I agree. I’m still in the baby steps of reading theory but Lenin’s Imperialism rewired my entire brain. Suddenly everything became so clear.

Woah that sounds good

i was going to suggest this but stopped myself because 1. lots of real life shit and 2. i wanted to write a review of both his books but then you said it so i'm gonna put in my two cents in a rambling condensed form in lieu of the review:

i think the majority of arrighi's main two books are useless for most people here; the development of capitalism in a western european context has been a highly complex (not in the difficult to understand sense, but rather in the something with many many moving parts sense) phenomenon spanning several centuries to the present and arrighi for his part attempts to distill (what ends up being mostly) braudel's third book down to what he thinks are the biggest contributors to capitalism as we know it today. the way it comes out is as a long as fuck list of absolutely pedantic shit about groups of white people doing this or that heinous thing over the centuries that is actually incredibly difficult to contextualize even after arrighi kindly arranges it all in sort of chronological and causal order for us. which makes most of the books really hard going and kind of bad for reading club retention numbers.

that being said, there are two segments in L20C that i think are worth going over despite the sad state of our collective attention spans: the introduction, and the fourth part of the third section called 'reprise and preview', which is a sort of breather segment where he (relatively) quickly summarizes the main takeaways from the previous parts. there is also one cool and useful figure in the postscript. added together they constitute approximately ~70 pages of content that provide a compact and comprehensive overview of the main thrust of his thesis, i will summarize what i think have been the most useful personally:

1. capitalism occurs in successive cycles of accumulation
2. said cycles consist of an initial (industrial) MC phase and are forced into CM' (financial) phase due to competitive pressures (TRPF), with turbulent transitional sections (wars)
3. the nature of these cycles of accumulation are cyclical as well, going from expansion to consolidation and back

general criticisms of L20C include:

1. eurocentric
2. teleological and deterministic
3. cherrypicking

to which i respond:

1. of course it is, it is a history of western capitalism
2. periodicity != teleology; patterns, not prophecies
3. motherfucking p values leaking into my shitposts fuck off

lastly, i believe L20C is a good candidate for the reading since it provides much needed context to our current systemic state. marxism is a science after all, and science is nothing without data. as we are dealing with events that have timescales reaching into decades or centuries, i think it is only logical to try and make sense of data that we have at hand, flawed though they may be. many doomers here enjoy reading catastrophe into what is effectively historical noise, resulting in less informed or opinionated comrades either being compelled into dooming themselves, perpetuating the cycle, or, with no other emotional outlet, having a meltdown online. neither of these outcomes are conducive to positive action or mental health (one might even call them unserious) and so it is necessary to arm ourselves with the requisite information to combat doomerism, one of the most comprehensive repositories of which are this book and its sources.

as to why i think it's a better candidate than the other suggestions so far, i think most of them operate at, for lack of better wording, 'tactical' or 'operational' levels that are too limited in scope to induce revolutionary optimism. it is good to understand and enumerate the minute intricacies of how capitalism inflicts upon us daily horrors beyond comprehension, but after a certain point this crosses the line towards navel gazing and, dare i say, intellectual masturbation. in this L20C differentiates itself to some degree because rather than offering us ephemeral glimpses towards a possible future, it instead directs our attention to the failures of hegemons past, showing us that these eldritch terrors bleed like the rest of us.

i wanted to upload the titillating important figures from the book here but i'm on the wrong device so i will upload them later.

edit: as promised, the cool figures. completely meaningless without context, but they are cool:

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Seconding Samir Amin’s work together with Lenin’s Imperialism for a start.

Super Imperialism, like most of Hudson’s work, is difficult, very academic and often requires multiple readings for things to start “clicking”, and going through a few pages per day is a good pace already. The first time I went through Killing the Host, another of Hudson’s excellent book, I understood maybe like 10-15% of it. It took several readings over the years (while interacting with news/events in the real world and applying that knowledge) for it to start making sense.

Having said that, I still consider Super Imperialism to be essential knowledge for serious leftists who want to understand how financial imperialism works at its core, even though I still don’t fully understand all of it.