In this large yet engaging volume, Day and Gaido gather much of the early twentieth century’s seminal Marxist and social democratic thought on the emerging subject of imperialism. Discovering Imperialism provides the reader with fifty-four texts, which plot both the development of the concept of imperialism and the major debates about imperialism within social-democratic circles. One such debate is the heated disagreement over the cultural “necessity” of colonialism, with revisionists like Eduard Bernstein on one side of the argument and Marxists such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky on the other. Authors represented in Discovering Imperialism include Otto Bauer, Max Beer, Rudolf Hilferding, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, Parvus, Leon Trotsky, and others.
A comprehensive introduction by Day and Gaido traces the history of the Marxist conception of imperialism from the origin of the term in the 1850s as a synonym for Bonapartism to Vladimir Lenin’s theory of imperialism as “the highest stage of capitalism” and beyond, to the developments of globalization and control of foreign interests “through recourse to the IMF or the WTO in place of . . . garrisons.” An appendix by Day and Gaido presents a critique of Luxemburg’s major work, The Accumulation of Capital.
