Was trying to make sense of this with a friend, but none of us has any theory to work from and just ended up making wild guesses.

Anybody know about this and willing to condense and/or link theory?

  • knfrmity
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    2 years ago

    I don’t think so, not in my reading of the preceding concepts. Kautsky coined the term Überimperialismus, which was loosely but not entirely correctly translated to super imperialism. Translation aside, he was getting at a different concept all together, the idea that the biggest imperialist powers could form a sort of cartel to prevent wars. Lenin obviously took issue with this, and Hudson argued against the idea many years later as well.

    When Kautsky wrote about Überimperialismus in 1914 it was also too early, the conditions for what we can call super imperialism today didn’t begin to exist until America joined the war at the absolute earliest, and didn’t solidify until 1945. Other theorists of the time such as Lenin didn’t see it coming either, and in a lot of ways they really couldn’t have.

    It appears it was Gerhart von Schulze-Gaevernitz who initially came up with the concept of monetary super imperialism. He called it Uberimperialismus as well, but his concept of the thing lines up far more with what we observe to this day. I referred to Hudson as he’s the theorist/economist who has developed the theory for its modern conditions the most and appears to have contributed most to the concept.