From: Thomas Seay <entheogens at yahoo.com>
And what was this great understanding of imperialism that Lenin gave us? Everything he said in this regard was borrowed from Hilferding, Bukharin and even Hobson. I dont think Lenin himself would deny that. "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism" is subtitled "A Popular Outline". So we must as regards Imperialism consider Lenin a "popularizer" and not a developer of a new theory of imperialism. Lenin was important, for better or worse, as a political revolutionary, but not as a theoretician of imperialism. Give credit where credit is due: to Hilferding and Bukharin. No?
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CB: Good show , Thomas . Yes, lets take a look at this. I'm not one whose into the importance of who first thought of it, but lets give credit, as you say. Also, Lenin does quite a little polemcizing with these guys, so it would be a little odd if his theory just reduced to some combination of them. I mean he says Hilferding makes a mistake in his theory of money, which might be pretty important if you are writing about finance.
Anyway, for starters, the following:
Intro : Imperialism , the Highest Stage of Capitalism by V.I. Lenin
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.
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CB: I'd say the special contributions of Lenin are especially concentrated in the following chapters: VII. Imperialism as a Special Stage of Capitalism VIII. Parasitism and the Decay of Capitalism IX. Critique of Imperialism X. The Place of Imperialism in History
(Part II to follow)