Both Stalinism and Trotskyism had to try to explain the expansion of capitalism after WWII, and all sorts of ridiculous propositions were put forward, as I have discussed in previous years. Given that the USSR was in a global strategic competition with imperialism, and sought to win the allegiance of various developing economies, many of whom had, recently, emerged from colonial oppression, it went back to the pre-Marxist ideas of the Mercantilists, to explain the expanding wealth of the imperialist centre, on the basis of its exploitation of this colonial periphery via “unequal exchange”, “super-exploitation”, and a corresponding “development of underdevelopment”.
All of it was un-Marxist, petty-bourgeois, moralist nonsense, but, for organisations, rapidly, abandoning the centrality of the working-class, and hitching a ride on the back of petty-bourgeois nationalist, “anti-imperialist” movements, it seemed, for a while a fast route to “building the party”.
The fact that Trotsky, following Lenin, had pointed out that, in the age of imperialism, the process of combined and uneven development leads to a more rapid development of those less developed economies, escaped their attention.
“The law of uneven development of capitalism is older than imperialism. Capitalism is developing very unevenly today in the various countries. But in the nineteenth century this unevenness was greater than in the twentieth. At that time England was lord of the world, while Japan on the other hand was a feudal state closely confined within its own limits. At the time when serfdom was abolished among us, Japan began to adapt itself to capitalist civilization. China was, however, still wrapped in the deepest slumber. And so forth. At that time the unevenness of capitalist development was greater than now. Those unevennesses were as well known to Marx and Engels as they are to us. Imperialism has developed a more “levelling tendency” than pre-imperialist capitalism, for the reason that finance capital is the most elastic form of capital.”
And, the reality clearly was that, rather than imperialism securing its own more rapid development by extending such colonies, it was, under pressure from the US, abandoning its existing colonial empires. And, indeed, as Trotsky had described, in the quote above, many of those former colonies quickly industrialised themselves, becoming developed economies, in the same rank, and sometimes superior to their former colonial masters.
Another idiotic idea was that the improvement in the condition of Western workers was due to imperialism having to do so to prevent workers following the example of the USSR! This was the same USSR that was treating its own workers like slaves, and which could not even provide them with the kind of consumer goods taken for granted in the West, and which they, then, sought out on the black market!
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