Moving through this backward phase of capitalist development as quickly as possible, and into the phase of large-scale machine production is desirable. As Lenin put it, a few years later.
“And from these principles it follows that the idea of seeking salvation for the working class in anything save the further development of capitalism is reactionary. In countries like Russia, the working class suffers not so much from capitalism as from the insufficient development of capitalism. The working class is therefore decidedly interested in the broadest, freest and most rapid development of capitalism. The removal of all the remnants of the old order which are hampering the broad, free and rapid development of capitalism is of decided advantage to the working class.”
This illustrates the reactionary nature of the ideas of the “anti-imperialists”, and "anti-capitalists", who focus their opposition on the role of large-scale, multinational capital, which offers the only currently available means of industrialising economies achieving that more rapid transition. As Engels put it to Danielson,
“You yourself admit that "the social conditions in Russia after the Crimean War were not favourable to the development of the form of production inherited by us from our past history." I would go further, and say, that no more in Russia than anywhere else would it have been possible to develop a higher social form out of primitive agrarian communism unless – that higher form was already in existence in another country, so as to serve as a model...
… capitalism opens out new views and new hopes. Look at what it has done and is doing in the West.””
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