Theoretical

How do we understand and analyze this? What concepts and frameworks help us see what is happening?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

The core question this lens builds toward is what imperialism actually is: a policy that could be changed, a stage of capitalism, or the very shape of the world system. The traditions here give different answers. Lenin sees a stage of monopoly capital; the dependency and world-systems theorists see one integrated economy that produces wealth and poverty together; contemporary writers trace the same logic through global value chains. This scales up the value theory from the capitalism theme to the world market.

Anchor questions

What is imperialism? Is it a policy, a stage of capitalism, or the shape of the whole system?
Why does wealth flow from the poor world to the rich one, decade after decade?
What is the difference between colonialism and neocolonialism? Did empire ever really end?
Are poor countries “behind,” or were they made poor by the same process that made others rich?
Can a country develop by joining the world market, or only by breaking from it?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. Lenin is the anchor; the “Lenin in Five Minutes” video and the Then & Now explainer are the best on-ramps before the reading.

Classical theories of imperialism

V.I. Lenin (1870 to 1924), Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). The pivotal Marxist account of monopoly, finance capital, and the division of the world among great powers. Short, polemical, and the anchor for this lens. Free: marxists.org
J.A. Hobson (1858 to 1940), Imperialism: A Study (1902). The liberal analysis of underconsumption and financial interests driving empire that Lenin drew on and criticized. Reading the two together shows what Lenin added. Free: marxists.org
Rosa Luxemburg (1871 to 1919), The Accumulation of Capital (1913). Argues that capitalism must constantly expand into non-capitalist areas to survive, making colonial conquest structural rather than incidental. Free: marxists.org
Kwame Nkrumah (1909 to 1972), Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965). Names the mechanism by which formally independent states remain economically controlled from outside, written by a sitting head of state. The hinge between the classical and contemporary analyses. Free: marxists.org

Dependency and world-systems

Andre Gunder Frank (1929 to 2005), The Development of Underdevelopment (1966), in Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution (1969). The essay that launched dependency theory: underdevelopment is not a starting condition that some countries have not yet grown out of, but something actively produced, by the same process and at the same time as development elsewhere. It is the opening essay of this book, so read it and stop if you like. Free to borrow: archive.org. The canonical Monthly Review printing is durable but costs three dollars: monthlyreviewarchives.org
Theotonio dos Santos (1936 to 2018), The Structure of Dependence (1970). Six pages, and the tightest statement of the theory in this lens: dependence is a conditioning situation in which some economies can expand only as a reflection of the expansion of others, and it comes in colonial, financial-industrial, and technological-industrial forms. Free: digamo.free.fr (this host is HTTP only, and the essay is also on JSTOR behind a paywall)
Immanuel Wallerstein (1930 to 2019), World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (2004). The clearest short entry to core, periphery, and semi-periphery as one integrated capitalist world-economy. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: dukeupress.edu
Samir Amin (1931 to 2018), Imperialism and Unequal Development (1976). Develops unequal development and the case for “delinking” peripheral economies from the world market, a position the liberatory lens takes up. Free to borrow: archive.org
Arghiri Emmanuel (1911 to 2001), Unequal Exchange (1972). The controversial argument that international wage differences transfer value from poor countries to rich ones through ordinary trade. Debated hard, and worth the debate. Free to borrow: archive.org

The drain, from India

Dadabhai Naoroji (1825 to 1917), Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901). The original drain theory, and the ancestor of everything in the section above: Naoroji put numbers to what Britain was taking out of India and tried to shame the empire with its own liberal principles. Dependency theory arrived at his conclusion half a century later, with a different vocabulary. Free: archive.org
Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism (2016). Imperialism is not a stage capitalism passes through but a standing requirement: the system needs the tropical periphery’s commodities, and must hold its wages down to get them without setting off inflation at home. The volume prints David Harvey’s critique and their reply, so the disagreement is inside the book. Paywalled: cup.columbia.edu. Their free essay The Drain of Wealth carries the empirical heart of it, including Utsa Patnaik’s estimate of what Britain took: monthlyreview.org

Imperialism today

John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century (2016). Argues that global value chains rest on the super-exploitation of Southern labor, so the smartphone and the t-shirt are imperialism made ordinary. The book is not free, but this journal-length version carries the core argument. Free on Monthly Review’s own site, where it belongs: monthlyreview.org

Films, lectures, and audio

“World-Systems Theory, Dependency Theory and Global Inequality” (Then & Now, 2016). Roughly 14 minutes, about 346,000 views. A clear explainer of core, periphery, and unequal development. The cleanest video fit for this lens. youtube.com/watch?v=79gCqjl6ihQ
“Lenin in Five Minutes: Imperialism” (The Marxist Project, 2019). Roughly 5 minutes, about 107,000 views. A compact summary of Lenin’s theory as the highest stage of capitalism. A tight opener before the reading. youtube.com/watch?v=unCGQDKJ0p0

A note on method

These theories disagree in ways worth preserving. Lenin locates imperialism in monopoly capital; the dependency theorists locate it in the structure of trade and exchange; critics of Emmanuel dispute whether unequal exchange holds up. The point is not to crown a winner but to give the group the vocabulary, monopoly, finance capital, core and periphery, unequal exchange, super-exploitation, to analyze how wealth actually moves in their world.

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially dependency and world-systems theory from Latin American and African economists in their own words, and analyses of the dollar system and finance.

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