BOOK REVIEWS 83 Though Leslie Macfarlane states in l{ Marxist Critiques of the State" that he intends to analyze the concept of state outlined by Marx and Engels and later on developed by other Marxists, he has in fact denounced Lenin's policy of strengthening the machinery of state run by "the advanced section of the proletariat" and overpraised Kautsky's and Rosa Luxemburg's efforts to liberate the Russian proletariat by "abolishing the machinery of dominance of the bureaucracy, the political police, and the standing army" (Kautsky). Ironically enough, Macfarlane himself quotes Engels (as if he were agreeing to Engels's views) in order to show how the latter turned down the demand of abolishing the authoritarian political state unless "the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. He does not even question the validity of the demand for abolishing the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia made by Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg. Neil Harding in "Socialism and Violence55 establishes his thesis that the importance of violence as a means of achieving socialist goals was first laid by Babeuf in his The Conspiracy for Equality (1836). He then discusses the attitudes of social democrats and Marx and his disciples towards violence. After the failure of the joint efforts of the socialists, radicals and liberals (1848-1851) to keep democracy intact through peaceful means Marx articulated his strategy of proletarian revolution. Sorel and Bakunin supported him: Lenin practised the Marxian concept of praxis according to which in the process of revolutionary struggle the proletariat visualizes the real nature of different issues and becomes capable of determining its correct role. In our own days the theory of confrontation owes its origin to Lenin's views on violence. Raymond Williams'? contribution"You're a Marxist, Aren't You?" is a sort of confession of an unorthodox Marxist who is very much conscious of his open-mindedness and radical views on Marxism, Stalinism, Fabianism, the New Left and so on. Commenting on terms like Marxists and Marxism he says that for him Marx is "incomparably the greatest thinker in the socialist tradition" but he abhors the idea of reducing "a modern mass movement to a single name." He declares Stalinist regime as "an outrage to everything that the Socialist tradition and indeed the best of the Bolshevik tradition had stood for" and Fabian gradualism as "stupid" and "vicious"; he expresses his feeling of a "basic" solidarity with the aims and tactics of the struggle of the Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutionaries and supports the current revolutionary politics of confrontation in North America and Europe, though he believes that in "societies with functioning political democracies" such a political strategy should not be adopted. (Here he is echoing the real spirit of the views of Marx and Engels who suggested that the working class might achieve success by working with bourgeois legislatures and that socialist revolution might happen peacefully in