I don’t have the exact quote, if I did I would just search it and find it myself, but it essentially states that the communist revolution (or “revolution” in general, but it was related to socialism) would happen in industrialized countries first and then spread to non-industrialized ones. It was something like revolution starting in rich countries first and then in “poor” ones. Or I could be misremembering the quote entirely and it was the exact opposite point being made: revolution would begin in the non-industrialized countries and then spread to the industrialized.
Does that makes sense? I hope I’m making sense. I remember hearing this in class but I forgot who was named as the owner. Was it Marx? Lenin? Engels? Someone else? I keep forgetting to ask my professor so I’m asking here. I need it to make a point in my paper.
This is a notion that goes as far back as Engel’s principles of communism (section linked), that the revolution would be more likely in countries where the productive forces were the most developed, spreading outwards. Many (European) authors wrote something like that a lot basically up to the Russian revolution, where an actual successful revolution happened outside the imperial core and the European revolutions failed to follow through.
AFAIK this was also the basis for one of the early theoretical splits between the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks and Trotsky in-between, with their theories of two-stage revolution/stagism (first a bourgeois revolution is necessary to end feudalism and develop capitalism, then a socialist revolution) or permanent revolution, which IIRC at some point was used to advocate for exporting the revolution to the imperial core in order to receive material support back from the developed nations.
Now after the many ML revolutions peripheral nations, this position is reserved mostly to Western chauvinist social-democrats or revisionists, specially those who deny or ignore the theory of imperialism. AFAIK the standard notion now is that, with the exportation of capital and labour exploitation, and the opportunity for broad national anti-imperialist alliances, the peripheral nations are the ones with greater revolutionary potential.
I may be wrong there, and if so, I’d be glad to be corrected.