4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
Prcobrazensky.1 Still, as far as his own text is concerned, Andersen claims that "the final word rests with Lenin".
A closer look at the "structural coordinates" of the proletarian movement of the time, which are identified as having spawned "Western" Marxism, shows that this claim may be no more than a conscious attempt to conceal the fact that Andersen's account, whatever be its merits in analysing European socio-political thought, is fundamentally anti-Leninist on all questions crucial to the defence and further advance of proletarian revolution.
"In 1924", we are told, "Lenin died". The repudiation of Leninist theory that follows as Andersen presents his perspective, is carried out as an exposure of Stalin and "Stalinization". In this case the ready scapegoat is presented in terms of pure bourgeois prejudice with not a hint of an analysis of the experiences of socialist states, for which the international communist movement is constantly upbraided in the text. "Stalin's political apparatus actively suppressed revolutionary mass practices in Russia itself, and increasingly discouraged or sabotaged them outside the Soviet Union. The consolidation of a bureaucratically privileged stratum above the working class was secured by a police regime of ever intensifying ferocity. ...The most advanced country in the world in the development of historical materialism, which had out-dated all Europe by the variety and vigour of its theorists, was turned within a decade into a semi-literate backwater, formidable only by the weight of its censorship and the crudity of its propaganda".5
If there is no evaluation of Stalin's leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik), no analysis of the provocative prose, of which the above is only one sample, there is no shortage of innuendoes: "The Soviet State—caught in a vice of Russian backwardness (note, the same backwardness from which Lenin's writings suffered) without political aid from abroad—started to become endangered at home. The hardening usurpation of power by the party apparatus ••••belatedly became evident to Lenin himself... in 1922".6 And so the truth slips out. Prior to Stalin's taking over as general secretary of the party, years before the long debate with the Left Opposition which consolidated his position within the party, Lenin had become aware, and that too, "belatedly", of the "usurpation of power by the party appapatus"! Andersen's interpretation follows from his assertion that Lenin's formulations, for all the "systematization" they achieve, were after all rooted in the backwardness of the