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Perpetual War Economy: The Highest Stage of Capitalism?

Preamble:
--2024 update: I'm currently reading 2 works that use rather different lenses to engage with Lenin's short text:
a) Orthodox Marxist* Anthony Brewer's textbook Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey: describes Lenin's work as an outline (lacking in rigour) popularizing existing political economy theory (Hilferding/Hobson/Bukarin).
b) Global South Marxist-Leninist* organization Tricontinental Institute for Social Research's paper : treats Lenin's work as describing a dynamic situation ("conjuncture") and takes inspiration from Lenin's method, rather than treating it as a static grand theory (see ).
*Labels are rough approximates, as always.

...in hindsight, my review seems to be inspired by the latter. I first provide the highlights of the text itself, and then I try to take the next step.

Highlights:
--Lenin's 1916 text (during WWI) stands alongside his era of pioneering theorists of imperialism such as:
i) liberal J.A. Hobson's 1901 Imperialism: A Study
ii) Marxist Rudolf Hilferding's 1910 Finance Capital: A Study in the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development
iii) "socialism or barbarism" Rosa Luxemburg's 1913 The Accumulation of Capital
iv) pioneering US sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois's 1915 essay on how the imperialist “Scramble for Africa� were at the roots of WWI.

--Lenin's ABC's of Imperialism:
a) Monopoly Capitalism: stage of concentrated production reached in late 19th century, as it dominates profitability (efficiency, resilience during capitalist crises), while control/profit remains private. Petty bourgeoisie want to return to “free competition�, while “Tens of thousands of huge enterprises are everything; millions of small ones are nothing.�
b) Finance Capitalism: concentration of banks and industry, given the growing use of finance capital (controlled by banks, employed by industry), resulting in the financial oligarchy.
c) Colonial foreign policy: accumulated capital exported abroad to achieve greater profits (cheaper costs) instead of invested domestically. Accelerated division of the world for its raw materials and markets.
--Also: “super-profits� of imperialism used to bribe the “labour aristocracy� in the core capitalist countries (where Marx had envisioned the socialist revolutions), limiting their domestic workers' movements to opportunist reformism and social chauvinism (includes interesting tidbit of Engels and Marx discussing this tendency in mid-19th century Britain).

The Missing:
--Lenin's preface:

This pamphlet was written with an eye to the tsarist censorship. Hence, I was not only forced to confine myself strictly to an exclusively theoretical, specifically economic analysis of facts, but to formulate the few necessary observations on politics with extreme caution, by hints, in an allegorical language […]

--Next steps?

1) Perpetual War Economy:
--Global capitalism's rising contradictions of vast productive factories dictated by the needs of capitalist short-term profits rather than long-term social needs led to the Great Crash/Depression in the 1930s, vividly illustrated in the novel The Grapes of Wrath.
--The first capitalist countries to escape capitalism's pessimism (blocking long-term investments to revive the factories) used fascism, i.e. scapegoating/expansionist war/the visible fist to destroy socialist alternatives: Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism.
--Fascism's expansionism eventually revived imperialist world war (WWII), leading to the "creative destruction" to revive investments and rescue global capitalism from the Great Depression.
...However, with the end of WWII's booming war markets, the US's war factories risked crashing into another Great Depression. Its new productive capacity could only be harnessed by the demand of global war's insatiable appetite. Capitalist investments require profit, which requires finding buyers for ever-more commodities (compound growth!). Oh, the irrationality of capitalism, the ability to crash from a boom!
--Peacetime consumerism (despite subsidies to build the "middle class") often failed to suffice, ex. "the near-bankrupt aircraft industry" (Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation). Thus, the crucial role of the US military industrial complex, to artificially keep alive the war markets (Cold War "arms race"), to keep the flow of profits going.
...Related: "surplus recycling mechanism", see The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy
--I've yet to find a masterpiece on this, relying on bits and pieces:
-War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier
-Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner was written before he really started getting into the economics, as he mentions in this .

2) History of Imperialism up to today:
-Overview of coups, debt, SAPs, unequal trade/intellectual property: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions (taking the best from Chang's "kicking away the ladder" Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism while avoiding the "US Enlightenment" rose-colored glasses.
-intro: Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations (see Vijay Prashad on ...my favorite lecturer, along with )
-The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
-The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump
-The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World
-The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South
-The British Empire before WWI: Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

3) Updating Theories of Imperialism:
--Similar to how theories of imperialism are a crucial challenge to rigidly-linear "stages of development" theories, we can expand on Lenin's linear "highest stage" framing by considering the lifetime of the global economic system ("structural time") and cycles within it ("cyclic time"): World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Hyman P. Minsky's "debt cycles" are also a useful framing (see The Bubble and Beyond).
--On Global South resources:
-intro: The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry (see ).
-dive: Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present.
-overview (including "super profits": The Veins of the South Are Still Open: Debates Around the Imperialism of Our Time
-debate between the Patnaiks vs. David Harvey in A Theory of Imperialism.
-Intermediate economic (esp. geopolitical/monetary) theory of imperialism (i.e. dollar imperialism) from a Global North lens: Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance (see ) and free trade imperialism: Trade, Development and Foreign Debt
- on reductionist "Monopoly Capitalism" vs. "real competition".

Quotes:
--Super-profits/labour aristocracy:

Obviously, out of such enormous superprofits (since they are obtained over and above the profits which capitalists squeeze out of the workers of their “own� country) it is possible to bribe the labour leaders and the upper stratum of the labour aristocracy. And that is just what the capitalists of the “advanced� countries are doing: they are bribing them in a thousand different ways, direct and indirect, overt and covert.

This stratum of workers-turned-bourgeois, or the labour aristocracy, who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their entire outlook, is the principal prop of the Second International, and in our days, the principal social (not military) prop of the bourgeoisie. For they are the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class, real vehicles of reformism and chauvinism. In the civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie they inevitably, and in no small numbers, take the side of the bourgeoisie, the “Versaillese� against the “Communards�.

Unless the economic roots of this phenomenon are understood and its political and social significance is appreciated, not a step can be taken toward the solution of the practical problem of the communist movement and of the impending social revolution.

Imperialism is the eve of the social revolution of the proletariat. This has been confirmed since 1917 on a world-wide scale.

--On shell in state of decay:

Private property based on the labour of the small proprietor, free competition, democracy, all the catchwords with which the capitalists and their press deceive the workers and the peasants � are things of the distant past. Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the populations of the world by a handful of “advanced� countries. And this “booty� is shared between two or three powerful world marauders armed to the teeth (America, Great Britain, Japan), who involve the world in their war over the sharing of their booty.

When a big enterprise assumes gigantic proportions, and, on the basis of an exact computation of mass data, organises according to plan the supply of primary raw materials to the extent of two-thirds, or three-fourths, of all that is necessary for tens of millions of people; when the raw materials are transported in a systematic and organised manner to the most suitable places of production, sometimes situated hundreds or thousands of miles from each other; when a single centre directs all the consecutive stages of processing the material right up to the manufacture of numerous varieties of finished articles; when these products are distributed according to a single plan among tens and hundreds of millions of consumers (the marketing of oil in America and Germany by the American oil trust)�then it becomes evident that we have socialisation of production, and not mere “interlocking�, that private economic and private property relations constitute a shell which no longer fits its contents, a shell which must inevitably decay if its removal is artificially delayed, a shell which may remain in a state of decay for a fairly long period (if, at the worst, the cure of the opportunist abscess is protracted), but which will inevitably be removed. [Note: emphasis added]