Welcome to the first week of the Imperialism Reading Group!

This will be a weekly thread in which we read through books on and related to imperialism and geopolitics. How many chapters or pages we will cover per week will vary based on the density and difficulty of the book, but I’m generally aiming at 30 to 40 pages per week, which should take you about an hour or two.

The first book we will be covering is the foundation, the one and only, Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. We will read two chapters per week starting from this week, meaning that we will finish reading in mid-to-late February. Unless a better suggestion is made, we will then cover Michael Hudson’s Super Imperialism, and continue with various books from there.

Every week, I will write a summary of the chapter(s) read, for those who have already read the book and don’t wish to reread, can’t follow along for various reasons, or for those joining later who want to dive right in to the next book without needing to pick this one up too.

This week, we will be reading Chapter 1: Concentration of Production and Monopolies, and Chapter 2: Banks and their New Role.

Please comment or message me directly if you wish to be pinged for this group.

  • Sebrof [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    4 hours ago

    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.