“Lenin, of course, was not the only proletarian leader who was trying to rethink the new era. Kautsky (‘the renegade’) thought that the number of great powers on the international scene would decrease and that they would eventually become organised as a kind of ‘super imperialist bloc’ whose frictions would be resolved by recourse to instruments and processes other that war. Lenin’s concept of the uneven development of capitalism refutes this ‘nonsense’ of Kautsky’s, described as ‘the joint exploitation of the world by internationally united finance capital’ (51). In Lenin’s view the now less developed countries would be more rapid in their imperialist development. This differential development rate would lead to major wars between the imperialist blocs since ‘once the relation of forces is changed, what other solution of contradictions can be found under Capitalism than that of force’ (52). Needless to say, this new theory saw tsarist Russia as a cynosure of events, and since revolution could no longer be regarded as imminent in the advanced capitalist countries, backward countries like Russia would now have to fulfil the historical mission of the proletariat. The proletariat of the capitalist countries, ran the implications of Lenin’s law, is now corrupted to such an extent that non only did it encourage the imperialist governments to go to war in the first place but it was later quite unable to see its historical duty, which, according to Lenin in 1914, was to change imperialist war into civil wars in their respective countries. The imperialist wars, however savage, are not any longer, he believed, destroying the capitalist system (their main objectives being invariably only the further redistribution of the world). The outcomes of such wars merely bring readjustment of the capitalist ‘status quo’, while the basis of capitalism remains intact. The element that would be the agency of the destruction of imperialism must now take place on a world scale (and on this point coincided with Marx and Engels) but would do so through a sequential development of a phase revolutionary process” [V. Kubalkova – A.A. Cruickshank, ‘Marxism-Leninism and Theory of International Relations’, London, 1980] [(51) Lenin, Selected Works, op. cit., 1/741; (52) Ibid., p. 743][Lenin-Bibliographical-Materials] [LBM*]
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- Articolo pubblicato:7 Dicembre 2015