I understand how the free trade policies lead to monopoly, and I understand how financial monopolies take over industrial monopolies. But I don't really get the jump from monopolies to imperialism.
I understand how the free trade policies lead to monopoly, and I understand how financial monopolies take over industrial monopolies. But I don't really get the jump from monopolies to imperialism.
The first thing you have to keep in mind is that capitalist firms must constantly expand due to market forces, technological progress, and the declining rate of profit. This necessitates constant growth and since growth is limited within the context of the nation-state, capitalists must become international. They do this by exporting capital to foreign lands to reap the value of foreign resources and labor. The monopolies which begin exporting capital emerged near simultaneously in a number of European countries so they all become competitors on the world stage. It should also be noted that as resource extraction becomes more difficult, finance capital is exported more, and since finance capital is basically made up, it further under-develops regions. I forget the exact terminology Lenin uses, but these monopolies cover what I will call "spheres of influence" which is to say territories which they hold the monopoly on any given resource in.
In some cases the monopolies work together as cartels. They agree to not trespass into the spheres of influence of one another. Since they must constantly expand however, this can only be a temporary solution. Eventually they go to war with one another. If this war was kept to the field of business, that might be okay, but let us not forget that these monopolies are controlled by the bourgeoisie who also control their respective nation-states. These "business wars" eventually turn into real ones like the First World War.
On one level we see that bourgeoisie lead their nation states into alliances with others to catastrophic results, but a proper materialist reading sees WW1 as the European oligarchs formally dividing the lands of the liquidated Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires and Africa, as well as territories in Europe such as Alsace-Lorraine, Poland, the regions on the border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Kingdom of Italy (Specifically Carniola and the Julian March), and the Balkans into their own spheres of influence. Even more specifically, we see that finance capital is driving these conflicts just as it drives the monopolization of industry and its own monopolization. To put it simply, WWI was a war between the finance capitalists of Germany and France + The United Kingdom to determine which financial capitalists, and therefore which industrial capitalists could hold monopolies in which regions. Also that imperialism will drive more wars.
Lenin also briefly touches upon the "United States of Europe" which is his theory that a unified European cartel could emerge (the EU?) but more interestingly he discusses the possibility of the labor aristocracy arising in the imperial core which overturns the orthodox Marxist ideas about the relationships between capital and labor. The massive profits of imperialist exploitation do in a sense, trickle down to the working masses of that nation state and so there becomes an immediate economic interest for that nation's proletariat to maintain the imperialist order rather than overthrow the capitalist system.
Can you clear up some confusion for me? If it's the ever expanding growth of capital seeking new markets that can generate profits which drives imperialism then what was the cause of imperialism before capitalism? What the drove Mongol or Roman or various other pre capitalist empires?
What's the core idea of historical materialism which the Communist Manifesto starts out with? All history hitherto is the history of class struggle. We're only developing new scales for old methods of exploitation. Romans lacked heavy industry but they had factories with a division of labour reflecting them. They lacked the modern economic relationships that created the bourgeoisie but their patricians served the same role in society. Their colonialism was driven by primitive accumulation, a core population backed by a powerful military and industrial/logistical network which demands ever-greater levels of comfort. They needed Egyptian grain to distribute Caesar's bread, they needed British tin for bronze in regions without tin deposits.
Capitalism evolved out of the new division of labour that developed when aristocracy gave way to a merchant and bureaucrat class. A lord and serf had the same boss-employee relationship in a form reflecting the village and castle, but merchants could afford larger factories backed by larger resource extractors and the way power was wielded shifted away from the old institutions. The forms of modern colonialism increasingly became shaped by the bourgeoisie that profited from it instead of the older aristocratic forms. It's just a more complex manifestation of what has been happening since the Sumerians.
I would say the easiest way to begin is to divorce the historical/political idea of empires from Lenin's ideas of imperialism. There is a reason he called it "the highest stage of capitalism" after all. Capitalist imperialism is drastically different from pre-capitalist imperialism.
You can however, supported by historical reading, begin to see similar trends in the politics and economics of past empires, and ironically empires make a lot more sense as a political unit when you think about them from a materialist perspective. Why did the Romans and the Parthians fight over Armenia? Did crusaders invade the Levant to secure the holy land for pilgrimage or for Italian spice merchants? Why did the Mongols conquer so much? As happybadger says in his reply, this is just history repeating itself, but I would posit that it might be a good idea to firmly understand imperialism as a stage of capitalism (as it is now) first before you try to dig into the imperialism of historical empires because it will be confusing to try to understand imperialism as a universal phenomenon through different modes of production.