Lenin, in
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), argued that capitalism necessarily induced
monopoly capitalism - which he also called "imperialism" - in order to find new business and resources, representing the last and highest stage of capitalism.
[3] One year later, Lenin went on to become the ruler of a renamed and re-invigorated Russian Empire. This theory of necessary expansion of
capitalism outside the boundaries of
nation-states - one of the foundations of
Leninism as a whole - was also shared by
Rosa Luxemburg (in
The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperialism[4]) and then by liberal philosopher
Hannah Arendt.
[5] Since then, however, Lenin's theory has been extended by Marxist scholars to be a synonym of
capitalistic international trade and
banking.
[6]
While
Karl Marx never published a theory of imperialism, he referred to
colonialism in
Das Kapital as an aspect of the prehistory of the
capitalist mode of production. In various articles he also analyzed British colonial rule in Ireland and India. Lenin defined imperialism as "the highest stage of capitalism" (the subtitle of his outline), the era in which monopoly finance capital becomes dominant, forcing nations and corporations to compete themselves increasingly for control over resources and markets all over the world.
Marxist theories of imperialism, or related theories such as
dependency theory, focus on the
economic relations between countries (and within countries, as outlined below), rather than the more formal
political and/or military relationships. Imperialism thus consists not necessarily in the direct control of one country by another, but in the economic
exploitation of one region by another, or of a group by another. This Marxist usage contrasts with a popular conception of 'imperialism', as
directly controlled vast
colonial or
neocolonail empires.
-Cited Wikipedia
