Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Zhizn i Znaniye, 1917 — Leftist Audiobooks, 2019

During the 20th Century and onwards, there have been a significant amount of political and historical accounts that have attempted to analyze the ways in which modern nation states have interacted. In cases where the undeniable reality of one state dominating others is present, there tends to be a surface analysis that, although at times useful, lacks the ability to concretize this global form of exploitation and oppression in a concrete political, historical and economic analysis.

Vladimir Lenin, in his ground-breaking work of Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, was one of the first theoreticians to ground the concept of imperialism in the concrete ways in which “free market” capitalism inevitably transformed itself into monopoly capitalism. Relying heavily on statistics provided by capitalist firms and banks, and on critiques of imperialism written by the social-liberal John A. Hobson and the revisionist “Marxist” Rudolf Hilferding, Lenin was able to lay the foundations for what would become a revolutionary communist understanding of capitalist-imperialism.

Additional details: Given the statistical nature of the work and the fact that there are a number of charts and datum included within it, a PDF Companion including these charts has been included in the production of this work. With that said, Lenin also explains everything that is visible in the charts and diagrams he uses; therefore, listeners would still be able to digest the entire work without necessarily having to view the PDF Companion.