Fusion of banking and industrial capital.
Finance capital and imperialism
With its entry into its imperialist phase, capitalism transforms the structure of each national capital. The result of the extraordinary concentration and centralization of capital is light-years away from the free-competition capitalism that had operated during rising capitalism. Increasingly dependent on the banks, individual capitalists will exchange the shares of their companies for shares in the banks themselves, which thus become poolers of the risk of capital as a whole.
The result, the fusion of industrial and banking capital, makes up contemporary finance capital. The bourgeoisie of employers and captains of industry is transformed into a financial oligarchy and merges more and more with the state bureaucracy. The ruling class thus rehearses what will be its characteristic form in decadence and the first forms of state capitalism.
At the same time there develops, so to speak, the personal union of the banks with the largest industrial and commercial enterprises, the fusion of the one with the other through the ownership of shares, through the entry of bank directors into the supervisory boards (or boards of directors) of industrial and commercial enterprises, and vice versa. (…)
The "personal union" of the banks and industry is completed by the "personal union" of both with the government. "Seats on the supervisory boards," writes Jeidels, "are voluntarily entrusted to persons of renown, as well as to former state officials, who can facilitate to a considerable degree (!!) relations with the authorities." (…)
The result is, on the one hand, an ever-growing fusion, or, to use N. I. Bukharin's apt expression, the coalescence of banking and industrial capital and, on the other, the transformation of the banks into institutions of a truly "universal character". (…)
In commercial and industrial circles one often hears complaints about the "terrorism" of the banks (…) At bottom, these are the same complaints of small capital against the yoke of big capital, only in this case the category of "small" capital corresponds to a whole consortium! The old struggle between small and big capital is reproduced at a new and immeasurably higher stage of development. (…)
Concentration of production; the monopolies arising from it; the fusion or coalescence of the banks with industry: such is the history of the rise of finance capital and what that concept contains. (…)
The management of capitalist monopolies inevitably becomes, under the general conditions of commodity production and private property, the domination of a financial oligarchy (…)
[Meanwhile] the apologists of imperialism and finance capital do not expose but conceal and embellish the mechanism" of the formation of oligarchies, their methods, the size of their "licit and illicit" incomes, their relations with parliaments, etc., etc.
Lenin. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1916