Cyril Smith (1929-2008)[1] was a British lecturer of statistics at the London School of Economics, socialist, and revolutionary humanist.
[4] Starting in 1987, Smith began to examine what he was beginning to feel was the distortion of Marx's ideas by his own followers.
While well aware of its limitations, Smith hoped that the work would begin a dialogue on the subject rather than be the final word.
[5]In his studies, Smith came to the conclusion that there was no basis in the writings of Karl Marx for a "Leninist party" or a "workers' state," putting him sharply at odds with the views of his former comrades and those that he had earlier himself held.
This state, then, was not something apart and above the working-class, directing its revolutionary movement from afar, but instead the organized mass of individuals carrying out the process of unified self-liberation.
(4) The critique of these categories breaks up their appearance of being ‘natural’, and so opens the way for conscious social practice to release their human content.