The analysis of the deepening of the various economic, political and social contradictions of the imperialist world such as those described in V I Lenin’s Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism

Harpal Brar – Editor, Lalkar, United Kingdom

Contribution to the International Communist Seminar

"The world socialist revolution in the conditions of imperialist globalisation"

Brussels, 2-4 May 2001

Dear Comrades and fellow delegates, I have been instructed to speak on the above topic. Translated into ordinary English, the title means: is Lenin’s thesis on imperialism still valid in the contemporary world? I answer this question with the single word Yes. I submit the following brief evidence in substantiation of my affirmative reply to the question posed. Anyone desiring to have a far more detailed treatment of the subject is advised to look at my book Imperialism – decadent, parasitic, moribund capitalism. Further information on the developments in this field since I wrote my book at the beginning of 1997 will be found in a few review articles that I intend to write in the coming issues of Lalkar. Now to the subject in question.

Lenin repeatedly emphasised that "the deepest economic foundation of imperialism is monopoly;" that the "transformation of competition into monopoly is one of the most important – if not the most important – phenomena of modern capitalist economy". That "the rise of monopolies; as a result of the concentration of production, is a general and fundamental law of the present /imperialist/ stage of development of capitalism" and that "Monopoly! This is the last word in the "latest phase of capitalist development."

Analysing the origins of imperialism, Lenin wrote: "Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general. But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development; when certain of its fundamental characteristics began to change into their opposites, when the features of the epoch of transition from capitalism to a higher social and economic system had taken shape and revealed themselves all along the line.

1. The concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life;
2. The merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this ‘finance capital’ of a financial oligarchy;
3. The export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance;
4. The formation of international monopolist combines which share the world among themselves;
5. The territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist combines is completed.

Wherever you are, in whichever direction you look, whether you are at work or at home, whether you are awake or asleep, you cannot get rid of monopoly.

The world’s 500 largest industrial corporations, which employ only 0.05% of the world’s population, control 25% of the world’s economic output. According to the Economist, the top 300 multinational companies (MNCs), excluding financial institutions, own 25% of the world’s productive assets (‘A survey of multinationals: everybody’s favourite monsters’, the Economist, 27 March 1993, Special Supplement). The combined assets of 50 of the world’s largest banks and diversified financial companies account for 60% of the Economist’s estimate of a $20 trillion global stock of productive capital (Hoover’s Handbook of World Business, 1993).

A mere 1% of all the MNCs own half the total stock of foreign direct investment (FDI) (see UN World Investment Report; 1993 – WIR).

Together these MNCs produce 30% of the world’s output, they account for 70% of global trade and 80% of international investment (Paul Hawken, ‘The Power of Transnationals’, The Ecologist, July/Aug 1992). The biggest of these corporations have revenues greater than the GNP of all but a tiny handful of countries.

Today, the combined sales of the world’s top 200 corporations are far greater than a quarter of the world’s economic activity. Their combined sales are larger than the combined economies of all countries except the biggest nine. In other words, they exceed the combined economies of 182 countries – there being 191 countries at the latest count. If we exclude the 9 biggest economies (those of the US, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, the UK, Brazil, Canada and China), the combined GDP of the remaining 182 countries is $6.9 trillion. However, the combined sales of the top 200 corporations amount to $7.1 trillion (see The Top 200 – the Rise of Global Corporate Power, by Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh, Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, 25 September 1996 – hereafter ‘Top 200’).

The combined sales of the world’s 10 largest corporations in 1991 were greater than the combined Gross National Product (GNP) of the world’s 100 smallest countries. General Motors’ 1992 sales ($133 billion) were equal to the aggregate GNP of Tanzania, Ethiopia, Nepal, Bangla Desh, Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya and Pakistan – countries which together are host to 500 million people, representing nearly a tenth of the global population (ibid.).

And the share of the global economic activity of the top 200 has grown rapidly ever since 1982. Whereas in that year the sales of these top 200 amounted to 24.2% of global GDP, in 1992 they had risen to 26.8% and in 1995 to 28.3% of world GDP (ibid.).

Of the 100 largest economies in the world, only 49 are countries – 51 are corporations! US retailer Wal-Mart – the twelfth largest corporation in the world – is larger than 161 countries, including Israel, Greece and Poland. Mitsubishi, the largest corporation, is bigger than Indonesia, the fourth most populous country on earth. Toyota is bigger than Norway; Ford is bigger than South Africa, and Philip Morris is bigger than New Zealand.

The top 200 possess an economic clout almost double that of the poorest four-fifths of humanity. The poorest 4.5 billion people in the world account for only $3.9 trillion of economic activity, which is only just over half of the combined revenues of $7.1 trillion of the top 200. This means that global income and wealth are disproportionately concentrated among the rich. According to a statistician working at the UN Development Programme (UNDP), 85% of world GDP is controlled by the richest one-fifth of humanity; only 15% is controlled by the poorest four-fifths (see Top 200).

A tiny handful of 15 multinationals control the market in 20 key commodities. They control 90% of the world’s wheat trade, 70% of the rice trade; 80% of the tea and coffee trade; 90% of the timber, the cotton and the tobacco trade; 80% of copper; 60% of oil, 90% of iron ore; and 90% too of the trade in pineapples.

The top 5 companies typically account for 35-70% of total sales across a range of products. Here is the percentage of world sales by sector of the top five multinationals in the year 1992:

Consumer durables 70%

Cars and trucks 58%

Airlines 58%

Aerospace 55%

Electronic components 53%

Oil, personal computer and

media industries 50%

Steel 50%

(Source, The Economist, 27 March 1993).

During the short period of five years since I completed my book, the monopolisation of the economy has proceeded at an unprecedented speed. The frenzy of activity in the field of mergers and acquisitions turned 1999 into a landmark year, with the total value of deals reaching the hitherto unthinkable sum of $3,435 billion (Financial Times, 28 January 2000). In the United States alone, M&A volume in 1999 reached $1,730 billion – up from $1,630 billion in 1998.

In the first six months of 1999 TMTs (technology, media and telecommunications companies) did 2,900 deals worth $445 billion, as against $488 billion for all of 1998.

If 1999 was the landmark year, the value of mergers and acquisitions went higher still in 2000, which saw the biggest mergers and takeovers in corporate history.

Vodafone AirTouch completed its $203 billion takeover of Mannesmann, and AOL that of Time Warner for $182 billion.

Overall, more than $3,495 billion worth of deals were announced worldwide in 2000 – a record volume according to Thomson Financial.

With each passing year the value of the deals is getting bigger. Here are just a few examples, chosen at random, of the mergers effected in the last three years:

Vodafone Mannesmann $203 billion

AOL Time Warner $182 billion

NCI Sprint $115 billion

Pfizer Warner-Lambert $ 85 billion

Exxon Mobil $ 77 billion

BP Amoco $ 94 billion

Glaxo Wellcome SmithKline Beecham $ 78 billion

Daimler-Benz Chrysler $ 40 billion

Mergers and acquisitions, including deals within national borders, have soared at an annual rate of 42% over the past two decades to reach a completed value in 1999 of $2,300 billion, equivalent to 8% of the global GDP. Of the 24,000 deals, a quarter were cross-border, valued at $720 billion.

Global sales of the world’s 63,000 multinationals reached $14 trillion in 1999 – almost double the volume of global exports.

Globalisation (the bourgeois professorial term for the scientifically precise term imperialism) is only a further manifestation of the over-accumulation of capital in the centres of imperialism, insufficient opportunities for its profitable investment and thus inadequate profits for financing a growing state sector as well as a fast-expanding private-service sector. The chief features of this globalisation are:

1. extreme monopolisation of the economy through mergers, acquisitions and privatisation of the formerly state-owned enterprises;
2. further consolidation in banking and the further dominance of finance capital, as we shall shortly see;
3. ever-increased export of capital;
4. formation at an unprecedented pace of international monopolist combines and a furious struggle for re-division of the world;
5. reduction in social wage through cuts in welfare expenditure;
6. increased exploitation of labour power through de-regulation of every kind, especially of the labour market; and lastly (g) increased inequality between countries and within countries.

"The concentration of production; the monopoly arising therefrom; the merging or coalescence of banking with industry ) – this is the history of the rise of finance-capital and what gives the term ‘finance-capital’ its content" (Lenin, Imperialism – the Highest Stage of Capitalism).

"As banking develops and becomes concentrated in a small number of establishments", says Lenin, "the banks grow from modest middlemen into powerful monopolies having at their command almost the whole of the money capital of all the capitalists and small businessmen and also the larger part of the means of production and sources of raw materials in any one country and in a number of countries. THIS TRANSFORMATION OF NUMEROUS MODEST MIDDLEMEN INTO A HANDFUL OF MONOPOLISTS IS ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL PROCESSES IN THE GROWTH OF CAPITALISM INTO CAPITALIST IMPERIALISM" (Lenin, p.30 – emphasis added).

The concentration of banking, even in Lenin’s day, compelled banking specialists, who regarded economic questions "from a standpoint which does not in the least exceed the bounds of the most moderate and cautious bourgeois reformism," (p.35) to conclude that Germany was governed (in 1914) by 300 financial magnates, and that this number was forever declining.

The concentration of banking capital has accelerated at breakneck speed. If in 1997 31 banks had combined assets of 10.4 trillion, today the top 10 banks in the world have combined assets of more than $7.5 trillion.

As in industry, so in banking, the epoch of imperialism is characterised by growing concentration and centralisation. With each passing decade, with the growth in this centralisation of money capital, the number of banks has dwindled at an increasingly fast tempo. In the three decades from 1890 to 1920, the number of banks in Britain declined by four-fifths from 104 to 20. What is more, control of the total deposit and current accounts passed into fewer hands. Whereas in 1900 twenty-four banks accounted for 68% of all the joint-stock deposits, in 1920, five banks accounted for 86% of all such deposits.

In 1997, the banking scene in Britain was dominated by what even the bourgeois economists call ‘the gang of four’, that is to say, Barclays, NatWest, the Midland and Lloyds. If in 1953, the then big five between them made profits of almost ₤10 million, by 1997 each of the big five(five because since shedding its mutual status the Abbey National in effect became the fifth largest bank and others, such as the Halifax soon followed suit) were forecast by the Independent on Sunday to make a pre-tax profit well in excess of ₤1 billion (‘Banks to report ₤10 billion record profits’).

Note that since 1997 NatWest has been taken over by the Royal Bank of Scotland and Midland by HSBC and profits today are ₤10 billion.

At 10 a.m. on Monday 12 October 1998 in the Hilton banquet hall of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel it was announced that the Bank of America had merged with NationsBank to become one of the US’s largest banks. Having been told this, the Wall Street analysts were marched across the corridor to the equally dazzling Empire banquet room to learn that Bank One and First Chicago had merged to become the fifth largest bank in the US. These deals were worth $60 billion and $30 billion respectively.

The above two announcements, within two hours in the same hotel, emphasised "the almost manic pace of consolidation of America’s fragmented banking industry. Only a week earlier, the biggest banking deal of all had been announced, between Travelers and Citicorp" (Observer, 18 April 1998).

These deals are merely the latest in a trend which has been gathering pace for the past 20 years. If in 1987 there were 13,723 commercial banks in the US, by the end of 1997 there were just 9,143.

The most common complain from customers in the US is that they can’t keep track of their bank’s name, such is the speed of consolidation.

"Most analysts reckon that when the dust settles in 10 years or so, there will be a handful of nationwide banks and a few thousand small ones" (ibid.).

If the consolidation in the US was to reach the same proportions of concentration as in the UK or Canada, which is by no means impossible, there might be left no more than 500 banks in all in he US, with half a dozen truly national giants with a huge national and international financial clout.

The above deals represent an attempt to create truly national coast-to-coast banking giants, operating from all areas, providing unprecedented services, and having an unprecedented reach.

Source: Financial Times, 8 June 1999

August 1999 Fuji Bank, Industrial Bank of Japan and Dai-Chi Kangyo announced their merger, with assets totalling $1,241 billion – the world’s largest financial group.

7 October 1999 Asahi Bank and Tokai Bank, creating Japan’s third largest banking group, with $ 549 billion of assets.

14 March 2000 The group merged with Sanwa, creating the world’s second trillion-dollar bank.

March 2000 Sumitomo and Sakura merged to form a bank with assets of $968 billion, leaving the poor bank of Tokyo – Mitsubishi – in the fourth position with assets of $673 billion.

Consequent upon this dramatic consolidation in Japanese banking, the number of banking groups has fallen to 8 from 21 three years ago.

As a matter of fact, this furious consolidation in the Japanese banking sector means that there are really only four giant banks in this sector, namely:

• IBJ- Fuji- DKB (now known as Mizuho);
• Asahi-Tokai-Sanwa group;
• Sumitomo-Sakura group;
• Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi.

In the wake of the announcement by Sumitomo and Sakura (in October 1999) that they were preparing to integrate their operations, through a merger in 2002, to create the world’s second largest bank in terms of assets, Gillian Tet and Naoko Nakamae made this penetrating and colourful observation in the Financial Times of 15 October 1999:

"This autumn, the mood in Japan’s banking has seemed as edgy as the closing minutes of a teenage disco.

"While many banking players have been cuddling up, the rest have been eyeing each other anxiously. For none of the unattached want to look unattractive when the music stops – let alone lose their favourite partner to a rival. ‘The pressure is rising’, quipped one Japanese banker recently." (‘Preparing for the last tango in Tokyo’).

The authors added that with the announcement of the above merger "…the pressure on loners edged even higher."

Banco Central Hispanoamericano acquired Banco Santander for $11.6 billion.

Banque Nationale de Paris acquired Paribas for $13 billion.

We must now deal with the question of export of capital.

"It is characteristic of capitalism in general", says Lenin, "that ownership of capital is separated from the application of capital to production, that money capital is separated from industrial or productive capital, and that the rentier who lives entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur and from all those who are directly concerned in the management o capital. Imperialism, or the domination of finance capital, is that highest stage of capitalism in which this separation reaches vast proportions. The supremacy of finance capital over all other forms of capital means the predominance of the rentier and of the financial oligarchy; it means that a small number of financially ‘powerful’ states stand out among all the rest … In one way or another, nearly the whole of the rest of the world is more or less the debtor to and tributary of these international banker countries, these … pillars of world finance capital" (Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, pp. 57-58)".

The latest stage of capitalism is characterised not only by the emergence of monopolistic associations of capitalists in all the advanced capitalist countries, but also by the emergence of the "monopolist position of a few very rich countries, in which the accumulation of capital has reached gigantic proportions", giving rise to "an enormous ‘surplus of capital’" (Lenin, ibid., p. 60).

Of course, there would be no question of surplus of capital if capitalism could raise the living standards of the masses – an argument all too frequently resorted to by the petty-bourgeois critics of capitalism.

"But if capitalism did these things it would not be capitalism; for both uneven development and a semi-starvation level of existence of the masses are fundamental and inevitable conditions and constitute premises of this mode of production. As long as capitalism remains what it is, surplus capital will be utilised not for the purpose of raising the standard of living of the masses in a given country, for this would mean a decline in profits for the capitalists, but for the purpose of increasing profits by exporting capital abroad to the backward countries. In these backward countries profits are usually high, for capital is scarce, the price of land is relatively low, wages are low, raw materials are cheap … The need to export capital arises from the fact that in a few countries capitalism has become ‘overripe’ and … capital cannot find a field for ‘profitable’ investment" (ibid.).

The export of capital, too, has accelerated enormously since Lenin’s day, especially since the end of the Second World War. In the 13 years between 1983 and 1995, according to The Economist of 24 June 1995, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) grew five times faster than trade, and ten times faster than world output.

Although benignly called Transnational Corporations as Engines of Growth, the UN’s World Investment Report (WIR) of 1992 supplies us with an abundance of statistics which enable us to discern the furious attempts being made by the imperialist powers to redivide the world through the means of FDI by MNCs based in a handful of imperialist countries.

1990, says the WIR, witnessed the outflows of FDI to reach the then unprecedented figure of $225 billion. Between 1985-1990, FDI grew at the rate of 35% a year, well in excess of the growth in world exports (13%) and GDP (12%). According to WIR 2000, FDI in 1999 grew to $865 billion, and for the year 2000 was expected to be $1,000 billion. Of these vast sums of capital exported, M&A activity now dominates FDI flows into the industrialised (imperialist) countries. In 1999 the export of capital between imperialist countries rose to $636 billion from $481 billion in 1998.

UK was the world’s biggest overseas investor in 1999, with outflows of $199 billion, and the US was the biggest recipient with inflows of $276 billion. Most of these outflows between imperialist countries, accounted for as they are by M&A activity, do not go towards creating new productive facility. Far from creating any new employment opportunities, they only make for intensified rationalisation, cost cutting and mass redundancies.

In a furious bid to counter falling profits in the imperialist countries, the MNCs from the main imperialist countries are investing heavily in the developing countries ($208 billion in 1999 – up from $178 billion in 1998).

It is estimated that the accumulated stock of FDI in 1997, and belonging to MNCs and their foreign affiliates, amounted to $305 billion – 90% of it accounted for by the MNCs from the rich imperialist countries, of which 69% from just 5 imperialist countries, namely, the US, UK, Germany, Japan and France.

As far as the FDI to developing countries is concerned, most of it goes to just a handful of countries – China, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Hong Kong and Taiwan (the last two ought to be considered as part of China).

"If the ability to attract international capital flows were a beauty contest, Asia would be awarded the title of Miss World every year, " so observed Mr Anthony Rowley in The Banker.

The rates of return on FDI of the imperialist countries in third-world countries were estimated in the mid-1990s at 17% - twice the rate of return in the imperialist countries. As a result, there has been a marked acceleration in the movement of manufacturing and service industries out of the countries with higher labour costs to third-world countries with low wage costs. Not surprisingly, the Economist of 2 November 1996, using the figures concerning wage rates in different countries produced by Morgan Stanley, the American investment bank, asks: "Whom would you rather employ: one German worker, two Americans, five Taiwanese or 128 Chinamen? "

All this is producing misery for millions upon millions of workers in the imperialist and the oppressed countries alike.

It would be worth our while in this context to say a few words about the third world debt. From being $70 billion in 1971, the third-world debt has grown to the gargantuan sum of $2,095 billion, a 30-fold rise. The third world pays $233 billion a year to service this debt, while receiving $55 billion a year in development aid. Some of the poorest countries in the world have literally to take food out of the mouths of their children and let them starve to death in order to be able to service this debt. Typical of these countries is Uganda, which in 1995 spent only $2.60 per person on health but $30 per person on debt service. 13 billion children in the developing countries die each year of preventable and malnutrition-related diseases, which is the equivalent of 2½ times the notorious Nazi holocaust. All this, however, does not prevent the hired servants of the bourgeoisie from claiming that "… a dynamic market economy … is the only possible basis for human advance" (Martin Wolf, Financial Times, 15 September 1999).

Although the separation of the ownership of capital and its application to production is characteristic of capitalism in general, this separation reaches immense proportions at the imperialist stage of its development. Imperialism is the domination of finance capital and "the supremacy of finance capital over all other forms of capital means the predominance of the rentier and of the financial oligarchy; it means that small number of financially ‘powerful’ states stand out among all the rest …In one way or another, nearly the whole of the rest of the world is more or less the debtor to and tributary of these international banker countries, … pillars of world finance capital" (Lenin, Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism).

The truth contained in the above observation of Lenin is fully corroborated by the increasing inequality between the imperialist and the oppressed countries since the onset of the imperialist stage in the development of capitalism. Here are the figures:

1820. 3:1

1913. 11:1

1950. 35:1

1973. 44:1

1997. 72:1

Some countries with a GDP of $300 per capita, and others with $25,000!

In 1997 one-fifth of the world’s population (living in the imperialist countries) generated 86% of the world product. The bottom fifth produced 1% . 1.3 billion people live on incomes of less than $1 a day.

And the solutions?

These are the ‘solutions’ put forward by the best brains among bourgeois journalism, at the height of imperialism’s decadence:

1. a United Nations foreign legion
2. improved governance, with donors paying for, and recruiting, judges, officials, soldiers, police, medical personnel and teachers – "such operations could be mounted under UN auspices, in some kind of protectorate" (M Wolf, Financial Times, 14 July 1999)
3. More liberal trade, openness to FDI and more privatisations
4. This means some sacrifice of independence – so be it.

In 1997, the wealth of the world’s 358 billionaires exceeds the combined annual incomes of countries which are home to nearly half the world’s people. These 358 held between them $760 billion, a sum equal to the wealth of 2.5 billion of the world’s poorest people, representing 45% of the global population.

Now the world’s top 200 billionaires have $1.135 trillion. The assets of the three top billionaires were more than the GDP of all the least developed countries.

In 1990-1993 average incomes fell by a fifth or more in 21 countries, mostly in eastern Europe and the CIS.

In 70 countries average incomes are less than they were in 1980, and in 43 less than in 1970.

In Africa, Aids has cut life expectancy from 62 years to 47.

Per capita water supply in developing countries has dropped by two-thirds since 1970.

World military spending is $778 billion.

(Human Development Report, Oxford University Press, 1996.

Over 100 million people in OECD countries live below the poverty line. Over 40 million of these are unemployed.

The annual expenditure on narcotics alone exceeds the combined GDP of 80 developing countries.

40 million US citizens have no health insurance and one adult out of five is functionally illiterate.

3 million cases of child abuse annually.

7,000 children suffering gunshot wounds a year.

15 million criminal cases are recorded by crime statistics annually.

Here is the other pole, i.e., "the side that produces its own product in the form of capital" (Marx, Capital, Vol 1), graphically portrayed in this interview with a sharecropper’s child in nearby Selma, Alabama, by Raymond Wheeler of CBS television:

"Do you eat breakfast before school?"

(Quoted in Korten, p. 105).

"It is beyond doubt", said Lenin, "that capitalism’s transition to the stage of monopoly capitalism, to finance capital, is connected with the intensification of the struggle for partitioning the world" (Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism).

It is undoubtedly the case that the end of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20^th century (precisely the period which marked the transition of pre-monopoly capitalism to the monopoly stage of its development) saw tremendous intensification of the struggle among the imperialist power for the conquest of those parts of the globe which had not yet been occupied by these powers. Once this partition of the globe was complete, there could only be re-division and re-partition, as a result of the change in the relative strength of the imperialist countries due to their uneven development. This alone explains both the first and the second world war.

Following the Second World War, for reasons which need not been gone into here, most of the colonies managed to gain political independence, yet imperialism was nevertheless able to devise mechanisms whereby these formally independent countries have been fully enmeshed in the net of financial, diplomatic and military dependence on imperialism. In other words, colonialism has made way for neo-colonialism. In fact, there is now, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a movement back from political independence to semi-colonial status – South Korea, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, many African and Latin American countries and, last though not least, the Balkans.

Through a system of alliances, a network of military bases, the establishment of a string of client puppet regimes, and through its economic power, finance capital is able to enmesh almost the whole world in a net of dependence. In fact, one may say that there is barely an inch of the earth’s surface where it does not lay its heavy boot.

Thus, although there are not many formal colonies in existence, and although most countries are endowed with the accoutrements of political independence, all the same the characteristic feature of the present-world is in essence the same as at the beginning of the 20^th century, namely, its partition into spheres of influence among the various contending imperialist powers. In fact, a frenzied struggle is already under way for the re-division of the world between the three imperialist blocs centred around the US, the European Union and Japan. The war in Yugoslavia, the occupation of the Gulf, the daily bombing of Iraq by the Anglo-American imperialist forces, the war provocations on the Korean peninsula, the extension of the warmongering NATO alliance to the borders of Russia, the American bombing of the Chinese embassy during the Yugoslav War, the recent American spy-plane incident off the Chinese coast, the sale of sophisticated weaponry to the renegade province of Taiwan, the European attempts to build a European army, and the American decision to go ahead with Nuclear Missile Defence Programme in violation of the 1972 ABM Treaty, the proxy wars in Africa, the attempts at building three economic blocs (in the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific) – all these can only be explained in the context of a complicated but furious struggle going on right before our eyes for the re-partitioning of the world. Sooner or later, unless prevented by proletarian revolutions, these imperialist blocs, or a combination of some of these, must come to blows against each other.

It is precisely in the furtherance of the struggle for the partitioning of the world that the imperialist powers, notably the United States, have armed themselves with the teeth. US imperialism alone spends close to $300 billion a year on military expenditure, which accounts for more than a third of the military expenditure of the world as a whole.

Thomas Friedman, reactionary journalist, spoke with rare candour when he wrote in the New York Times of 28 March 1999 when he wrote thus:

"For globalisation to work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is. The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell-Douglas, the designer of F-15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for silicon valley’s technology is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. "

Following Lenin, we must devote special attention to "yet another aspect of imperialism to which most of the discussions on the subject usually attach insufficient importance, " namely, to parasitism, which is one of the characteristic features of imperialism. Since imperialism is an enormous accumulation of money capital in a few countries, it gives rise to an enormous growth "of a class, or rather, of a stratum of rentiers, i.e., people who live by clipping coupons’, who take no part in any enterprise whatever, whose profession is idleness. The export of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the rentiers from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labour of several overseas countries …" (Lenin, Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism).

From the above Lenin concludes that opportunism in working class of the imperialist countries was not an accidental phenomenon; that, on the contrary, it had deep economic roots, namely, in the superprofits received by the bourgeoisie of the imperialist countries from the plunder of the whole world, a part of which plunder could be, and is, used to bribe the upper stratum of the workers – the labour aristocracy – and thus engender a split in the working class; that this stratum of "bourgeoisified workers", thoroughly petty-bourgeois in their style of life, the size of their earnings and their world outlook, serve as the "principal social … support of the bourgeoisie … the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the labour movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class, the real carriers of reformism and social chauvinism. In the civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie they inevitably, and in no small numbers, stand on the side of the bourgeoisie, on the side of ‘Versaillese’ against the ‘Communards’" (ibid.).

Lenin adds: "Unless the economic roots of this phenomenon are understood and its political and social significance is appreciated, not a step can be taken toward the solution of the practical problems of the communist movement and the impending social revolution. "

The Gulf and the Balkan wars, and the attitude of the opportunists, from trade-union leaders to leaders of social democracy, constitute an eloquent proof of the correctness of the above observation of Lenin’s. In our own country, in Britain, with the sole and honourable exception of Arthur Scargill and one or two of his comrades, not a single trade unionist of any note condemned the imperialist war against Yugoslavia or the daily bombing of Iraq.

Thus it can be seen that imperialism faces humanity with the choice: either revolution or war and barbarism. It is our bounden duty to spread among the proletariat "… the grim and inexorable truth that it is impossible to escape imperialist war, and the imperialist world which inevitably engenders imperialist war, it is impossible to escape that inferno except by a Bolshevik struggle and a Bolshevik revolution" (Lenin, 14 October 1921).

The Leninist theory of revolution and Leninist tactics and methods of organisation offer the only road to salvation open to the proletariat faced with the stark choice: "Either place yourself at the mercy of capital, eke out a wretched existence and sink lower and lower, or adopt a new weapon – this is the alternative imperialism puts before the vast masses of the proletariat. Imperialism brings the working class to revolution" (Stalin, CW6, pp. 74-75).

In its bid to maintain its profits, imperialism is confronting humanity with the dilemma: "either sacrifice all culture or throw off the yoke of capitalism by revolutionary means, eliminate the domination of the bourgeoisie and win a socialist society and lasting peace" (Lenin, For Bread and Peace, December 1917). At the same time imperialism sharpens all the contradictions to their extreme – those between labour and capital, between imperialism and the oppressed nations, between the various imperialist countries, and contradiction between imperialist and socialist countries. By riding roughshod it is surely spurring the working class and the oppressed people to effect its revolutionary overthrow.

Notwithstanding the colossal reverses suffered by socialism during the past three decades, notwithstanding all the zigzags of the struggle and the tortuous course of events, nothing on earth can stop the victory of proletarian revolution on a world scale.

"Imperialism is the eve of the social revolution of the proletariat" (Lenin, Preface to the French and German editions of Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism).