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Rejection of what would seem politically to follow from this, though, is equally fundamental to his polemic against the Legal Marxists and Economists. In fact, as we shall shortly see, this rejection was well grounded in a superlative empirical analysis of the Tsarist social formation and its potentialities, informed by the historical experience of its class struggles; but this in no way, of itself, erases the tension. That tension, we shall argue, was eventually to develop into a raging contradiction at the very heart of Bolshevism.

32 Socialist Construction and Marxist Theory Importantly, Russia was never a colony, in the sense that it never fell under the yoke of anyone national fraction of the international bourgeoisie. It was, rather, the prey of competing imperialisms. 24 Further, Tsarism's own programme of modernisation (itself largely financed via foreign loans) was precipitated by the pressures of this imperialist environment, its immediate stimulus being the Crimean debacle, and its continuing condition the military threat of the capitalist states.

Social production is thus transformed into 'production techniques'; the object of political economy becomes the object of technology. , 65) In a footnote to the same passage Colletti notes how Engels's famous caveats (in his 1890b, 1890c, and 1894f) on the errors of naked economic determinism if anything reinforced the vulgarity of this conception. For he preserved what was fundamental to it (and, as we have argued in Chapter 1, alien to Marx): a separation of 'the economic' from 'other spheres' of social life, and an assumption of external, causal relations between them.