what-is-marxism-all-about-by-fist

either expand or die in its quest to accumulate profits.
Vladimir Lenin was a leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
in Russia and a prominent Marxist who popularized the
term “imperialism” and provided it with a scientific definition.
Lenin identifies five essential features of imperialism in his germinal
work on the subject, “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of
Capitalism.” The five features of imperialism are:
1) The creation of decisive monopolies through the
concentration of production and capital.
2) The merger of bank capital and industrial capital to
create an oligarchy of financial capital.
3) The export of capital and commodities, with capital
being the more fundamental of the two.
4) The formation of global capitalist monopolies that
share the world among themselves.
5) The territorial division of the whole world amongst
the most powerful capitalist powers.
These five features of imperialism explain the process by
which monopoly capitalism has developed to the point where it
raises huge armies and navies and develops high-tech weapons
of mass destruction in order to forcibly open new markets and
exploit new sources of cheap labor. It is this character of imperialism
— its nature to carve the world up for the great capitalist
powers — that is behind all the images of war and devastation
on the nightly news.
Wars have historically been waged by imperialist powers,
regardless of the type of political administration. Liberal or
conservative, social democratic or monarchist or fascist, governments
of imperialist countries have all been responsible for
waging imperialist war. Capitalism’s expand-or-die dilemma
requires near constant war, regardless of the politics of the government
in power. Fred Goldstein, a leader of Workers World
Party, examines the three stages of imperialist war throughout
history in his book, “Low-Wage Capitalism.”
24 What is Marxism All About