After reading the book, Lenin accurately describes and analyzes the structures, functions and organization of the economy, polity and society. He believed that the economic base determined the political structures; the economy determined politics and culture. From what I know, imperialism had been thought in two separate classical fields. One is from politics and the other economics, however, a new course has evolved and these two merge into one new discipline i.e. Political-Economy. There were various interpretation from different academics e.g. Sociology, Western and Eastern perspectives. Lenin’s theory captured the world economic, financial and military systems where imperial powers competed to dominate the globe. In this way, peaceful economic competition pursued through political and diplomatic means, which give way to military competition and war. Lenin called this process of economic and military competition between the great powers and the domination of less developed countries resulting from it – Imperialism.
His data and summary proved to him that imperialistic wars are absolutely inevitable under such an economic system, as long as private property is the chief means of production. He even argued that capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of advanced countries. Lenin’s approach to the colonized by the great powers was qualitatively different. Underpinning the definition made by Karl Kautsky on imperialism as a product of highly developed industrial capitalism. It consists in the striving of every industrial capitalist nation to bring under its control or to annex all large territories, irrespective of what nations inhabit it. This new form of imperialism is an ambition of a single growing empire motivated by similar lusts of political aggrandizement, commercial gain and dominance of investments over mercantile interests.
The economic essence of imperialism is simply monopoly capitalism it arose out of the concentration of production at a very high stage, stimulated the seizure of raw materials, has sprung from banks, and grown out of colonial policy. But what would be the last result or stage? According to Lenin, there would be a decaying or declining stage of capitalism. Yet he failed to see economic alliances and the roles of globalization even though he clairvoyantly prophesized globalization that focuses on dominance to understand world politics. This image has been materialized through the formation of World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, and the like. Lenin’s consistent ideological insistence on the eventual decay and decline of capitalism blinded him to the other stages and possibilities that capitalism would develop in a measured duration of time.
A.M.Nassef
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