Imperialism and world economy

Bukharin wrote Imperialism and World Economy in 1915, but it was not published until after the revolution in Russia. It dealt, as Lenin notes in his introduction, with "the changing forms of capitalism in recent times." These "changing forms" had already been recognized, as early as the First World War, as including the growth of monopoly organizations within each capitalist country, the process of "internationalization" of capital, the International division of labor, imperialism, the world market and the world movement of capital, and changes in the structure of state power. The early recognition of these "changing forms" enabled some Marxists, and in particular Lenin, Bukharin, and Hilferding, to comprehend the direction in which modern capitalism was evolving before the forms had become fully developed, and to lay the basis for understanding them. Bukharin's Imperialism and World Economy, available in this edition for the first time in paperback, constitutes a vital contribution to the analysis of imperialism and monopoly capital.
Bukharin, who in the decades before as well as after the Russian Revolution was often the spokesman for the Bolsheviks in matters of political economy, was born in Moscow in 1888, and his career as a revolutionary began while he was a student at Moscow University. He studied economics in Vienna, and during the First World War worked with Lenin in Switzerland and with Trotsky on Novy Mir in New York. He played a leading role in the Bolshevik insurrection in Moscow, and after the revolution his position and authority were chiefly those of a theoretician. He was among those executed after the 1938 Moscow Trial.