ABSTRACT
Lenin's pamphlet bears the same relation to the literature of imperialism before 1914 as the Communist Manifesto does to the socialist or even liberal literature of the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1945, as a result of its World War II victory, the Soviet Union—which was absolved, by definition, of the sin of imperialism—annexed what previously had been Romanian, Czech, Polish, and German territory. Hence, under capitalism, imperialism becomes as "structural" as "exploitation". The twentieth-century world capitalist economy consequently becomes in itself imperialistic, this word denoting the two inseparable relationships of domination and exploitation of the periphery by the center, of the developing by the industrialized countries. The word exploitation has at least two meanings, one of them neutral: putting to use a piece of land, a mine or an oil field; the other carrying a political and moral connotation: making unfair profits from some transaction or economic activity.
