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.

  • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
    3·
    16 days ago

    It’s genuinely incredible just how applicable all of this stuff is to the present day. The exact mechanisms might have changed (as Super Imperialism will soon demonstrate) but this is all the same stuff as was going on a hundred years ago, and all the same political arguments about how we ought to improve things (make every worker a shareholder in a corporation? divide up the monopolies, somehow, in government systems that are dominated by those very monopolies?).

    Of course, this isn’t to say that conditions haven’t developed or anything. I think we can all see that the current capitalist system is gradually disintegrating as the whole world has been enveloped in monopolies and there are fewer places for capital to run for profit as China and friends improve conditions in exploited nations (hopefully faster than the US and NATO can destroy them in bombing campaigns).