Domination of the decision-making process of one people by that of another. The capitalist system of economics requires a political environment in which market forces are permitted to vie openly with one another. This environment is imposed upon a people that they may better participate in international capitalism as consumers and producers.
In 1917 Vladimir Lenin designated Imperialism ‘The Highest Stage of Capitalism’: ‘Imperialism is monopoly capitalism,’ he wrote, and signals ‘the transition from the capitalist system to a higher social-economic order.’ He viewed the Great War as the exhaustion of homogenising potential of capitalism that Marx and Engels had predicted.