Латиноамериканский исторический альманах (Sep 2024)
Toward Communism Past Capitalism: From Marxist Theory to Communist Practice
Abstract
The article analyzes the evolution of the Marxist concept of the transition to communism in countries where capitalism has not yet developed (mainly colonial and dependent coun-tries of the East) until the emergence of the USSR. If initially K. Marx and F. Engels saw a one-line perspective of the de-velopment of the countries of the East, when they eventually repeat the path of Europe, then under the influence of narod-niki’s criticism, the view of the "classics" in 1877-1882. It has become more complicated: in the case of a successful proletarian revolution in the West, countries such as Russia, in principle, can bypass capitalism, being in close alliance with the communist West. This problem was discussed in the German social democracy, whose representatives did not ex-clude the use of the resources of the colonies for the con-struction of socialism (but on condition of humanization and democratization of the situation in the colonies). The victory of Bolshevism in Russia put into practice the problem of cre-ating socialism in a country where capitalism has not yet ex-hausted its modernization potential. If this was considered possible in Russia, then the question arose that the countries of the East, in which capitalism is in its infancy, could go this way. Moreover, the resources of the periphery of the former Russian Empire were required for the implementation of the communist project. The desire to obtain these resources and spaces gave rise to the phenomenon of the "colonial revolu-tion", which was completed with the formation of the repub-lics of the USSR in 1922-1925. The experience of interaction with Muslim peoples and the tasks of confrontation with the Entente pushed the Soviet leadership to intensify its Eastern foreign policy. First, the Socialist-revolutionary maximalist K. Troyanovsky, and then the theorists of the Comintern, led by V. Lenin, came to the conclusion that it was possible to estab-lish Soviet power in the East despite the absence of a large working class there and the need for the countries of the East to move towards communism bypassing capitalism in alliance with Soviet Russia. This is how the concept of modernization, an alternative to the capitalist path, was formulated.
Keywords
