This book examines the history of empire and its influence on capitalism. Taking inspiration from Vladimir Lenin’s essay Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, the thoughtful chapters explore how workers and resources in Africa, Latin America, and Asia were exploited by capitalist colonizers. Particular attention is given to the empires of Great Britain, Russia, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States. This book aims to trace the historical development of capitalism and its reliance of colonialism, and is relevant to those interested in economics, development studies, international relations, and global politics.

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, 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.

A comprehensive survey of capitalism's colonialist roots and uncertain future Those who control the world’s commanding economic heights, buttressed by the theories of mainstream economists, presume that capitalism is a self-contained and self-generating system. Nothing could be further from the truth. In this pathbreaking book—winner of the Paul A. Baran-Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award—radical political economists Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik argue that the accumulation of capital has always required the taking of land, raw materials, and bodies from noncapitalist modes of production. They begin with a thorough debunking of mainstream economics. Then, looking at the history of capitalism, from the beginnings of colonialism half a millennium ago to today’s neoliberal regimes, they discover that, over the long haul, capitalism, in order to exist, must metastasize itself in the practice of imperialism and the immiseration of countless people. A few hundred years ago, write the Patnaiks, colonialism began to ensure vast, virtually free, markets for new products in burgeoning cities in the West. But even after slavery was generally abolished, millions of people in the Global South still fell prey to the continuing lethal exigencies of the marketplace. Even after the Second World War, when decolonization led to the end of the so-called “Golden Age of Capitalism,” neoliberal economies stepped in to reclaim the Global South, imposing drastic “austerity” measures on working people. But, say the Patnaiks, this neoliberal economy, which lives from bubble to bubble, is doomed to a protracted crisis. In its demise, we are beginning to see—finally—the transcendence of the capitalist system.

Ever since the First World War, socialists have considered imperialism a calamity: responsible for militarism, economic stagnation, and assaults on democracy in the metropolitan countries, an impediment to economic and cultural development in the Third World. So widespread has this view become that it is shared, in its essentials, not only by Marxists but also by an entire school of liberal development economists. Bill Warren breaks with this traditional outlook, arguing that the theory of imperialism, one of Marxism's most influential concepts, is not only contradicted by the facts, but has diluted and distorted Marxism itself. In particular, Warren disputes the claim that "monopoly capitalism" represents the ultimate stage of senile capitalism and sets out to refute the notion that imperialism is a regressive force impeding or distorting economic development in the Third World. The book argues on the contrary that direct colonialism powerfully impelled social change in Asia and Africa, laying the foundation for a vibrant indigenous capitalism. Finally, it takes issue with the conventional view that postwar economic performance in the Third World has been disastrous, presenting a powerful empirical case that the gap between rich and poor countries is actually narrowing. Closely argued, clearly written, original and iconoclastic, Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism is a compelling challenge to one of the chief tenets of contemporary socialist politics.

This book discusses the case for socialism and the models of socialist planning. Through examining different countries, each chapter examines the successes and failures of contrasting socialist policies. The theories and techniques of socialist planning are discussed in relation to the Soviet Union and India, with additional attention given to Great Britain, Scandinavia, and the former Yugoslavia. Imperialism and Capitalism, Volume 2: Normative Perspectives aims to explore the alternatives to capitalism within different sectors and situations. The book is relevant to those interested in economics, development studies, international relations, and global politics.

Winner of the first Paul A. Baran-Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award for an original monograph concerned with the political economy of imperialism, John Smith's Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century is a seminal examination of the relationship between the core capitalist countries and the rest of the world in the age of neoliberal globalization.Deploying a sophisticated Marxist methodology, Smith begins by tracing the production of certain iconic commodities-the T-shirt, the cup of coffee, and the iPhone-and demonstrates how these generate enormous outflows of money from the countries of the Global South to transnational corporations headquartered in the core capitalist nations of the Global North. From there, Smith draws on his empirical findings to powerfully theorize the current shape of imperialism. He argues that the core capitalist countries need no longer rely on military force and colonialism (although these still occur) but increasingly are able to extract profits from workers in the Global South through market mechanisms and, by aggressively favoring places with lower wages, the phenomenon of labor arbitrage. Meticulously researched and forcefully argued, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century is a major contribution to the theorization and critique of global capitalism.

2021 Hardcover Reprint of 1934 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism", by Lenin, describes the function of financial capital in generating profits from imperial colonialism, as the final stage of capitalist development to ensure greater profits. The essay is a synthesis of Lenin's modifications and developments of economic theories that Karl Marx formulated in "Das Kapital". Lenin's book greatly influenced the Core-Periphery model of global capitalist development, as well as World-systems theory and Dependency theory.