This is what some modern communists say, and it is just an excuse (and in fact wrong, it will not work even in that case). Early communists actually believed the opposite thing: an example of one communitst nation would be enough to convert the whole world.
It’s been a while since I read Marx and Engels, but I’m not sure they would have been speaking in terms of conversion by example. IIRC, they thought of communism as a more-or-less inevitable development from capitalism, and that it would develop somewhat orthogonally to nation-state boundaries but establish itself first in those nations that were most industrialized (and therefore had progressed the furthest in Marx’s future-historical timeline). At the time they were writing, that would probably have meant Britain.
The idea of socialism in one country was a development of the Russian Revolution, and is something of a departure from Marxism as originally formulated.
This is what some modern communists say, and it is just an excuse (and in fact wrong, it will not work even in that case). Early communists actually believed the opposite thing: an example of one communitst nation would be enough to convert the whole world.
It’s been a while since I read Marx and Engels, but I’m not sure they would have been speaking in terms of conversion by example. IIRC, they thought of communism as a more-or-less inevitable development from capitalism, and that it would develop somewhat orthogonally to nation-state boundaries but establish itself first in those nations that were most industrialized (and therefore had progressed the furthest in Marx’s future-historical timeline). At the time they were writing, that would probably have meant Britain.
The idea of socialism in one country was a development of the Russian Revolution, and is something of a departure from Marxism as originally formulated.