Jim Devine wrote:
>
>
> this combines the workers' state with smashing the pre-existing
> bourgeois state, no?
This has always been my understanding. The workers cannot use the _bourgeois_ state to achieve their purposes, and that state, the capitalist state, must be smashed, not merely taken over and use for different purposes.
But statements about the future always have to leave a lot of wiggle room to allow for utterly unpredictable conditions under which a new regime will come to power. Hence "smash the state" must be mostly thought of as a blank to be filled in later.
Carrol
P.S. We can make a general prediction: the conditions under which a socialist regime might come to power (by election or insurrection) will be qualitatively different from any conditions that exist now, and undoubtedly quite chaotic.