Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
Marxism–Leninism aims to create an international communist society. It opposes colonialism and imperialism and advocates decolonisation and anti-colonial forces. It supports anti-fascist international alliances and has advocated the creation of popular fronts between communist and non-communist anti-fascists against strong fascist movements. This Marxist–Leninist approach to international relations derives from the analyses (political, economic, sociological and geopolitical) that Lenin presented in the essay "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism" (1917). Extrapolating from five philosophical bases of Marxism, namely that human history is the history of class struggle between a ruling class and an exploited class; that capitalism creates antagonistic social classes, i.e. the bourgeois exploiters and the exploited proletariat; that capitalism employs nationalist war to further private economic expansion; that socialism is an economic system that voids social classes through public ownership of the means of production and so will eliminate the economic causes of war; and that once the state (socialist or communist) withers away, so shall international relations wither away because they are projections of national economic forces, Lenin said that the capitalists' exhaustion of domestic sources of investment profit by way of price-fixing trusts and cartels, then prompts the same capitalists to export investment capital to undeveloped countries to finance the exploitation of natural resources and the native populations and to create new markets. That the capitalists' control of national politics ensures the government's military safeguarding of colonial investments and the consequent imperial competition for economic supremacy provokes international wars to protect their national interests.