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p One of the greatest achievements of Marxism-Leninism in the history of social thought is its formulation and solution of the question of a worldwide revolutionary process. Generations of forward-looking thinkers had considered revolution in the context of individual countries. It is true that many of them assumed that the revolution would spread to other nations as well. What were the grounds for this assumption? In the 18th century, it was believed that the revolution amounted to a re-establishment of “man’s natural rights”, which the tyrants had robbed him of. That was also the view taken by the French revolutionaries. This line of thinking had led to the formulation of a “right to revolution" which progressive thinkers in the period recognised. In the medieval period the feudal lords had the right to refuse allegiance to the king on some occasions, while the Church was empowered to release the people from their oath of loyalty to a king who had run afoul of the Church. The 18th century had established the people’s right to uprising and revolution and had declared the people to be the sovereign source and vehicle of power. The revolution was seen as a progressive and beneficial act. The peoples had to recognise this and join revolutionary France. Many impassioned speeches in this spirit were delivered in the Convent. But if this had been an idea of a world revolutionary process, it was altogether embryonic.

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p When the idea of socialist revolution first appeared it was initially just as vague and abstract. Working on the question of a second revolution that would be the last one and would establish a revolutionary dictatorship and social equality, the followers of Gracchus Babeuf likewise said nothing about a world revolutionary process.

p In the pre-Marxist period, the Russian revolutionary democrats had gone farthest in working out the idea of a world revolutionary process, and had considered the question of Russia’s role in the revolutionary changes they were expecting to take place in Europe as well. They seemed to be thinking along two lines of revolutionary movement towards the ideals of socialism, one Western and the other Russian. But it was quite obvious that Herzen and Chernyshevsky merely strove to attain to an understanding of the world revolutionary process, but in effect stopped just short of formulating the concept. It was the remarkable call issued by Marx and Engels—“Workers of all countries, unite!"—that announced to the world the birth of a theory of the world revolutionary process, the end of the era of a working-class movement closed within national boundaries and the start of the era of proletarian internationalism.

p Marx formulated the sociological law on the inevitable decline of all the formations preceding communism.

p Communism is the result of all earlier historical development, and the most perfect organisation of society, ushering in mankind’s true history. Marx indicated the real way and direction of historical development, putting the question of revolution within the world context in his coherent theory of the world revolutionary process.

p But Marx also clearly saw and warned against the danger facing a triumphant socialist revolution which stemmed from the fact that on a vast territory of the globe in that period bourgeois society was still on the upgrade. Marx considered the external threat to an emergent socialist society and gave an answer in accordance with the contemporary historical conditions. There could have been no theory of the world revolutionary process without such an answer. In the period when Marx was working on the problem the world would have looked as follows once socialism won out: on the one hand, there were the advanced capitalist countries in which the socialist revolution won out almost simultaneously, and on the other, the less developed countries in which the bourgeois system was still on the ascendant.

p Replying to the question in his Principles of Communism (1847), Engels said that the socialist revolution could not take place in any one country. He added: “Large-scale industry, already by creating the world market, has so linked up all the peoples of the earth, and especially the civilised peoples, that each people is dependent on what happens to another. Further, large-scale industry has levelled the social development of all civilised countries so much that in all these countries the bourgeoisie and 126 proletariat have become the decisive two classes of society, and the struggle between them has become the main struggle of the day. The communist revolution, therefore, will be not only a national one; it will take place in all civilised countries, that is, at least simultaneously in England, America, France and Germany.” Engels went on to say that the revolution “will also exercise considerable influence upon other countries of the world, completely changing the hitherto existing mode of their development and accelerating it greatly".  [126•66 

p In the 1850s, Marx and Engels did not apparently have any doubts that the revolutionary process in the advanced capitalist countries would start in Western Europe and only later spread to the USA, where capitalism was still on the upgrade. In an international survey in the mid-19th century, Marx and Engels considered prospects for the development of the relations between bourgeois Western Europe and the USA as follows:

p “Italy was the focus of world relations in the Middle Ages, Britain in the modern period, and the southern half of the North American subcontinent is now becoming a similar center. Old Europe’s industry and commerce need to make tremendous efforts unless they want to reach a state of decline like the one in which Italy’s industry and commerce have been since the sixteenth century, unless they want Britain and France to become like present-day Venice, Genoa and Holland. ...The Atlantic Ocean will be reduced to the role of an internal sea, like that of the Mediterranean today."  [126•67  Marx and Engels drew their conclusions against a broad historical background: Europe could lose its importance as the old center of capitalism, and that center could move to the USA. The emergent conflict between the old bourgeois Europe and the new bourgeois America was a natural stage in the development of capitalism, whose history had its beginnings in the medieval cities of Italy, then in wealthy Holland and Britain, with its bourgeois revolution, and in revolutionary France, which threw off the fetters of feudalism. Finally, capitalism had spread to North America, where it initially brought about a rapid growth of the productive forces, for there the influence of feudal and absolutist impediments was least, while the bonds with Britain were soon broken. In the mid-19th century, Marx and Engels were already considering the possibility of Europe subsequently being politically and economically dependent on America.

p They drew the most profound conclusions about Europe’s historical destinies on the strength of the experience of the 1848 revolution. They wrote: “The only condition on which the civilised European countries will not be plunged into the same kind of industrial, commercial and 127 political dependence as that of present-day Italy, Spain and Portugal is a social revolution, which will transform, before it is too late, the mode of production and exchange in accordance with the requirements of production itself which are being generated by the modern productive forces, thereby making it possible to create new productive forces to ensure the superiority of European industry and so to equalise the disadvantages of geographical location."  [127•68 

p “Before it is too late.” Indeed, the hour of revolution first struck in Russia, and this at a time when the threat of its conversion into a colony of the US capitalists was quite real. The revolution did not occur in the center of Europe, but in its eastern part, and it generated great productive forces which have not only been successfully competing with the economy of the New World, but have also surpassed it in a number of modern technical indicators. That was the birth of a socialist world which has no fear at all of US capitalism. The contradiction between bourgeois Europe and bourgeois America has been developing in new historical conditions. Together with its overseas rivals, America has now entered a period of deep crisis and capitalist stagnation. The Soviet Union and a growing world socialist system now exist in the world, while the colonial system of capitalism is on the way out.

p However, the way of development and prosperity for Europe indicated by Marx still remains its only alternative.

p The shift of the center of the capitalist world to the USA is not in any sense an indication of strength, but of weakness. Western Europe has become its vulnerable spot. The world revolutionary process cannot skirt this old center of capitalism, for after all there is the other Europe, the Europe of which Marx and Engels were the two great citizens, the Europe which cherishes the memory of Lenin’s genius. This living and fighting Europe does not regard the collapse of colonial regimes and the growing might of the socialist world as a threat to its future, but as the dawn of its democratic renovation.

p Marx held that a socialist revolution in the West European countries could face a threat from the countries lagging behind in their development. Marx wrote: “As for social revolution, what does it amount to except the struggle of classes? This struggle between the workers and the capitalists would perhaps be less fierce and sanguinary than it had been between the feudal lords and the capitalists in Britain and France. One should hope so. But at any rate, while such a social crisis could invigorate the Western nations, it could, like any internal conflict, cause an attack from outside."  [127•69  At the time, Marx feared the possibility of intervention by tsarist Russia against the revolutionary 128 movement in Western Europe: Russia would once again play the part “which it already played during the anti-Jacobin war and since the emergence of the Holy Alliance—the role of a divinely ordained saviour of law and order".  [128•70 

p In 1916, Lenin recalled this idea of Marx’s when he wrote: “If the concrete situation which confronted Marx when tsarism dominated international politics were to repeat itself, for instance, in the form of a few nations starting a socialist revolution (as a bourgeois-democratic revolution was started in Europe in 1848), and other nations serving as the chief bulwarks of bourgeois reaction—then we too would have to be in favour of a revolutionary war against the latter, in favour of ‘crushing’ them, in favour of destroying all their outposts, no matter what small-nation movements arose in them."  [128•71  Lenin also recalled that at the time tsarism had used some small national movements for its anti-democratic purposes.

p Marx held that social revolution—“internal conflict" in capitalist society—could cause an external attack, an important question in the theory of historical process which he formulated on the strength of a vast array of historical facts. The threat of external attack always became real whenever a new social system was just being established in this or that country, while the old system was still a force to be reckoned with in the international arena. Internal conflicts spilled over into the international arena, where a struggle broke out for the victory of the new over the old.

p Marx formulated this idea in more general terms in a letter to Engels on October 8, 1858: “The difficult question for us is this: on the Continent the revolution is imminent and will immediately assume a socialist character. Is it not bound to be crushed in this little corner, considering that in a far greater territory the movement of bourgeois society is still in the ascendant?"  [128•72 

p In a letter to Kautsky in 1882, Engels appeared to answer this question when he stressed that socialist revolution in the advanced capitalist countries “will furnish such colossal power and such an example that the semi-civilised countries will of themselves follow in their wake; economic needs, if anything, will see to that".  [128•73  But Engels did not rule out the possibility that other countries would rise against the states in which the socialist revolution had won out. Lenin subsequently summed up this idea as follows: “An economic revolution will be a stimulus to 129 all peoples to strive for socialism; but at the same time revolutions—against the socialist state—and wars are possible."  [129•74 

p On the strength of new data on the development of the revolutionary struggle in the lagging countries, Russia in particular, and the writings of the Russian revolutionary democrats, Marx and Engels were convinced that once the socialist revolution won out in the West the other countries could follow a noncapitalist way of development, because there, too, social conflicts and revolutionary forces were in the making. The important thing to stress is Marx’s role in studying the Russian revolutionary process in his formulation of the theory of the world revolution. This was a new contribution to the theory of the world revolutionary process.

p Marx and Engels criticised and corrected the mistakes of the Russian revolutionary democrats and gave a correct understanding of the role of the Russian revolution in the world process. In a preface to the Russian translation of the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1882, they wrote: “If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development."  [129•75 

p But the revolution in Russia could start in various ways. Back in 1853, Engels believed that “a noble-bourgeois revolution in Petersburg with an ensuing civil war inside the country, is quite within the realm of possibility".  [129•76 

p The Marxist classics subsequently stressed that the development of capitalism in Russia had gone so far that, as Engels wrote in 1894, there was “accelerated transformation of Russia into an industrial capitalist state, the proletarisation of a large part of her peasantry, and the destruction of the old communist community".  [129•77 This took Russia onto the path of proletarian revolution.

p However, their study of the potentialities of Russia’s historical development in the second half of the 19th century gave Marx and Engels ground to draw the general conclusion that after a proletarian victory in Western Europe the countries just taking the capitalist way with survivals of the tribal order could use these relicts of communal ownership and the corresponding popular usages as a powerful instrument for taking a shortcut in their development towards socialist society. Thus, the countries lagging in their development merged with the general revolutionary tide and reduced their way to socialist society. 130 “But an inevitable condition of this is the example and active support of the hitherto capitalist West. Only when the capitalist economy has been overcome at home and in the countries of its prime, only when the retarded countries have seen from their example ’how it’s done’, how the productive forces of modern industry are made to work as social property for society as a whole—only then will the retarded countries be able to start on this abbreviated process of development. But then their success will be assured."  [130•78  This is, in effect, a clear-cut formulation of the importance of the socialist system, which has become a world system, for the development of the precapitalist countries. This idea was subsequently elaborated by Lenin in new historical conditions.

p Lenin also later worked out Engels’s remark on the power of example, of “how it’s done" not only in respect of the precapitalist countries, but also of the bourgeois world surrounding the country of victorious socialist revolution.

p Lenin attached much importance to the fact that Marx and Engels drew attention to the foreign-policy conditions for the further development of the revolutionary process and that they pointed to an external danger in the event of a socialist revolution in Europe. Lenin stressed this idea as follows: “Engels was perfectly right when, in his letter to Kautsky of September 12, 1882, he clearly stated that it was possible for already victorious socialism to wage ’defensive wars’. What he had in mind was defence of the victorious proletariat against the bourgeoisie of other countries."  [130•79  That letter of Engels’s contained the following lines: “One thing alone is certain: the victorious proletariat can force no blessings of any kind upon any foreign nation without undermining its own victory by so doing. Which of course by no means excludes defensive wars of various kinds."  [130•80 

p Thus, the writings of Marx and Engels contained indications about a possible stage in the revolutionary process when the socialist revolution, having won out in the advanced countries, was still forced to carry on a struggle for its existence and for its right unconditionally to determine the subsequent course of world history. In formulating a new theory of socialist revolution Lenin gave the closest attention to the fact that Marx and Engels had allowed for such a possibility. In the new historical conditions, with capitalism in its final stage, and with the conditions for a victory of the working class substantially different, Marx’s theory of socialist revolution called for further development.

It was Lenin who fulfilled this vast undertaking.