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p What was Lenin’s idea of the main features of the world revolutionary process once socialism had been initially established in one country?

p Lenin expressed a remarkable idea about the prospects for the development of the world revolutionary process in his “Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and the Colonial Questions" (1920), where he brought out the importance of the period in which ever greater urgency attaches to the “task of converting the dictatorship of the proletariat from a national dictatorship (i.e., existing in a single country and incapable of determining world politics) into an international one (i.e., a dictatorship of the proletariat involving at least several advanced countries, and capable of exercising a decisive influence upon world politics as a whole)".  [166•36  With this transformation Lenin also connected 167 the growing urgency of the struggle against various expressions of petty-bourgeois nationalism, which in these conditions becomes especially dangerous, because the transformation of the proletarian dictatorship into an international dictatorship cannot be realised without a struggle against nationalistic narrowness, which tends to slow down the process.

p Consequently, Lenin quite clearly outlined two stages in the development of the world revolutionary process once the socialist revolution had won out initially in one country, and indicated the qualitative distinctions of these stages, with the attendant changes in the world situation.

p The first stage is the existence of the socialist state in a hostile capitalist encirclement. At this stage, the socialist state is unable to determine world politics. The main task of this stage is the construction of a socialist society in one country with the support of the revolutionary forces abroad, the working class in the capitalist countries in the first place. In this period, there is need to use all the foreign-policy instruments to prolong the breathing space and to use all the domestic-policy instruments to consolidate and develop the socialist system, to industrialise the country, and to build up the solid property of the whole people—socialist industry—to secure the victory of socialist property in the countryside on the basis of collectivisation and to carry out a cultural revolution.

p After the Great October Socialist Revolution it became possible for the revolution to win out in several countries of Eastern and Central Europe, which would have created a world socialist system. But capitalism was still very strong, the Soviet Union was still weak, and there were no mature Communist parties anywhere, except the Soviet Union, capable of leading a victorious socialist revolution. The Soviet Republic in Hungary and the revolution in Germany were put down by imperialist reaction.

p It took a long period for the transition from the first stage of the world revolutionary process—the victory of socialism in one country—to the establishment of a world socialist system. In that period, the forces of socialism became much stronger, while the Communist parties in the capitalist countries grew into a key factor in political life.

p The Great October Socialist Revolution gave a fresh impetus to the national liberation movement in the colonies and the dependent countries. The historical experience of the national liberation and social emancipation of the peoples of the Soviet Union gave ideological and political strength to the national liberation movement and Marxist-Leninist groups and parties were set up in some countries of the East.

p At the second stage, the influence of socialism on the world historical process underwent a fundamental change. Socialism, which has become 168 a world system, has been exerting the decisive influence on and determining the whole world process.

p Bourgeois and petty-bourgeois conceptions of the contemporary historical process ignore these characteristics. In our day, the struggle between bourgeois and petty-bourgeois conceptions, on the one hand, and the Marxist-Leninist theory of the historical process, on the other, is most acute. The question of determining the character of the contemporary epoch and bringing out its qualitative peculiarities is on the order of the day. Bourgeois theorists regard our epoch as one in which capitalism is being “transformed”. Petty-bourgeois theorists, who have adopted Marxist terminology, keep saying that in our day it is imperialism that determines world development.

p The CPSU and its Leninist Central Committee have shown the harmfulness of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois conceptions of the contemporary epoch, for both in essence insist that capitalism continues to determine the course of the historical process. The metaphysicians accept only two stages of world history: bourgeois domination and capitalism, and the complete triumph of socialist social relations all over the globe. They do not understand the dialectics of the displacement of capitalism by socialism.

p The fact is, however, that in world history formations have never instantly succeeded each other on a world scale. Formations which had outlived their day had never given way to a new social system at a stroke. The struggle for the new mode of production went on primarily in the individual countries but was inevitably carried over into the world arena. That was how the slave-holding society emerged in the form of isolated seats while the rest of the inhabited globe continued to be at the first stage of historical development. That was how the shoots of feudalism grew up on the ruins of the collapsed slave-holding empires. The struggle between advancing capitalism and outgoing feudalism was carried on in the various countries and in the international arena for a long time.

p Indeed, a look at the early Middle Ages reveals a period in which the feudal mode of production did not yet win out finally, when slavery had not yet left the historical scene and when, consequently, feudalism did not exert a decisive influence on the course of history. It took centuries for the advantages of the feudal system to materialise and the process of its formation to be completed. In Europe, the development of the feudal mode of production went at a slow pace for about 400 years. Centuries passed before the feudal estates, with all their advantages and drawbacks, arose. Engels stressed that “the social classes of the ninth century had taken shape not in the bog of a declining civilisation, but in the travail of a new".  [168•37 

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p This idea of Engels’s is of great methodological importance. Of course, the first elements of the new mode of production did appear as the old civilisation was being destroyed, but the course of history was still being determined by the old society and its uniformities and some time had to pass before those of the full-fledged new social system began to determine the whole historical process.

p That is something bourgeois theorists could not understand for a long time. This applies to Edward Gibbon, one of the founders of bourgeois historical science in the 18th century, who believed that feudalism was “... the state of the city of Rome, during the darkness and confusion of the Middle Ages".  [169•38  Gibbon felt that this whole period was one of destruction and collapse of the old, and he did not see the emergence of a new society in general. But Guizot, a bourgeois historian of the Restoration epoch, modified this conception and concentrated his attention on the emergence of the new. In a preface to an 1828 edition of Gibbon’s work, he wrote that the downfall of the Roman Empire showed “the dilapidation of the ancient world, the spectacle of its expiring glory and its degenerate morals, the infancy of the modern world, a picture of its early progress, and the new direction imprinted on minds and characters".  [169•39  Guizot quotes a very meaningful line from the French poet Pierre Corneille, who said: “A great destiny begins, a great destiny ends.”

p Thus, bourgeois historical science was only gradually edging up to the idea that the emergence and development of the new, feudal mode of production had been a long process abounding in struggle between the old and the new in the world arena. The first bourgeois philosophical conception of the emergence of feudalism merely allowed a period of destruction and disintegration of the old world. Of course, even today, when studying the history of “individual societies" in isolation, as present-day bourgeois sociology requires, one tends to lose the idea of the world scale, and it is exceedingly difficult to understand the emergence of feudalism, which calls for an analysis of the interaction of societies differing in system in the world arena, the struggle between the old and the new not only within the given society, but also in the international arena, that is, an analysis of world development. From the standpoint of bourgeois sociology it is also impossible to answer the question when the decisive influence on the whole historical process is exerted not by the uniformities of the declining civilisation but of the emergent new society.

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p Still, the length of the transition from the ancient world to the Middle Ages produced in bourgeois historical science many terms and concepts whose content should bring out the distinction between one stage and the other. There was the concept of the “early Middle Ages”, which was introduced into scientific usage precisely to separate the early stage, when the struggle between the new and the old did not yet result in a flourishing of the new, when the old, disintegrating social system still continued to exert much influence on the historical process. For instance, the so-called Romanisation of the society of the Ostrogoths in that period amounted to the integration of the Ostrogoth aristocracy with the Roman slave-holders. The conquest of Italy by the Langobards dealt a heavier blow at the domination of slave-holding relations and at the large landed estates existing on their basis. Let us recall Engels’s well-known remark that “between the Roman colonus and the new serf there had been the free Prankish peasant".  [170•40  The rural communities which arose throughout Europe, the growing proprietary inequality, the class differentiation and the development of forms of dependence were important aspects of emergent feudalism, but it took centuries for all these processes and phenomena to develop.

p Bourgeois historiography in the 19th century was unable to analyse this process with its bluntly evolutionary approach. Fustel de Coulanges believed there was nothing but a mere continuity between the institutions of the Roman Empire and the barbarian kingdoms. In a modified version this theory was later elaborated by the well-known Austrian historian Alfons Dopsch who sought to “purify” the ancient Germanic tribes of any traces of barbarism and primitiveness, and to approximate in every way the social system of the Roman Empire and the barbaric tribes .This straightforward evolutionism was designed to obliterate the qualitative distinctions between the slave-holding system and feudalism, and to eliminate the question of transition from the old formation to the new. Another school of bourgeois historians, emphasising its “understanding” of the break in the continuity of historical development, reduced everything to violence and conquest, and depicted the Germanic tribes as some kind of Messiah carrying feudalism to Europe. All of this is the fruit of false conceptions in social thinking.

p Bourgeois social thought met a stumbling block in the problem of periods in history when the emergent regularities of the new social system were yet to determine the course of the historical process and when, by contrast, the regularities of the outgoing society still continued to be of importance. Of course, even in the early period it is not right to assume that the outgoing system fully retained its erstwhile domination. That is something it had already lost. But the new element making 171 headway did not yet have the prevailing economic, political and ideological force in the historical process.

p Of course, from the outset the destiny of the new exerts an influence on the nature and direction of the historical process, but for a long time this new element does not yet exert a decisive influence on all events.

p A characteristic feature of the world process in high antiquity was that the slave-holding states emerged as islands in a sea of barbaric tribes, which to some extent served as a nutrient medium for the slave-holding states. These tribes became a reservoir of manpower. In the epoch of the early Middle Ages, the balance of forces in the world arena changed, so that the slave-holding empires themselves, already on the decline, fell victim to the raids and conquests of the barbaric tribes. Of course, these empires were subjected to such raids even in the heyday of the slave system, but then the slave-holding mode of production in a given society, despite the upheaval, continued to develop, for the conditions for transition to feudalism had yet to take shape. Students of the ancient world tell us of “processes of feudalisation" in Egypt, after it had been conquered by Libyan tribes, or in Babylon in the period when it was being conquered by the Kassites. But even bourgeois historians do not risk saying that these processes developed and were completed in the ancient world.

p In the early Middle Ages, the situation was a different one. The slave-holding empires were already too weak to conquer the neighbouring tribes, to seize slaves and develop slave-holding relations, as will be seen from Justinian’s wars against the barbaric Goth kingdoms and his “pragmatic sanctions”. Indeed, because of its socio-economic nature the slave-holding empire was no longer interested in a steady influx of fresh masses of slaves. Byzantium was switching to the colon system, as feudal processes developed in it. In this way, wars and seizures ceased to serve the development of the slave-holding system, for they were already serving emergent feudalism. Is it right on this ground to treat the role of war and armed clashes as an absolute, even if only for that epoch of man’s history? Of course, it is not right to do so, unless one breaks with Marxism-Leninism and the truth of history.

p These acute conflicts in the sphere of policy, in the balance of forces in the world arena reflected the processes taking place chiefly in the economy. In this decisive sphere of human activity the old system had already been weakened, while the new system had yet to gain the strength and the stature to secure a complete victory.

p In place of slave labour, feudalism made use of a producer who was in possession of the means of production and engaged in farming. That was the ultimate reason for the triumph of feudalism. Under the slaveowning system the influx of slaves depended on wars of aggrandisement and plunderous raids. But when debtors were impressed into slavery for 172 their debts, this tended to erode the whole of society and led to its destruction. Feudalism changed these social relations and took society out of the dead end. That is quite obvious, but mankind did not take this path at once.

p Marx said that “serfdom in the early Middle Ages" still contained within itself “many features of ancient slavery".  [172•41  But the way to new forms of more productive labour was being opened up. There was established “a lack of freedom which may be reduced from serfdom with enforced labour to a mere tributary relationship".  [172•42  Such is the framework of the possible dynamics and tendencies in the development of the feudal mode of production.

p But it will be centuries before the features of ancient slavery disappear, the commune (mark) develops, and serfdom is established. Lenin said that “the allotment-holding peasant must be personally dependent upon the landlord, because he will not, possessing land, work for the landlord except under coercion. This system of economy gives rise to ’non-economic coercion’, to serfdom, juridical dependence, lack of full rights, etc.”   [172•43  in the feudal period, the instrument of exploitation is the attachment of the working man to the land. To develop, this process took a considerable period and required conditions which did not arise all at once. Until then, there could be no question of the domination of feudalism and its decisive prevalence over the forces of the old system.

p The period required for the maturing of feudalism and for the creation of a prevalence of its forces in the economic and political spheres is not at all a purely “European” or “Western” phenomenon.

p In India, the period of transition of feudalism was also characterised by the downfall of the big slave-holding power and the emergence in the historical arena of various tribes which had already reached the stage of disintegration of their primitive order and, joining in military alliances, invaded the ancient slave-holding states and set up feudal principalities. However peculiar the development of these processes, the overall regularity is clear. The deep crisis into which the slave-holding system was plunged heralded the birth of a new system, but it took a considerable period of struggle between the old and the new, the maturing and development of the new before it came to exert the decisive influence on the direction of the historical process and to be transformed into the dominant social system finally determining the direction of the historical process.

p The development of feudal relations in China, the profound social 173 upheavals and the downfall of the great Han power, all these are processes occurring over a long period of time. The fact that historians are at odds over the period of China’s transition to feudalism is highly indicative. In the early period of feudal relations it is hard to find a definite demarcation line between the old and the new. What is unquestionable is that there is a later line—the post-Han period—which everyone accepts as the period of domination by the feudal mode of production. How the relationships between the tribal world that had come into motion and the ancient society were shaping out, and what impact these relationships had on the development of the feudal system is a special question. For our purposes here, let us emphasise that there again tribes which had remained in the darkness of prehistory came on the scene and that the early period of feudalism in China includes interaction and struggle between ancient seats of civilisation and barbaric tribes and that only in the subsequent period does the new social system become dominant.

p In transition from one formation to another it is inevitable that the question of change of state power became most acute. Transition to the slave-holding mode of production could not have, of course, occurred but for the emergence of the machinery of force, the state, which was in the hands of the slave-holders. Various aspects of political organisation in society from the slave-holding despotisms of the Ancient East to the democracies of antiquity corresponded to the stages of development of slave-holding ralations. Republican forms of government developed in society which already rested entirely on slavery; wherever the rural commune still had a considerable role to play, we find a grosser and more primitive form of political organisation of society, the slaveholding despotism. The democracy of antiquity gave way to slaveholding empires, which expressed and consolidated the further development of slave-holding.

p The establishment of a new political organisation of society also had a great part to play in the transition to feudalism. The old slave-holding empires were doomed to destruction. Neither in Rome nor in Byzantium could they have become a political form of feudal society. With the advance of feudalism, the old empires collapsed. The establishment of a new state power of the exploiting classes took a considerable period, ranging from the barbaric kingdoms (5th-6th centuries) to the Carolingian state (7th century), and this corresponded to the period of the development of feudal property. Thus, the political organisation of society emerging in the world arena in the interests of the social and economic system which produced it was itself developing, gaining in strength or being weakened depending on the destiny of that system.

p The epoch of transition from feudalism to capitalism, which Marx, Engels and Lenin studied in depth, shows that for a fairly long time the new and the old social systems existed simultaneously in the world 174 arena. Lenin said that feudalism was characterised by the existence of “farms of the different manors, village communities and peasant families" which “were ‘self-sufficing’, were not dependent on other farms, and no power on earth could drag them out of their age-long stagnation".  [174•44  The feudal order “perpetuates technical stagnation and the producer’s condition of bondage".  [174•45 

p It was Marxism-Leninism alone that saw the main line of historical development and its stages behind the complex patchwork of political events in the epoch of transition from feudalism to capitalism. Meanwhile, bourgeois historians had produced many false theories, all of which boiled down to an attempt to obscure the qualitative distinction between capitalism and feudalism, so as to eliminate the question of any leap in the sphere of socio-economic relations. The hardest efforts here were made by the Dopsch school. Making use of some new data and some very old metaphysical and idealistic conceptions of the historical process, this school strove to show that capitalism had existed in Western Europe even at the time of the Carolingians in the form of “estate capitalism”. There being nothing new under the sun, capitalism was being “discovered” even in the 8th and 9th centuries. Actually, capitalism emerged very much later, but even then it was not capable of determining the course of world development.

p Subsequent history shows how and when capitalism came to exert a decisive influence on the whole course of world development and how it became master of the world. This process is based on the development of the capitalist mode of production. The capitalist mode of production took a relatively long time to defeat outgoing feudalism. Marx wrote: “Although we come across the first beginnings of capitalist production as early as the 14th or 15th century, sporadically, in certain towns of the Mediterranean, the capitalistic era dates from the 16th century."  [174•46  But even the 16th century was only the initial stage in the development of the capitalist mode of production. At the time, the feudal-absolutist order was established in Europe and this initially gave some leeway for the development of the capitalist mode of production, but it subsequently became necessary to destroy that order so as to consolidate and establish the domination of capitalism. The following stage in the development of capitalism is one of stubborn struggle against the feudal-absolutist forces.

p The struggle for the victory of capitalism was carried on in the individual countries and in the world arena. The French bourgeois revolution could not have been an isolated phenomenon, but emerged and developed in a definite international situation. The fact that the 175 revolution in France defeated feudalism also enabled it to attack the hostile forces threatening it in the European arena. The struggle against the feudal-absolutist forces in the individual countries and in the world arena continued in the 19th century, until the power of the bourgeoisie was finally established, until it gained a full victory and ushered in the period of its domination on a world scale. Thus, world development is the only angle from which the changeover from feudalism to capitalism can be understood.

p The political struggle in that period was of tremendous importance. In the first place, this was a struggle for state power, which the bourgeoisie sought to wrest from the landowners. Being unable to do this without the help of the people, it sought to rise to power on the shoulders of the peasantry and the plebeian elements of the cities. Because capitalism originates in the entrails of the feudal system, the transformation of the political superstructure is an important requirement at a definite stage, without which it is impossible for the new system further to develop. Feudalism in Europe was dealt one blow after another: the Reformation and the peasant war in Germany, the revolution in the Netherlands, the English revolution and, finally, the bourgeois revolution in France. These are characteristic stages in the process of world development, in the course of which the bourgeoisie and the landowners are locked in conflict and also compromise with each other in face of the growing activity of the working people, whose revolutionary scope terrifies the exploiters.

p What then is the main historical line of capitalist development, what stages has its history gone through? In the history of capitalism, Lenin identified the following main epochs: “The first epoch from the Great French Revolution to the Franco-Prussian war is one of the rise of the bourgeoisie, of its triumph, of the bourgeoisie on the upgrade, an epoch of bourgeois-democratic movements in general and of bourgeois-national movements in particular, an epoch of the rapid breakdown of the obsolete feudal-absolutist institutions. The second epoch is that of the full domination and decline of the bourgeoisie, one of transition from its progressive character towards reactionary and even ultra-reactionary finance capital. This is an epoch in which a new class—present-day democracy—is preparing and slowly mustering its forces. The third epoch, which has just set in, places the bourgeoisie in the same position as that in which the feudal lords found themselves during the first epoch. This is the epoch of imperialism and imperialist upheavals, as well as of upheavals stemming from the nature of imperialism."  [175•47  Characterising the third epoch, Lenin says: “The place of the struggle of a rising capital, striving towards national liberation 176 from feudalism, has been taken by the struggle waged against the new forces by the most reactionary finance capital, the struggle of a force that has exhausted and outlived itself and is heading downward towards decay."  [176•48 

p The main objective content of the historical phenomena in the course of the first and partially of the second period, according to Lenin, were the “convulsions” of bourgeois society as it shed various types of feudalism. “The bourgeoisie was then the chief class, which was on the upgrade as a result of its participation in those wars; it alone could come out with overwhelming force against the feudal-absolutist institutions.” That was what determined the character of the epoch. Lenin stressed: “At that time there could have been no possibility of really independent action by present-day democracy, action of the kind befitting the epoch of the over-maturity and decay of the bourgeoisie, in a number of leading countries.”  [176•49 

p Thus, at the dawn of the capitalist era, in the 16th-18th centuries, the new mode of production did not secure a dominant position and did not exert a decisive influence on the course of world development. In the subsequent epoch, which opened after the French Revolution of 1789, capitalism prevailed, but even then there was intense struggle for a rapid breakup and destruction of the feudal-absolutist system and for the development, as Lenin put it, of nationally emancipating capital on a world, or rather, on an all-European scale. In that epoch, Lenin said, “the mainspring was the movement of the bourgeoisie against the feudal and absolutist forces".  [176•50 

p These feudal-absolutist forces were a drag on the capitalist mode of production and hampered its development. The struggle was carried on within the individual countries and in the world arena, where coalitions and military-and-political alliances of the feudal-absolutist forces continued to operate.

p Without an analysis of the economic basis of the great changes in the life of the peoples, it is, of course, impossible to understand the political and ideological battles expressing the advent of these changes and showing the intensity of the struggle between the old and the new within the Individual countries and in the world arena, that is, reflecting the development of the world process and becoming its manifestation.

p That is a problem bourgeois social thinkers could not solve. For them, the question of the relation between economics, politics and ideology in the period of transition from feudalism to capitalism remained a closed book. With their defective idealistic methodology, bourgeois theorists stressed the importance of the ideological conflicts, wars and armed 177 clashes, which they said were due to ideological conflicts. The stages of the historical process disappeared, its economic basis remained in the background and only the idealistically interpreted facts of armed struggle were in evidence.

Although capitalism grew up within the entrails of feudalism, it still took a long time to overcome the old system by developing its own advantages and realising them in the sphere of world politics. The struggle for the victory of capitalism in the world arena is simultaneously a struggle for the primacy of the strongest plunderers. Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands were the strongest and richest countries in the 16th century, while France and Britain joined in the fight for world supremacy in the 17th century. After the bourgeois revolution, the balance was tilted in favour of Britain. That is how things stood in the early period of capitalist development, when the feudal-absolutist order was still dominant in the world. But the struggle against the feudalabsolutist order also frequently took the form of armed conflicts. Those are the facts bourgeois theorists usually stress, without trying to get through to their meaning. They also start from the fact that whereas under capitalism peaceful relations between nations became much more extensive and profound, as compared with those in the slave-holding and serf period, the fight between the capitalist plunderers constantly produced wars of aggrandisement, so that war continued to be a permanent instrument of policy, a means of enslaving other nations, taking over their wealth and converting them into colonial slaves.