Welcome to the second week of the Imperialism Reading Group! Last week's thread is here.
This is 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 are covering is the foundation, the one and only, Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. We will read two chapters per 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, we will be reading Chapter 3: Finance Capital and the Financial Oligarchy, and Chapter 4: Export of Capital.
Please comment or message me directly if you wish to be pinged for this group.
Thank you so much for the summary. I am listening to this one as an audiobook on my walks and with that my mind sometimes wonders a bit and I lose my focus. The summary really brought home the listening.
On the first two chapters I started thinking about monopolies and cartell like capitalist operators in my own national context. We have a supposedly atypically developed retail and baking/milling industry where a few large owners share the entire playing field amongst themselves. This used to be these few fields, but today it applies to almost all industry here. From chocolate capitalists to the shipping or logging industry.
I have myself lived in a family that tried to compete in this environment as a small business and failed, like almost all do. And I've read this being always framed as some national peculiarity explained by geography etc. that always felt to me like it lacked the real explanation of why it is this way.
These first chapters are shedding new light into this for sure. I can't quite articulate this yet, but this has been on my mind when listening to this.
And where did that bring you? Back to the reading group.
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I'll add more later bc only quick work break:
Couldn't help but thinking
the entire first two chapters. "Compulsory submission to monopolist combines" That was written over 100 years ago and Capital et al have just been playing the hits on repeat since then.
The simultaneous existence of 1) like, ten corporations that own basically everything, and 2) bourgeois economists and politicians still doing the "we love our small businesses, don't we folks, we gotta help 'em out" thing, really shows just how right Lenin is
And how anti-trust law is just saving the capitalists from themselves. A very real example of how bourgeois states act to enforce capitalist hegemony even if on the surface, they appear to be acting against them (with minimum wage laws and safety laws and so on), and thus are tools of capitalist rule, rather than limiters on the capitalists. One of those things that libertarians are unwilling to believe or understand. Without all these "pro-worker" laws (and that's not to say that state-mandated breaks are Bad, Actually or anything) this whole system would have imploded like 50 years ago.
This isn't a smarty pants theoretical point, but your comment about the worshipping of small business owners remind me of an early, somewhat, darkly humorous, memory in my radicalization. On the TV news there was some report about a pretty bad flood in Pennsylvania (or some state), and while they were showing a rescue boat in the waters carrying away what survivors they could find, the TV anchor had to chime in to remind us to "think about all those small businesses, oh gosh main street is just under water, it's gonna take some time to rebuild those businesses!" I don't remember them mentioning anything about the people being saved. Just harping about the flooded ma and pop shops while rescue workers were trying to look for real people to save.
Anyway, once I saw it back then I just never stopped noticing it. Nothing new, it was just memorable the first time my baby leftist brain noticed it.
