Imperialism: The Final Stage of Capitalism

De: Vladimir Lenin

Narrado por: Michael Richards

Vladimir Lenin’s 1916 essay "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism", is a synthesis of Lenin's development of economic theories that Karl Marx formulated in Das Kapital. It attempts to account for the increasing importance of the global market in the 20th century. Lenin contends that colonialism and the First World War were the consequences of the global spread of the capitalist economy.

In the course of colonizing undeveloped countries, the Germans, British, French, and Russian empires would eventually clash over the economic exploitation of large portions of the globe. He argues that, in the capitalist homeland, the profits generated by the exploitation of colonies allow the business class to bribe native politicians, labor leaders, and the labor aristocracy in order to avoid worker revolts.

Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks

An insightful critique of capitalism

A classic and insightful critique of capitalism. The discussion in this book is highly relevant to the challenges we face today.

Enlightening for fans of Lenin's analyses

While not as strong as The State and Revolution in overall style, Lenin gives an enlightening breakdown of the means by which capitalism progresses and consumes as part of its cycle of development. I would list this as a must-read for those interested in theory, but if you're not that mathematically oriented you might glaze over the large amounts of statistical data.

Most compelling about this piece is how relevant it still is to the modern day. Though the labor wars of the early 20th century did dilate the timescales by which many major communist writers predicted socialist revolution would come about, the forces which animate capitalism continue to function up to the present. Namely, the fact by which corporations in their compulsive need for profit will grow, subsume or otherwise merge with each other, and become deeply intertwined with finance over the actual production or distribution of goods as a means of maintaining profit margins. This leads to the imperialist state of things, where corporations must seek out new wells of exploitation to prolong their ultimately unsustainable MOs.

This work actually makes for a good "sequel" of sorts to Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, where Engels outlines the material forces by which capitalism came into the world, and Lenin shows how those forces continue to develop with the compounding effects of time.

Performance of the narrator was good, and the ideas were presented well.

I was disappointed in the ideology. I was expecting a more complicated and well thought out attack on "Imperialism". The ideology is childish.