First Published in 2015. Classic and contemporary Marxist theoretical works on imperialism are systematically summarized and critiqued in this useful survey. Throughout the discussion, attention is focused analyses of the causes of capitalist foreign economic expansion and the impact of that expansion. The study begins with a discussion of Marx's political economy and the work of early theorists of imperialism, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Nikolai Bukharin and Rudolf Hilferding. This analysis then serves as the basis for a critical survey of the major strands of postwar Marxist thought, including the work of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Harry Madgdoff, James O'Connor, Andre Gunder Frank and more, Following the survey ae extended critiques of Baran and Sweezy's theory of monopoly capitalism and Arghiri Emmanuels' theory of unequal exchange.

Forging an anti-imperialist Marxism through dialectical and historical approaches, this volume of Political Power and Social Theory demonstrates how the South Asian facet of this revolutionary tradition can contribute to and even reenergize global Marxist theory.

For Marxists, imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. Critical analysis of imperialism has been a feature of Marxist throughout the twentieth century. The conceptualising and theorising of imperialism by Marxists has evolved over time in response to developments in the global capitalist economy and in international politics. Murray Noonan here provides the first complete analysis of Marxist theories of imperialism in over two decades. Presenting three phases of imperialist theories, he analyses and compares 'Classical', 'Neo' and 'Globalisation-era' Marxist theories of imperialism. The book moves chronologically, tracking the origins of imperialism theorised by J.A. Hobson at the beginning of the twentieth century up to the present day. He critically identifies and engages with a new 'Globalisation-era' phase of Marxist imperialism theory. Through a detailed scholarly analysis of the history and evolution of these theories, Noonan offers vital new perspectives on imperialist theory and its relevance and application in the twenty-first century.

The last two hundred years have seen a massive increase in the size of the world economy and equally massive inequalities of wealth and power between different parts of the world. They have also witnessed the rise to dominance of the capitalist mode of production. Marxists, from Marx himself through to present day thinkers, have argued that these changes are profoundly interconnected. This book offers a unique account of Marxist theories of Imperialism. It has been fully updated and expanded to cover all the developments since its initial publication and will be essential reading for any student of Marxism.

Amidst a capitalist crisis that has upturned mainstream orthodoxies, this title underscores the importance of historical and materialist understandings of capitalist economies. It exposes the limitations of neoclassical economics' endogenous growth theory and how it, in fact, gropes for understandings well established within Marxism.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.

A decade after Francis Fukuyama announced the ‘End of History’, anti-capitalist demonstrators at Seattle and elsewhere have helped reinvigorate the Left with the reply ‘another world is possible’. More than anyone else it was Marx who showed that slogans such as this were no utopian fantasies, and that capitalism was just as much a historical mode of production, no more natural and certainly no less contradictory, than were the feudal and slave modes which proceeded it. Paul Blackledge opens this study with a defence of the Marxist approach to the study of history against what he argues as being the naive empiricism of traditional historians and the relativism of the postmodernists. He moves on to outline Marx and Engels analyses of concrete historical processes and their critiques of the alternative historiographic methodologies of their contemporaries. He then discusses neglected historical works produced by Marxists in the half-century or so after Marx and Engels’ deaths. Two central chapters survey recent Marxist debates on, first, the nature of modes of productions, including slave, feudal and tributary systems, and the revolutionary transitions between them; and, second, the methodological debate over the issue of structure and agency in the movement of history. Finally, he shows the political relevance of these debates through a concluding survey of competing Marxist attempts to periodise the present, postmodern, conjuncture. This book should be read by historians, students of cultural, social and political theory and anti-capitalist activists.

From President Nixon's historic visit to China in 1972 to the aftermath of the Tiananmen tragedy, this book examines the changing perceptions of the United States articulated by China's "America Watchers," whose occupation is to interpret the "beautiful imperialist" for China's elite and public. While other studies have looked at the behavioral history of U.S.-China relations, this is the first to probe the perceptual dimension.