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ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, in exile in Zurich during the spring of 1916, Lenin started writing one of his most important and influential works, his pamphlet on imperialism. What is the relevance of this work today?
I will argue that, although the nature of imperialism has not changed, its structures, functions, and other specifications are very different from the imperialism of Lenin's time. Confronting this invisible and omnipresent goliath is far more complicated than challenging the colonial imperialism of the previous century. Lenin's imperialism pamphlet is a valuable historical document that, as he himself wrote in the introduction, was a composite picture of the world capitalist system at the beginning of the twentieth century. But it cannot be a blueprint for current-day anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist activists.
The first edition of Lenin's pamphlet was published in April 1917 in Petrograd, after the February Revolution, under the title Imperialism, the Latest Stage of Capitalism (A Popular Framework). In 1920, the term "latest stage" was replaced by the "highest stage" in the German and French editions, which reflected Lenin's more decisive view of the perceived forthcoming end of capitalism.
As Lenin noted, in writing this pamphlet he was influenced by John A. Hobson, an English liberal economist, and Rudolf Hilferding, a prominent Marxist theoretician. Most of the main concepts and ideas were based on the works of these two men, as well as on Nicolai Bukharin's Imperialism and the World Economy, for which Lenin had written an introduction. The title was also inspired by the subtitle of Hilferding's Finance Capital: Study ing the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development. Hobson had argued that as monopolies expand, their share of profit and savings grows, leading to over-saving and under-consumption and to the need for capital export, foreign investment, and imperialist expansion. Hilferding had argued that the period of monopoly capitalism was characterized by the fusion of industrial and bank capital into what he called "finance capital," which greatly enhanced the power of the banks and monopolies. Bukharin had expanded the theory to the global level and had theorized the internationalization of capitalist production. In that period also, Rosa Luxemburg had written The Accumulation of Capital, focusing on, among other things, the question of the realization of surplus value and the...