Lenin and State Capitalism (1990)

From the August 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the article reprinted last month from the Socialist Standard of July 1920, the author was quoting from a contemporary translation of a speech Lenin delivered on 29 April 1918. In 1983 Progress Publishers of Moscow published another translation in Lenin on State Capitalism During the Transition to Socialism. This modern translation reveals that Lenin never used the term "State Socialism” which the 1920 translation attributed to him.

So whereas this latter has him saying "only madmen whose heads are full of formulas and doctrines can deny that State Socialism is our salvation", what he actually said was "everyone who is not out of his senses and has not stuffed his head with fragments of book-learning would have to say that state capitalism would be our salvation”.

Clearly, the Bolshevik sympathisers who did the 1920 translation were embarrassed by Lenin's admission that what the Bolsheviks were constructing in Russia was not socialism but state capitalism. So they falsified the translation in order to try to disguise this fact from workers in the West.