LENINISM AND ^WESTERN MARXISM5' 11 even reverse the direction of the historic struggle between socialism and imperialism. Lenin had placed this struggle in the forefront as one heralding the era of proletarian revolutions. But Andersen is so diverted by the charms of bourgeois democracy from the class perspective, central to any Marxist analysis, that he reduces the entire content of this struggle to an absurd opposition between "bureaucratic regimes" and "democracy based on fully universal suffrage". In the "altered universe" that Andersen concocts, the capacity of the proletariat, extinguished under socialism, is slowly being groomed in the advanced centres of imperialism "as they steadily gain in cultural skills and self-confidence"!17 Is this the "superstructural" element that Andersen wishes to impose on further investigations into the nature and mechanisms of the bourgeois state? Is this the direction which he is attempting to advocate for "up-dating" historical materialism? It must be clearly stated that Andersen and those who think like him can have no part in the advance of Marxist theory, and calling themselves "Western Marxists" makes not an iota of difference. Rigorous and continuing criticism of the political forms evolved by proletarian dictatorships certainly forms a major part of the advance of Marxist-Leninist theory in the contemporary period, but it cannot be made by losing sight of the class character of the state form in question, still less does it require this window-dressing of bourgeois democracy. In fact, following Lenin in his critique of Kautsky, one grasps the inherent duplicity of the so-called Marxists who subscribe to this position. Andersen, while claiming to identify a distinct tendency within Marxism, has in fact attempted to re-interpret the working class movement in Europe (for him, by definition, it can exist nowhere else as a mature movement) which would eliminate the world context provided by the sucessful socialist revolutions in a number of countries and the collapse of the vast colonial empires. For both these "oversights" it is not his intellectual negligence but his Trotskyite understanding which must be held responsible. If the former are the target of vitriolic attacks it is because they are the "official" communists, the political off-spring of a "stratum" (party) which would not wait for imperialism and bourgeois democracy to educate the oppressed masses but took on that task themselves. The latter are condemned to silence. So low is the spontaneous democratic training of the peoples of the erstwhile colonial countries that they do not even merit a mention by Andersen, who has no place in his account for the massive upsurge of national liberation struggles, for the great