I think that in Lenin's day, "bribery" was only experienced by skilled workers in certain key industries, it was not something that the great majority of workers were experiencing at that time. Since skilled workers had been at the center of resistance to capital earlier in the Industrial Revolution, it would have made sense to try to bribe these workers to purchase their aquiescence. So that sort of thing would not have bred resistance in those days. Later on (during and after the Second World War), when relative affluence began to be experienced by a majority of workers in the advanced capitalist countries, that in fact did help to encourage them to resist capital, since they were now able to bargain with capitalists from a position of strength. Which is why since the mid-1970s, capital has been so eager to destroy any sense of economic security that workers had enjoyed up to that time.
^^^^ CB: Post WWII,by the Taft-Hartley anti-Communist provisions and Walter Reuther leading the US labor federations CIO and AFL into opportunism, including the purge of the most militant working class partisans from the trade unions. The better living standards for a larger portion of US workers in this period may have encouraged "resistance of capital" to the level of _reforms_,( though I'd say the legal reforms were in anti-white supremacist Civil Rights laws and the War on Poverty, not any advances of the National Labor Relations Act or direct labor interests; Landrum-Griffin was not an advance of labor's interests). By theses many US working class were steered away from _revolutionary_ class struggle, and their higher standard of living is certainly a candidate as contributing to this process ; and booty from US imperialism is a good candidate as some explanation for the higher standard of living. The US capitalists could tolerate domestic higher wages compensated for by superprofits from transnational business, contra Carrol.
The position of strength of the US workers post WWII was significantly based on the existence of the Soviet Union and the expansion of socialist revolutions to a number of countries and socialist oriented national liberation movements around the world. These nations removed large parts of the world the imperialist economy.
With the end of the Soviet Union and opening China to capitalist investment, in some senses the world today is closer to the situation when Lenin wrote _Imperialism_ before the Soviet Union was a significant world power. So, some of Lenin's thesis may be more applicable than it has been since 1920. The whole world is imperialism's oyster again.