I agree, but I wanna point out Marx also agrees with you! Marx is slandered as thinking the revolution will start in the developed core. This is incorrect. The reality is Marx (and Engels) consistently (from the leadup to 1848 onwards) pointed to the revolution starting outside the core (at the time britain).
In 1848 (i can dig up quotes if u want but on my phone atm), Marx and Engels consistently pointed to the revolution starting at the peripheries (e.g. Poland, Hungary, Italy) and spreading closer to but still not in the core (e.g. France, Germany), leading to a military confrontation between the revolutionary bloc and the english-russian alliance. Marx and Engels view was that only such a "world war" (they used this phrase) could give the proletariat in the core the opportunity to rise up without being instantly squished by the british-russian military alliance.
This is the sequence of events they predicted in their newspaper: national bourgeois liberation revolutions at the periphery (e.g. poland, hungary); bourgeois revolutions closer to the core in germany-france-italy; war between revolutionary bourgeois germany-france-italy-hungary-poland and reactionary feudal-bourgeois england-russia; proletarian revolution in both these bourgeois blocs.
Later on, in December 1869 letter to Engels iirc, Marx explicitly revised this further, saying that because the English proletariat benefitted from the colonial oppression of the colonies (he talks about ireland in the letter, but its applicable to e.g. india as well) theyd never accomplish anything until they were rid of ireland (i.e.. that ireland rebelled and threw the english out)
Reading this like "nope, sorry bud all ur hopes and dreams are gonna be crushed next year"
Poor marx
If Marx were plucked from Cologne in 1848, many supposed marxist would call him a third worldist imo
The idea that Lenin innovated new ideas about imperialism etc is an interesting one to me. On the one hand, the more I read Marx the more I see everything people say Lenin "innovated" already objectively present in 1848-9 writings of Marx and Engels, and Lenin seems more to uphold those views against revisionists like post 1914 Kaustsky. But on the other hand from the perspective of communists in the early 20th century, without access to anywhere near as many of Marx's writings, these things may have been seen as innovations ig.
like a big example of something framed as an innovation is the idea of the proletarian revolution immediately succeeding a bourgeois revolution instead of coming after decades of bourgeois rule. This was hugely contentious in 1917, and Lenin was called "non-marxist" for saying it, but that was basically the view marx espoused back in 1848 wrt Germany's bourgeois revolution when germany was less industrially developed than 1917 russia