He argues that the so-called dysfunction of the political economy created the socio-cultural desire to extend the national markets into foreign lands, in search of profits greater than those available in the Mother Country.
Because of its innate productive capacity for generating profits, capitalism did not functionally require a large-scale, large-term, and costly socio-economic enterprise such as imperialism.
His geopolitical propositions influenced the work of prominent figures such as Nikolai Bukharin, Vladimir Lenin, and Hannah Arendt.
Except for coining a new and clever catch-word, replacing one Latin prefix by another, the only progress [that] Kautsky has made, in the sphere of 'scientific' thought, is that he gave out, as Marxism, what Hobson, in effect, [had] described as the cant of English parsons.
[5]Moreover, Lenin ideologically disagreed with Hobson’s opinion that capitalism, as an economic system, could be separated from imperialism; instead, he proposed that, because of the economic competitions that had provoked the First World War, capitalism had come to its end as a functional socio-economic system, and that it would be replaced by pacifist socialism, in order for imperialism to end.
[17][21] Hobson believed "colonial primitive peoples" were inferior, writing in Imperialism he advocated their "gradual elimination" by an international organization: "A rational stirpiculture in the wide social interest might, however, require a repression of the spread of degenerate or unprogressive races".
[22][23] While it can be said the 1902 work reflected the Social Darwinism trend of the time, Hobson left this section mainly unchanged when he published the third edition in 1938.
[24] The British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn wrote a foreword for the 2011 edition, calling Hobson's "analysis of the pressures that were hard at work in pushing for a vast national effort in grabbing new outposts of Empire on distant islands and shores" brilliant.
[25] In a strongly worded letter, the Board of Deputies of British Jews expressed “grave concerns” about the emergence of the foreword.