 As I had said at the beginning of my last lecture when I was asked to speak on the October Revolution, I did not treat the October Revolution as a museum piece. The October moment is still with us or if I can change the metaphor, the era which was started by the October Revolution is one in which we all are still placed and consequently talking about the October Revolution in my view entails really reviewing this entire era which was inaugurated by the October Revolution. In that context I had made a few remarks last time and I want to continue with those remarks. If I can recapitulate the idea which underlay the October Revolution was that the capitalist world had entered into a period in which inter-imperialist rivalries were going to increasingly frequently manifest themselves in wars. In these wars the workers of the different capitalist countries were being asked to kill each other across the trenches and therefore the only choice before them was either to kill fellow workers across the trenches or to overthrow the system, to turn the guns against the system. And this was not only a matter confined to the workers in the advanced capitalist countries because these wars had also drawn in the people from colonised economies, colonised countries as cannon fodder. They had as it were brought these people onto the stage of history and therefore they too were now in a position to engage in the project of overthrowing the world capitalist system except that they had to pass through stages which were quite different from the stages through which the advanced country workers had to pass through. In other words capitalist development because of its own imminent tendencies which had given rise to inter-imperialist rivalry had brought the world to a period of revolution, a period of overthrow of the system. The communist international was in fact set up on this assumption, on this belief of the imminence of a world revolution. The communist international was something the like of which the world had never seen before where revolutionary activists from Vietnam and China and India and Mexico rubbed shoulders with revolutionaries from Britain or Germany or France. And the programme of the communist international actually had the concept of the general crisis of capitalism which basically meant that now the world had entered into this period of transition towards a different mode of production altogether, a transition that would occur in various stages. Now the idea that this was on the cards meant that the only obstacle to this, the only hitch that there could be is the fact that there may be segments of workers, segments of workers following specific kinds of leaders of the trade union movement for instance or working class parties who are either pusillanimous or were corrupt or what have you who would not be able to join in this project when the occasion was ripe. In other words the idea was that if necessary it was essential for the revolutionary forces in any particular country to go it alone because not doing so would entail a betrayal of the cause of the working class. Going it alone is something which of course to start with limit the social base of the revolution but this is something which is bound to get rectified over time because of the fact that the history was on the side of the revolutionaries. In other words even if the fact that capitalism has become practically obsolete is not always immediately obvious to several segments of the workers, its historical obsolescence would actually make its practical obsolescence obvious over a period of time to all segments of workers and besides the idea was that it is not just one country but one country after another where the revolution would be occurring and consequently even if the workers seized power in a particular country it's not as if they would be getting pushed thereby into some sort of a closed space that basically history was on the side of the revolutionaries. Now I think this is not just rhetoric but I think this is a very important implication that I think many of the things for instance it is not only people on the right who see the Bolshevik Revolution as kind of a conspiracy sometimes a Jewish conspiracy but even many on the left quite rightly in some sense in retrospect raised questions about for instance the dismantling of the Soviets, for instance the fact that you had the substitution of a dictatorship of the proletariat by a dictatorship of a particular party but I think the important thing to bear in mind is that this substitution occurred at least at that particular time not because somebody said that is a very good idea to have a dictatorship of the party replacing the dictatorship of the proletariat as a conceptual thing but basically because the contingencies of the situation were such that it was felt that to defend the dictatorship of the proletariat it was essential it was felt at that particular point to have a dictatorship of the party. In other words it was not theorised that the dictatorship of the proletariat must take the form of a dictatorship of the party until much later but at that particular time it was considered to be a contingent necessity. Therefore I think if we detach from the developments of that period the sense that history would vindicate these developments the sense right or wrong that history would vindicate these developments that it was historically essential that over a period of time things would get okay. Now if we detach from the actual developments that particular sense then those developments appear in a very different light. The sense of history is something which was, which as it was permeated the thinking of everybody. When Julie Martoff the momentary leader walked out of the meeting of the Congress of Soviets, Leon Trotsky of whom he had been a mentor earlier for years actually shouted out to him go to the dustbin of history that basically if you are going to walk out of the revolution then you are going to the dustbin of history that history is one which is on the side of the revolution. Incidentally the idea that there may be occasions in which it becomes essential to defend the revolution even if the revolution does not enjoy majority support is something which had been put forward not by Lenin but it had been put forward by Georgie Plekhanov who as you know is considered the father of Russian Marxism. In fact Plekhanov had made this statement in a particular speech in one of the meetings of the one of the Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and it had a profound impact on Lenin. Plekhanov had said that whenever a choice came to defending majoritarian principles on the one side and defending the cause of the revolution, proletarian revolution on the other, the revolutionaries must have no hesitation whatsoever in defending the proletarian revolution. Plekhanov's idea which actually in a sense Lenin imbibed and it is that idea that underly many of the developments which occurred in that period and as I said when we judge those developments when you look at those developments it would be wrong in my view to look at them in isolation from this sense of history from this idea that the world is on the threshold of a revolution. It is on the cusp of a revolution which is going to spread from one country to another and in the course of which anything which is occurring any errors that may be taking place would get rectified that basically the revolution would not push itself into a closed space where it would become isolated because of its relatively narrow social base. If it happens to have a relatively narrow social base but on the contrary would continue to grow. This idea that the October revolution can survive only if revolutions occur elsewhere is something that remain with Lenin all through his life. Even after the German revolution had failed he had in one of his very last writings this to say that of course China and India can be the next theatres of revolutions and let us not forget that Russia, China and India would more or less constitute more than half of mankind. So the idea that the October revolution was really the harbinger of a whole space of world revolutions remained with him throughout his life and many of the actions that occurred in the October revolution following the revolution have to be understood in the context of this sense of history. I would refer to the situation to the conjuncture in which the world is on the threshold of a revolution or is likely to experience revolutions because of intense imperialist rivalry. The conjuncture captured by the common term thesis of the general crisis of capitalism as the Leninist conjuncture, which is actually the topic of my lecture today. The fact that such a Leninist conjuncture existed in Lenin's lifetime is obviously without any doubt. As a matter of fact in the second Congress of the Communist International Lenin quoted copiously from the writings of John Maynard Keynes, the economic consequences of the peace and as you know John Maynard Keynes was in fact strongly anti left, strongly anti Bolshevik, a defender of capitalism. Nonetheless Lenin had said look at this man, he's a defender of capitalism but even he is saying that capitalism as it exists today is something which is, I mean his data show that capitalism as it exists today has really lost its right to continue. That consequently the fact that in Lenin's time there was such a conjuncture, the belief about the generality of the need for change is something which not only was held by the left, not only was held by the revolution but was held by large segments of sensitive intelligent intellectual opinion. This in fact continue even subsequently, not only the first world war but the Great Depression of the 1930s which itself can also be seen as an expression of contradictions among the capitalist powers. Very well known economist Charles Kinneberger thinks in terms of the fact that this was a period in which there was no clear leadership among the capitalist economies which was actually one of the factors underlying the intensity of the Great Depression. The fact that therefore you had and the subsequent rise of fascism and the second world war which was once more spilling out of interimperialist rivalry onto the theater of war, all of these are really reminiscent of the fact that that entire period was one in which Lenin's understanding of the epoch was vindicated resoundingly. That in fact it was a period of the Leninist conjuncture. I'd like to read out a quotation which I located in George Maynard Keynes in one of the articles which he wrote in 1933 long after Lenin's death and the code goes as follows. It was written in an article in the Yale Review, the decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we find ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous and it doesn't deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it and we are beginning to despise it. But when we consider what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed. He would be because he was of course a defender of capitalism but the fact that capitalism had reached in some sense, capitalism as it had existed until then had reached in some sense the end of its tether is something which was very widely shared and consequently that to my mind constitutes the fact that there was a Leninist conjuncture. I would say that the Leninist conjuncture actually came to an end in 1945. Now this is something which may appear quite strange because after all with the end of the war you had a remarkable spread of the socialist camp. The Red Army's march through Eastern Europe made many of these countries come to the socialist camp followed by the Chinese revolution, followed by the Vietnamese revolution in between with the Cuban revolution. In some sense therefore you can say that Lenin's anticipation of the world being dominated by socialism implies that actually 1945 was the apogee of the Leninist perception of the Leninist vision. So to talk of it in terms of the end of the Leninist conjuncture may appear very odd at first sight but as a matter of fact when you think about it the conjunctures must always end at their apogee and consequently with 1945 there were certain structural changes which were taking place in the world situation which really took it out of the period that roughly characterised 1914 to 1945. These changes were actually brought about caused by the very fact of the war itself and one of the things that the war did is that it left capitalism at the end of the war with a situation where vast numbers of advanced capitalist countries were devastated where you had one undisputed, undoubted major capitalist power which established its hegemony over the rest of the capitalist world. The United States which have been referred to by some as a situation of super imperialism be that as it may but the point is that inter imperialist rivalries of the kind which had characterised the entire capitalist world between 1914 and 1945 were rivalries that actually got substantially muted that significantly lost their intensity in the immediate post war period. Now together with this there was a very significant increase in the political strengths of the working class. This is something which was clear in Eastern Europe of course where you had large numbers as I said of socialist regimes coming up alongside the Red Armies marched through Eastern Europe. Then you also had in France and Italy the communist parties being virtually the only major political force that remained and even in the rest of Europe social democracy was in serious ascendancy manifested above all in the fact that in Britain the war time Prime Minister Winston Churchill lost the election immediately after the war and of course were succeeded by a Labour government. So social democracy communism were on the ascendancy generally there was an increase in the political strength of the working class. The working class had seen the depression and the war and was certainly most unwilling to go back to those kinds of times all over again and consequently a number of changes were forced on capitalism. It's not as if capitalism welcomed those changes. I'd argue in my next lecture how many of these changes have subsequently been undone. But the point is that capitalism was forced to restructure itself in at least three ways. One way of course was decolonisation. The traditional colonial powers had lost their strength and were no longer really in a position to cope with the anti-colonial the wave of anti-colonial struggles they were rocking the third world. The new power which had emerged the United States even though it had its own colony that was the Philippines and even though it was an imperial power nonetheless was more inclined to control the third world in ways other than through direct colonialism. As a result the old colonial empires tended to disintegrate. You had a phase of decolonisation. It is true that decolonisation did not mean the acquisition of control by the newly liberated countries over their natural resources. Decolonisation did not mean the end of imperialism but decolonisation nonetheless represented a significant shift that took place in the world situation. The second thing which happened of course is as I said the working class was not going to go back to the days of recession which had characterised the pre-war scenario and as a result it was essential that capitalism maintained high levels of employment. The new deal had already made clear that it could be done provided there was sufficient state expenditure and as a result the institution of Keynesian demand management as far as state intervention is concerned in order to keep capitalist economies at high levels of employment or low levels of unemployment is something which became a factor which became a feature of post-war capitalism. In Europe a lot of it where social democracy was on the ascendancy a lot of it was in the form of welfare state expenditures in the United States what many people call military Keynesianism namely you had significant military expenditures which actually boosted the level of demand increased employment not only in the United States but in the entire capitalist world. As a matter of fact there was a calculation which was made by the monthly review economists which actually said that if the military expenditure in the United States was cut to the same level where it had been in the pre-second world war period then you might well have unemployment in the United States which would be roughly what it was in the pre-second world war period. So you actually had significant military expenditures which in the United States propped up the level of demand and therefore employment and this in turn had a number of other implications. If you have a high level of demand then of course investment takes place if investment takes place productivity changes take place if you have high level of employment trade unions are powerful when productivity rises they can raise wages and therefore this was a period which saw much lower levels of unemployment and much higher rates of growth of real wages for a comparable period of time that at any other time in the history of capitalism. The third aspect of this restructuring which occurred was of course the introduction of political democracy, the introduction of democratic institutions. People don't realise how recent the introduction of democratic institutions in bourgeois societies is. In Britain women got the vote in 1928 and even so there were quite a few residual restrictions on franchise which had continued and it's only in the post war period that you actually have really universal adult franchise. In France universal adult franchise was introduced in 1945, the country of the original bourgeois revolution, the French revolution and subsequently there was a spread of democratic institutions even to the newly liberated ex-colonial third world countries. Now I think we should be very clear that the introduction of political democracy did not mean the end of the bourgeois state nor did it mean the end of the very close relationship which the states had acquired with multinational corporations with monopoly capital in the earlier period. As a matter of fact if you look at the difference, the defeat of the Paris commune in 1871 which can be the date that the French bourgeois state consolidated itself. As a matter of fact Antonio Gramsci had talked about a permanent revolution, not in the Trotsky's sense of permanent revolution but he talked about a continuous revolution in which the French bourgeoisie having defeated feudalism then goes on to defeat the working class challenge in 1871 and that is the period of consolidation of the bourgeois state. Between 1871 and 1945 when you have universal adult franchise you have a period of roughly 74 years, three quarters of a century. Likewise many people talk in terms of the consolidation of the bourgeois state in Britain in the middle of the 19th century. Between then and 1928 when you actually had the close approximation to universal adult franchise with women getting the vote you again get a period of roughly three quarters of a century. In other words political democracy gets introduced at a time when the bourgeois state has consolidated itself. And consequently political democracy does not really represent as much of a challenge to the bourgeois state as may appear at first sight but nonetheless it is a significant achievement because it opens up new ways for working class struggles, working class struggles to undermine the bourgeois state. It was obviously a very major thing. So what you find is that this restructuring of capitalism in the post war period in a context in which inter-imperialist rivalries have got substantially muted. This restructuring basically means that the impasse into which capitalism had entered in the Leninist conjuncture no longer continues to operate. That impasse had been captured as I had mentioned in my last lecture. In Rosa Luxembourg's very pithy description that capitalism today offers a choice between, in other words, the context of capitalism today is such that we are faced with a choice between socialism and barbarism. Now it is not possible to say that that was the choice in post war capitalism. In other words the restructuring, the restructuring of capitalism really meant something significant. As I said it was not a voluntary restructuring. It is not as if capitalism wanted to restructure itself. It is a spontaneous system. But the point is that it was forced upon capitalism by the ascending power of the working class and this ascending power of the working class was in no mean way aided by the success of the October Revolution itself. So in a sense the October Revolution is something that actually forced a restructuring of capitalism in the post war conjuncture. But while capitalism restructured itself, the fact is that socialism as it existed really did not restructure itself. There were two basic features of the Soviet Union which continued into the post war period where you actually had a multiplicity of closed spaces as socialism expanded instead of getting out of the closed space which was the idea that Lenin had. Lenin's idea was that the spread of socialism would enable socialism in countries where it already exists to actually break out of the kind of closed space, the kind of encirclement infaced. But as a matter of fact what you had a proliferation of closed spaces rather than a breaking out of it. And this is because the two main features of the socialist societies which had developed in the interwar period were features and they reinforced one another. They actually continued to exist. They continued to characterize the socialist society. One of them of course was the command economy. Now a lot of criticism has been made of the command economy. Most of it I believe is really beside the point. Most of it is irrelevant. On the contrary the command economy had enormous achievements to its credit. Yanosh Kornai, the Hungarian economist who is not sympathetic to communism, he is actually critic of the system which existed at that time, nonetheless drew a distinction between what he called demand constraint systems and resource constraint systems. That he said classical capitalism was a demand constraint system by which he meant that it's a system in which the level of employment, the level of output and so on are determined by the fact that this is insufficient demand. That you know that there's not enough demand, not everybody can be employed because it's insufficient demand. By contrast socialism as it existed was in fact a resource constraint system where actually there was a shortage of labour. The fact that you have in modern conditions a shortage of labour rather than unemployment is really a very significant comment on the functioning of the command economy. This of course had very important social implications for instance it drew women into the workforce, it had major changes with regard to structure of the family, with regard to the role of women in society and so on. Very significant social changes came in its context but the basic point is that it was something the like of which we have not seen before in modern times and the like of which we are not seeing at this moment again. Namely that it actually created labour shortage, that it actually created a situation where far from there being unemployment, not enough jobs for people, not enough people for jobs. So the command economy had remarkable things to its credit. Many people argued that it was inefficient. I believe that is really not a very relevant argument because capitalism given the fact there's a demand constraint system is so afflicted with unutilised capacity and unemployment and so on. Wasted resources which lie idle that in comparison to capitalism the fact that all resources were utilized and intensively utilized itself represents a big achievement. Additionally given the amount of resources wasted in capitalism in things like sales effort, circulation of commodities and so on, advertising you find that the absence of that kind of a waste once again meant that resources could be utilized for more worthwhile purposes. So obviously the idea that somehow socialism was inefficient, misdirected resources and idea that doesn't wash it all. At the same time some people argue that it was not innovative enough. Now as a matter of fact even under capitalism much of the work towards innovations is done under the ages of the state or even under the ages of multinational corporations and there is no reason why the command economy intrinsically should be any inferior in this sense. Where the command economy didn't actually fail was in something quite different and that's the following that if you have a new society then or a new mode of production or a new economic arrangement then every such arrangement requires some factor which actually makes people work. There has to be some work motivation. Under feudalism the work motivation the fact that the surf works is provided by coercion, by force, custom backed by force. Under capitalism this work motivation is provided by the existence of a reserve army of labour. That basically you have unemployed people. If you don't work, if your work is not satisfactory then out you go to join the ranks of the reserve army of labour. Discipline in capitalism in work. Motivation for work under capitalism is ensured through the existence of a permanent reserve army of labour which incidentally is one reason why capitalism can never have full employment. Because the very more disoperant eye of the system relies on the existence of unemployment and the reserve army of labour. Under socialism you don't have to have unemployment. On the country you did not even have unemployment as I said on the country you actually had labour shortage. So if you have full employment in that case what is it that would constitute the motivation for work, the motivation for work discipline. Ideally the organisation of socialism must be such that individuals work not because they are forced, not because they are coerced but because of the fact that their self realisation takes the form of the individual self realisation. Takes the form of working for the collective. In other words there has to be a certain commitment to the fact that even me as an individual finds fulfilment in working for the collective. Now true, this is something which doesn't come about, this is something which may take time but fundamentally the extant socialist economies, the command economies did not even move towards that kind of a society where the basis for work motivation, the basis for discipline is something which is quite different. What did make people work of course was political coercion, was the fact that if you didn't work you would be punished and so on. So in a certain sense the one party dictatorship that existed that inflicted this kind of punishment and the command economy tended to complement one another. And this is a situation from which the socialist economies and socialist societies never really came out. One of the implications of this, in other words it is not only, I mean one of the implications of this of course was as I mentioned last time was the alienation of the working class. The working class which is alienated in capitalism for a different reason altogether because they have to sell their labour power as a commodity, didn't get alienated even under socialism but for an altogether different reason because as it became objects of a one party dictatorship and consequently objects of coercion but of a different kind. Not the coercion of the market, not the coercion of commodity, not the alienation associated with commodity production but a very different kind of alienation. In my young days when I was teaching in Cambridge there was a colleague I had called Michael Ellman, very well known economist who worked on socialist economies. He once narrated a story and the story was he used to visit the Soviet Union and so on very often because that was his area of research. He narrated this story that when he would go to and he was very left wing. So when he went to the Soviet Union many of his friends would ask him what do you think of the Vietnam War. So he said oh it's terrible look at what the Americans are doing to the Vietnamese people and so his friends would tell him you mean you believe all that. Braf dda writes that and so we don't believe a word of it. So that was the kind of alienation that you actually had in that kind of society. I remember when I was in my youth I remember when Nixon went to visit the Soviet Union when Vietnam war negotiations were more or less taking place. The end of the war was broadly on the horizon. Nixon if you remember had gone to China to visit Mao, talk to Mao and also went to the Soviet Union. When he was in the Soviet Union visiting the Bolshoi Valley somebody shouted out assassin. Now we were delighted. We said you see in the Soviet Union there are still people who believe in the revolution and they actually shouted Nixon assassin. And it turned out the person who shouted this out was an Italian tourist. So that's the kind of alienation that I'm really talking about. One of the implications of this of course was an atrophy of intellectual life which I put a lot of emphasis on. Because one of the things that you find about the socialist revolutionary tradition is that at a time when bourgeois societies were characterized by an intellectual life in which conformism in which, you know, let's say kind of you know what Marx would have called vulgar thinking apologetics were dominating. The socialist movement had produced outstanding thinkers. I'm not talking about Marx in English. Karl Kautsky, Lenin Lunacharski, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, Georgie Lukacs etc. So you can actually think in terms of the fact that socialist movement was brimming with creativity, with brimming with ideas at a time when bourgeois intellectual life had really got into a rut was associated with apologetics and so on. But over a period of time, one of the things that did happen in the Soviet Union is the fact that and this got replicated elsewhere is the fact that there was an atrophy of intellectual life, which meant that once more conformism end of creativity etc. began to dominate intellectual life. Now obviously if it's the case that you can't become a professor in a university, unless you're a member of the communist party, in that case every climber who wants to be a professor in a university would join the communist party. And that's the kind of thing which actually began to happen and as a result intellectual life was characterized by kind of conformism, which generally led to an atrophy of it. But it's not just that over a period of time then what tends to happen is that even in the leadership, I mean if you are let's say a member of the communist party because you want to become a professor in a university, no matter whether you believe in communism or not, in that case you naturally begin to mouth platitudes. You begin to say things which you don't believe in. Now this is something which actually tends to get generalized. Even leaders of the communist party would actually express things which are supposed to be what they should be expressing irrespective of whether they privately believed in it or not. And therefore you actually form a space into which reality does not intrude, reality does not intervene. It's significant that after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialism, in the Soviet Union every republic into which the Soviet Union disintegrated, almost every republic had a leader in the post-Soviet, post-communist era, who had been a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Leonid Kravchuk, Edward Shevarnatsy, Nur Sultan Nazarbayev, Boris Yeltsin, Islam Karimov who actually died last month, all of them had been members of the Politburo of the CPSU and all of them led the various republics after the collapse of the Soviet Union and obviously they were not carrying out any communist practices. In other words they had this remarkable situation that the Communist Party was led by people who didn't believe in communism. In the entire Soviet Union and Eastern Europe perhaps the only leader of the communist governments who it turned out continued or had believed in communism of some kind was Eric Honecker in the German Democratic Republic. None of the others, about none of the others can you say that there was any belief in communism but on the other hand they were all leading communist parties, they were leading communist governments. In other words you have a situation where people say things which they do not necessarily privately believe in so that you actually have a closed space into which reality does not intervene, does not intrude and the fact that the Leninist conjuncture had actually come to an end is something which itself escaped attention as far as much of the leadership was concerned which continued to talk in terms of the general crisis of capitalism, continued to talk as if the world had not changed in the post war period. Now I think this is something which is, which arises because of a problem with the Leninist party itself. I say Leninist party only as a short form because I would argue that when you look at Lenin's own writing including on the trade union question and so on what has come to be known as the Leninist party which is a highly centralist party is not the kind of party that Lenin had in mind. Be that as it may, the point is that the idea of a political party which consists of a self-correcting vanguard of professional revolutionaries and that you have a dictatorship of this party in society at large because of the fact that they have access to theory and you can have a self-correcting vanguard of this kind is ultimately to my mind a metaphysical idea because it presupposes that this vanguard does not have likes and dislikes. This is vanguard does not have favoritism. This vanguard doesn't have any of the human elements that we associate with people. This vanguard then becomes a pure embodiment of theoretical thought and that is something which is really impossible to have. Consequently the very idea of a one party dictatorship led by a communist party which is run by on the principles of democratic centralism which essentially is centralist on the assumption that this is something which is you know that it is legitimized because of the fact that that this leadership consists of a self-correcting vanguard of professional revolutionaries. I believe that idea is fundamentally unworkable and that idea is one which actually relies on a metaphysical argument and human beings do not conform to this idea of a self-correcting vanguard that is essentially theoretically. I mean whose essential preoccupation is to be theoretically correct. In fact George Lucas himself had to accept, I mean George Lucas said that he had to make theoretical compromises in order to stay on in the party in order to fight fascism. The fact that Lucas himself had to make compromises implies that compromises were demanded of him and it was not as if it was a pure theoretical argument that was taking place. It was actually in some sense faction struggles which were taking place and he had to conform in that context. Now this being the case the question may arise that obviously when we talk in terms of future revolutionary societies what is it? How do we visualize them? Now I think the idea of a closed space in which you have a communist party run by a self-correcting vanguard, this idea simply would not work. There has to be an accountability of the rulers to the working class or the working people as a condition for the success of the revolution. Institutional arrangements must be such that actually this is fulfilled. Now here an important theoretical question can be asked of me and that is the following that look if you have I mean the legitimacy of the communist leadership leading the country is that they have access to theory. You may think they don't have, you may think they're useless and so on but that's not the point. There is a theoretical basis to the fact that a group of people who can understand reality who actually are interested in studying how society is changing or certain theoretical finesse are the people who are actually leading the country. What is it if you have for instance accountability of such a leadership to the working class or the working people? What do the working class or the working people have so that they can actually enforce accountability on these people? To my mind the answer, the theoretical answer to that question which I would present to you lies in the fact that the working class has a class instinct that even though it may not have theory it has a class instinct therefore it has a capacity to judge between right and wrong theory based on that class instinct and it follows therefore that a minimal requirement of a new post-revolutionary society must be a multiplicity of views presented to the working class and one way this can be ensured is of course a multiplicity of political parties. When I was a student we used to spend enormous amounts of time discussing how can socialist systems change, how can we actually have a proper socialist system and of course there was an intense amount of debate, an intense debate. Debate that was participated in not so much by traditional communist intellectuals as by independent Marxist, Paul Sweezy, Jean Paul Sartre and so on. I remember reading an article of Jean Paul Sartre one of his last articles called the party class and state. In other words what is the relationship between the party, the class and the state in a socialist society, what should it be etc. But the point is that in retrospect it strikes me that a lot of that discussion occurred on the premise that the future revolutions would be more or less of the same sort as the past revolutions. That basically the same kinds of revolutions, the same kinds of problems are going to be confronting us in the future and how do we cope with them better. But precisely for reasons I have been discussing the Leninist conjuncture to my mind is over. I had argued in the last lecture that once more I believe a revolutionary conjuncture is coming before mankind but it would not be a replication of the Leninist conjuncture and consequently the kind of problems we would be facing are not the problems that let us say the Soviet Union had faced. The relationship between the party class and the state which had been faced at that time, the problems which underlay the relationship between the party class and the state at that time are not the problems that is going to confront us in future. In some sense therefore we have moved away from the kind of problems that existed then which is not to say that we should not study those societies and the problems they faced. But on the other hand I think losing excessive amount of sleep in discussing what should be the relation between the party class and the state in a Soviet style society is something which is probably uncalled for today. Thank you.