Or this, a shock, perhaps, to those who believe Russia cannot be considered imperialist in any Leninist sense: “[Among] the six powers [that had divided the world], we see, firstly, young capitalist powers (America, Germany, Japan) which progressed very rapidly; secondly, countries with an old capitalist development (France and Great Britain), which, of late, have made slower progress than the previously mentioned countries, and, thirdly, a country (Russia) which is economically most backward, in which modern capitalist imperialism is enmeshed, so to speak, in a particularly close network of pre-capitalist relations.” (V.I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, International Publishers, 1939, p. 81) The essence of imperialism, wrote Lenin, is the “division of nations into oppressor and oppressed.” (V.I. Lenin, Declaration of Rights of The Working and Exploited People, 4 January, 1929 in Pravda No. 2 and Izvestia No. 2.)
What do you make of the point this article raises and the criticism that Lenin’s five points don’t apply to a individual countries but are rather characterizations a globe-girding economic system? Is the article a wrong reading of Lenin?
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Yes, “oppressed” and “oppressor” in this sense are moral categories, not material ones. But ultraleftists have never understood oppression in a material sense. They identify oppression with suffering, and nothing more; which, because everybody suffers, is a very slippery slope. The ultimate absurd conclusion of this kind of thinking is that everybody in society oppresses everybody else; and that is basically western Marxism today. You cannot fix anything, you cannot build a mass movement, you cannot industrialize, you cannot propose any sort of universal destiny for human beings, because all you will be doing is enforcing oppressive authority structures. Such a philosophy is infantile, and certainly not Marxist in any meaningful sense. Avoid it like the plague.
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