only five years after its founding congress, the RSDLP split at a crucial party
congress held in London (at that time the vast bulk of the party leadership was
in exile), as a result of political manipulation byLenin; some unity was restored
to the RSDLP in 1906. The Mensheviks, the name means simply ‘minority’ in
Russian, believed that a Marxist revolution was impossible in Russia because it
was so underdeveloped economically, and favoured a period of reform and
economic progress before anything likesocialismorcommunismcould be
introduced. After the February revolution of 1917 they formed a party of their
own, opposed to Lenin’sBolsheviks, and indeed were initially more popular
than the latter in most parts of Russia. They were overthrown, along with the
bourgeois parties, in the October revolution (or, as some would describe it,
coup d’e ́tat) organized by the Bolsheviks, and the party was gradually
suppressed.
Mercantilism
Mercantilism has not been an acceptable economic theory anywhere in the
capitalist international arena for several centuries, and it is unlikely that one will
find someone who admits to supporting mercantilism. One will, however, not
infrequently find others being accused of blatant mercantilism. Mercantilist
economic theories technically depend on a complete identification of wealth
with some special commodity, historically usually gold or silver. The idea was
that it was the essential policy of the state to be as wealthy as possible to
facilitate an aggressive external relations policy, and it should therefore max-
imize national holdings of wealth of the precious commodity. This led in turn
to highly protectionist policies, and in the extreme, to an autarkic economic
system, completely closed to all external influence.
As international interdependence under a consensually liberal capitalist
framework has become universal, the idea of a self-contained economy can
be shown to be in no-one’s interest, at least in the long term. Protectionist
policies are no longer openly acceptable anywhere. At the same time, the idea
that wealth comprised any one commodity has vanished. Even countries that
seek to maximize, say, foreign-currency holdings, are aware that they are only
using units of account, and that wealth is not, in fact, a zero sum matter.
Nevertheless, the urge to protect one’s national economy, to prefer one’s own
producers and to protect one’s own labour force from unemployment has not
vanished. Few governments find it comfortable to explain to their electorate
that, in the long term it is in everyone’s interests that their automobile industry
collapse, or that cheap imports should be allowed from countries with lower
labour costs causing unemployment at home. Hence, there develops a perpe-
tual tendency to avoid the theoretical capitalist solution towards protectionism.
Similarly, a desire to continue counter-competitive policies of state interven-
Mercantilism