Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

No matter how political conditions change and what kind of attitude society has toward the ideas of Marxism and communism, V. I. Lenin has been, is, and will remain one of the most famous political philosophers in history. Lenin in his work paid great attention to the transformation of capitalist society. As early as the beginning of the 1910s, he began collecting materials for a work in which— in an accessible form—he would set out the main economic patterns characteristic of capitalism at that stage of development. First published in Petrograd in April 1917, the book “Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism” became a direct continuation and development of Marx’s “Capital.” Even to this day, Lenin’s work remains one of the key texts for describing the economic and political features of imperialism. His careful study is exceptionally important today for discussing and understanding the most crucial problems facing modern civilization: the degree to which the main Marxist models are adequate in analyzing the development and crisis of capitalism; the nature of the Russian Revolution and the causes of the split in the Russian left movement in 1917; the collapse of official Soviet ideology and the global left movement at the end of the twentieth century; prospects for building a market economy on the territory of the USSR; the doctrine of globalization and its ideological cover.