Imperialism
The Highest Stage of Capitalism
Vladimir Lenin
Having read it
★★★★☆
Given when it was originally written, many parts of it, if not its whole essence, ring very true in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We seem to be suckers for the magic and myths of finance capitalism and many of the examples used, from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, demonstrate early issues and problems of, essentially, turning real community and meaningful livelihoods into one big lottery that finance can gamble with for as long as it can stomach.
A good passage
Private property based on the labour of the small proprietor, free competition, democracy, i.e., all the catchwords with which the capitalists and their press deceive the workers and the peasants – are things of the past. Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the people 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 whole world in their war over the sharing of their booty.
A second good passage
The capitalists divide the world, not out of any particular malice, but because the degree of concentration which has been reached forces them to adopt this method in order to get profits. And they divide it in proportion to ‘capital,’ in proportion to ‘strength,’ because there cannot be any other system of division under commodity production and capitalism. But strength varies with the degree of economic and political development. In order to understand what takes place, it is necessary to know what questions are settled by this change of forces. The question as to whether these changes are ‘purely’ economic or non-economic (e.g., military) is a secondary one, which does not in the least affect the fundamental view on the latest epoch of capitalism. To substitute for the question of the content of the struggle and agreements between capitalist combines the question of form of these struggles and agreements (today peaceful, tomorrow war-like, the next day war-like again) is to sink to the role of a sophist.
The epoch of modern capitalism shows us that certain relations are established between capitalist alliances, based on the economic division of the world; while parallel with this fact and in connection with it, certain relations are established between political alliances, between states, on the basis of the territorial division of the world, of the struggle for colonies, of the ‘struggle for economic territory.’
A third good passage
Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital and of monopolies, which introduce everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom. The result of these tendencies is reaction all along the line, whatever the political system, and an extreme intensification of existing antagonisms in this domain also. Particularly acute becomes the yoke of national oppression and the striving for annexations, i.e., the violation of national independence (for annexation is nothing but the violation of the right of nations to self-determination).