Imperialism

Capitalism must expand or die. When the capitalists of a country are driven to reach beyond their own borders — economically and militarily — in the hunt for profit, that is imperialism: the highest and last stage of capitalism.

Lenin’s five features of imperialism

What forces capitalism into imperialism? At a certain stage, production and capital pile up in the hands of a few giant monopolies. Lenin analyzed this stage in “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” written in 1916, and drew out five marks of it that are still on the world today: monopoly grown up out of free competition; the merging of bank and industrial capital into a “finance capital” that dominates economic and political life; the export of capital itself, on top of the old trade in goods, hunting higher profits abroad; the world market divided up among giant international monopolies; and the earth itself parceled out into spheres of plunder among the great powers.

War is built into the system

To survive, the monopolies must pile up ever-greater profits — which means exploiting the working class more intensively, since labor is the source of all value. To guard their investments and markets, the imperialist powers build huge armies and navies, both to hold down the oppressed nations reaching for independence and to make war on rival imperialist powers. The two World Wars were such inter-imperialist bloodlettings, carving whole portions of the world among the powers of Europe, Japan and the United States.

U.S. imperialism took over the world

World War II was the turning point. After six years of slaughter that killed more than 70 million people, the United States emerged as the strongest imperialist power, taking over the former empires of Europe in Asia and Africa. The U.S. — an imperialist power since 1898 — had already brought Latin America under its control by the end of World War I. Today they call it globalization, but it is still imperialism. U.S. military spending now tops $1 trillion a year, and the Pentagon runs some 750 bases in more than 80 countries.

Colonies and neocolonies

A few lands under U.S. rule are outright colonies — Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam. Others are neocolonies: formally independent, but ruled by governments that answer to Washington and the banks. Either way the result is the same. The oppressed nation is kept a one-crop or one-mineral “underdeveloped” economy, its wealth pumped out to fill the vaults of the big U.S. banks — which, standing at the pinnacle of imperialism, keep branch offices from Bangkok to Beirut, from Buenos Aires to Bombay. Mighty as U.S. imperialism looks, it is already past its peak and has begun to decline.

Imperialism is the enemy of all workers

Imperialism is the enemy of all working people — whether they live in the imperialist country or in the country it preys on. But the workers of the imperialist country carry a special obligation: to stand with those fighting to free their nations from super-exploitation and foreign domination.

Additional reading

  • War and Lenin in the 21st Century — by Gary Wilson (2024). The full, current application of Lenin’s five features to the present: the megabanks and finance capital, the export of capital and the shift of surplus-value production to the oppressed nations, the U.S. base network and hybrid war. The deep dive this page only sketches.
  • Imperialism and the Split in Socialism — by V.I. Lenin (1916). The companion to “Imperialism, the Highest Stage”: how the superprofits of empire let the bourgeoisie bribe a “labor aristocracy,” splitting the workers’ movement into revolutionary and opportunist wings.
  • Expanding Empire: The global war drive of big business and the forces that will stop it — by Vincent Copeland (1969). The Workers World co-founder on the war drive of U.S. monopoly capital and the working-class and anti-colonial forces that can halt it.
  • Bolsheviks and War: Lessons for today’s anti-war movement — by Sam Marcy (1985). Marcy draws on the Bolsheviks’ fight against the First World War for the strategy of the modern anti-war movement.
  • Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism — by Kwame Nkrumah (1965). The Ghanaian revolutionary on how formal independence can mask continued economic control by foreign capital — neocolonialism.
  • Liberate the Colonies! Communism and Colonial Freedom 1917–1924 — edited by John Riddell, Vijay Prashad and Nazeef Mollah (LeftWord Books, 2019). Speeches and resolutions from the early Communist International’s fight for colonial freedom, in the revolutionists’ own words.
  • How Europe Underdeveloped Africa — by Walter Rodney (1972). Rodney’s classic account of how European capitalism and the slave trade actively underdeveloped Africa to enrich themselves.
  • The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World — by Vijay Prashad (2007). A history of the Third World as a political project — the hopes, achievements and defeats of the anticolonial and non-aligned movements.