Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The core–periphery model of global capitalist exploitation, developed by Lenin in the early 20th century, exerted much intellectual influence upon world-systems theory. World-systems theory was developed by the social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein and emphasises world systems of international labour, that divide the world into core countries, semi-periphery countries, and periphery countries. The core–periphery model also influenced dependency theory, which proposes that natural resources flow from a periphery of poor and underdeveloped countries to a core of wealthy and developed countries, enriching the latter at the expense of the former, because of how the poor countries are integrated to the global economy." --Sholem Stein |
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Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) by Vladimir Lenin is a classic Marxist theoretical treatise about the relationship between capitalism and imperialism, wherein the merging of banks and industrial cartels produces finance capital. In the final, imperialist stage of capitalism, in order to generate greater profits than the home market can offer, business exports capital, leading to the division of the world among international monopolies and European states colonising large parts of the world to generate profits. Imperialism is thus an advanced stage of capitalism relying on monopolies and on the export of capital, not goods, and of which colonialism is one feature (Bowles 2007).
As a result of the super-profits generated by colonial exploitation, business can bribe labour leaders and the upper stratum of the labour aristocracy to thwart the risk of worker revolt in the capitalist homeland; thus, the new proletariat are the exploited workers in the Third World colonies. In the preface to the French and German editions (1920) of Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin indicates that the revolt against the capitalist global system will be effected with the "thousand million people" of the colonies and semi-colonies, the system’s weak links, rather than in the advanced Western societies. (V.I. Lenin 2000: 37-8). He prophesied that from those countries — and from under-developed Russia, where he seized the initiative in the October Revolution — that revolution would spread to the advanced capitalist states (Read 2005: 116-26).
Lenin derived much of his analysis from the German Karl Kautsky, from the English economist John A. Hobson's Imperialism: A Study (1902), and from the Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding's Finance Capital (Das Finanzkapital, Vienna: 1910), but applied it to the new circumstances of the First World War (1914–18) between the German and British empires — which exemplified imperial capitalist competition. He viewed Russia as a subsidiary, socially retarded ally of the latter capitalist countries. In the post war edition, Lenin indicated the punitive treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Versailles as proving the economic motivation of the War, as he proposed in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Read 2005: 116-26).
