CHAPTER VII.
Imperialism as a Special Stage of Capitalism
We are now going to make an attempt to strike accounts, to summarise what we have said on the subject of imperialism.
Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the essential qualities of capitalism in general. But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and a very high stage of its development, when certain of its essential qualities began to be transformed into their opposites, when the features of a period of transition from capitalism to a higher social and economic structure began to take shape and be revealed all along the line.
The feature that is economically essential in this process is this substitution of capitalist monopolies for capitalist free competition. Free competition is the fundamental quality of capitalism, and of commodity production generally. Monopoly is exactly the opposite of free competition; but we have seen this latter beginning to be transformed into monopoly beneath our very eyes, creating big industry and eliminating small, replacing big industry by still bigger industry, finally leading to such a concentration of production and capital that monopoly has been and is the result: cartels, combines and trusts, and, fusing with them, the power of a dozen or so banks manipulating thousands of millions. At the same time monopoly, which has sprung from free competition, does not drive the latter out of existence, but co-exists over it and
