imperialism

I.Lenin’s aims in writing this work

The term “imperialism” came into common usage in England in the 1890s as a development of the older term “empire” by the advocates of a major effort to extend the British Empire in opposition to the policy of concentrating on national economic development, the supporters of which the advocates of imperialism dismissed as “Little Englanders”. The term was rapidly taken into other languages to describe the contest between rival European states to secure colonies and spheres of influence in Africa and Asia, a contest that dominated international politics from the mid-1880s to 1914, and caused this period to be named the “age of imperialism”.

The first systematic critique of imperialism was made by the English bourgeois social-reformist economist John Atkinson Hobson (1858-1940) in his 1902 book Imperialism: A Study, which, as Lenin observes at the beginning of his own book on the subject, “gives a very good and comprehensive description of the principal specific economic and political features of imperialism” (see below, p. 33).

Lenin had long been familiar with Hobson’s book. Indeed, in a letter written from Geneva to his mother in St. Petersburg on August 29, 1904, Lenin stated that he had just “received Hobson’s book on imperialism and have begun translating it” into Russian.1

In a number of his writings between 1895 and 1913, Lenin had noted some of the characteristics of the imperialist epoch, for example: the concentration of production and the growth of monopolistic trusts and cartels, the growing importance of the export of capital compared with the export of commodities, the internationalisation of capitalist economic relations, the struggle between the rival European powers to partition the world market, the parasitism and decay of capitalism, and the creation

Doug Lorimer is a member of the National Executive of the Democratic Socialist Party.8 Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

through capitalism’s socialisation of production of the material conditions for the transition to socialism.

However, it was not until the outbreak of the World War I in August 1914 that Lenin felt the need to make a comprehensive and systematic Marxist analysis of the nature of the imperialist stage of capitalism, i.e., to go beyond the analysis made by Hobson in 1902 and by the Austrian Marxist economist Rudolf Hilferding in his 1910 book Finance Capital. The latter work, Lenin stated in his Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, “gives a very valuable theoretical analysis of ‘the latest phase of capitalist development’, as the subtitle runs” .

Given his comments on both Hobson’s and Hilferding’s works, why then did Lenin feel the need to produce his own analysis of imperialism? Lenin himself provides the answer in his 1920 preface to the French and German editions of his book. The “main purpose of the book”, Lenin explained, was “to present, on the basis of the summarised returns of irrefutable bourgeois statistics, and the admissions of bourgeois scholars of all countries, a composite picture of the world capitalist system in its international relationships at the beginning of the 20th century — on the eve of the first world imperialist war”. In doing this, Lenin had three objectives in mind:

1. To prove that “the war of 1914-18 was imperialist (this is, an annexationist, predatory war of plunder) on the part of both sides” and thus to refute the arguments of the leaders of the Second International, above all those of its leading theorist, Karl Kautsky, that each side in the war was merely fighting for “national defence” and therefore there was nothing opportunist or class-collaborationist in these leaders supporting the war efforts of the governments of their own countries.

2. To counter the theoretical arguments of Kautsky about the nature of imperialism and to demonstrate that he was “obscuring the profundity of the contradictions of imperialism and the inevitable revolutionary crisis to which it gives rise”.

Kautsky did this, firstly, by arguing that it was wrong to “identify with imperialism all the phenomena of present-day capitalism — cartels, protection, the domination of the financiers, and colonial policy”. That is, according to Kautsky, imperialism was not a “phase” of capitalist economic development but a “special policy” of capital, which “consists in the striving of every industrial capitalist nation to bring under its control or to annex ever bigger areas of agrarian territory, irrespective of what nations inhabit them”.3 Secondly, proceeding from this view of imperialism, Kautsky argued that this “special policy” might be superseded after the world war by a new policy, that of “the extension of the policy of the cartels to foreign policy, the phase of ultraimperialism”, i.e., the peaceful uniting of all the rival finance groups into a Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism 9

single, world-wide trust and the “abolition of imperialism through a holy alliance of the imperialists”.4 Lenin sought to counter this argument by demonstrating that imperialism was the highest and last stage of the development of capitalism.

3. To demonstrate that there was a causal connection between this new stage in the development of capitalism and the existence of a relatively stable opportunist, pro-imperialist, trend within the working-class movement of the “advanced” capitalist countries. As Lenin noted at the end of his 1920 preface:

Unless the economic roots of this phenomenon are understood and its political and social significance is appreciated, not a step can be taken toward the solution of the practical problems of the Communist movement and of the impending social revolution.

However, the “economic roots of this phenomenon” and its “political and social significance” were only outlined briefly in the book. They were taken up more thoroughly in the article “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism”, printed here as an appendix. This was published in Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata — the war-time theoretical supplement to Sotsial-Demokrata, central organ of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) — in October 1916, a few months after Lenin had completed writing his book on imperialism. The book itself was written between January and June of 1916, though Lenin started research for it in mid-1915. However, it was not published until the middle of 1917.