Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

In his Prefaces, Lenin states that the First World War (1914–1918) was "an annexationist, predatory, plunderous war"[2] among empires, whose historical and economic background must be studied "to understand and appraise modern war and modern politics".[3]

In order for capitalism to generate greater profits than the home market can yield, the merging of banks and industrial cartels produces finance capitalism and the exportation and investment of capital to countries with underdeveloped economies is required. In turn, such financial behaviour leads to the division of the world among monopolist business companies and the great powers. Moreover, in the course of colonizing undeveloped countries, business and government eventually will engage in geopolitical conflict over the economic exploitation of large portions of the geographic world and its populaces. Therefore, imperialism is the highest (advanced) stage of capitalism, requiring monopolies (of labour and natural-resource exploitation) and the exportation of finance capital (rather than goods) to sustain colonialism, which is an integral function of said economic model.[4][5] Furthermore, in the capitalist homeland, the super-profits yielded by the colonial exploitation of a people and their economy permit businessmen to bribe native politicians, labour leaders and the labour aristocracy (upper stratum of the working class) to politically thwart worker revolt (labour strike).

Lenin's socio-political analysis of empire as the ultimate stage of capitalism derived from Imperialism: A Study (1902) by John A. Hobson, an English economist, and Finance Capital (Das Finanzcapital, 1910) by Rudolf Hilferding, an Austrian Marxist, whose synthesis Lenin applied to the new geopolitical circumstances of the First World War, wherein capitalist imperial competition had provoked global war among the German Empire, the British Empire, the French Empire, the Tsarist Russian Empire, and their respective allies.

Three years earlier, in 1914, rival Marxist Karl Kautsky proposed a theory of capitalist coalition, wherein the imperial powers would unite and subsume their nationalist and economic antagonisms to a system of ultra-imperialism, whereby they would jointly effect the colonialist exploitation of the underdeveloped world. Lenin countered Kautsky by proposing that the balance of power among the imperial capitalist states continually changed, thereby disallowing the political unity of ultra-imperialism, and that such instability motivated competition and conflict, rather than co-operation:

Half a century ago, Germany was a miserable, insignificant country, if her capitalist strength is compared with that of the Britain of that time; Japan compared with Russia in the same way. Is it "conceivable that in ten or twenty years' time the relative strength will have remained unchanged?" It is out of the question.[6][7]

The post-War edition of Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1920) identified the territorially punitive Russo–German Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918) and the Allied–German Treaty of Versailles (1919) as proofs that empire and hegemony—not nationalism—were the economic motivations for the First World War.[8] In the preface to the French and German editions of the essay, Lenin proposed that revolt against the capitalist global system would be effected with the "thousand million people" of the colonies and semi-colonies (the system's weak points), rather than with the urban workers of the industrialised societies of Western Europe.[9] He proposed that revolution would extend to the advanced (industrial) capitalist countries from the underdeveloped countries, such as Tsarist Russia, where he and the Bolsheviks had successfully seized political command of the October Revolution of 1917.[10] In political praxis, Lenin expected to realise the theory of Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism via the Third International (1919–1943), which he intellectually and politically dominated in the July and August conferences of 1920.[11]

Immanuel Wallerstein, an exponent of the World-systems theory. (ca. 2008)

Lenin's use of Hobson pre-figured the core–periphery model of unequal capitalist development and exploitation. He argued in the preface to the 1920 edition of Imperialism, the structural causes of the reformist failure; that imperialism afforded ‘superprofits’ to the capitalists of the advanced countries and that

...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 labor leaders and the upper stratum of the labor 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.

Making use of English economist J. A. Hobson's work, Lenin understood capitalism as world system of unequal development that created the reformist labor aristocracy in industrial countries:

Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries. And this ‘booty’ is shared between two or three powerful world plunderers armed to the teeth (America, Great Britain, Japan), who are drawing the whole world into their war over the division of their booty."[12]

Lenin specifically used the term "world system," which, combined with his use of J. A. Hobson and Rudolf Hilferding to emphasize the global accumulation of wealth among colonizing countries, was an insight into the global dimensions of capitalism. Such ideas were early contributions to the development of world-systems theory, but similar ideas are found in Marx's work as well. Immanuel Wallerstein adopted the term "world-systems" from Ferdinand Braudel's concept of the Mediterranean "world-economy" and applied it to the "capitalist world-economy" which is also known as "the modern world-system" as an entity that is a "world" not necessarily global in size, though it eventually became global in size, and that is a "system" through the integrated functioning of a division of labor manifest in zones: core countries, semi-periphery countries, and periphery countries. The core–periphery expression originated in dependency theory, whose proponents Raúl Prebisch, Andre Gunder Frank and Fernando Henrique Cardoso proposed that countries and colonies become peripheral zones because they specialize in the low tech and labor-intensive activities, including the supply of raw materials and cheap labor to core zone areas, and thus become "underdeveloped" through unequal exchange mechanisms consequent to colonization and/or imperialism.[13]

In 1916, Lenin wrote Imperialism, the Highest Stage of the Capitalism, in Zürich, during the January–June period. The essay was first published by Zhizn i Znaniye (Life and Knowledge) Publishers, Petrograd, in mid 1917. After the First World War, he added a new Preface (6 July 1920) for the French and German editions, which was first published in the Communist International No. 18 (1921).[14]

Editions

• Владимир Ленин (1917), Империализм, как Высшая Стадия Капитализма, Петроград: Жизнь и Знание.
• Vladimir Lenin (1948), Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
• Vladimir Lenin (2000), Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, with Introduction by Prabhat Patnaik, New Delhi: LeftWord Books
• Vladimir Lenin (2010), Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Penguin Classics.

• Vladimir Lenin bibliography
• Banana republic
• Globalization
• Singer–Prebisch thesis
• Neocolonialism
• The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperialism (1913), by Rosa Luxemburg

• Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Vladimir Lenin at the Marxists Internet Archive