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
    1·
    8 hours ago

    Finished the first two chapters and am in the process of writing notes.

    I’d like to ask for others’ comments on a section in the middle of the second chapter. Maybe some context or further explanation.

    This is where Lenin mentions the decline of the Stock Exchange (citing a review from Die Bank) as an expression in the decline of free competition and the rise of monopoly:

    The review, Die Bank, writes: "The Stock Exchange has long ceased to be the indispensable medium of circulation that it formally was…"

    In the same way, Reiser, a still more authoritative economist and himself a banker, makes shift with meaningless phrases in order to explain away undeniable facts: “… the Stock Exchange is steadily losing the feature which is absolutely essential for national economy as a whole and for the circulation of securities in particular - that of being not only a most exact measuring-rod, but also an almost automatic regulator of the economic movements which converge on it”

    In other words, the old capitalism, the capitalism of free competition with its indispensable regulator, the Stock Exchange, is passing away. A new capitalism has come to take its place, bearing obvious features of something transient, a mixture of free competition and monopoly.

    Now we still have a Stock Exchange, but is this more of a comment that the stock exchange we have today is less of a way for capital to reallocate and regulate investments in industry, and today it is almost like a Ponzi scheme (maybe that’s too simplistic) or just a place for people to dump money into without serving as the role of “regulator”? And any actual regulation is done by larger financial institutions rather than individual capitalist investing in different stocks? Thanks for any clarifications!

  • Cowbee [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netMEnglish
    2·
    16 hours ago

    Just finished the first 2 chapters. For reference, this is a reread. The biggest thing I want to point out is that this text is abundantly clear, and does a fantastic job laying out the real nature of the problems of modern society in a way that needs to be read by all, and those who deny its existence or dismiss Lenin entirely inevitably end up following in the footsteps of the “bribed proletarians” Lenin references in the preface, and support Western Imperialism. This fundamental fact is the real nature of the struggle for organizing in western countries.

  • Sebrof [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    5·
    3 days 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.

  • CthulhusIntern [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    5 days ago

    The thing I don’t like about the Tiktok ban is that Tiktok in particular has been GREAT for a particular community I’m in, for a specific hobby. Its algorithm is really good at favoring relatively unknown content creators, helping my community grow. Google, Meta, et al, however, are just like “fuck you, we only want people to see the big guys”.