The Soviet forebears of world-systems analysis?

Reflections on Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism by Kuusinen

I am a diagnosed obsessive-compulsive, and it reflects in many spheres of my life even as some of these manifestations are benign enough not to need clinical treatment (at least in my judgement). One such is in reading. I cannot dispose of anything on my bookshelf, no matter how old, random, or not worth having unless I have read it. Cover-to-cover. One such, which would fetch a decent price on eBay, is Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, a Soviet political education text translated and published by Foreign Languages Press in 1963. A team of scholars compiled the book, but the editing effort was headed by one-time Finnish revolutionary Otto Willie Kuusinen — who gets the credit when it is cited (1963).

Anyway, the point being, that I finally forced myself to sit down and read this in lieu of more interesting things because I had had it sitting around for too long. I don’t remember when I bought in or why — in a time when I had more money, and was often in altered states which lend themselves so well to impulse buys. At any rate, I settled in for a slog. Early readers will know that I share Wallerstein’s (1995) assessment of Leninism as a historically transitory political form, one whose revolutionary pretensions paradoxically helped to stabilize the capitalist world-system by raising the hope that a fundamental transformation could result from nationally-segmented industrialization and (state) capital accumulation in the periphery and semi-periphery. So the daylight between Kuusinen and the “national bourgeois” politicians he criticizes (1963: 403-404) are actually rather less than might be imagined. This book has everything Wallerstein criticizes in spades — the groan-inducing Enlightenment positivism which views capitalism as one “historically progressive” stage of linear human evolution (Kuusinen, 1963: 85-87; for a critique see Wallerstein, 115-137), the ridiculous characterizations of the twentieth-century Global South as somehow “feudal” (see Kuusinen, 1963, Chapter Sixteen). I was actually kind of surprised by the extent to which it urged collaboration with the chauvinist parties of European social democracy (see Kuusinen, 1963: 360-365) — praise for the French Socialist Party is schizophrenically combined with that of the Algerian national-liberation struggle! Keep in mind that Fundamentals came out in 1963, after Khruschev’s “Secret Speech,” and so is at least in part heavily intellectualized propaganda for the bureaucratic elite who would ultimately bring the USSR down once it suited them (Amin, 2016: Chapter Three) — and for all of their their more-or-less openly liberal priorities, like those of “peaceful coexistence” and “convergence” with the West. I don’t think that “Marxism-Leninism” was ever anything more ideologically substantial than a justification for the immediate political exigencies of Moscow, but unlike most who say this I don’t really mean it as critique or moral condemnation. It simply was what was on the table at a time when the “encirclement” of a strong capitalism had limited the paths available for the Soviets (or anyone) to take, in a way that is less true today. For instance, it’s hard to argue with Moscow encouraging Western Hemisphere communist parties to support their governments in the war effort against the Axis — when thirty million of your people are massacred, caring about much else is lunacy. That doesn’t mean that the CPUSA, or even more farcical Argentine Communist Party had to go along of course — but neither did Stalin somehow “make” them, if he even could.

All that aside, there are some interesting things in Fundamentals:

1. Although Kuusinen repeats the Leninist “capital export” theory of imperialism whose historical-statistical basis was fatally undermined by the critiques of Emmanuel (1972a) — the imperialized countries export capital to the imperialist ones, not the other way around — there are also repeated references to “unequal” or “non-equivalent” exchange (see Kuusinen, 1963, 286; 411). What makes this curious is that Fundamentals appeared nine years before the concept was really popularized by the work of Emmanuel (1972b). I should mention here that part of the reason I chose to plow through Kuusinen rather than equally dry tomes on my bookshelf was seeing his work referred to favorably during a read-through of Andre Gunder Frank’s (1978: 20) classic Capitalismo y subdesarollo [Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America]. So Kuusinen, and by extension Soviet Marxism did have some direct influence on early dependency/world-systems thought — even after the former had begun its (ultimately) terminal decline. More on this in a bit. Of course, Kuusinen (1963: 438-439) also condemns the “equalization of wages” as an “anti working-class measure,” which even if in the context of criticizing the Common Market of European monopoly-capital negates the central political demand implied by unequal exchange theory. Kuusinen (1963, 286) states that “the relatively high standard of living in the small group of capitalistically developed countries rests upon plundering the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America.” But his sections on the “labor aristocracy” is the typical one of those who prize fidelity to Lenin’s original — and like so much else in Lenin, polemic more than substantive — formulation, where this term refers solely to an alleged miniscule “top stratum” of the imperialist-country working-class, whose precise boundaries are however never defined (see Kuusinen, 253-254). The evident contradiction is likely a result of the book’s political-propagandistic function — Soviet leadership, “revisionist” or no, saw both the Third World movement and Northern socialist/communist parties as allies, and thus could not admit any opposition between the two.

2. Perhaps more interesting is that Kuusinen (1963, 384) makes a couple of references to “semi-proletarian”(-ization). This is a concept I first encountered in Wallerstein (2004: 32-36) who argues that less-than-full proletarianization (that is, dependence on wage-work for survival) is the normative state of most of the global labor force in a capitalist world-economy. He explicitly contrasts this position with the classical Marxist(-Leninist) one, where capitalism is seen to be intrinsically connected with the fullest expansion of wage-labor and any moment of production where this does not hold true is defined by “semi-feudalism” (see Wallerstein, 2004: 12-13). Evidently, the concept of semi-proletarian has an earlier provenance, since Kuusinen (1963: 254) quotes Lenin on it. The former does make frequent recourse to the anachronistic concepts of “feudal holdovers” and “semi-feudalism,” but interestingly also describes semi-proletarianization as something which is increasing — that is, momentarily breaking with his own mechanistic schema which sees history as unidirectionally moving towards the expansion of “capitalism” and its typical forms.

What’s my takeaway from this handful of sentences in an old Soviet political textbook?

My interest was sparked by the use of some terms earlier than what is typically considered their date of coinage. Unequal exchange has a long Marxian and even pre-Marxian history (see Brolin, 2007) — particularly in the sense of unequal exchange between town and country that Kuusinen (1963: 387) at one point uses — but its usage to refer to a generalized form of exploitation in North-South trade is undoubtedly credited as beginning with Emmanuel. The appearance of some world-systems inflected terms originally in the work of Lenin is noteworthy given the growing interaction (see for instance Teschke, 2003; Anievas and Nişancıoğlu, 2015) between world-systems writing and that dealing with uneven and combined development (UC&D). UC&D is typically seen as originating with Trotsky (2008), but as Jason W. Moore reminded me recently, that seminal chapter in History of the Russian Revolution is after all just a re-hashing of Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia. The influence of Bolshevik authors on world-systems is on a certain level obvious — Lenin’s Imperialism (1927), for all its flaws, along with Bukharin’s Imperialism and world economy (2010), created the basic problematic of a capitalism which is polarizing on the international scale — but its subtler dimensions are certainly provocative to think about.

More generally, I think the outlined moments in Kuusinen offer a glimpse of the underappreciated richness — by me personally, but by Westerners at large — of Soviet, and later Russian Marxism. Kuusinen, after all, compiled Fundamentals with the help of a large team of authors, and it appears that some of their generative analyses made it into what is otherwise a dry political textbook. Such textures in Lenin, I think, has been underappreciated partially out of fears of what effects using his name could have on one’s precarious niche in the neoliberal university, but also undoubtedly because Soviet, and later Western communist politics have left us with only the political-polemic side of his work. It is understandable why that side would be of the greatest relevance to organizers, but the loss of the analytic Lenin is an unambiguous tragedy for scholars. In the case of (ex-)Soviet Marxism writ, for myself at least the issue is largely one of language barrier. Russia, at least, continues to have a flourishing Marxist academe, one which has not been driven underground by the type of state repression and/or paramilitary violence seen in Ukraine since 2014 and even earlier in the Central Asian republics. With the possible exception of Boris Kagarlitsky, however — a seemingly avowed liberal never known for political consistency to begin with — very few contemporary Russian Marxist or world-historical writers are translated. Andrei Fursov, for instance, the doyen of Russian historical sociology, has only a single* readily accessible journal publication in English, and none at all of book- or monograph-length. My exposure to Fursov mainly comes from the Telegram channel in which he discusses the thought of his mentor, V.V. Krylov — in turn an unknown thinker in the West — and Krylov’s difficulties within the increasingly bureaucratic-authoritarian late Soviet academy. In any event, the world-systemic insights on display (secondhand) from Krylov in the channel demonstrate that Soviet writers were transiting in parallel a remarkably similar track to post-dependency thought elsewhere in the world. Evidently, that current was strong enough in the Soviet academy to even leave its mark on a heavily-constrained writing process like that of Fundamentals.

Notice — the rest of the world, and not the West/North. If it were just that Soviet/Russian writers are unavailable in English translation, that would be easily explained by Anglo-American chauvinism — although, English is a lingua franca for much of the African continent too. But the dearth of publications by Fursov, for instance, also extends into the Spanish language — all that can be found online are odd fragments translated by crank-y sites with names like antiglobalista. In general, I think it’s interesting how much the Latin American dependency analyses — which paved the way for such thinkers as Emmanuel and Wallerstein — were written explicitly in rebuttal to Moscow-promulgated views of the political economy of imperialism. This is more than understandable in light of, for instance, how the Soviet-aligned Argentine Communist Party’s line that Argentina needed intensified bourgeois power in order to break out of “semi-feudalism” led it to take diametrically anti-popular, pro-imperialist stances such as support not only for the 1955 overthrow of Perón but even initially for the 1976 military coup that ushered in Videla (see Peña, 2012: 63-66; 502; Martin, 2023). But as can be seen, it is not clear that liberal political contortions, even where Lenin was cited to back them up, were really in sync with the living, dynamic corpus of contemporary Soviet Marxism.

*Fursov did spend a year at the Fernand Braudel Center, and apparently contributed an article to Review, but it has not been digitized and my inquiries at the Binghamton library in search of a hard copy were fruitless. Furthermore, someone who was at FBC during that time had no recollection of him, so the whole thing is rather mysterious.

References:

Amin, Samir. Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016.

Anievas, Alexander, and Kerem Nişancıoğlu. How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism. London, England: Pluto Press, 2015.

Brolin, John. The bias of the world: Theories of unequal exchange in history. No. 9. Lund University, 2007.

Bukharin, Nikolaĭ. Imperialism and world economy. Nabu Press, 2010.

Emmanuel, Arghiri. Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade. Translated by Brian Pearce. New York: [Monthly Review Press], 1972b.

Emmanuel, Arghiri. "White-settler colonialism and the myth of investment imperialism." New Left Review 73, no. 1 (1972a).

Gunder Frank, André. Capitalismo y subdesarrollo en América Latina. 5a ed. México: Siglo XXI, 1978.

Kuusinen, O. W. (Otto Wille). Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, Manual. Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1963.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilych. Imperialism. New York: Vanguard Press, 1927.

Martin, Hugo. “Jorge Sigal: ‘Para el Partido Comunista, Videla era un general moderado con el que se podía hablar.’” infobae, May 4, 2023. https://www.infobae.com/politica/2023/05/04/jorge-sigal-para-el-partido-comunista-videla-era-un-general-moderado-con-el-que-se-podia-hablar/.

Peña, Milcíades. Historia Del Pueblo Argentino: 1500-1955. C.A.B.A. [i.e. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires]: Emecé, 2012.

Teschke, Benno. The myth of 1648: class, geopolitics, and the making of modern international relations. Verso, 2003.

Trotsky, Leon. History of the Russian revolution. Haymarket Books, 2008.

Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice. After Liberalism. New York: New Press, 1995.

Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice. Historical Capitalism: with Capitalist Civilization. New ed. London: Verso, 2011.

Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice. World-Systems Analysis: an Introduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.