LENIN’S ECONOMICS: A MARXIAN
CRITIQUE$
Seongjin Jeong
ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts an evaluation of Lenin’s economic thoughts from a
Marxian standpoint. This chapter argues that Lenin’s reading of Marx’s
Capital in Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) was biased
toward Ricardian or logico-historicist interpretation of value, disproportionality
theory of crisis as well as economic determinism, characteristic
of the Second International Marxism. While admitting that Lenin
overcame economic determinism and reformist politics of the Second
International Marxism in his Imperialism (1917), this chapter shows
that some essential elements, such as thesis of progressiveness of
capitalism, stagiest or typologist conceptions of capitalism, still persisted
within and after Imperialism. Moreover, this chapter argues that Lenin’s
Imperialism cannot be considered as a successful concretization of three
latter parts of Marx’s plan of critique of political economy in Grundrisse
(1857), that is, State (Part 4), Foreign Trade (Part 5), and World
Market Crisis (Part 6). This chapter also argues that the ambivalence of
Lenin’s economic thoughts and incomplete break with the Second
International Marxism unexpectedly led to Stalinist thesis of state