Belgium controlled smaller but still enormous empires in Indonesia and the Congo. By contrast, Germany had only a few relatively small colonies, despite its economy beginning to overtake that of Britain. It was this discrepancy that lay behind the repeated clashes between the rival alliances of great power that culminated in the First World War.
Finally, where Kautsky focused simply on the control of the "agrarian" parts of the world (what today would be called the Third World or the Global South), Lenin was insistent that the imperialist division of the world was increasingly centred on industrial areas. "The characteristic feature of imperialism is precisely that it strives to annex not only agrarian territories, but even most highly industrialised regions (German appetite for Belgium; French appetite for Lorraine)". 34
Bukharin's Imperialism and World Economy, written shortly before Lenin's work, but appearing afterwards with an introduction by Lenin, made the argument just as forcefully as he draws of the consequences of the tendencies that Hilferding had described:
Combines . . .in industry and banking . . . unite the entire "national" production, which assumes the form of a company of companies, thus becoming a state capitalist trust. Competition . . . is now competition of the state capitalist trusts on the world market . . . Competition is reduced to a minimum within the boundaries of the "national" economies, only to flare up in colossal proportions, such as would not have been possible in any of the preceding historical epochs . . . The centre of gravity is shifted in the competition of gigantic, consolidated and organised economic bodies possessed of a colossal fighting capacity in the world tournament of "nations" . . . 35
Writing three years after the end of the war, he drew out the implications even more sharply:
The state organisation of the bourgeoisie concentrates within itself the entire power of this class. Consequently, all remaining organisations . . . must be subordinated to the state. All are "militarised" . . . Thus there arises a new model of state power, the classical model of the imperialist state, which relies on state capitalist relations of production. Here "economics" is organisationally fused with "politics"; the economic power of the bourgeoisie unites itself directly with the political power; the state ceases to be a simple protector of the process of exploitation and becomes a direct, capitalist collective exploiter . . . 36
Beyond Marx: Monopoly, War and the State
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