Preface¶
Core Argument¶
Lenin’s preface to his 1916 pamphlet on imperialism, written in Petrograd in April 1917, establishes the work’s origins, its tactical constraints, and its central political purpose. The pamphlet was composed in Zürich under conditions of exile, where Lenin faced a shortage of French, English, and especially Russian sources. He notes, however, that he made full use of J.A. Hobson’s principal English study of imperialism, which he regards with serious respect.
The most striking feature of the preface is Lenin’s frank account of the censorship imposed by the tsarist regime. Because the pamphlet was written as a “legal” work, he was forced to confine himself to a purely economic analysis and to express political conclusions only through hints and allegory—the “accursed Aesopian language” that all revolutionaries had to adopt. He laments that re-reading the text in the new conditions of liberty after the February Revolution reveals how severely the argument was “distorted, cramped, compressed in an iron vice.” The key political points that could not be stated directly were: that the period of imperialism is the eve of the socialist revolution; that social chauvinism—socialism in words, chauvinism in deeds—constitutes a complete betrayal of socialism and a desertion to the bourgeoisie; and that this split within the working-class movement is bound up with the objective conditions of imperialism. For these matters, Lenin refers readers to his illegal articles written abroad between 1914 and 1917.
Lenin provides a concrete example of the censor’s effect: to illustrate how capitalists and social chauvinists (including Kautsky, whom he charges with inconsistency) lie about annexations, he was forced to cite Japan as the annexing power. The careful reader, he instructs, should substitute Russia for Japan, and Finland, Poland, Courland, the Ukraine, Khiva, Bokhara, Estonia, or other non-Great Russian regions for Korea.
The preface closes with Lenin’s stated hope: that the pamphlet will help the reader grasp the economic essence of imperialism, without which it is impossible to understand or appraise modern war and modern politics. The preface thus frames the entire work as a necessary theoretical foundation for revolutionary strategy, written under duress but aimed at exposing the economic roots of imperialist war and the political treachery of those who defend it.