Welcome to the second week of the Imperialism Reading Group! Last week’s thread is here.

This is a weekly thread in which we read through books on and related to imperialism and geopolitics. How many chapters or pages we will cover per week will vary based on the density and difficulty of the book, but I’m generally aiming at 30 to 40 pages per week, which should take you about an hour or two.

The first book we are covering is the foundation, the one and only, Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. We will read two chapters per week, meaning that we will finish reading in mid-to-late February. Unless a better suggestion is made, we will then cover Michael Hudson’s Super Imperialism, and continue with various books from there.

Every week, I will write a summary of the chapter(s) read, for those who have already read the book and don’t wish to reread, can’t follow along for various reasons, or for those joining later who want to dive right in to the next book without needing to pick this one up too.

This week, we will be reading Chapter 3: Finance Capital and the Financial Oligarchy, and Chapter 4: Export of Capital.

Please comment or message me directly if you wish to be pinged for this group.

  • Sebrof [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    4 months ago

    I wish I had a more succinct response, and something more definite to share, but I’ve found that Red Sails has a lot of articles about Hegel, Lenin’s and Marx’s interpretations of Hegel, as well as articles on dialectics as well. You can do a search for any of the above and find some good hits.

    I haven’t given all of them a read, so I can’t back them up, but the following articles are ones that I have on my reading list and I thought I’d share. Perhaps if others are already familiar they can chime in to support or reject the below articles:

    Dialectics

    Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and General Philosophy

    From Hegel to Lenin

    On Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks

    Some are long reads though, so I’m also still on the lookout for any shorter overview of the ideas, or even an encyclopedia of the basic terms would be nice. So far it just feels like one reads a lot of the above and overtime the conception gets less and less vague. My understanding is still in this vague territory, I feel like I can sorta get what is meant by the terms, but couldn’t define them well (so not much of an understanding I guess).

    On the topic of dialectics (apart from Hegel specifically), I found this article, Dialectics - Maoist and Daoist to be the articled where dialectics started to ‘click’ for me. It compares and contrasts dialectics as understood and applied by Mao to Taoism. This article also discusses Lenin’s ideas on dialectics as well.