70 SOCIAL SCIENTIST not in existence. It appears that, according to the author, antagonistic classes and class struggle must continue till you reach Communism. This fatuous idea is spread all over the book. The author fails to understand that the dictatorship of the proletariat, like everything else, has a past, present and future. At various stages various aspects are dominant. He does not really understand that the dictatorship of the proletariat is not only suppression of violence, but also economic organisation and establishment and consolidation of socialism. The guiding role of the State under working class hegemony becomes more and more prominent with the suppression and economic uprooting of the exploiting classes. The socialisation of the means of production, planning, converting petty-bourgeois production gradually into socialist production and abolishing the exploitation of man by man—these are the tasks before the dictatorship of the proletariat after suppressing the resistance of the exploiting classes. They are dfficult to discharge, they involve a correct approach to the non-proletarian toilers, and understanding of the priorities in Industry and agriculture, of the law of social development in the transitional period. The struggle against the old society, against old relations, does not end with the establishment of socialism, but continues to win new conquests till you reach Communism. The author makes light of these tasks posing to concentrate attention on the final objective—Communism. Following his arguments it appears that for him hardly anything changes during thi3 transitional period—antagonistic classes and exploitation remain, the dictatorship of the proletariat undergoes no change. This lias nothing to do with Marxism-Leninism. Denigrating the c First Phase9 Balibar who claims to develop a lot of dialectical thinking on the role of dictatorship, on the question of two worlds (imperialist and socialist) and finally on the meaning of socialism, breaks with the Marxist-Leninist understanding of socialism to advance his own "dialectical" definition. He observes: "Let us first therefore say a word about what socialism cannot be, from the Marxist standpoint: socialism cannot be a classless society. And, since it is not a society without classes, it cannot be a society without exploitation, a society from which every form of exploitation has disappeared. Socialism can only be a society in which every form of exploitation is on the way to disappearing, to the extent that its material foundations are disappearing" (p 139).