exactly for these reasons our age is the age of imperialism and proletarian revolutions.

Lenin said exactly the following:

“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.”²

Imperialism in the proper sense arose with the development of the capitalist economy, i.e. with its monopolization and complete internationalization. It arose through the merging of bank and industrial capital, through the rise of the finance capital, through the concentration of capital in the hands of few, i.e. throuth the intensive monopolization of the sphere of production and capital. This was caused, in the words of Lenin, by “the development of industry and the monumental concentration of production”. The monopolies erected their bourgeois dictatorship over the masses based on the capitalist states. The monopolization of capitalism is the essence of imperialist economy.

Lenin explains the economic nature of imperialism briefly and concisely:

“We have seen that in its economic essence imperialism is monopoly capitalism. This in itself determines its place in history, for monopoly that grows out of the soil of free competition, and precisely out of free competition, is the transition from the capitalist system to a higher socio-economic order.”³

A further characteristic of the imperialist system is its absolute tendency to uneven development between the capitalist countries. For this reason, the search for sameness between imperialists of 100 years ago and the new imperialist countries is leading astray and does not do justice to the economic nature of the imperialist system.

Lenin determines in his article “On the slogan for a United States of Europe”:

“Under capitalism the smooth economic growth of individual enterprises or individual states is impossible. Under capitalism, there are no other means of restoring the periodically disturbed equilibrium than crises in industry and wars in politics.”⁴

To view imperialism as a purely political tendency or to treat the capitalist system as a voluntary phenomenon, along the lines of “the imperialists will not allow semi-colonial countries to become imperialist”, means to ignore the most fundamental aspect of the problem, namely the economic aspect (the transformation of capitalism into monopoly capitalism). In a time where production has internationalized, all capitalist national economies are connected inseparably to the imperialist system and chained to international monopolies.

In 2000, worldwide GDP amounted to 33.87 trillion US dollars, while in 2021 it had almost tripled to 96.1 trillion US dollars. In 1960 this number amounted to 1.39 trillion US dollars.⁵ And in 2023 worldwide GDP will amount to 104.791 (about 105) trillion US dollars.⁶ This means that the monopolist capitalist economy is not static, but in continuous development. These developments show that capitalism, to express it with the words of Marx, “created a world after its own image”. And today there are almost no countries of the old type that are known as “semi-feudal”.

China, Russia, India, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, Turkey, Iran, South Africa, Indonesia, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are the new imperialist countries. In my personal opinion, to these imperialist countries there have been added new imperialist countries like Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, Ireland, Poland, Hungary, Portugal and the Czech Republic. Their entry into the divided markets of the imperialist world has further exacerbated the inter-imperialist contradictions and given rise even sooner to the danger of a new imperialist war (and nuclear war). And the imperialist social system has brutalized itself in proportion to the accumulation and concentration of capital and is threatening all living beings through the destruction of nature. The capitalist imperialist system is totally rotten, and capitalism is not able to produce a working population.

Especially an approach like “the rest is not so important” is an attitude that conceals the true nature of the bourgeoisie of one’s own country from the masses and especially the working class.

Those that do not recognize the fact that their own country is imperialist are going about it in a dogmatic way in my opinion. They run the risk of passing over to social chauvinism sooner or later.

1Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” Collected Works, Vol. 6, pp. 487f.

2Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 22, p. 200

3ibid., p. 298

4Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 341

5https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD

6https://www.statista.com/statistics/268750/global-gross-domestic-product-gdp/