Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

Lenin wrote Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism in the first half of 1916, in exile in Zurich, cut off from Russian libraries and short of French and English ones. He called it "a popular outline", and the modesty is exact: it is a compact synthesis built out of the two best studies then available - the English liberal J. A. Hobson's Imperialism and the Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding's Finance Capital - welded to a mass of "irrefutable bourgeois statistics". Its aim was to show, in a hundred pages, that the world war then in its second year was not an accident of diplomacy or a crime of wicked statesmen but the necessary product of a definite stage of capitalism.

One fact about the writing shapes everything that followed, and Lenin puts it in his own preface: the pamphlet "was written with an eye to the tsarist censorship". He was therefore "not only forced to confine myself strictly to an exclusively theoretical, specifically economic analysis" but had to make his political points in what he later called a slavish tongue - Aesopian language, veiled hints a censor would pass. The loud economics and the muted politics are both deliberate.

What it still explains is considerable: the anatomy of monopoly and the fusion of bank and industrial capital into finance capital; the export of capital rather than goods as the distinguishing mark of the new stage; the division of the world among trusts and then among states; and the honest naming of the labour aristocracy's material stake in empire, which is the least comfortable argument in the book and the one its admirers most often skip.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.