V. I.

Lenin

Materials Relating to the Revision of the Party Programme

3

Comments on the Remarks Made by the Committee of the April All-Russia Conference

With regard to the remarks on the preamble to the programme, I
must say the following.

In my opinion, there is no need for a revision of the entire
preamble. The plan for such a revision proposed by the committee
seems to me theoretically incorrect.

As now worded, the preamble contains a description and analysis
of the main and essential features of capitalism as a social and
economic system. Fundamentally, these features have not
been changed by imperialism, by the era of finance capital. Imperialism is a continuation of the development of
capitalism, its highest stage—in a sense, a transition stage to socialism.

I cannot therefore see how the addition of an analysis of
imperialism to the general analysis of the basic features of
capitalism can be regarded as “mechanical”. Imperialism, in
fact, does not and cannot transform capitalism from top
to bottom. Imperialism complicates and sharpens the contradictions of capitalism, it “ties up” monopoly with free
competition, but it cannot do away with exchange, the market, competition, crises, etc.

Imperialism is moribund capitalism, capitalism which is dying
but not dead. The essential feature of imperialism, by and
large, is not monopolies pure and simple, but monopolies in
conjunction with exchange, markets, competition, crises.

It is therefore theoretically wrong to delete an analysis of
exchange, commodity production, crises, etc., in general and to
“replace” it by an analysis of imperialism as a whole .

There is no such whole. There is a transition from competition to monopoly, and therefore the programme would be
much more correct, and much more true to reality, if it retained
the general analysis of exchange, commodity production, crises,
etc., and had a characterisation of the growing monopolies added to it. In fact it is this combination of
antagonistic principles, viz., competition and monopoly, that is
the essence of imperialism, it is this that is making for the
final crash, i.e., the socialist revolution.

Furthermore, in the case of Russia it would be wrong to present
imperialism as a coherent whole (imperialism in general is an
incoherent whole), since in Russia there are no few fields and
branches of labour that are still in a state of transition from
natural or semi-natural economy to capitalism. Backward and poor
though they are, they nevertheless exist, and given the
conditions, may introduce an element of delay in the collapse of
capitalism.

The programme proceeds—as it should proceed—from the simplest phenomena of capitalism to the more complex and
“higher” ones, from exchange to commodity production, to the
ousting of small industries by the large ones, to crises and so
forth, ending up in imperialism, that highest stage of capitalism, which is only now being reached in the advanced
countries. That is how matters stand in actual reality. To begin
by placing “exchange” in general in juxtaposition with the
export of capital is incorrect historically and theoretically.

These are the comments I have to make on the remarks of the
committee.

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