You know what I didn’t expect?

How un-radical this book was 😆

This book, originally published in 1916, was downright quaint. I thought I was going to be all like ‘look at me, I’m so rebellious, I’m reading Lenin’ lol nope

He argued that capitalism incentivizes certain business behaviours, sounding the alarm bells that:
▪️ companies buy their direct competitors (a trend towards monopolies),
▪️ businesses become ‘combines’ (buy up stuff to vertically integrate or to diversify),
▪️ finance and shareholders were becoming a thing, 
▪️ European companies invest capital into colonies expecting to get back more than they give (then reinvest that capital into further monopolizing and further ‘combining’), and 
▪️ these now-large companies/investors pressure governments to use taxpayer dollars for imperial arrangements that benefit themselves

Aka, a totally normal description of late 19th century and pre-WWI economics that—and I cannot stress this enough 😭—even the most rightwing pro-capitalist person would agree with Lenin on.

But his “we can fix it!” can-do attitude snapped me out of my cynicism. And his links between capitalism and modern imperialism were good primer for books I read after this one. Namely, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (Imperialism is the title of its second of three volumes) and Globalists by Quinn Slobodian (about the imperial origins of neoliberalism).