The sections on working conditions were sobering, I had many feelings. They read to me almost like a warning. In Ch.10 Marx quoted Horace when speaking to the then American readers “It is of you that the story is told”. At the time it was a direct truth, now it is a harbinger. There ought to be a black book of capitalism. Imperialism only imports the suffering of yesteryear for NA-Europe where the trauma is well contained in the commodities to fit the bill for the old reaper of scarcity.

Capitalism developed into imperialism in about 1900 according to Lenin. Imperialism was defined interestingly not just as a type of economic model a country can have but as an age, an era. This is why even the first socialist camp didn’t have national elections because under the age of imperialism itself democracy which in its beauty is one person one vote is subverted by capital into becoming one unit money one vote. Democratic centralism / internal party democracy was seen as a way to save democracy from bourgeois subversion actually. As communists we love democracy in its fullest form in principle but where we have limited its scope was out of a concession to reality.