THE original slogan of the communist movement, “Workers of the world unite” — the rallying cry and final phrase from the Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Engels in 1848 — was put forward at a time when the nascent communist movement was geographically limited to Europe and North America, and focused almost exclusively on the industrial working class.

Lenin’s study of global political economy, and particularly of the dynamics of monopoly capitalism and the emergence of modern imperialism, led him to an acute understanding of the expanded — global — applicability of Marxist thought.

Study of imperialism

Marx had already outlined the economic dynamics of an emerging international capitalism in Volume I of Capital, first published in 1867: “A new and international division of labour springs up, one suited to the requirements of the main industrial countries, and it converts one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production for supplying the other part, which remains a pre-eminently industrial field.”