Imperialism and war

Bukharin and Lenin on monopoly capitalism, 1914–17

pp. 243-266

in: M. C. Howard, J. E. King, A history of Marxian economics I, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1989

Abstract

The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 did not immediately bring a fundamental change in Lenin's analysis of capitalism, or in his view that Russian backwardness precluded anything other than a democratic revolution in that country. Although the nature of capitalism as a world system figured much more prominently in his work of the war years, most elements of his Imperialism,¹ written in 1916, can be found in his pre-war writings,² and he retained allegiance to his formula of the "democratic dictatorship" until the early months of 1917.³ Equally Plekhanov and the Mensheviks remained committed to their pre-war economic analysis and to an alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie. Trotsky alone introduced a significant change into his theory of permanent revolution, but as we have seen in Chapter 12 this reinforced rather than modified his previous conclusions.