L'importanza del capitale bancario

“Lenin, who had been working on the theme in 1915 and 1916, considered the item to be of same importance, so much so that he asked Lev Kamenev, in the event of his, Lenin’s, death, which was a real possibility in the pogrom atmosphere of July, to publish his notebook ‘Marxism and the State’, which had been held up in Stockholm. He was, however, able to retrieve it and work on it further and it emerged as ‘State and Revolution’. What was in it that Lenin considered to be so vital? The core of the work consists of Lenin’s interpretation of Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune. (…) ‘State and Revolution’ was also remarkable for some of its other assumptions and sources. In addition to the Marx/Paris Commune core there is also a large measure of Hilferding’s ideas present. Hilferding, as we have seen, argued that capitalism was becoming organized and its essential nutrient, capital, was turning into bank capital (finance capital in Hilferding’s phrase) controlled not by entrepreneurs and owners of capital but by bank employers, its managers. Take over the banks and one would thereby take over the essence of capitalism. Lenin proposed exactly this in ‘The April Theses’. He developed the principle even further in ‘State and Revolution’ arguing that all ‘political’ functions could, similarly, be reduced to accounting and control within the grasp of the average, literate intelligence”. [Christopher Read, Lenin. A Revolutionary Life, 2005]