Now we are entitled to say that for us the mere growth of cooperation … is identical with the growth of socialism, and at the same time we have to admit that there has been a radical modification in our whole outlook on socialism. The radical modification is this; formerly we placed, and had to place, the main emphasis on the political struggle, on revolution, on winning political power, etc. Now the emphasis is changing and shifting to peaceful, organizational, “cultural” work. I should say that emphasis is shifting to educational work, were it not for our international relations, were it not for the fact that we have to fight for our position on a world scale.19

Of course he treated the outlook for real socialism very cautiously on account of the “ridiculously inadequate elements of knowledge, education and training.”

The most comprehensive modern theory of socialism has been published by István Mészáros, who ties his work on capital to the theoretical fundamentals of Marx and Lenin, and links his concept of socialism, not to the concepts of market production, but both looks for and defines these concepts beyond the market and the state – “beyond capital,” in short. The first generation of Soviet ideologues, including Lenin, defined the difference between the state capitalisms under the reign of capital and the dictatorship of the proletariat in that they wielded power in the name of a different class. They consolidated different modes of distribution and ownership, with a preference for different cultural values, marking out different political goals for society. Lenin limited the direct socialist exchange of goods (following war communism) to the state-socialist sector, its fate hanging by the market competition that connected to the capitalist sectors of the NEP and the “state-regulated buying and selling, to the money system”.20 Contrary to Lenin, Bukharin often defined this “state economy” as socialism, in both the ABC he wrote with Preobrazhensky, and in his Economics of the Transition Period (Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda). This definition of socialism as state socialism transitioned directly – leaving Lenin out – to the ideological medium of the Stalinist period.

Lenin outlines four potential courses of development during the “state capitalist” phase of the transitional period, which also explains why such a wide variety of movements, both inside and outside of Russia, refer to his ideas. Three of these possibilities remained aligned with the conceptions of socialism (the fourth being the Ustryalov scenario of reversion to capitalism). In the course of time, the three basic trends could be observed not only in political thought and factional struggles, but also in historiography: