Stage of capitalism as a global system that culminates its progressive development and plunges it into its historical phase of decadence, from which point capitalism goes from being a spur to being a fetter on the free development of the productive forces it has itself created.
Origin of imperialism
Imperialism is produced by the absence of sufficient extra-capitalist markets to realize the whole of the surplus value produced and to make the accumulated capital profitable. Extra-capitalist markets are those formed by artisans, independent peasants and, in general, by producers of commodity value who do not take part in the expanded reproduction of capital, whether they are inside or outside the borders of a given national state.
The extra-capitalist markets outside the bourgeois national states begin to be insufficient in volume to absorb the surplus value these states generate. As a result, the relations between the constituted states, between these and their colonies, and the organization of capital in each of them begin to change. This transformation means the entry into a new historical stage of the development of capital: imperialism.
In the internal organization of capital, imperialism means a development of the concentration and centralization of capital. Industrial and banking capital merge into finance capital, which becomes ever more tied to the state and the monopolies. Militarism appears for the first time as a global tendency, and the struggle to find outlets for over-accumulated capital becomes a struggle to export capital.
Imperialism gives shape to the final stage of rising capitalism. The extension and deepening of its conditions leads -through world wars and counter-revolution- to the phase of decadence of the system, whose main features it shapes, radically transforming with them the conditions of the class struggle.
The concentration and centralization of capital around finance capital and the state will turn into the generalization of state capitalism and the absorption of the trade union into the state; the chronic saturation of the world market into a globalization of militarism, together with the impossibility of an independent development of national capital -and therefore the impossibility of a national liberation of a progressive character; and, in general, the difficulties of capital in freely developing the productive forces into a definitive split between growth and development.