Crap, I'm behind! Will catch up this week.

Hell yeah!

The simultaneous existence of 1) like, ten corporations that own basically everything, and 2) bourgeois economists and politicians still doing the "we love our small businesses, don't we folks, we gotta help 'em out" thing, really shows just how right Lenin is

And how anti-trust law is just saving the capitalists from themselves. A very real example of how bourgeois states act to enforce capitalist hegemony even if on the surface, they appear to be acting against them (with minimum wage laws and safety laws and so on), and thus are tools of capitalist rule, rather than limiters on the capitalists. One of those things that libertarians are unwilling to believe or understand. Without all these "pro-worker" laws (and that's not to say that state-mandated breaks are Bad, Actually or anything) this whole system would have imploded like 50 years ago.

My version has that quote as "[The banking system] presents indeed the form of common bookkeeping and distribution of the means of production on a social scale, but only the form".

From what I could understand it is about how that information could be used in a socialized ("general") economy for the benefit of all, but in practice conforms to the whims of Big Capital (the "private").

It's genuinely incredible just how applicable all of this stuff is to the present day. The exact mechanisms might have changed (as Super Imperialism will soon demonstrate) but this is all the same stuff as was going on a hundred years ago, and all the same political arguments about how we ought to improve things (make every worker a shareholder in a corporation? divide up the monopolies, somehow, in government systems that are dominated by those very monopolies?).

Of course, this isn't to say that conditions haven't developed or anything. I think we can all see that the current capitalist system is gradually disintegrating as the whole world has been enveloped in monopolies and there are fewer places for capital to run for profit as China and friends improve conditions in exploited nations (hopefully faster than the US and NATO can destroy them in bombing campaigns).

Chapter 3: Finance Capital and the Financial Oligarchy

As capitalism progresses, money capital is separated from industrial/productive capital. Rentiers, who purely survive on income from money capital, are separated from entrepreneurs, who are involved in the management of productive capital. Under imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, financial oligarchy takes hold and the rentier is dominant.

Nonetheless, as bank monopolists sink their funds into industry, and take control away from the original industrialists, they increasingly become industrial capitalists themselves. Bank capital which is transformed into industrial capital can thus can be called finance capital. Under a system which produces commodities and has private property, such as capitalism, a financial oligarchy invariably arises. Part of what enables this is the “holding system”:

A concern needs only hold 50% of the shares to control another company (in practice, about 40%). This means that, through subsidaries companies, a principal company may control a set of subsidiary companies which then control their own subsidiaries and so on, while only requiring a relatively small amount of capital, by using the capital of acquired subsidiaries to control yet more subsidiaries. For example, the General Electric Company held sufficient shares in ~200 other companies to dominate their dealings, and thereby controlled a total capital of 1500 million marks despite not actually possessing that capital directly.

If the ownership of shares is “democratized” (”every worker should be a shareholder!” etc), the financial oligarchy can actually further strengthen itself by overpowering small, scattered shareholders. There are certain limits on this process; Germany, for example, does not allow shares to be issued below the value of 1000 marks. However, in more advanced capitalist countries, like Britain, the limit is just one pound (20 marks), which allows them to be more imperialist.

As these holding (”mother”) companies are technically separate from the subsidiary (”daughter”) companies, there are many tricks that can be performed without accountability, such as drawing up false balance sheets which do not violate the law on strict technicalities but nonetheless allow the monopolists to confidently make otherwise very risky major transactions that smaller companies cannot do, and conceal information from shareholders.

In Russia, the banks are divided into 1) those under this holding system and 2) “independent banks; the former consists of German, British, and French holdings. Over 75% of the capital of the big banks actually belonged to banks that were mere daughter companies of foreign banks; thereby making Russian shareholders relatively powerless compared to German shareholders. Additionally, over 40% of the working capital in the major St. Petersburg banks is devoted to mining, oil, metallurgical, and cement industries - indicating the merging of industrial and bank capital.

There are many tricks that monopoly allows you to do. Oligarchs can buy up the shares of many firms and then establish high prices under their monopoly, increasing their profits well in excess of the initial price of buying the shares. Additionally, bank monopolies can make substantial profit out of large loans received by countries, such as that which Morocco received in 1904 in which ~20% of the total loan went to French monopoly banks (essentially, international usury). A country can have a stagnant population and economy and yet grow rich via usury. An extraordinarily high rate of profit can be obtained via bonds; the profit gained by floating foreign loans is much more profitable than regular businesses.

During industrial booms, the financial oligarchy makes large profits; in industrial depressions, these oligarchs buy failing businesses for cheap, and are “reconstructed” or “reorganised”, and new capital invested, in order to bring in enough profit to make up for the purchase. This not only increases the profits of the banks, but also eliminates competition. Oligarchs also speculate in land in the suburbs of growing towns, also allowing them a monopoly on rents.

A monopoly is unbound by the form of government and most other political details; political or economic “freedom” is made increasingly worthless. Those who work for the government may aspire to work for the large banks, and those in state cartel committees may go on to work for those very same cartels.

The growth in issued securities grew relatively slowly in the decades after 1870, and then exploded, doubling from 1900 to 1910 (reflecting the aforementioned establishment of the financial oligarchy at the turn of the century). Britain, the United States, France, and Germany dominate the total issued securities, jointly owning 80% of the global total, with Russia in distant fifth and the rest of Europe far behind. Two of these economies are old capitalist economies and possess many colonies (Britain and France); while the other two are rapidly developing and have capitalist monopolies in industry (Germany and the United States). The rest of the world are the debtors to these four countries.