Something I want to be on the lookout for when reading Imperialism are arguments against the claim that Lenin wrote only about horizontal conflict between great powers (inter-imperialism) and not about exploitation of dominated nations by great powers.

An MR article I recently read and highly suggest, The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left, discusses how there is a trend amongst Western Leftists (who deny imperialism) to abuse and misquote Lenin’s work to reduce imperialism to horizontal great power conflict, and minimize vertical core-periphery exploitation. They then use this to justify that China and Russia are one big imperialist bloc locked into rivalry with NATO.

Hence, it is commonly argued today by the Eurocentric left that Lenin did not focus on issues of inequality between colonizing and colonized countries or between center and periphery. Rather, we are told that he saw his work as mainly concerned with horizontal conflict between the great capitalist powers… Here, China and Russia are portrayed as constituting a single bloc (though representing very different political-economic systems), engaged in an imperialist rivalry with the triad of the United States, Europe, and Japan.

I got this vibe (from what I remember) when watching Prolekult’s mini-doc on the Ukraine War, where they seem to reduce the conflict to inter-imperialist rivalry between Russia and the US, which doesn’t sit with me. And unfortunately I know too many leftists who seem to only be able to analyze the world-situation in this lens of equal-footing, horizontal great power rivalry. As if 1914 is just copy-pasted onto today.

Is there a specific copy that will be being used? I'm not aware if there are different translations or what people generally recommend and want to make sure I'm following along with the majority.

EDIT: I grabbed the 2010 Penguin published epub since it was easily accessible and I need an epub for my ereader.

Biden has named some old US Technology that recendent crawled out of the middle east, humiliated the USS George W. Bush .

Edit: its a quote from the book.

The thing I don't like about the Tiktok ban is that Tiktok in particular has been GREAT for a particular community I'm in, for a specific hobby. Its algorithm is really good at favoring relatively unknown content creators, helping my community grow. Google, Meta, et al, however, are just like "fuck you, we only want people to see the big guys".

Very excited for the notes and insights the comrades here will share. Always very edifying

Please ping me! I might not actually read along, I did a re-read not too long ago, but I wanna read everyone’s comments

Ping me, please! Down for a reread of Imperialism, and Super Imperialism has been on my radar.

I'll pin and unpin your posts when you ping, if you'd like.

I guess I'll offer some metatexual/paratexual (?) commentary:

From the prefaces:

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.

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.

Far from some holy text, Lenin himself felt the final work was compromised due to having to write the work in such a way that it would sneak past Tsarist censors. We ought to read the work with a much more critical eye because there's the literal text and there's what Lenin is really trying to say between the lines that the Tsarist censors won't catch. This also shows how so many people engage in book-worship. Yes, this text is absolutely foundational in understanding imperialism, but it does no good to put this text on a pedestal when even the author himself admits that he can't read it without cringing slightly at certain parts. This is why the prefaces along with the companion piece "Imperialism and the Split in Socialism" are also important to read as well.

I'll go over some of the banking institutions Lenin mentioned:

In France, three very big banks, Crédit Lyonnais, the Comptoir National and the Société Générale extended their operations and their network of branches in the following manner.

Those three French banks more or less existed until 1966 when Comptoir National merged with another bank to form Banque Nationale de Paris. Crédit Lyonnais, BNP, and Société Générale then existed until 2000 when BNP merged with another bank to form BNP Paribas. Around 2002, Crédit Lyonnais almost got absorbed by BNP Paribas but in the end got taken over by another French bank called Crédit Agricole, which Wikipedia calls "the second largest bank in France, after BNP Paribas, as well as the third largest in Europe and tenth largest in the world."

We have just mentioned the 300 million marks capital of the Disconto-Gesellschaft of Berlin. This increase of the capital of the bank was one of the incidents in the struggle for hegemony between two of the biggest Berlin banks-the Deutsche Bank and the Disconto. In 1870, the first was still a novice and had a capital of only 15 million marks, while the second had a capital of 30 million marks. In 1908, the first had a capital of 200 million, while the second had 170 million. In 1914, the first increased its capital to 250 million and the second, by merging with another first-class big bank, the Schaaffhausenscher Bankverein, increased its capital to 300 million. And, of course, this struggle for hegemony went hand in hand with the more and more frequent conclusion of “agreements” of an increasingly durable character between the two banks. The following are the conclusions that this development forces upon banking specialists who regard economic questions from a standpoint which does not in the least exceed the bounds of the most moderate and cautious bourgeois reformism

The final conclusion of the increasingly durable character was met when Deutsches Bank merged with Disconto-Gesellschaft to form Deutsche Bank und Disconto-Gesellschaft in 1929. They changed their name back to Deutsche Bank in 1937, presumably because calling yourself "German Bank" plays well in Nazi Germany, which they aggressively collaborated with, including taking over Austria's largest bank after the Anschluss.

And now that I think about it, it's somewhat curious that Lenin would focus more on German banks when the center of capital during the late 19th/early 20th century wasn't in Berlin, but London (or I guess Washington DC if you're one of those people who argues that the center of capital had already moved to the US by the early 20th century). To really understand how 19th century finance capital operates, why would you focus on German banks instead of British banks? Could it be that because Russia was allied with the UK during WWI against Germany, those Tsarist censors were more tolerant of someone shitting on Russia's enemies instead of Russia's allies?

Since I'm almost done with capital, ping me!

I hope you've all got your reading in this week! There's still some time left if you haven't, depending on your time zone. And like, you can also just read it any time you want. I'm not your teacher.

Lenin has a clear style and is quite easy to understand, so the first two chapters shouldn't have been too challenging, aside from a section here or there.

I'll be posting my summaries in the reply to this comment, for use by current and future readers of this thread. It's obviously no supplement for reading the real thing, and I've largely skipped his (very justified) attacks of bourgeois economists; my summaries basically take what Lenin says and assumes they're true without mentioning the facts and figures Lenin quotes (except when they really help to clarify what he means).

(excuse the random uses of "has" or "had"; I might say an enterprise back in Lenin's day "has" a certain amount of money or power as if they still do, when they clearly don't. but hopefully you know what I mean)

Ping, will be fun to re-read some works and read new ones

Ping please and thank you

Ping please and thank you

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First! Can ye ping me?

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Ping me, I need to do some reading

I'll take a ping please

Ping Gracias might be overcommitted as I just started a third in-person reading group but hell if I join enough eventually they have to start overlapping right?

ping pls

Ping

Finished the first two chapters and am in the process of writing notes.

I'd like to ask for others' comments on a section in the middle of the second chapter. Maybe some context or further explanation.

This is where Lenin mentions the decline of the Stock Exchange (citing a review from Die Bank) as an expression in the decline of free competition and the rise of monopoly:

The review, Die Bank, writes: "The Stock Exchange has long ceased to be the indispensable medium of circulation that it formally was..."

In the same way, Reiser, a still more authoritative economist and himself a banker, makes shift with meaningless phrases in order to explain away undeniable facts: "... the Stock Exchange is steadily losing the feature which is absolutely essential for national economy as a whole and for the circulation of securities in particular - that of being not only a most exact measuring-rod, but also an almost automatic regulator of the economic movements which converge on it"

In other words, the old capitalism, the capitalism of free competition with its indispensable regulator, the Stock Exchange, is passing away. A new capitalism has come to take its place, bearing obvious features of something transient, a mixture of free competition and monopoly.

Now we still have a Stock Exchange, but is this more of a comment that the stock exchange we have today is less of a way for capital to reallocate and regulate investments in industry, and today it is almost like a Ponzi scheme (maybe that's too simplistic) or just a place for people to dump money into without serving as the role of "regulator"? And any actual regulation is done by larger financial institutions rather than individual capitalist investing in different stocks? Thanks for any clarifications!

Ping me please. Thanks everyone for the community and for setting this up!

Ping

Just finished the first 2 chapters. For reference, this is a reread. The biggest thing I want to point out is that this text is abundantly clear, and does a fantastic job laying out the real nature of the problems of modern society in a way that needs to be read by all, and those who deny its existence or dismiss Lenin entirely inevitably end up following in the footsteps of the "bribed proletarians" Lenin references in the preface, and support Western Imperialism. This fundamental fact is the real nature of the struggle for organizing in western countries.

Ping please 72

Just some interesting things to note

Chapter 1

“Combination,” writes Hilferding, “levels out the fluctuations of trade and therefore assures to the combined enterprises a more stable rate of profit. (Note - Profit Stability)

Secondly, combination has the effect of eliminating trade. (Decoupling from potential competitors?)

Thirdly, it has the effect of rendering possible technical improvements, and, consequently, the acquisition of superprofits over and above those obtained by the ‘pure’ (i.e,, non-combined) enterprises. (Technical Improvement for super profit?)

Fourthly, it strengthens the position of the combined enterprises relative to the ‘pure’ enterprises, strengthens them in the competitive struggle in periods of serious depression, when the fall in prices of raw materials does not keep pace with the fall in prices of manufactured goods.”[3] (Relative security, compared to pure enterprises in times of crises)

the civilised struggle for “organisation”:

(1) stopping supplies of raw materials … –

(2) stopping the supply of labour by means of “alliances” (i.e., of agreements between the capitalists and the trade unions by which the latter permit their members to work only in cartelised enterprises);

(3) stopping deliveries; (4) closing trade outlets;

(5) agreements with the buyers, by which the latter undertake to trade only with the cartels;

(6) systematic price cutting (to ruin “outside” firms, i.e., those which refuse to submit to the monopolists. Millions are spent in order to sell goods for a certain time below their cost price; there were instances when the price of petrol was thus reduced from 40 to 22 marks, i.e., almost by half!);

(7) stopping credits; (8) boycott.

Chapter 2

The big enterprises, and the banks in particular, not only completely absorb the small ones, but also “annex” them, subordinate them, bring them into their “own” group or “concern” (to use the technical term) by acquiring “holdings” in their capital, by purchasing or exchanging shares, by a system of credits, etc., etc.

It is obvious that a bank which stands at the head of such a group, and which enters into agreement with half a dozen other banks only slightly smaller than itself for the purpose of conducting exceptionally big and profitable financial operations like floating state loans, has already outgrown the part of “middleman” and has become an association of a handful of monopolists.

The “decentralisation” that SchuIze-Gaevernitz, as an exponent of present-day bourgeois political economy, speaks of in the passage previously quoted, really means the subordination to a single centre of an increasing number of formerly relatively “independent,” or rather, strictly local economic units. In reality it is centralisation, the enhancement of the role, importance and power of monopolist giants.

Yeah I'm down for a ping.

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I already read Imperialism but I'd be down to review it so I can read the Hudson book. Ping me up Scotty.

Ping!

I wish to be pinged for this group

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