Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism - The New Monopoly of Finance Capital

Table of contents

1. The New Monopoly of Production and Circulation
2. The New Monopoly of Finance Capital
3. Minority of Financial Institutions Control Main Global Economic Arteries
4. The Globalization of Monopoly-Finance Capital
5. From Production to Speculative Finance
6. The Monopoly of the U.S. Dollar and Intellectual Property
7. The Spatial Expansion of the Capital-Labor Relation: Global Value Chains and the Global Labor Arbitrage
8. Monopoly-Finance Capital and Multinational Corporate Dominance
9. Neoimperialism and the Neoliberal State
10. U.S. Dollar Hegemony, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Plundering of Global Wealth
11. The New Monopoly of the International Oligarchic Alliance
12. The G7 as the Mainstay of the Imperial Capitalist Core
13. NATO and the International Monopoly-Capitalist Military and Political Alliance
14. Cultural Hegemony Dominated by Western “Universal Values”
15. The Economic Essence, the General Trend, and the Four Forms of Ideological Fraud
16. Economic Hegemony and Fraud
17. Political Hegemony and Fraud
18. Cultural Hegemony and Fraud
19. Military Hegemony and Fraud
20. Neoimperialism Is a Parasitic and Decaying Late Imperialism
21. Neoimperialism Is a Transitional and Moribund Late Capitalism

In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin stated: “The concentration of production; the monopolies arising therefrom; the merging or coalescence of the banks with industry—such is the history of the rise of finance capital and such is the content of that concept.”11 Finance capital is a new type of capital formed by the merger of bank monopoly capital and industrial monopoly capital. The turning point in the change from general capitalist rule to that of finance capital appeared around the beginning of the twentieth century, when banks in the leading imperialist countries were transformed from ordinary intermediaries into powerful monopolists. But before the Second World War, due to recurrent wars, high information transmission costs, and technical and institutional barriers such as trade protection, the linkages between global investment, trade, finance, and the market were relatively weak. The degree of globalization of the economy remained low, hindering the outward expansion of monopoly capital. After the Second World War, economic globalization was accelerated by the new technological revolution. In the early 1970s, rising oil prices triggered a worldwide economic crisis and brought about the grotesque phenomenon, impossible for Keynesian economics to explain, in which inflation and economic stagnation coexisted. In order to find profitable investment opportunities and escape from the “stagflation” quagmire, monopoly capital transferred traditional industries overseas, thus maintaining its original competitive advantage. Meanwhile, it accelerated its decoupling from the traditional industries and sought to open up new financial territory. Capitalist globalization and financialization catalyzed and supported each other, accelerating the “virtualization” of monopoly capital and the hollowing out of the real economy. The Western economic recession of the 1970s thus acted not only as a catalyst for the internationalization of monopoly capital, but also as the starting point for the financialization of industrial capital. Since then, monopoly capital has accelerated its turn from monopoly exercised in a single country to international monopoly, from the monopoly of the industrial entity to the monopoly of the financial industry.

Within the context of the new monopoly of finance capital, the second key characteristic of neoimperialism is that financial monopoly capital plays a decisive role in global economic life, giving rise to economic financialization.

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The New Monopoly of Finance Capital

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