Lenin and Development

Abstract

Lenin put Marxism into practice, leading the Russian revolutions in 1905, July 1917 and, finally, October 1917. Lenin was also a close student of development and our first section below deals with his neglected classic The Development of Capitalism in Russia published in 1889. Interestingly, he took a considerably more negative view of the prospects for the Russian commune than Marx did in the late writings on Russia. The various Russian revolutions occurred in conditions we might call today semi-development rather than under development. As Lenin put it ‘Russia is a capitalist country …[but] … Russia is still very backward, as compared with other capitalist countries, in her economic development.’ For Lenin, thus, socialism would necessarily be built through Soviets plus Electrification as his slogan of the time dramatically put it. There were others in the Bolshevik leadership, who took different views of the development process, arguing for a more balanced strategy between agriculture and industry in an interesting debate which still repays attention. Lenin himself, in his last writings became very conscious of the limitations of the way they were building socialism in conditions of underdevelopment. However, in Leninism as Development Ideology we see how, after Lenin’s death in 1924, his successor, Stalin, created an ‘official’ Leninism where all his hesitations, doubts and contradictions were ironed out, and it became an arm of the Soviet state as it expanded in the development world. This was a discourse that was no longer contestatory and reflected the interests of a Soviet state pledged to the building of ‘socialism in one country’ that was inimical to Marx’s view of capitalist development as an integrated global system. With Lenin the Marxist engagement with development was no longer theoretical and entered, brutally, into the realm of political practice.