REPLY 67 Anderson and see if they would consider it "Leninist". Here is what the socialist revolution means to Anderson: "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." What is absent from this statement is precisely Lenin's central theme, i. e., the proletariat organised as the ruling class. Instead we have the ambiguous phrase, "associated producers". But how are these "producers' to be identified in class terms? Where Lenin distinguishes between 'producers', the exploited, in terms of the classes to which they belong, asserting thereby the significance of the leadership of the proletariat in the struggle for socialism, Anderson, by the use of the term 'producers', attempts to level out the class distinctions. As such he is silent on the question which is central to the class character of the socialist revolution—the leadership of the working class. A direct consequence of this -is Anderson's conception of a "new type of state and economic order in which the associated producers" have certain economic and political rights. However radical Anderson's commitment to "direct control over their working lives and direct power over their political government" may appear, it effectively rests on denying his class-neutral producers the right to constitute the State. The crucial difference between the "existing capitalist state" and the ^new type of state" is thus a difference between a class State and a State which transcends class differentiations. But how is one to distinguish this assertion of the state, while remaining supremely indifferent to its class nature, from the idealised Hegelian conception of the state? And how is one to incorporate it within the Marxist-Leninist conception of the state? Further, as my article shows, Anderson is of the view that stable parliamentary democracies in the advanced capitalist countries are providing the conditions, by developing the "cultural skills and self-confidence" of the exploited, for effecting the transition to the "new type state". Thus the mass revolutionary movement in Europe does not require organisational constraints, class leadership or finally even a class State. Now the struggle too is deprived of its class character so that Anderson's view of the struggle between Imperiaism and Socialism, as my article states, necessitates its reduction to "an absurd opposition between 'bareaucratic regimes' and 'democracy based on fully universal suffrage' ". In conclusion, I would like to state that I do not share Basu's and Ghosh's concern over the fact that I do not indentify Tom Nairn or E P Thompson. The scope of my criticism is much wider. Anderson himself presents the text in question as the cumulative product of