V.I. Lenin

Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

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Writing in 1916 in the midst of World War I, Lenin relates the growth of monopoly and the enormous concentration of finance capital in a few hands to a new stage in capitalist development, leading to inevitable military clashes between industrial nations over markets and sources of raw materials.

Lenin analyzes the creation of a labor bureaucracy from the imperialist spoils, leading to the betrayal of the working class, as Social Democratic parties in Europe sent “their” workers to fight their class brothers on the killing fields of the world war.

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Writing in 1916 in the midst of World War I, Lenin relates the growth of monopoly and the enormous concentration of finance capital in a few hands to a new stage in capitalist development, leading to inevitable military clashes between industrial nations over markets and sources of raw materials.

Lenin analyzes the creation of a labor bureaucracy from the imperialist spoils, leading to the betrayal of the working class, as Social Democratic parties in Europe sent “their” workers to fight their class brothers on the killing fields of the world war.

Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter
⁠I—Concentration of Production and Monopoly
⁠II—The Banks and Their New Role
⁠III—Finance Capital and Financial Oligarchy
⁠IV—The Export of Capital
⁠V—The Division of the World among Capitalist Groups
VI—The Division of the World among the Great Powers
⁠VII—Imperialism as a Special Stage of Capitalism
VIII—Parasitism and the Decay of Capitalism
⁠IX—The Critique of Imperialism
⁠X—The Place of Imperialism in History
Appendix

Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) was the founder and leader of the Bolshevik Party and a central figure within the Marxist movement from the end of the 19th century until his death in 1924. In October 1917 he, along with Leon Trotsky, led the Russian Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power and established the first workers’ state.

In 1902 Lenin published What is to be Done?, a major theoretical work which critiqued the trade unionist perspective that sought to limit the struggles of workers to economic questions. He insisted on the necessity of a political solution to capitalist exploitation and outlined a theory of the revolutionary party as the vanguard of the working class.

Lenin led the split with the Mensheviks in the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1903, maintaining that the forthcoming revolution in Russia could not be of a solely bourgeois-democratic character. Over the course of the next 14 years he fought a long struggle against Menshevism. This ultimately culminated in his issuing in April 1917 of a set of political theses that unequivocally called for a proletarian socialist revolution in Russia.

Lenin was an ardent defender of internationalism. In 1914, when the German Social Democratic Party, the leading section of the Second International, abandoned Marxism by supporting German imperialism in World War I, Lenin fought against this national chauvinist perspective. In defense of the outlook of world revolution, he advocated the founding of the Third International. His Imperialism, published in 1917, identified the origins of the bloodbath engulfing Europe at the time in the inner workings of capitalism.

Lenin made major contributions to the development of Marxist philosophy, leaving behind a voluminous body of writings. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was his defense of dialectical materialism and a withering critique of efforts by figures with ties to the Bolshevik Party to substitute idealist forms of thinking for materialist philosophy.

Lenin died in January 1924 after a series of strokes, which had left him incapacitated for many months prior. In his Last Testament, suppressed for many years by the rising Soviet bureaucracy, he called for the removal of Joseph Stalin from his post as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

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