In fact, as Lenin and Trotsky noted, there was no evidence that imperialism retarded economic development compared to free competition. On the contrary, as Marx noted in relation to India, even under colonialism, it brought about the first real social revolution, the investment in railways brought further economic development, and, as railways did everywhere, solidified different regions within the nation state. A large part of economic development, in Russia, resulted from the investment there by large-scale foreign capitals, which is one reason that Lenin sought to encourage them to stay, and more to join them after the revolution. The same was true, as Trotsky set out in China.
Lenin goes on,
“Even if we correct this argument and say, as Spectator says, that the trade of the colonies with Britain is now developing more slowly than their trade with other countries, it does not save Kautsky; for it is also monopoly, also imperialism that is beating Great Britain, only it is the monopoly and imperialism of another country (America, Germany).”
(ibid)
Which indicates that, as against the conditions existing under colonialism, what imperialism signifies is that, the role of industrial capital, as against the role of mercantilism, and the former's basis of the production of surplus value, in production, via the export of capital, meant that these competing imperialist states could be played off one against another, as each sought to obtain access to the reserves of labour-power in these developing economies.
Lenin's argument was the same as that used against the Narodniks 25 years earlier, but he could also see what happened in the US, where the large trusts were broken up in the 1890's. As predicted, each smaller component simply now, itself, became a new monopoly. Sometimes, that occurred by the weaker of these companies succumbing, enabling the others to expand, or, also, occurred as each company engaged in vertical integration, taking over its suppliers and customers, as well as the creation of conglomerates. That also includes, in the form of multinational companies, the taking over of capitals in the same sphere, in other countries, which, of itself, creates the requirement for a capitalist state providing and protecting bourgeois property laws, a level playing field for all capital. In other words, the same dynamic that went with the development of capitalism and produced the nation state, now applied on an international scale, and produces the need for the multinational state, as the minimum adequate form, in the era of imperialism.
Looking at the privatisation of the various state monopolies, in Britain, for example, in water, electricity, telecoms, coal, steel, gas, road and rail transport, the consequence was not a return to some mythical golden era of free competition (even with the assistance of specially created bureaucratic quangos responsible for it) and lower prices etc. In each case, the result was that each of these simply ended up being taken over by other monopolies, or more or less disappeared. Coal production, which at one point employed 2 million workers, effectively disappeared. The original reason was that cheaper coal could be imported, but that was supplemented by the “dash for gas”, which saw coal consumption itself fall dramatically.
Some of the water companies were taken over by foreign utilities companies, some by other UK water companies. Some merged with other utilities companies, providing energy etc., such as United Utilities, forming new conglomerates. Steel production was decimated by foreign competition, and where it was maintained it did so only by the British state giving large financial handouts to foreign steel conglomerates such as Tata and Mittal, to take over that production.
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