banks in exporting financial capital. But this did not fit with the picture even when Lenin was writing, let alone in the decades afterwards. The export of finance had indeed been a central feature of British imperialism, but the situation was rather different with its new competitors. In the German case it was the industrial combines, especially those in heavy industry, rather than finance as such, that sought to expand beyond national frontiers by the establishment of colonies and spheres of influence. And the characteristic feature of the US and Russian economies in the pre-First World War decades was not the export of capital but the inflow of funds from other capitalist countries (although there was some re-export of capital). The focus on finance became even more problematic in the quarter of a century after Lenin wrote. The quantity of capital invested abroad never rose above the level of 1914 and then declined.42 Yet the great capitalist powers remained intent on imperialist expansion during the interwar years, with Britain and France grabbing most of the Middle East and the former German colonies, Japan expanding into China, and German heavy industry looking to carve out a new empire in Europe.
The phraseology of certain parts of Lenin's pamphlet has led to some interpretations of it that see financial interests, rather as Hobson and Kautsky did, as mainly responsible for imperialism. This was especially so when, basing himself on Hobson, Lenin insisted on the "parasitic" character of finance capital, writing of:
the extraordinary growth of . . . a social stratum of rentiers, ie people who live by "clipping coupons", who take no part in any enterprise whatever, whose profession is idleness.43
This stress on the "parasitism" of finance capital has even led to some on the left embracing strategies based on anti-imperialist alliances with sections of industrial capital against finance capital-precisely the Kautsky policy that Lenin attacked so bitterly.
Bukharin's account of imperialism by and large avoids these faults. He uses the category of "finance capital" repeatedly. But he explicitly warns against seeing it as something distinct from industrial capital. "Finance capital. . . must not be confused with money capital, for finance capital is characterised by being simultaneously banking and industrial capital" .44 It is inseparable, for Bukharin, from the trend towards domination of the whole national economy by "state capitalist trusts" struggling globally against other "state capitalist trusts " .
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Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond