Saeed Rahnema is an award-winning retired professor of political science and public policy at York University, Canada. He was the founding director of York’s School of Public Policy and Administration and a director of the Middle East Economic Association. During the Iranian Revolution of 1979 he was a leading activist in the Left and Workers Council movement. This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the international conference “Imperialism and Empire in the XXI Century,” organized by the Economics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, on the occasion of the centennial of Lenin’s “Imperialism ,the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” Moscow, October 2016. A Farsi version has been published in Naghd; pecritique website in Iran, June 2016.