ABSTRACT
The democratic undertones of Marxism are disposed of, revolutionary anarchism is extirpated, and the task of construction in spirit and by means antithetical to the revolutionary stage is begun. The “bourgeois democratic” state has, in effect, been smashed; but, in ironic fulfillment of Karl Marx’s dictum of the state’s being the executive committee of the exploiting class, the executive organs of the Communist party became the state. Any drastic attempt to apply the logic of Marxism in defiance of its revolutionary spirit would have met, in the Communist party of 1919 or 1920, with repudiation by a vast majority of its members. The problem that confronted Stalin and his advisers in 1927-1928, with the country’s economy recovered to, roughly, the pre-war level, with the state and party firmly in their hands, was the classical problem of Marxism: the transition to socialism and the method of industrialization under Russian conditions. The peasant collectivization illustrates the meaning of Marxism under Russian conditions.
