War now becomes central to the system, arising from the competition between the "state capitalist trusts", and also feeding back into and determining their internal organisation:
With the formation of state capitalist trusts, competition is being almost entirely shifted to foreign countries. The organs of the struggle waged abroad, primarily state power, must therefore grow tremendously . . . In "peaceful" times the military state apparatus is hidden behind the scenes where it never stops functioning; in war times it appears on the scene most directly . . . The struggle between state capitalist trusts is decided in the first place by the relation between their military forces, for the military power of the country is the last resort of the struggling "national" groups of capitalists . . . Every improvement in military technique entails a reorganisation and reconstruction of the military mechanism; every innovation, every expansion of the military power of one state, stimulates all the others.37
The logic of the argument presented by Lenin and Bukharin was that the period of peace that followed the First World War would, sooner rather than later, give way to a new world war unless capitalism was overthrown. "The possibility of a 'second round' of imperialist war is . . . quite obvious", wrote Bukharin.38 As we shall see later, the reaction of the great capitalist powers to the economic crisis that began in 1929 confirmed this prediction. That has not, however, stilled the argument against the Lenin-Bukharin account.
The economics of empire
This argument assumed-and still assumes39-that peaceful free trade rather than a militaristic struggle to control chunks of territory would have been the most profitable course for the majority of capitalists to pursue. This claim is easy to deal with. The great period of growth of the Western empires was the last quarter of the 19th century. In 1 876 no more than 10 percent of Africa was under European rule. By 1900 more than 90 percent was colonised. In the
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Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond