What do you mean, "Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder", is less than 100 pages?!
What do you mean, "Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder", is less than 100 pages?!
A month ago I embarked on reading "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism," and as of a few days ago I have finished that book!
This has been part of an ongoing quest of mine to read Lenin because his works, as it turns out, are incredibly short compared to the popular works of Marx and Engels. Those boys really laid down some text in ways that can give the impression that all Marxist texts are thick, hefty tomes.
To recap, over the last two months, I have now finished:
The only thing that slowed down my progress on Imperialism was returning from a vacation and a work crunch.
As for Imperialism, much like the other works of Lenin, it is highly digestible and easy to read. The least of which is "What Is To Be Done?" which you can read about in that book thread. Imperialism is a numbers-dense book with tables on tables of data, rooted in the period. It's easy to gloss over these charts and to gloss over the numbers, but it is a truly astonishing pace of colonial expansion that he exposes via these dry statistics.
He illustrates the mechanisms of control by foreign banks through their holdings in domestic banks and how that influence shapes monitary policy. How the reaction to this form of control breeds state-sponsored monopolies, which only continue this process of expropriation, both foreign and domestic. How these monoplies spill out of the national borders to divide and redivide the world under their demands. The primary example that reoccurs is that of the railroad and electrical industries, building infrastructure in developing colonial territories, not to the betterment of the people in those territories but to the betterment of colonial industry.
Through finance capital, the primary exports cease to be commodities and instead become capital itself. The labor of the developing nations is thus exploited at an even greater rate than the labor at home, leading to the development of superprofits and, eventually, a labor aristoracy. A class of "workers-turned-bourgeois" that Lenin describes as:
quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their entire outlook, [...] 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".
You can see this play out even today in labor leaders like the Teamsters Sean O'Brien and his unflinching embrase of the Republicans and their policy, and the UAW's own Shawn Fain, recent darling of the American "Left," praising Trump's tarrif policy, which is now leading to cuts in profit share among his union members.
As Lenin points out, this stage of capitalism isn't just the highest stage of capitalism; it is also decaying capitalism. These relations of fiance capital transform the state into a rentier state, which I feel is highly emblematic of the globalization period of American foreign policy of the 1990s.
Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination instead of the striving for liberty, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by an extremely small group of the richest or most powerful nations – all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism. More and more prominently there emerges, as one of the tendencies of imperialism, the creation of the “bondholding” (rentier) state, the usurer state, in which the bourgeoisie lives on the proceeds of capital exports and by “clipping coupons.”
This unhindered embrace of "free trade" policy has dramatically weakened the state in various ways. As we have seen with America and its free trade period, it led to rapid deindustrialization of the economy and transformed it into a service economy. It became a rentier state over the course of a decade and has suffered the ill effects of being a rentier state every decade since. Through this free trade policy, finance capital not only exploits the labor of underdeveloped countries, it also develops the productive forces of those underdeveloped countries:
It would be a mistake to believe that this tendency to decay precludes the possibility of the rapid growth of capitalism. It does not. In the epoch of imperialism, certain branches of industry, certain strata of the bourgeoisie and certain countries betray, to a more or less degree, one or other of these tendencies. On the whole, capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before. But this growth is not only becoming more and more uneven in general; its unevenness also manifests itself, in particular, in the decay of the countries which are richest in capital (such as England).
As we have seen throughout history, these developments can and do lead to national liberatory struggles on the basis of national self-determination. When this decolonization process begins, the level of control of the state weakens, and desperate attempts to maintain control are employed. These developments can be seen throughout decolonial history, and you can see them happening now in places like Burkina Faso.
Lenin as a writer is always entertaining, even when the subject is as dry as earnings reports, corporate mergers, and infrastructure development. In all his writings, he brings his distinct style and voice, often sarcastic and snarky, full of character, which makes the process of reading so enjoyable. His insights on strategy and his analysis are invaluable, and it is clear why his contributions are held so highly.
If you haven't read Lenin, you should! It's easier than you think.