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| | Tony Cliff: State Capitalism in Russia (Chap.2) |
 | | The antithesis of the workers’ state was the monstrous bureaucracy and army of the capitalist states, which, in Engels’ words, “threaten to devour the whole of society”. |
 | | To use Lenin’s formulation, the state “consists of special bodies of armed men which have prisons, etc., at their disposal.” [7] Therefore, the starting point of any analysis of the present Russian state apparatus, especially from the standpoint of Marxism, must be the structure of the armed forces. |
 | | Stalinist spokesmen have stopped speaking of the “withering away of the state”, and, indeed, have gone to quite the other extreme, claiming that “socialism in one country” and even “communism in one country” goes hand in hand with the strengthening of the state. |
| www.marxists.org /archive/cliff/works/1955/statecap/ch02.htm (8500 words) |
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