66 SOCIAL SCIENTIST "belief that Lenin's State and Revolution and Imperialism 'exhaust' all that has to be said on the matter. Basu and Ghosh have followed Anderson to the point where, in their view, any justifiable criticism of his position would of necessity be merely peripheral. I have specifically referred to Lenin's Imperialism not because it 'exhausts' the subject, but because it provides ''a composite picture of the world capitalist system in its international relationship" (Imperialism, p 7). It thus contrasts sharply with Andersen's picture of capitalism in its "Central and Western European" relationship. The latter obliterates the contours of Lenin's analysis and reduces the category 'imperialism' to insignificance, as is evident from Anderson's conclusion that "this was also the epoch of an unparalleled objective consolidation of capital throughout the advanced industrial world ... a new phase in the development of the mode of production as such, apparently confounding classical predictions". The geographical and historical limitations imposed by Anderson's account are used to effect a fundamental theoretical shift from Lenin, and one would have to be really naive to accept the interpretation that they serve merely to focus on "periods of buoyancy within the long-run trend". Lenin's concern, in State and Revolution, with the nature of the State as an organ of class rule, is not merely academic. His analysis of the class character of all States, and the inclusion of democratic republics as a form of the bourgeois State is significant; it emphasises precisely the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat, ie., "the proletariat organised as a ruiing class" (State and Revolution, p 254) for ttie success of the socialist revolution. Nor does Lenin mince words in precisely identifying the organisation necessary for initiating and bringing to completion the tasks of socialism. "The proletariat needs state power,... both to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population—the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and semi-proletarians—in the work of organising a socialist economy. By educating the workers' party, Marxism educates the vanguard of the proletariat, capable of assuming power and leading the whole people to socialism, of directing and organising the new system, of being...the leader of all the working and exploited people in organising their social life without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie" (State and Revolution, p 255). Convinced of Anderson's "unequivocal disengagement from a reformist strategy", Basu and Ghosh reproduce his "harder and more precise" meaning of the socialist revolution, concluding with the rhetorical poser, "Would Prasad consider this anti-Leninist?" Unashamedly following the precision of my "gospel" to expose the hollowness of Anderson's apparent revolutionism, I would ask Basu and Ghosh to look more closely at the selection they have made from