FP’s podcast Ones and Tooze has recently launched a new mini-series to mark two key dates in twentieth-century history: the beginning and the end of the Soviet Union (December 1922 and December 1991). The series opens, quite logically, with an episode on Lenin and is set to continue with discussions of Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky and Stalin.
The first instalment, Episode 219 (available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXJxP2QigWc), is certainly worth listening to. It is intellectually rich, ranges widely over twentieth-century history, and places Lenin within a broad geopolitical and ideological landscape. Yet, for all its strengths, it does not really deliver on what its title promises: “The Economic Legacy of Vladimir Lenin.” You will not learn very much about Lenin’s economic legacy, either in terms of his intellectual contribution to political economy or the concrete economic policies implemented under his leadership. The discussion focuses primarily on Lenin’s political legacy: the idea of the “weak link” in the imperialist chain, the theory and practice of the revolutionary party, and the strategic choices of Bolshevism in a backward, agrarian country.
To be sure, Lenin was first and foremost a professional revolutionary rather than a professional economist. Yet his economic thinking, and its evolution across different phases of Russian and global development, is of considerable interest. The episode briefly mentions two major pre-revolutionary works, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) and Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), but even these are treated mainly as background to his political strategy rather than as contributions to the analysis of capitalist development, concentration, monopoly and the export of capital.
Tooze is right to stress what is genuinely novel in Imperialism: Lenin’s decision to shift the analytical spotlight from a handful of “advanced” countries to the colonised and semi-colonial world, the three quarters of humanity largely ignored by mainstream economists and socialist parties of his time, which Tooze reads, suggestively, as an early reflection on “globalization.” Yet in the episode this shift appears primarily in its political form, as a re-mapping of the revolutionary “weak link” in the imperialist chain, while the specifically economic implications of Lenin’s analysis receive much less attention.
Before 1917, however, Lenin had already formulated ideas that would echo far beyond his own time. In Imperialism, he does not simply re-label great-power rivalry; he recasts capitalism as a hierarchically structured world system in which a handful of “advanced” states extract super-profits from a colonised and dependent majority. His insistence on the “uneven economic and political development” of capitalism undermines the comforting reading of Marx’s dictum that the more developed country shows the less developed “the image of its own future.” For Lenin, the combination of monopoly, capital export and colonial subordination tended to lock much of Asia, Africa and Latin America into a peripheral, dependent trajectory under capitalism. Later development economics and, more explicitly, dependency and world-system theories would build on similar insights about core–periphery relations, often without acknowledging how much of this problematic had already been posed, in embryo, in Lenin’s pre-1917 work.
Much of Lenin’s economic legacy, however, lies in his writings and policies from 1917 onwards. It encompasses his reflections on the transition to socialism in a backward country, his theorisation of “state capitalism” under socialist control as a necessary stage, the abandonment of War Communism and the turn to the New Economic Policy, including the replacement of grain requisitions with a tax in kind, and his increasingly explicit view that the ultimate criterion for the superiority of socialism had to be sustained, innovation-based growth of labour productivity. As Branko Milanović has recently underlined in his discussion of Lenin’s 1922 writings on NEP and state capitalism, Lenin presents this arrangement as one in which capitalist methods are tolerated and even encouraged in order to create the material base for communism through higher labour productivity, without any clear time limit beyond the open-ended formula that state capitalism should last “as long as it takes” for workers to learn to run the economy themselves – a reading Milanović connects to later ideological justifications of Chinese-style state capitalism (“socialism with Chinese characteristics”).
This orientation towards harnessing state-regulated markets and state capitalism for productivity-driven catch-up growth found programmatic expression not only in the famous formula “Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country,” but also in the early attempts at complex, territorially integrated planning that laid the foundations of the Soviet planning system. The roots of this approach can already be seen in his pre-revolutionary writings, where he stressed the territorial structure of the economy, regional specialisation, and the alignment of production with local needs and comparative advantages.
To be fair to Tooze, some of these elements are mentioned, including the shift from War Communism to NEP in 1921, but they are framed largely as Bolshevik “survival tactics” rather than as components of a coherent and evolving system of economic views.
The discussion in the episode may also leave the impression, familiar from Lenin’s contemporary critics, that his economic thinking was essentially opportunistic: a string of ad hoc improvisations in response to crisis. This, I would argue, is misleading. Lenin’s position was principled in its ultimate aims: the socialisation of the means of production; the organisation of production under workers’ control; a planned development strategy grounded in territorial differentiation, regional needs and comparative advantages; and a conception of economic policy that ought to be shaped through broad, democratic discussion inside the workers’ movement. At the same time, he was acutely aware that the concrete path towards these goals would be anything but linear. Circumstances, including civil war, foreign intervention, economic collapse and the failure of European revolution, would force detours, compromises and temporary retreats. Precisely for that reason, when Lenin argued for specific policies such as the New Economic Policy, he consistently framed them as concessions and retreats necessitated by the situation, while reiterating that the strategic objective remained a socialist economy based on socialised property, worker participation and planned, territorially integrated development.
This body of work, developed as the hoped-for European revolution failed to materialize and the Bolsheviks confronted the realities of governing a poor, war-ravaged country in isolation, is central to understanding twentieth-century debates on late development, planning versus markets, and mixed economic systems. Serious engagement with Lenin’s economic legacy would help clarify how he thought about accelerated catch-up growth, the role of the state in directing accumulation, and the limits and uses of market mechanisms under socialism. It would be worthwhile to see a future discussion that takes this dimension seriously.