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Damn near prophetic.

Imperialism reads like Vladimir Lenin’s attempt to write a sort of addendum, or update to Marx’s Das Kapital. To provide a materialist, statistically-derived examination of the ways capitalism changed between the time of Marx, up to the first world war.

That sounds like a dry theoretical project, but what Lenin achieves here is almost scary. This book is possibly the first coherent statement about the nature of capitalism once it transcends specific national origins and becomes a truly global phenomenon.

Here at last, we are in the proper world of global finance that we still occupy 100 years later. In which global banks wielding staggering amounts of wealth have superseded industry as the real makers and breakers of economic life.

He gets it all. The panicked global rush to find new resource chains and new markets to sell to. The cycles of war and peace that are the only ways those resources can be redistributed on an already thoroughly owned planet. The rise of a global power elite (ever heard of the 1%?). The inevitable transfer of the working class away from the major powers into the developing world…sound familiar yet?

It’s still Lenin’s world. We just live in it.