Vladimir Lenin
“This transformation of competition into monopoly is one of the most important – if not the most important – phenomena of modern capitalist economy.”During the First World War, Lenin found himself isolated, but he was not afraid to fight against the stream. He dedicated all his strength to educating and training the Bolsheviks on the basis of the genuine ideas of Marxism. His masterpiece, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, is an immortal monument to his work in the vital field of theory.No book has ever explained the phenomena of modern capitalism better. Indeed, all of Lenin’s predictions concerning the concentration of capital, the dominance of the banks and finance capital, the growing antagonism between nation states and the inevitability of war arising out of the contradictions of imperialism have been shown to be true by the entire history of the last 100 years.The Communist Manifesto already explains that free competition inevitably gives rise to monopoly and the concentration of capital in a few giant enterprises. However, this process did not culminate during the life time of Marx and Lenin was in a position to analyse it in great details. Using the vast amount of statistics at his disposal, he outlines this process.Lenin further explains that in the stage of imperialist monopoly capitalism, the entire economy is under the domination of the banks and finance capital. Today, over one hundred years after it was first published, this domination is 100 times greater. Lenin’s text therefore stands as required reading for anyone fighting to change society.
