But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, when certain of its fundamental characteristics began to change into their opposites, when the features of the epoch of transition from capitalism to a higher social and economic system had taken shape and revealed themselves in all spheres. Economically, the main thing in this process is the displacement of capitalist free competition by capitalist monopoly. Free competition is the basic feature of capitalism, and of commodity production generally; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our eyes, creating large-scale industry and forcing out small industry, replacing large-scale by still larger-scale industry, and carrying concentration of production and capital to the point where out of it has grown and is growing monopoly: cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks, which manipulate thousands of millions. At the same time the monopolies, which have grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system.

If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism. Such a definition would include what is most important, for, on the one hand, finance capital is the bank capital of a few very big monopolist banks, merged with the capital of the monopolist associations of industrialists; and, on the other hand, the division of the world is the transition from a colonial policy which has extended without hindrance to territories unseized by any capitalist power, to a colonial policy of monopolist possession of the territory of the world, which has been completely divided up.

> But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development,

That's...not really true in any substantive sense. Capitalist imperialism co-developed with capitalism the whole time the latter was developing from pre-capitalist systems. The only way you can say either came later is if you artificially construct both as binary rather than continuous transitions and then draw the arbitrary binary line one each to make that ordering work.

Read the book, that's exactly what he's saying, and that way of thinking is a fundamental aspect of dialectical materialism. The semantic and conceptual differences come when these small changes accumulate and a new way of describing the phenomenon is necessary.

For anyone interested in further discussion of this topic, I highly recommend "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism" by Lenin (1917).

You're describing corporations, not capital. While corporations require capitalism, you can easily have a capitalistic society where there is no corporate shield. Everyone could be a mom and pop shop.