Which leads to an interesting question about whether the war was "in the interests of the ruling class". These are not simple questions. Was Hitler's mad plunge into the USSR in the interests of the German ruling class? To a certain extent, you will always have a disjunction between the state and the class it rules on behalf of, despite Lenin's dictum about the state as executive committee of the ruling class.
it's not Lenin's dictum. It's Marx & Engels' dictum. In the MANIFESTO, they write that: "The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." By the way, that does not say that the committee always does a good job or even that it consists of members of the whole bourgeoisie. All it describes is the executive's _job_. It can do a very poor job. The job could have been delegated (and usually is). -- Jim Devine / "In economics, the majority is always wrong." -- John Kenneth Galbraith
