V. I. Lenin
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism
PREFACE
The pamphlet here presented to the reader was written in the spring of 1916, in
Zurich. In the conditions in which I was obliged to work there I naturally
suffered somewhat from a shortage of French and English literature and from a
serious dearth of Russian literature. However, I made use of the principal
English work on imperialism, the book by J. A. Hobson, with all the care that,
in my opinion, that work deserves.
This pamphlet was written with an eye to the tsarist censorship. Hence, I was
not only forced to confine myself strictly to an exclusively theoretical,
specifically economic analysis of facts, but to formulate the few necessary
observations on politics with extreme caution, by hints, in an allegorical
language - in that accursed Aesopian language - to which tsarism compelled all
revolutionaries to have recourse whenever they took up the pen to write a
"legal" work.
It is painful, in these days of liberty, to re-read the passages of the pamphlet
which have been distorted, cramped, compressed in an iron vice on account of the
censor. That the period of imperialism is the eve of the socialist revolution;
that social-chauvinism (socialism in words, chauvinism in deeds) is the utter
betrayal of socialism, complete desertion to the side of the bourgeoisie; that
this split in the working-class movement is bound up with the objective
conditions of imperialism, etc. - on these matters I had to speak in a "slavish"
tongue, and I must refer the reader who is interested in the subject to the
articles I wrote abroad in 1914-17, a new edition of which is soon to appear. In
order to show the reader, in a guise acceptable to the censors, how shamelessly
untruthful the capitalists and the social-chauvinists who have deserted to their
side (and whom Kautsky opposes so inconsistently) are on the question of
annexations; in order to show how shamelessly they screen the annexations of
their capitalists, I was forced to quote as an example - Japan! The careful
reader will easily substitute Russia for Japan, and Finland, Poland, Courland,
the Ukraine, Khiva, Bokhara, Estonia or other regions peopled by non-Great
Russians, for Korea.
I trust that this pamphlet will help the reader to understand the fundamental
economic question, that of the economic essence of imperialism, for unless this
is studied, it will be impossible to understand and appraise modern war and
modern politics.
Author
Petrograd, April 26, 1917
PREFACE TO THE FRENCH
AND GERMAN EDITIONS
I
As was indicated in the preface to the Russian edition, this pamphlet was
written in 1916, with an eye to the tsarist censorship. I am unable to revise
the whole text at the present time, nor, perhaps, would this be advisable, since
the main purpose of the book was, and remains, to present, on the basis of the
summarised returns of irrefutable bourgeois statistics, and the admissions of
bourgeois scholars of all countries, a composite picture of the world capitalist
system in its international relationships at the beginning of the twentieth
century - on the eve of the first world imperialist war.
To a certain extent it will even be useful for many Communists in advanced
capitalist countries to convince themselves by the example of this pamphlet,
legal from the standpoint of the tsarist censor, of the possibility, and
necessity, of making use of even the slight remnants of legality which still
remain at the disposal of the Communists, say, in contemporary America or
France, after the recent almost wholesale arrests of Communists, in order to
explain the utter falsity of social-pacifist views and hopes for "world
democracy". The most essential of what should be added to this censored pamphlet
I shall try to present in this preface.
II
It is proved in the pamphlet that the war of 1914-18 was imperialist (that is,
an annexationist, predatory, war of plunder) on the part of both sides; it was a
war for the division of the world, for the partition and repartition of colonies
and spheres of influence of finance capital, etc.
Proof of what was the true social, or rather, the true class character of the
war is naturally to be found, not in the diplomatic history of the war, but in
an analysis of the objective position of the ruling classes in all the
belligerent countries. In order to depict this objective position one must not
take examples or isolated data (in view of the extreme complexity of the
phenomena of social life it is always possible to select any number of examples
or separate data to prove any proposition), but all the data on the basis of
economic life in all the belligerent countries and the whole world.
It is precisely irrefutable summarised data of this kind that I quoted in
describing the partition of the world in 1876 and 1914 (in Chapter VI) and the
division of the world's railways in 1890 and 1913 (in Chapter VII). Railways are
a summation of the basic capitalist industries, coal, iron and steel; a
summation and the most striking index of the development of world trade and
bourgeois-democratic civilisation. How the railways are linked up with
large-scale industry, with monopolies, syndicates, cartels, trusts, banks and
the financial oligarchy is shown in the preceding chapters of the book. The
uneven distribution of the railways, their uneven development - sums up, as it
were, modern monopolist capitalism on a world-wide scale. And this summary
proves that imperialist wars are absolutely inevitable under such an economic
system, as long as private property in the means of production exists.
The building of railways seems to be a simple, natural, democratic, cultural and
civilising enterprise; that is what it is in the opinion of the bourgeois
professors who are paid to depict capitalist slavery in bright colours, and in
the opinion of petty-bourgeois philistines. But as a matter of fact the
capitalist threads, which in thousands of different intercrossings bind these
enterprises with private property in the means of production in general, have
converted this railway construction into an instrument for oppressing a thousand
million people (in the colonies and semicolonies), that is, more than half the
population of the globe that inhabits the dependent countries, as well as the
wage-slaves of capital in the "civilised" countries.
Private property based on the labour of the small proprietor, free competition,
democracy, all the catchwords with which the capitalists and their press deceive
the workers and the peasantsare things of the distant past. Capitalism has grown
into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of
the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of
"advanced" countries. And this "booty" is shared between two or three powerful
world plunderers armed to the teeth (America, Great Britain, japan), who are
drawing the whole world into their war over the division of their booty.
III
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk dictated by monarchist Germany, and the subsequent
much more brutal and despicable Treaty of Versailles dictated by the
"democratic" republics of America and France and also by "free" Britain, have
rendered a most useful service to humanity by exposing both imperialism's hired
coolies of the pen and petty-bourgeois reactionaries who, although they call
themselves pacifists and socialists, sang praises to "Wilsonism", and insisted
that peace and reforms were possible under imperialism.
The tens of millions of dead and maimed left by the war -a war to decide whether
the British or German group of financial plunderers is to receive the most booty
- and those two "peace treaties", are with unprecedented rapidity opening the
eyes of the millions and tens of millions of people who are downtrodden,
oppressed, deceived and duped by the bourgeoisie. Thus, out of the universal
ruin caused by the war a world-wide revolutionary crisis is arising which,
however prolonged and arduous its stages may be, cannot end otherwise than in a
proletarian revolution and in its victory.
The Basle Manifesto of the Second International, which in 1912 gave an appraisal
of the very war that broke out in 1914 and not of war in general (there are
different kinds of wars, including revolutionary wars) - this Manifesto is now a
monument exposing to the full the shameful bankruptcy and treachery of the
heroes of the Second International.
That is why I reproduce this Manifesto (This Manifesto is not given as an
appendix to this edition - Ed) as a supplement to the present edition, and again
and again I urge the reader to note that the heroes of the Second International
are as assiduously avoiding the passages of this Manifesto which speak
precisely, clearly and definitely of the connection between that impending war
and the proletarian revolution, as a thief avoids the scene of his crime.
IV
Special attention has been devoted in this pamphlet to a criticism of
Kautskyism, the international ideological trend represented in ...
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