21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"...clarifying the world as it is today.", March 10, 2005
This pamphlet by Lenin was first published 90 years ago in the midst of World War I and on the eve of the Russian revolution.
In this work Lenin sets out to achieve two things; first, to give a concise and scientific explanation of the nature of Imperialism and, secondly, to debate the ideas of influential and long time German Social Democratic Party leader Karl Kautsky who, under the pressure of war helped to lead the capitulation of the majority of his party to the side of the German ruling class.
Advocates for social change familiar with arguments on the "left" blaming the cause of the today's ills on various forms of globalisation, - which is meant to represent a more aggressive and rapacious form of imperialism - will find Lenin's polemic against Kautsky invaluable.
Lenin presents a more than convincing case that what we see today is no more than the normal workings of imperialism and therein lays the source of the problem
Taking in Lenin's five principal features of imperialism starting from the first chapters is essential to understanding his discussion with Kautsky near the end of pamphlet. In fact, it goes a long way to clarifying the world as it is today.
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Brief Summary and Contemporary Debate, December 7, 2006
The durability of Lenin's Imperialism no doubt owes as much to the stature of the man as to the accomplishment of the work itself. Lenin drew a distinction between the contemporary (late 18th, early 19th century) imperialism of the European great powers and pre-Capitalist imperialism. "Thus, the beginning of the twentieth century marks the turning point at which the old capitalism gave way to the new, at which the domination of capital in general made way for the domination of finance capital." He argued that monopoly had become the inexorable result of the capitalist system, with the concentration of production into vertically integrated enterprises. Moreover, he argued that the banks had come to play a central role in this new system, "instead of being modest intermediaries they become powerful monopolies having at their command almost the whole of the money capital of all the capitalists...". The financiers and the industrialists had now fused into a complex in which the means of production were socialized but the profits remained private.
This pattern of capitalist development within the state, Lenin argued, was also repeated at the international level. "The supremacy of finance capital over all other forms of capital means the rule of the rentier and of the financial oligarchy; it means the crystallization of a small number of financially "powerful" states from among all the rest." This system was predicated on the export of capital by the great imperialist nations, especially Britain. As financiers in the metropolis sought ever-higher returns, they exported capital across the empire, maintaining peripheral states in subjugation via a system of debenture. Moreover, as the imperialist nations of Western Europe had finally carved up the known world into their respective spheres of interest, the only means by which an imperial power could expand its domain was at the expense of another. Indeed, this is one of the frequently cited explanations for the outbreak of WWI.
What insight does Lenin's work provide for us in the contemporary world? While contemporary Marxists remain enthusiastic about the notion of a periphery of nations held in subjugation by a neo-imperialist center (e.g. Noam Chomsky, (2003), Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance, Metropolitan Books), America's categorical shift from creditor to debtor nation represents an awkward empirical anomaly for this theory. However, one does not have to adopt a socialist perspective to be critical of empire; the liberal critique is well presented in the work of Jennifer Pitts (2005) A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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17 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Still a Clasic, March 20, 2000
This is one of Lenin's major works. He shows how the economical system of capitalism leads to large contradictions between states and war. A clasic still relevant in theese times of "globalisation" (imperialism).
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