By Doug Lorimer

[Talk presented to January RSP Marxism education conference.]

In a December 1915 introduction to Bolshevik theorist Nikolai Bukharin’s book Imperialism and World Economy, Lenin wrote:

“There had been an epoch of a comparatively ‘peaceful capitalism’, when it had overcome feudalism in the advanced countries of Europe and was in a position to develop comparatively tranquilly and harmoniously, ‘peacefully’ spreading over tremendous areas of still unoccupied lands, and of countries not yet finally drawn into the capitalist vortex. Of course, even in that epoch, marked approximately by the years 1871 and 1914, ‘peaceful’ capitalism created conditions of life that were very far from being really peaceful both in the military and in a general class sense. For nine-tenths of the population of the advanced countries, for hundreds of millions of peoples in the colonies and in the backward countries this epoch was not one of ‘peace’ but of oppression, tortures, horrors that seemed the more terrifying since they appeared to be without end. This epoch has gone forever. It has been followed by a new epoch, comparatively more impetuous, full of abrupt changes, catastrophes, conflicts, an epoch that no longer appears to the toiling masses as horror without end but is an end full of horrors.

From Monthly Review February 2010

Martin Hart-Landsberg

Martin Hart-Landsberg (marty@lclark.edu) teaches economics at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon, and is the author with Paul Burkett of China and Socialism (Monthly Review Press, 2005).

by Chow Wei Cheng

[ This article was published in Links magazine Number 10, March-July 1998. Chow Wei Cheng is a financial analyst and at the time was a member of the National Committee of the Australian Democratic Socialist Party. He was expelled in May 2008 and is now a member of the Revolutionary Socialist Party.]

It is often claimed that the extent of internationalisation of production today has far outstripped the levels that existed when Lenin made his analysis of imperialist capitalism and that his analysis, which was based on a world market still fragmented into many national economies, is therefore "outdated".It is certainly true that there was a phenomenal increase in international movements of money-capital over the last two decades of the 20th century. Trillions of dollars flow in and out of bond, share and currency markets on a 24-hour basis.

Utilising Marx's theory of capitalist development, Lenin concluded 85 years ago that all the features which Marx had forecast in 1865 as characteristic of "capitalist production in its highest development" had become dominant in Western Europe, North America, Japan and in his native Russia.On the basis of economic data compiled by bourgeois economists in the early years of the 20th century, Lenin argued in December 1915 that "at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, commodity exchange had created such an internationalisation of economic relations, and such an internat

This pamphlet is based on the text of a talk presented on behalf of the DSP National Executive to the Marxism 2000 conference, held in Sydney, January 5-9, 2000.

By Doug Lorimer

Feature Talk: International capitalism and its crises long & short term trends by Jorge Jorquera at the Revolutionary Socialist Party Marxist Education Conference January 2-5, 2010

PDF version available HERE

New edition, expanded and updated

Nearly 150 years after its first publication, Karl Marx’s epoch-making analysis of capitalism and its workings retains its relevance for all those who seek to understand the modern world and, even more so, for those who seek to change it.

This pamphlet presents in outline the basic concepts and terms of Marxist economics. It is intended both as an aid to the study of Capital and as a clarification of ideas and phrases from Marx’s great work that are encountered in the modern labour movement. Socialists who have read part or all of Capital and socialists who have not yet done so can both benefit from this logically arranged collection of definitions.