World Market Discussion

Abstract

One of the outstanding characteristics of the Soviet experience has been its particular process of accumulation which took place relatively independently of the international division of labour. This corresponded to one of the original objectives of Marxist revolutionaries. In contrast to certain trends within the Second International, colonial exploitation was considered out of the question, their aim being the replacement of capitalism on a world scale by an alternative economic order. Political events in Europe during the first decades of this century re-inforced this way of thinking. Competition among leading capitalist states for privileges in the world system, culminating in the First World War, had been a major cause of the internal crisis in Russia. Although an imperialist country itself, Tsarist Russia was not among the leading capitalist nations. In fact the opposite was the case. The Bolshevik Revolution thus took place, as Lenin said, in the ‘weakest link of the imperialist chain’.