I can find no evidence to support the claim that Stalin said all classes were extinguished in the USSR. In an interview in Pravda he distinguished national "socialism" from Marxism-Leninism by noting that in Germany capitalists still existed and in his rescripts of the '36

constitution (the "Stalin Constitution") he wrote that capitalists, landlords, and kulaks were gone but there remained proletarians, peasants, and intelligentia (openly identifying the latter two as containing essentially bourgeois elements).

Now, on the one hand, it is unimportant what Stalin thought: if he retracted his earlier theory that class struggle intensified under socialist construction, he was wrong. But on the other, dogmatists use Stalin quotes to "prove" the USSR was never socialist and Stalin was a fool

All of this is wrong-headed in its approach to understanding Communism. First, I highly doubt whether Stalin himself understood the USSR as entering a complete form of socialism rather than having changed its dominant mode of production. Second, if he did, he was wrong. It's easy

to admit that individual theorists were incorrect, or interpreted material conditions on an incorrect basis. Even whole parties have been incorrect in the past. This does not affect the methodology of the science, except insofar as some flaw gave rise to this incorrect analysis.

If it did, *it is corrected* by subsequent analysis. This is how Marxism-Leninism works. It is not merely the science of economic development, but the perfection of all science - but to be perfected, it must constantly flush away old, bourgeois assumptions and do battle with the

still-existing fragments of bourgeois society, bourgeois science, bourgeois morality. Comrade Stalin was a hero of the people, but like all "heroes," he merely represents the culmination of social forces, the embodiment of the social power and the class forces at the time.

What is the point of all this? SOCIALISM that is SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY is but SOCIALIST CONSTRUCTION. Those who demand an immediate change to the mode of production, or one that is made regardless of conditions, are those who abandon the project of scientific socialism