Chapter 8: Parasitism and Decay of Capitalism

Monopoly capitalism engenders a tendency towards stagnation, due to the combination of 1) fixed monopoly prices (as prices are a major mechanism and motivator for technical progress under capitalism) and 2) it can become profitable for a capitalist or group of capitalists to deliberately slow down or stop technical progress if designs would threaten their own monopoly and/or prices. Competition and development can never be fully eliminated, and so there can never be total stagnation, but the tendency remains as a major impeding force.

Lenin draws on an example of a German bottle-manufacturing cartel purchasing and then ignoring a machine patent that would have made bottle production much easier (and therefore cheaper, and therefore less profitable).

Imperialism also allows for the accumulation of capital in a few countries and for relatively few people, creating a stratum of rentiers who do not contribute even slightly to enterprises; exporting capital further insulates them, allowing them to exploit countries thousands of miles away, with little possibility of rebellion.

In Britain, the income of the rentiers through this parasitism is five times greater than the income obtained from British foreign trade. In Lenin’s day, economists increasingly divided the world into the usurer states and the debtor states, with five countries standing above the rest: Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland. The United States is a creditor for its hemisphere, too. Britain is transforming from an industrial to creditor state; while industrial output is still increasing, the income from interests and dividends and speculation and such is increasing more rapidly; this is what allows Britain to be such a powerful imperialist.

This parasitism naturally influences everything inside the rentier state, including the working class movements inside it. The profits gained from imperialism make it possible to bribe the upper stratum of the proletariat and thereby strengthens opportunism. This upper stratum consists of the membership of cooperatives and trade unions and other highly-placed workers, and naturally this upper stratum has much more political representation than the lower stratum (the vast majority of workers). It is worth noting that in Britain, this temporary decay in the working class movement was present significantly before imperialism truly took hold, as described by Marx and Engels; the latter of which famously described the English proletariat as becoming increasingly bourgeois. English workers are unconcerned about (or are even supportive of) colonial policy because of Britain’s dominant position in the world economy. They have become social chauvinists, aligned with bourgeois policy; not only in Britain (it was merely the first country to become this strong), but throughout Europe.

To continue with the effects of imperialism on the imperialists: the land itself inside imperialist countries results in the transformation from agricultural land to that for the rich, such as horse-riding and fox hunting [today, we might think of golf courses]; this naturally means that the percentage of workers employed in productive enterprises is declining [the service economy!]

Emigration from imperialist countries declines (not just in relative but also in absolute terms; that is, even population increases aren’t counteracting it) and immigration into these countries increases from the exploited countries abroad. German emigration between 1881 and 1890 was 1.5 million, then fell to 350,000 over the next two decades. Meanwhile, workers from Austria, Italy, Russia, and other countries pour in by the hundreds of thousands; by 1907 there was a total of 1.3 million foreign workers inside Germany. Immigrants make up a great number of the workers in poorly-paid industries in France and the United States.