Discovering Imperialism: Social Democracy to World War I

GAIDO, DANIEL; DAY, RICHARD B.

Brill

Lugar: Leiden; Año: 2010 p. 650

Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido, Discovering Imperialism: Social Democracy to World War I, Leiden: Brill, 2010. (Historical Materialism Book Series) (Hardcover) The theory of imperialism is usually associated with some of the big names in the history of European Marxism, such as Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Rudolf Hilferding and Nikolai Bukharin, alongside whom the English Progressive John Hobson is usually mentioned due to his influence on Lenin. However, little is known about the development of the Marxist theory on this subject besides the books of these ‘big five.’ This volume assembles for the first time the main documents of the international debate on imperialism that took place in the framework of the Second International during the period 1898-1916 — a discussion carried out mostly in Germany and Austria and scattered in obscure journals published in Fraktur. We asses the contributions of the individual participants to the developing theory of imperialism, placing them in the context of the contemporary debates on revisionism and, later, of the developing split between the centre and right wings of the SPD, which had an international repercussion after the outbreak of the First World War. The volume closes with a series of analyses of imperialism by the main theoreticians of the Zimmerwald Left, which provided the immediate background to the writing of Lenin’s famous booklet on this subject.