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's chapter summary is here.

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]
    ·
    13 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!