The excerpt below is from the report titled “The World Political Situation and the Tasks of the Communist International,” presented to the delegates at the congress by V. I. Lenin, the central leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik Party. The entire report can be found in the first of the two volumes. In it, Lenin reviews the rise of imperialist monopolies out of the capitalist “free market.” He explains how these monopolies and finance capital came to dominate the economies of a few developed capitalist countries, which in turn divided the world among themselves and subjected entire nations to imperialist domination as direct colonies or semicolonies. Copyright © 1991 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
 

Imperialism’s economic relations constitute the core of the entire international situation as it now exists. Throughout the twentieth century, this new, highest and final stage of capitalism has fully taken shape. Of course, you all know that the enormous dimensions that capital has reached are the most characteristic and essential feature of imperialism. The place of free competition has been taken by huge monopolies. An insignificant number of capitalists have, in some cases, been able to concentrate in their hands entire branches of industry; these have passed into the hands of combines, cartels, syndicates, and trusts, not infrequently of an international nature. Thus, entire branches of industry, not only in single countries but all over the world, have been taken over by monopolists in the field of finance, property rights, and partly of production. This has formed the basis for the unprecedented domination exercised by an insignificant number of very big banks, financial tycoons, financial magnates who have, in fact, transformed even the freest republics into financial monarchies. Before the war this was publicly recognized by such far-from-revolutionary writers as, for example, Lysis in France.

This domination by a handful of capitalists achieved full development when the whole world had been partitioned, not only in the sense that the various sources of raw materials and means of production had been seized by the biggest capitalists, but also in the sense that the preliminary partition of the colonies had been completed. Some forty years ago the population of the colonies stood at somewhat over 250 million, who were subordinated to six capitalist powers. Before the war of 1914 the population of the colonies was estimated at about 600 million, and if we add countries like Persia, Turkey, and China, which were already semicolonies, we shall get, in round figures, a population of 1 billion people oppressed through colonial dependence by the richest, most civilized, and freest countries. And you know that, apart from direct political and juridical dependence, colonial dependence presumes a number of relations of financial and economic dependence and a number of wars, which were not regarded as wars because very often they amounted to sheer massacres, when European and American imperialist troops, armed with the most up-to-date weapons of destruction, slaughtered the unarmed and defenseless inhabitants of colonial countries.

The first imperialist war of 1914-18 was the inevitable outcome of this partition of the whole world, of this domination by the capitalist monopolies, of this great power wielded by an insignificant number of very big banks—two, three, four, or five in each country. This war was waged for the repartitioning of the whole world. It was waged in order to decide which of the small groups of the biggest states—the British or the German—was to obtain the opportunity and the right to rob, strangle, and exploit the whole world. You know that the war settled this question in favor of the British group. And, as a result of this war, all capitalist contradictions have become immeasurably more acute. At a single stroke the war relegated about 250 million of the world’s inhabitants to what is equivalent to colonial status, namely Russia, whose population can be taken at about 130 million, and Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Bulgaria, with a total population of not less than 120 million. That means 250 million people living in countries, of which some, like Germany, are among the most advanced, most enlightened, most cultured, and on a level with modern technical progress. By means of the Treaty of Versailles, the war imposed such terms upon these countries that advanced peoples have been reduced to a state of colonial dependence, poverty, starvation, ruin, and loss of rights; this treaty binds them for many generations, placing them in conditions that no civilized nation has ever lived in. The following is the postwar picture of the world: At least 1.25 billion people are at once brought under the colonial yoke, exploited by a brutal capitalism, which once boasted of its love for peace and had some right to do so some fifty years ago, when the world was not partitioned, the monopolies did not as yet rule, and capitalism could still develop in a relatively peaceful way, without tremendous military conflicts.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home