introduces a classic pamphlet that explains how capitalism was transformed by spreading international conflicts.
Socialist Worker, December 2, 2008 | Issue 686
LENIN WROTE Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1916 in the middle of the carnage of the First World War.
Socialist Worker writers introduce ten of the most important writings by leading thinkers in the revolutionary socialist tradition.
The pamphlet was an intervention in the sharp political debate that had torn apart the international socialist movement at the start of the war, with nearly every socialist party in Europe backing its own government in the conflict.
When war was declared in 1914, socialists in the German parliament voted unanimously to fund it, arguing that they had to defend civilization against the despotism of the Russian Tsar. Meanwhile, French socialists said they had to defend revolutionary France against Prussian militarism, and so on, across the board.
Lenin’s Bolshevik Party in Russia was one of the few socialist organizations that maintained principled opposition to its own government. Lenin argued that the war was an imperialist conflict in which all sides were trying to grab more territory and extend their power and influence–or at the very least hang on to territories to which they had no right in the first place.
Lenin’s main goal in Imperialism was to show how the colonial expansion and imperialist rivalry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were rooted in profound changes in the nature of capitalism during the same period. That’s why he called imperialism at the beginning of the 20th century a stage of capitalism.
- Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto
- Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
- Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
- Karl Marx, The Civil War in France
- Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike
- Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution
- Vladimir Lenin, State and Revolution
- Vladimir Lenin, What Is to Be Done
- Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
- Leon Trotsky, Permanent Revolution
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LENIN DID not claim that there was no imperialism before the late 19th century. As he explicitly noted, “Colonial policy and imperialism existed before the latest stage of capitalism, and even before capitalism. Rome, founded on slavery, pursued a colonial policy and practiced imperialism.” But, Lenin added:
“general” arguments about imperialism, which ignore, or put into the background the fundamental difference of social-economic systems, inevitably degenerate into absolutely empty banalities, or into grandiloquent comparisons like “Greater Rome and Greater Britain.”
Even the colonial policy of capitalism in its previous stages is essentially different from the colonial policy of finance capital.
What Lenin was attempting to explain was the extremely virulent form of imperialism that began to emerge in the late 19th century, resulting in the scramble for Africa from the 1880s, and the increasing tensions between the major powers that eventually led to world war.
In calling it a stage of capitalism, Lenin was saying that the new imperialism was fundamentally an economic phenomenon.
According to Lenin, an adequate definition of modern imperialism needs to embrace “five essential features”:
1) The concentration of production and capital developed to such a high stage that it created monopolies, which play a decisive role in economic life.
2) The merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital,” of a “financial oligarchy.”
3) The export of capital, which has become extremely important, as distinguished from the export of commodities.
4) The formation of international capitalist monopolies, which share the world among themselves.
5) The territorial division of the whole world among the greatest capitalist powers is completed.
Lenin’s list has to be treated with a little care, since in retrospect some of the features are more fundamental than others. For example, the integration of industrial and banking capital was certainly an important aspect of German capitalism in the early 20th century, but far less developed in countries such as Britain.
Nor was it true that all the major capitalist powers had become net exporters of capital–more investment was still flowing into the U.S. and Japan, when Lenin was writing, for example, than was going out.
But Lenin himself was clear that the most important feature of imperialism was the first one that he listed. “If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism,” he wrote, “we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.”
Lenin’s argument was that the rivalries and wars between capitalist powers were inherent in one of capitalism’s basic features: the tendency for capital to become more centralized and concentrated–in other words, for the dominant capitalist firms to acquire monopoly or near monopoly status in particular sectors of their national economy.
Lenin wrote Imperialism, which he described as a “popular outline,” after reading–and writing an introduction to–Nikolai Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Economy, and it is clear that he had Bukharin’s account of the underlying dynamic of imperialism in mind while writing his own pamphlet.
According to Bukharin, imperialism is the result of two conflicting tendencies in modern capitalism.
Competition tends to give rise to the concentration and centralization of capital, and as this process develops, the state comes to play an increasingly active role in managing the economy. Bukharin argued that there is, in fact, a tendency for capital and the state to merge together on the national level to form what he called “state capitalist trusts.”
But at the same time, there is a tendency for production, trade and investment to break out of national boundaries and to become organized on a global scale.
Bukharin argued that as a consequence of these two contradictory processes, economic competition between capitals increasingly tends to take on the form of geopolitical competition. In other words, economic competition comes to be expressed in terms of political and military rivalries between states for territory, influence and power.
In a candid private comment, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson confirmed the Lenin-Bukharin analysis:
Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down.
Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.
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ONE OF Lenin’s main targets was the German Marxist Karl Kautsky, who argued that because the world economy was becoming internationally integrated, war had become irrational from the point of view of the capitalist class.
According to Kautsky, “the World War between the great imperialist powers may result in a federation of the strongest, who renounce their arms race.” Kautsky called this anticipated phase “ultra-imperialism,” and he saw the formation of the League of Nations at the end of the war as part of the shift to ultra-imperialism and a more peaceful world order.
But the League of Nations–which Lenin called a “thieves’ kitchen”–was never able to paper over the sharp differences between the major imperialist powers. Within a generation, the world was engulfed an even more barbaric war, and Kautsky’s vision of a relatively peaceful capitalism was revealed to be an illusion.
By contrast, Lenin’s theory does a remarkably good job of explaining the development of capitalism in the first half of the 20th century, and why the major capitalist powers plunged the globe into two catastrophic and barbaric world wars.
After the Second World War, the structure of global politics changed dramatically. Before the war, the world was economically and politically multi-polar. After the war, it remained economically multi-polar, but became politically bipolar–with the formation of two rival global military alliances, one dominated by the U.S., the other by the USSR.
Wars continued on the periphery, and the superpowers engaged in a massive arms race, but there was no war between the major powers, because the threat of nuclear escalation made them more cautious.
But with the collapse of the Soviet bloc at the end of the 1980s, the structure of the global system changed again. The U.S. emerged as the world’s only superpower, increasingly prepared to use its massive military superiority to maintain its position of global dominance and to prevent the emergence of serious rivals anywhere in the world.
But in the wake of the Bush administration’s disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq, intelligence analysts are now concerned that U.S. hegemony is in decline.
A report from the U.S. National Intelligence Council last month warns that the U.S. faces growing economic competition from rising powers such as China, India and Brazil, and that the next 20 years will be “fraught with risks,” including heightened potential for conflict over scarce resources in a more multi-polar world.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the international capitalist system is increasingly operating in accordance with the logic of imperialist rivalry that Lenin first described nearly a hundred years ago.
Peace and Justice Post 
Leon Trotsky: Lenin on Imperialism
February 25, 2009By Leon Trotsky, February 1939
From the 1942 introduction by the Editors of Fourth International
The 18th anniversary of Lenin’s death (he died January 21, 1924) find our planet engulfed in the second World War.
In the midst of the first world slaughter Lenin had predicted this second slaughter. Still more, he predicted that so long as imperialism survived world conflicts would unfailingly follow. Should imperialism also survive this present war, there will come a third, and a fourth …
By means of the same scientific method which enabled him to predict the course of events under the continued rule of imperiaism, Lenin arrived at a realistic program of struggle – the only progam which offers society a way out from its impasse.
Lenin reached his maturity in the period of the First World War. His analysis of the imperialist wars and the conclusions he drew from this analysis are among the greatest triumphs of Marxism. It was the Leninist program against imperialism that paved the way for the victory of the Russian masses in October 1917. And this victory in its turn resulted in the termination of the first imperialist world war.
No program other than Lenin’s offers today salvation to mankind.
We can think of nothing more appropriate for 1942 than the publication of Trotsky’s brilliant summary of the Leninist conclusions from the war 1914-1918. The document was written by Leon Trotsky early in 1939. This is the first time it appears in English. – The Editors (Fourth International)
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“It has always been the case in history,” Lenin wrote in 1916, “that after the death of revolutionary leaders popular among the oppressed classes, their enemies try to assume their names in order to deceive the oppressed classes.” With no one has history performed this operation so cruelly as with Lenin himself. The present official doctrine of the Kremlin and the policies of the Comintern on the question of imperialism and war ride roughshod over all the conclusions that Lenin came to and brought the party to from 1914 through 1918.
With the outbreak of the war in August 1914 the first question which arose was this: Should the socialists of imperialist countries assume the “defense of the fatherland”? The issue was not whether or not individual socialists should fulfill the obligations of soldiers – there was no other alternative; desertion is not a revolutionary policy. The issue was: Should socialist parties support the war politically? vote for the war budget? renounce the struggle against the government and agitate for the “defense of the fatherland”? Lenins answer was: No! the party must not do so, it has no right to do so, not because war is involved but because this is a reactionary war, because this is a dogfight between the slave owners for the redivision of the world.
The formation of national states on the European continent occupied an entire epoch which began approximately with the Great French Revolution and concluded with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. During these dramatic decades the wars were predominantly of a national character. War waged for the creation or defense of national states necessary for the development of productive forces and of culture possessed during this period a profoundly progressive historical character. Revolutionists not only could but were obliged to support national wars politically.
From 1871 to 1914 European capitalism, on the foundation of national states, not only flowered but outlived itself by becoming transformed into monopoly or imperialist capitalism. “Imperialism is that stage of capitalism when the latter, after fulfilling everything in its power, begins to decline.” The cause for decline lies in this, that the productive forces are fettered by the framework of private property as well as by the boundaries of the national state. Imperialism seeks to divide and redivide the world. In place of national wars there come imperialist wars. They are utterly reactionary in character and are an expression of the impasse, stagnation, and decay of monopoly capital.
The Reactionary Nature of Imperialism
The world, however, still remains very heterogeneous. The coercive imperialism of advanced nations is able to exist only because backward nations, oppressed nationalities, colonial and semicolonial countries, remain on our planet. The struggle of the oppressed peoples for national unification and national independence is doubly progressive because, on the one side, this prepares more favorable conditions for their own development, while, on the other side, this deals blows to imperialism. That, in particular, is the reason why, in the struggle between a civilized, imperialist, democratic republic and a backward, barbaric monarchy in a colonial country, the socialists are completely on the side of the oppressed country notwithstanding its monarchy and against the oppressor country notwithstanding its “democracy.”
Imperialism camouflages its own peculiar aims – seizure of colonies, markets, sources of raw material, spheres of influence – with such ideas as “safeguarding peace against the aggressors,” “defense of the fatherland,” “defense of democracy,” etc. These ideas are false through and through. It is the duty of every socialist not to support them but, on the contrary, to unmask them before the people. “The question of which group delivered the first military blow or first declare war,” wrote Lenin in March 1915, “has no importance whatever in determining the tactics of socialists. Phrases about the defense of the fatherland, repelling invasion by the enemy, conducting a defensive war, etc., are on both sides a complete deception of the people.” “For decades,” explained Lenin, “three bandits (the bourgeoisie and governments of England, Russia, and France) armed themselves to despoil Germany. Is it surprising that the two bandits (Germany and Austria-Hungary) launched an attack before the three bandits succeeded in obtaining the new knives they had ordered?”
The objective historical meaning of the war is of decisive importance for the proletariat: What class is conducting it? and for the sake of what? This is decisive, and not the subterfuges of diplomacy by means of which the enemy can always be successfully portrayed to the people as an aggressor. Just as false are the references by imperialists to the slogans of democracy and culture. “… The German bourgeoisie … deceives the working class and the toiling masses by vowing that the war is being waged for the sake of … freedom and culture, for the sake of freeing the peoples oppressed by czarism. The English and French bourgeoisies … deceive the working class and the toiling masses by vowing that they are waging war … against German militarism and despotism.” A political superstructure of one kind or another cannot change the reactionary economic foundation of imperialism. On the contrary, it is the foundation that subordinates the superstructure to itself. “In our day … it is silly even to think of a progressive bourgeoisie, a progressive bourgeois movement. All bourgeois democracy … has become reactionary.” This appraisal of imperialist “democracy” constitutes the cornerstone of the entire Leninist conception.
Since war is waged by both imperialist camps not for the defense of the fatherland or democracy but for the redivision of the world and colonial enslavement, a socialist has no right to prefer one bandit camp to another. Absolutely in vain is any attempt to “determine, from the standpoint of the international proletariat, whether the defeat of one of the two warring groups of nations would be a lesser evil for socialism.” In the very first days of September 1914, Lenin was already characterizing the content of the war for each of the imperialist countries and for all the groupings as follows: “The struggle for markets and for plundering foreign lands, the eagerness to head off the revolutionary movement of the proletariat and to crush democracy within each country, the urge to deceive, divide, and crush the proletarians of all countries, to incite the wage slaves of one nation against the wage slaves of another nation for the profits of the bourgeoisie – that is the only real content and meaning of the war.” How far removed is all this from the current doctrine of Stalin, Dimitrov, and Co.!
It is impossible to fight against imperialist war by sighing for peace after the fashion of the pacifists. “One of the ways of fooling the working class is pacifism and the abstract propaganda of peace. Under capitalism, especially in its imperialist stage, wars are inevitable.” A peace concluded by imperialists would only be a breathing spell before a new war. Only a revolutionary mass struggle against war and against imperialism which breeds war can secure a real peace. “Without a number of revolutions the so-called democratic peace is a middle-class utopia.”
The struggle against the narcotic and debilitating illusions of pacifism enters as the most important element into Lenin’s doctrine. He rejected with especial hostility the demand for “disarmament as obviously utopian under capitalism.”
The Roots of Social-Chauvinism
Most of the labor parties in the advanced capitalist countries turned out on the side of their respective bourgeoisies during the war. Lenin named this tendency as social chauvinism: socialism in words, chauvinism in deeds. The betrayal of internationalism did not fall from the skies but came as an inevitable continuation and development of the policies of reformist adaptation. “The ideological-political content of opportunism and of social chauvinism is one and the same: class collaboration instead of class struggle, support of ones own government when it is in difficulties instead of utilizing these difficulties for the revolution.”
The period of capitalist prosperity immediately prior to the last war – from 1909 to 1913 – tied the upper layers of the proletariat very closely with imperialism. From the superprofits obtained by the imperialist bourgeoisie from colonies and from backward countries in general, juicy crumbs fell to the lot of the labor aristocracy and the labor bureaucracy. In consequence, their patriotism was dictated by direct self-interest in the policies of imperialism. During the war, which laid bare all social relations, “the opportunists and chauvinists were invested with a gigantic power because of their alliance with the bourgeoisie, with the government and with the general staffs.”
The intermediate and perhaps the widest tendency in socialism is the so-called center (Kautsky et al.) who vacillated in peace time between reformism and Marxism and who, while continuing to cover themselves with broad pacifist phrases, became almost without exception the captives of social chauvinists. So far as the masses were concerned they were caught completely off guard and duped by their own apparatus, which had been created by them in the course of decades. After giving a sociological and political appraisal of the labor bureaucracy of the Second International, Lenin did not halt midway. “Unity with opportunists is the alliance of workers with their own national bourgeoisie and signifies a split in the ranks of the international revolutionary working class.” Hence flows the conclusion that internationalists must break with the social chauvinists. “It is impossible to fulfill the tasks of socialism at the present time, it is impossible to achieve a genuine international fusion of workers without decisively breaking with opportunism …” as well as with centrism, “this bourgeois tendency in socialism.” The very name of the party must be changed. “Isn’t it better to cast aside the name of Social Democrats, which has been smeared and degraded, and to return to the old Marxist name of Communists?” It is time to break with the Second International and to build the Third.
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What has changed in the twenty-odd years that have since elapsed? Imperialism has assumed an even more violent and oppressive character. Its most consistent expression is fascism. Imperialist democracies have fallen several rungs lower and are themselves evolving into fascism naturally and organically. Colonial oppression becomes all the more intolerable the sharper is the awakening and eagerness of oppressed nationalities for national independence. In other words, all those traits which were lodged in the foundation of Lenin’s theory of imperialist war have now assumed a far sharper and more graphic character.
To be sure, communo-chauvinists refer to the existence of the USSR, which supposedly introduces a complete overturn into the politics of the international proletariat. To this one, can make the following brief reply: before the USSR arose, there existed oppressed nations, colonies, etc., whose struggle also merited support. If revolutionary and progressive movements beyond the boundaries of ones own country could be supported by supporting ones own imperialist bourgeoisie then the policy of social patriotism was in principle correct. There was no reason, then, for the founding of the Third International. This is one side of the case, but there is also another. The USSR has now been in existence for twenty-two years. For seventeen years the principles of Lenin remained in force. Communo-chauvinist policies took shape only four-five years ago. The argument from the existence of the USSR is therefore only a false cover.
If a quarter of a century ago Lenin branded as social chauvinism and as social treachery the desertion of socialists to the side of their nationalist imperialism under the pretext of defending culture and democracy, then from the standpoint of Lenin’s principles the very same policy today is all the more criminal. It is not difficult to guess how Lenin would have designated the present-day leaders of the Comintern who have revived all the sophistries of the Second International under the conditions of an even more profound decomposition of capitalist civilization.
There is a pernicious paradox in this, that the wretched epigones of the Comintern, who have turned its banner into a dirty rag with which to wipe away the tracks of the Kremlin oligarchy, call those “renegades” who have remained true to the teachings of the founder of the Communist International. Lenin was right: The ruling classes not only persecute great revolutionists during their lifetime but revenge themselves upon them after they are dead by measures even more refined, trying to turn them into icons whose mission is to preserve “law and order.” No one is, of course, under compulsion to take his stand on the ground of Lenin’s teachings. But we, his disciples, will permit no one to make mockery of these teachings and to transform them into their very opposite!
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Tags:aims of imperialism, imperialist wars, Leon Trotsky, national states, V.I. Lenin
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