It sounds a lot like "uneven and combined development". Trotsky and Lenin were trying to figure out why if a technologically advanced nation moved all their high tech shit to an underdeveloped backwards country, why did the underdeveloped country remain backward? They realized that technology takes a long time to develop and where it develops and alienates the workers and causes all these social changes that workers organize against and the bourg has to make cultural adjustments...but once its finished you can just take it to a new country where it can be sold to the ruling class along with all the methods of suppression that were learned along the way, and the new tech just strengthens the ruling class in that underdeveloped country.

But it works the other way too. For example, after the failed 1905 Russian revolution, the burgeoning proletariat of Russia looked to workers organizations in more advanced countries and adapted the union form to suit their own purposes. But the Russian bourgeoisie was a joke and wasn't able to organize against the worker orgs, which became the soviets that grew into a dual power rival until they seized power in Feb 1917.

Uneven and combined development is definitely a crucial theory in order to understand historical development.