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V. I. Lenin:
Imperialism, the
Highest Stage of Capitalism
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Preface
The pamphlet here presented to the reader was written in
the spring of 1916, in Zurich. In the conditions in which I
was obliged to work there I naturally suffered somewhat from a
shortage of French and English literature and from a serious
dearth of Russian literature. However, I made use of the
principal English work on imperialism, the book by J. A.
Hobson, with all the care that, in my opinion, that work
deserves.
This pamphlet was written with an eye to the tsarist
censorship. Hence, I was not only forced to confine myself
strictly to an exclusively theoretical, specifically economic
analysis of facts, but to formulate the few necessary
observations on politics with extreme caution, by hints, in an
allegorical language - in that accursed Aesopian language - to
which tsarism compelled all revolutionaries to have recourse
whenever they took up the pen to write a “legal” work.
It is painful, in these days of liberty, to re-read the
passages of the pamphlet which have been distorted, cramped,
compressed in an iron vice on account of the censor. That the
period of imperialism is the eve of the socialist revolution;
that social-chauvinism (socialism in words, chauvinism in
deeds) is the utter betrayal of socialism, complete desertion
to the side of the bourgeoisie; that this split in the
working-class movement is bound up with the objective
conditions of imperialism, etc. - on these matters I had to
speak in a “slavish” tongue, and I must refer the reader who
is interested in the subject to the articles I wrote abroad in
1914-17, a new edition of which is soon to appear. In order to
show the reader, in a guise acceptable to the
censors, how
shamelessly untruthful the capitalists and the
social-chauvinists who have deserted to their side (and whom
Kautsky opposes so inconsistently) are on the question of
annexations; in order to show how shamelessly they screen
the annexations of their capitalists, I was forced to
quote as an example - Japan! The careful reader will easily
substitute Russia for Japan, and Finland, Poland, Courland,
the Ukraine, Khiva, Bokhara, Estonia or other regions peopled
by non-Great Russians, for Korea.
I trust that this pamphlet will help the reader to
understand the fundamental economic question, that of the
economic essence of imperialism, for unless this is studied,
it will be impossible to understand and appraise modern war
and modern politics.
Author
Petrograd, April 26, 1917
Preface to the French and German
Editions
I
As was indicated in the preface to the Russian edition,
this pamphlet was written in 1916, with an eye to the tsarist
censorship. I am unable to revise the whole text at the
present time, nor, perhaps, would this be advisable, since the
main purpose of the book was, and remains, to present, on the
basis of the summarised returns of irrefutable bourgeois
statistics, and the admissions of bourgeois scholars of all
countries, a composite picture of the world
capitalist system in its international relationships at the
beginning of the twentieth century - on the eve of the first
world imperialist war.
To a certain extent it will even be useful for many
Communists in advanced capitalist countries to convince
themselves by the example of this pamphlet, legal from the
standpoint of the tsarist censor, of the possibility, and
necessity, of making use of even the slight remnants of
legality which still remain at the disposal of the Communists,
say, in contemporary America or France, after the recent
almost wholesale arrests of Communists, in order to explain
the utter falsity of social-pacifist views and hopes for
“world democracy”. The most essential of what should be added
to this censored pamphlet I shall try to present in this
preface.
II
It is proved in the pamphlet that the war of 1914-18 was
imperialist (that is, an annexationist, predatory, war of
plunder) on the part of both sides; it was a war for the
division of
the world, for the partition and repartition of colonies and
spheres of influence of finance capital, etc.
Proof of what was the true social, or rather, the true
class character of the war is naturally to be found, not in
the diplomatic history of the war, but in an analysis of the
objective position of the ruling classes in
all the belligerent countries. In order to depict
this objective position one must not take examples or isolated
data (in view of the extreme complexity of the phenomena of
social life it is always possible to select any number of
examples or separate data to prove any proposition), but
all the data on the basis of economic life in
all the belligerent countries and the whole world.
It is precisely irrefutable summarised data of this kind
that I quoted in describing the partition of the world
in 1876 and 1914 (in Chapter VI) and the division of the
world’s railways in 1890 and 1913 (in Chapter VII).
Railways are a summation of the basic capitalist industries,
coal, iron and steel; a summation and the most striking index
of the development of world trade and bourgeois-democratic
civilisation. How the railways are linked up with large-scale
industry, with monopolies, syndicates, cartels, trusts, banks
and the financial oligarchy is shown in the preceding chapters
of the book. The uneven distribution of the railways, their
uneven development - sums up, as it were, modern monopolist
capitalism on a world-wide scale. And this summary proves that
imperialist wars are absolutely inevitable under such
an economic system, as long as private property in
the means of production exists.
The building of railways seems to be a simple, natural,
democratic, cultural and civilising enterprise; that is what
it is in the opinion of the bourgeois professors who are paid
to depict capitalist slavery in bright colours, and in the
opinion of petty-bourgeois philistines. But as a matter of
fact the capitalist threads, which in thousands of different
intercrossings bind these enterprises with private property in
the means of production in general, have converted this
railway construction into an instrument for oppressing a
thousand million people (in the colonies and semicolonies),
that is, more than half the population of the globe that
inhabits the dependent countries, as well as the wage-slaves
of capital in the “civilised” countries.
Private property based on the labour of the small
proprietor, free competition, democracy, all the catchwords
with which the capitalists and their press deceive the workers
and the peasants are things of the distant past. Capitalism
has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of
the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of
the population of the world by a handful of “advanced”
countries. And this “booty” is shared between two or three
powerful world plunderers armed to the teeth (America, Great
Britain, Japan), who are drawing the whole world into
their war over the division of their booty.
III
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk dictated by monarchist
Germany, and the subsequent much more brutal and despicable
Treaty of Versailles dictated by the “democratic” republics of
America and France and also by “free” Britain, have rendered a
most useful service to humanity by exposing both imperialism’s
hired coolies of the pen and petty-bourgeois reactionaries who,
although they call themselves pacifists and socialists, sang
praises to “Wilsonism”, and insisted that peace and reforms
were possible under imperialism.
The tens of millions of dead and maimed left by the war -
a war to decide whether the British or German group of
financial plunderers is to receive the most booty - and those
two “peace treaties”, are with unprecedented rapidity opening
the eyes of the millions and tens of millions of people who
are downtrodden, oppressed, deceived and duped by the
bourgeoisie. Thus, out of the universal ruin caused by the war
a world-wide revolutionary crisis is arising which, however
prolonged and arduous its stages may be, cannot end otherwise
than in a proletarian revolution and in its victory.
The Basle Manifesto of the Second International, which in
1912 gave an appraisal of the very war that broke out in 1914
and not of war in general (there are different kinds of wars,
including revolutionary wars) - this Manifesto is now a
monument exposing to the full the shameful bankruptcy and
treachery of the heroes of the Second International.
That is why I reproduce this Manifesto as a supplement to
the present edition, and again and again I urge the reader
to note that
the heroes of the Second International are as assiduously
avoiding the passages of this Manifesto which speak precisely,
clearly and definitely of the connection between that
impending war and the proletarian revolution, as a thief
avoids the scene of his crime.
IV
Special attention has been devoted in this pamphlet to a
criticism of Kautskyism, the international ideological trend
represented in all countries of the world by the “most
prominent theoreticians”, the leaders of the Second
International (Otto Bauer and Co. in Austria, Ramsay MacDonald
and others in Britain, Albert Thomas in France, etc., etc.)
and a multitude of socialists, reformists, pacifists,
bourgeois democrats and parsons.
This ideological trend is, on the one hand, a product of
the disintegration and decay of the Second International, and,
on the other hand, the inevitable fruit of the ideology of the
petty bourgeoisie, whose entire way of life holds them captive
to bourgeois and democratic prejudices.
The views held by Kautsky and his like are a complete
renunciation of those same revolutionary principles of Marxism
that writer has championed for decades, especially, by the
way, in his struggle against socialist opportunism (of
Bernstein, Millerand, Hyndman, Gompers, etc.). It is not a
mere accident, therefore, that Kautsky’s followers all over
the world have now united in practical politics with the
extreme opportunists (through the Second, or Yellow
International) and with the bourgeois governments (through
bourgeois coalition governments in which socialists take part).
The growing world proletarian revolutionary movement in
general, and the communist movement in particular, cannot
dispense with an analysis and exposure of the theoretical
errors of Kautskyism. The more so since pacifism and
“democracy” in general, which lay no claim to Marxism whatever,
but which, like Kautsky and Co., are obscuring the profundity
of the contradictions of imperialism and the inevitable
revolutionary crisis to which it gives rise, are
still very
widespread all over the world. To combat these tendencies is
the bounden duty of the party of the proletariat, which must
win away from the bourgeoisie the small proprietors who are
duped by them, and the millions of working people who enjoy
more or less petty-bourgeois conditions of life.
V
A few words must be said about Chapter VIII, “Parasitism
and Decay of Capitalism”. As already pointed out in the text,
Hilferding, ex-“Marxist”, and now a comrade-in-arms of Kautsky
and one of the chief exponents of bourgeois, reformist policy
in the Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany, has
taken a step backward on this question compared with the
frankly pacifist and reformist Englishman, Hobson. The
international split of the entire working-class movement is
now quite evident (the Second and the Third Internationals).
The fact that armed struggle and civil war is now raging
between the two trends is also evident - the support given to
Kolchak and Denikin in Russia by the Mensheviks and
Socialist-Revolutionaries against the Bolsheviks; the fight
the Scheidemanns and Noskes have conducted in conjunction with
the bourgeoisie against the Spartacists in Germany; the same
thing in Finland, Poland, Hungary, etc. What is the economic
basis of this world-historical phenomenon?
It is precisely the parasitism and decay of capitalism,
characteristic of its highest historical stage of development,
i.e., imperialism. As this pamphlet shows, capitalism has now
singled out a handful (less than one-tenth of the
inhabitants of the globe; less than one-fifth at a most
“generous” and liberal calculation) of exceptionally rich and
powerful states which plunder the whole world simply by
“clipping coupons”. Capital exports yield an income of eight
to ten thousand million francs per annum, at pre-war prices
and according to pre-war bourgeois statistics. Now, of course,
they yield much more.
Obviously, out of such enormous superprofits (since
they are obtained over and above the profits which capitalists
squeeze out of the workers of their “own” country) it is
possible
to bribe the labour leaders and the upper stratum of the
labour aristocracy. And that is just what the capitalists of
the “advanced” countries are doing: they are bribing them in a
thousand different ways, direct and indirect, overt and covert.
This stratum of workers-turned-bourgeois, or the labour
aristocracy, who are quite philistine in their mode of life,
in the size of their earnings and in their entire outlook, is
the principal prop of the Second International, and in our
days, the principal social (not military) prop of
the bourgeoisie. For they are the real agents of the
bourgeoisie in the working-class movement, the labour
lieutenants of the capitalist class, real vehicles of
reformism and chauvinism. In the civil war between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie they inevitably, and in no
small numbers. take the side of the bourgeoisie, the
“Versaillese” against the “Communards”.
Unless the economic roots of this phenomenon are
understood and its political and social significance is
appreciated, not a step can be taken toward the solution of
the practical problem of the communist movement and of the
impending social revolution.
Imperialism is the eve of the social revolution of the
proletariat. This has been confirmed since 1917 on a
world-wide scale.
N. Lenin
July 6, 1920
During the last fifteen to twenty years, especially since
the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Anglo-Boer War
(1899-1902), the economic and also the political literature of
the two hemispheres has more and more often adopted the term
“imperialism” in order to describe the present era. In 1902, a
book by the English economist J. A. Hobson, Imperialism,
was published in London and New York. This author, whose
point of view is that of bourgeois social-reformism and
pacifism which, in essence, is identical with the present
point of view of the ex-Marxist, Karl Kautsky, gives a very
good and comprehensive description of the principal specific
economic and political features of imperialism. In 1910, there
appeared in Vienna the work of the Austrian Marxist, Rudolf
Hilferding, Finance Capital (Russian edition, Moscow,
1912). In spite of the mistake the author makes on the theory
of money, and in spite of a certain inclination on his part to
reconcile Marxism with opportunism, this work gives a very
valuable theoretical analysis of “the latest phase of
capitalist development”, as the subtitle runs. Indeed, what
has been said of imperialism during the last few years,
especially in an enormous number of magazine and newspaper
articles, and also in the resolutions, for example, of the
Chemnitz and Basle congresses which took place in the autumn
of 1912, has scarcely gone beyond the ideas expounded, or more
exactly, summed up by the two writers mentioned above...
Later on, I shall try to show briefly, and as simply as
possible, the connection and relationships between the
principal economic features of imperialism. I shall not
be able to deal with the non-economic aspects of the question,
however much
they deserve to be dealt with. References to literature and
other notes which, perhaps, would not interest all readers,
are to be found at the end of this pamphlet.
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