Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis, by John Smith

John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century connects the theory of imperialism to Marx’s value theory and accounts for the most important changes in global capitalism since Lenin’s time: namely, global labor arbitrage and outsourcing. His criticism of the standard statistical measure of GDP and wages is innovative and enlightening, and he effectively connects the global crisis of the early twenty-first century to the new international division of labor. The book suffers from an inadequate definition of its central concept, imperialism, and from a tendency to lapse into old-style deterministic Marxism.