The critical communist discourse developed by Karl Marx, fraternally accompanied by Friedrich Engels, is a very powerful productive force that nevertheless shared the destiny of all the productive forces that are born in the bourgeois mode of production, which is to remain formally and even really subordinated. under capital.

Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky and Stalinism were the main architects of this subordination of “Marxism” under the dominance of the ideology of capital. On this basis, not only Lenin's theory of imperialism, which has turned out to be the most influential, but also the theories of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, Otto Bauer, Nicolai Bukharin, Henryk Grossman, Ernest Mandel, Paul. A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy and many other theorists try to account for the new configurations of the capitalist system, that is, how it works and how the terrain where the class struggle takes place develops.

These theories have been in crisis since the mere fact that today there is no one theory of imperialism but many that contradict each other from the turn of the 19th century to the 20th, and after the Second World War each one tries to explain what What is capitalism with a new adjective: “postindustrial societies”, “industrial societies”, “consumer societies”, “monopoly capitalism”, “state monopoly capitalism”, “neocapitalism”, “late capitalism”, “superimperialism”, etc.

In this second updated edition, this book aims to expose the critique of theories of imperialism from the perspective of Karl Marx's critique of political economy. In addition to the demonstration that neither in their discursive form nor in their essential content these theories could be considered Marxist except in intention, and the criticism of their fundamental theses, the text offers a very useful reconstruction of the Marxist theory of subsumption. formal and the real subsumption of the immediate work process under capital and its role in Marx's work as a whole; a systematic presentation of the critique of political economy as a precise discursive form, and a methodical clarification of the ideological, political and economic problems of contemporary capitalism that additionally constitutes the applied exposition of the dialectical method of investigation, analysis and presentation of reality.