Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

A POPULAR OUTLINE

PREFACE TO THE FRENCH AND GERMAN
EDITIONS [1]

I

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.

To a certain extent it will even be useful for many Communists
in advanced capitalist countries to convince themselves by the
example of this pamphlet, legal from the standpoint of the
tsarist censor, of the possibility, and necessity, of making use
of even the slight remnants of legality which still remain at
the disposal of the Communists, say, in contemporary America or
France, after the recent almost wholesale arrests of Communists,
in order to explain the utter falsity of social-pacifist views
and hopes for “world democracy”. The most essential of what
should be added to this censored pamphlet I shall try to present
in this preface.

II

It is proved in the pamphlet that the war of 1914-18 was
imperialist (that is, an annexationist, predatory war of
plunder) on the part of both sides; it was a war for the division of the world, for the partition and repartition of
colonies and spheres of influence of finance capital, etc.

Proof of what was the true social, or rather, the true class
character of the war is naturally to be found, not in the
diplomatic history of the war, but in an analysis of the
objective position of the ruling classes in all the belligerent countries. In order to depict this
objective position one must not take examples or isolated data
(in view of the extreme complexity of the phenomena of social
life it is always possible to select any number of examples or
separate data to prove any proposition), but all the data on the basis of economic life in all the
belligerent countries and the whole world.

It is precisely irrefutable summarised data of this kind that I
quoted in describing the partition of the world in 1876
and 1914 (in Chapter VI) and the division of the world’s
railways in 1890 and 1913 (in Chapter VII). Railways are a summation of the basic capitalist industries, coal, iron
and steel; a summation and the most striking index of the
development of world trade and bourgeois-democratic civilisation. How the railways are linked up with large-scale
industry, with monopolies, syndicates, cartels, trusts, banks
and the financial oligarchy is shown in the preceding chapters
of the book. The uneven distribution of the railways, their
uneven development—sums up, as it were, modern monopolist
capitalism on a world-wide scale. And this summary proves that
imperialist wars are absolutely inevitable under such an economic system, as long as private property in the
means of production exists.

The building of railways seems to be a simple, natural,
democratic, cultural and civilising enterprise; that is what it
is in the opinion of the bourgeois professors who are paid to
depict capitalist slavery in bright colours, and in the opinion
of petty-bourgeois philistines. But as a matter of fact the
capitalist threads, which in thousands of different intercrossings bind these enterprises with private property in
the means of production in general, have converted this railway
construction into an instrument for oppressing a thousand million people (in the colonies and semicolonies), that is,
more than half the population of the globe that inhabits the
dependent countries, as well as the wage-slaves of capital in
the “civilised” countries.

Private property based on the labour of the small proprietor,
free competition, democracy, all the catchwords with which the
capitalists and their press deceive the workers and the
peasants are things of the distant past. Capitalism has grown
into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial
strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of
the world by a handful of “advanced” countries. And this “booty”
is shared between two or three powerful world plunderers armed
to the teeth (America, Great Britain, Japan), who are drawing
the whole world into their war over the division of their booty.

III

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk dictated by monarchist Germany, and
the subsequent much more brutal and despicable Treaty of
Versailles dictated by the “democratic” republics of America and
France and also by “free” Britain, have rendered a most useful
service to humanity by exposing both imperialism’s hired coolies
of the pen and petty-bourgeois reactionaries who, although they
call themselves pacifists and socialists, sang praises to
“Wilsonism,” and insisted that peace and reforms were possible
under imperialism.

The tens of millions of dead and maimed left by the war—a
war to decide whether the British or German group of financial
plunderers is to receive the most booty—and those two “peace treaties,” are with unprecedented rapidity opening the
eyes of the millions and tens of millions of people who are
downtrodden, oppressed, deceived and duped by the bourgeoisie. Thus, out of the universal ruin caused by the war a
world-wide revolutionary crisis is arising which, however
prolonged and arduous its stages may be, cannot end otherwise
than in a proletarian revolution and in its victory.

The Basle Manifesto of the Second International, which in 1912
gave an appraisal of the very war that broke out in 1914 and not
of war in general (there are different kinds of wars, including
revolutionary wars)—this Manifesto is now a monument exposing to the full the shameful bankruptcy and treachery of
the heroes of the Second International.

That is why I reproduce this Manifesto (This Manifesto is not given as an appendix to this edition—Ed) as a supplement to the present
edition, and again and again I urge the reader to note that
the heroes of the Second International are as assiduously
avoiding the passages of this Manifesto which speak precisely,
clearly and definitely of the connection between that impending war and the proletarian revolution, as a thief
avoids the scene of his crime.

IV

Special attention has been devoted in this pamphlet to a
criticism of Kautskyism, the international ideological trend
represented in all countries of the world by the “most prominent
theoreticians,” the leaders of the Second International (Otto
Bauer and Co. in Austria, Ramsay MacDonald and others in
Britain, Albert Thomas in France, etc., etc.) and a multitude of
socialists, reformists, pacifists, bourgeois democrats and
parsons.

This ideological trend is, on the one hand, a product of the
disintegration and decay of the Second International, and, on
the other hand, the inevitable fruit of the ideology of the
petty bourgeoisie, whose entire way of life holds them captive
to bourgeois and democratic prejudices.

The views held by Kautsky and his like are a complete renunciation of those same revolutionary principles of Marxism
that writer has championed for decades, especially, by the way,
in his struggle against socialist opportunism (of Bernstein,
Millerand, Hyndman, Gompers, etc.). It is not a mere accident,
therefore, that Kautsky’s followers all over the world have now
united in practical politics with the extreme opportunists
(through the Second, or Yellow International) and with the
bourgeois governments (through bourgeois coalition governments
in which socialists take part).

The growing world proletarian revolutionary movement in
general, and the communist movement in particular, cannot
dispense with an analysis and exposure of the theoretical errors
of Kautskyism. The more so since pacifism and “democracy” in
general, which lay no claim to Marxism whatever, but which, like
Kautsky and Co., are obscuring the profundity of the contradictions of imperialism and the inevitable revolutionary
crisis to which it gives rise, are still very widespread all
over the world. To combat these tendencies is the bounden duty
of the party of the proletariat, which must win away from the
bourgeoisie the small proprietors who are duped by them, and the
millions of working people who enjoy more or less petty-bourgeois conditions of life.

V

A few words must be said about Chapter VIII, “Parasitism and
Decay of Capitalism.” As already pointed out in the text,
Hilferding, ex-“Marxist,” and now a comrade-in-arms of Kautsky
and one of the chief exponents of bourgeois, reformist policy in
the Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany , [2] has taken a
step backward on this question compared with the frankly pacifist and reformist Englishman, Hobson. The
international split of the entire working-class movement is now
quite evident (the Second and the Third Internationals). The
fact that armed struggle and civil war is now raging between the
two trends is also evident—the support given to Kolchak
and Denikin in Russia by the Mensheviks and
Socialist-Revolutionaries against the Bolsheviks; the fight the
Scheidemanns and Noskes have conducted in conjunction with the
bourgeoisie against the Spartacists [3] in Germany; the same thing in Finland, Poland,
Hungary, etc. What is the economic basis of this world-historical phenomenon?

It is precisely the parasitism and decay of capitalism,
characteristic of its highest historical stage of development,
i.e., imperialism. As this pamphlet shows, capitalism has now
singled out a handful (less than one-tenth of the inhabitants of the globe; less than one-fifth at a most
“generous” and liberal calculation) of exceptionally rich and
powerful states which plunder the whole world simply by
“clipping coupons.” Capital exports yield an income of eight to
ten thousand million francs per annum, at pre-war prices and
according to pre-war bourgeois statistics. Now, of course, they
yield much more.

Obviously, out of such enormous superprofits (since they are obtained over and above the profits which capitalists
squeeze out of the workers of their “own” country) it is possible to bribe the labour leaders and the upper
stratum of the labour aristocracy. And that is just what the
capitalists of the “advanced” countries are doing: they are
bribing them in a thousand different ways, direct and indirect,
overt and covert.

This stratum of workers-turned-bourgeois, or the labour
aristocracy, who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in
the size of their earnings and in their entire outlook, is the
principal prop of the Second International, and in our days, the
principal social (not military) prop of the bourgeoisie . For they are the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement, the labour
lieutenants of the capitalist class, real vehicles of reformism
and chauvinism. In the civil war between the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie they inevitably, and in no small numbers, take the
side of the bourgeoisie, the “Versaillese” against the “Communards.”

Unless the economic roots of this phenomenon are understood and
its political and social significance is appreciated, not a step
can be taken toward the solution of the practical problem of the
communist movement and of the impending social revolution.

Imperialism is the eve of the social revolution of the proletariat. This has been confirmed since 1917 on a world-wide
scale.

N. Lenin

July 6, 1920

During the last fifteen to twenty years, especially since the
Spanish-American War (1898) and the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902),
the economic and also the political literature of the two
hemispheres has more and more often adopted the term “imperialism”
in order to describe the present era. In 1902, a book by the
English economist J. A. Hobson, Imperialism, was published in London and New York. This author, whose point of view
is that of bourgeois social-reformism and pacifism which, in
essence, is identical with the present point of view of the
ex-Marxist, Karl Kautsky, gives a very good and comprehensive
description of the principal specific economic and political
features of imperialism. In 1910, there appeared in Vienna the
work of the Austrian Marxist, Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital (Russian edition, Moscow, 1912). In spite of the
mistake the author makes on the theory of money, and in spite of a
certain inclination on his part to reconcile Marxism with
opportunism, this work gives a very valuable theoretical analysis
of “the latest phase of capitalist development,” as the subtitle
runs. Indeed, what has been said of imperialism during the last
few years, especially in an enormous number of magazine and
newspaper articles, and also in the resolutions, for example, of
the Chemnitz and Basle congresses which took place in the autumn
of 1912, has scarcely gone beyond the ideas expounded, or more
exactly, summed up by the two writers mentioned above...

Later on, I shall try to show briefly, and as simply as
possible, the connection and relationships between the principal economic features of imperialism. I shall not
be able to deal with the non-economic aspects of the question, however much they deserve to be dealt with. References to
literature and other notes which, perhaps, would not interest all
readers, are to be found at the end of this pamphlet. [4]

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Notes:
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