62 SOCIAL SCIENTIST criticism of Anderson on this score seems all the more incongruous considering the latter's unequivocal disengagement from a reformist strategy: For us, a socialist revolution means something harder and more precise: the dissolution of the existing capitalist state, the expropriation of the possessing classes from the means of production, and the construction of a new type of state and economic order, in which the associated producers can for the first time exercise direct control over their working lives and direct power over their political government.6 Would Prasad consider this anti-Leninist? We have tried to answer Madhu Prasad's criticisms of Anderson's various anti-Leninst sins. If we have been a bit fuzzy in our arguments we may perhaps be pardoned considering the difficult terrain we had ventured into, for Prasad is both elusive and allusive. Elusive in her criiique as philosophy, theory, strategy, tactics dance about as in a masked ball. When you think you have come to grips with her philosophical criticism you find that it is only a tactic you were pursuing. At the outset she quotes from Stalin's Foundations of Leninism: "Leninism is Marxism of the era of Imperialism and the proletarian revolution. To be more exact Leninism is the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution in general, the theory and tactics of the dictatorship of the proletariat in particular." She contends that this "simple truth" is wilfully overlooked by Anderson. The quotation itself is rather unhappy and Prasad finds its imprecision to her taste. Having accomplished this simplification by decree, one is left guessing whether Leninism itself is the philosophy. Or, does it provide the theory for all political practice? Or is it just the strategy of proletarian revolution? Or the tactics of the Russian revolution? The texts she quotes are polemical, but she exalts them to the general (theoritical) level and then, quite glibly, uses them to deny the need for analysis of other conjunctures. Elusion is also the hallmark of E M S Namboodiripad's critique. Allusive is what we meant by 'making faces behind the back'. Prasad seems to be as much opposed to the theories whose process of becoming Anderson has interpreted, as to the interpretation itself. If opposition was against the latter alone, it could have been criticised along with the setting out of a more plausible interpretation of the growth of this body of literature. Otherwise argument is difficult, for Anderson is a particularly inappropriate scapegoat for the Western Marxists. He is as much opposed to them as he is, for separate reasons, to Thompson. Strait-jackets or simple ahistorical opposition? (Hegelian-anti-Hegelian, Leninist-anti-Leninist) especially when not accompanied