Over the next week or so we will be taking a close look at Lenin's
"Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism"
(http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/index.htm),
but I would like to start off with this introductory article to put
the work into context. There has been a unfortunate tendency to view
Lenin's writings as etched in granite, when that is exactly the wrong
approach. This tendency obviously is rooted in his deification in the
USSR, with the mausoleum, the ritual invocation of his texts and all
the other behavior suggestive of organized religion than a
revolutionary movement.
Even among Marxists, who have never had any sympathies for
Kremlin-style sanctification, there is still a tendency to
misunderstand Lenin's goal in writing something like "Imperialism".
Since so much of the analysis in the book no longer seems to apply to
our contemporary world, especially monopoly capitalism leading
inexorably to world war, some have concluded that it is of limited value.
But if you understand that Lenin was simply dealing with conjunctural
issues, then it makes a lot more sense. Lenin never wrote for the
ages. He was always writing for a particular time and a particular
place. "Imperialism" was prompted by the outbreak of WWI. He was
trying to explain why the imperialist system of his day led to that
war. He was also trying to debunk Kautsky's theory of
"ultra-imperialism" that viewed the development of cartels as
reducing the tendency toward war. But Lenin never had the intention
of writing some kind of handbook that would be a guide to
understanding future wars.
And, most importantly, he was not trying to explain the relationship
between "core" countries like Great Britain and "peripheral"
countries like India or China. In the debates over the Brenner thesis
that began to take place in the 1970s and continue until this day,
you hear repeated complaints about Lenin's irrelevance. Those
complaints can only emerge by misunderstanding what Lenin was trying
to do. This is obviously a function of Marxist academics projecting
onto Lenin their own scholastic habits of thought. The average
Marxist academic is always thinking in terms of permanent
contributions to the literature, while Lenin never thought that much
beyond the immediate tasks facing the revolutionary movement.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/06/22/lenins-imperialism-in-context/
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