ABSTRACT
The concept of imperialism obviated the need for Lenin and future Leninists to inquire about the past failure of American socialism. For whatever reasons American socialism had failed in the past, from Imperialism onward Leninists had a ready explanation for its more contemporary failures. Lenin presented the theory of imperialism as a more logical extension of Marxism. One of the major themes of Capitalism and Agriculture in the United States of America, the longest work Lenin ever wrote on America, was the swifter development of capitalist agriculture in the North and Midwest where slavery had been unknown. Even though he urged Russian radicals down the American road, he turned to the German Socialist Party when seeking strategic models and contrasted the problems of the German and Russian socialists with those of the Americans and the British. America had successfully completed its bourgeois revolution while Russia was still half-immersed in feudal chains.
