trying to couch it in historical materialist theory instead of admitting the limitations of the party and Soviet government at the time.
you yourself pointed out that these were the limitations of the time and the particular level of development, contradictions, material conditions and foreign position the ussr found itself at the time. And Lenin thouroughly talked about these things in any of his writtings in that era and maybe that specific passage seems that way to you cause it specificaly talks about a nep style direction economicaly. Also Tax in kind is an amazing work to read thats often ignored by people. But in general Lenin never pretended the USSR economy was something that it wasnt. He never said to the people "we have achieved socialism and smashes capitalist production" or "we will be able to do so in the near future". He is just describing and accepting a reality and his desciptions of it and of soviet economy in that post revolution era are honest but also changing a lot year by year cause a lot of huge shit and shifts were happening so you cant parse some general underlying tactic or economism from just what he wrote in lets say 1921 regarding something.
Perhaps my reading of it is colored by how people tend to talk about that quote, either pointing to it to claim the later Soviet model of centrally planned state-owned businesses with a quasi-market system was "state capitalist" because Lenin used that term for the long-since-ended NEP, or to try to argue an idea of a strict progression through systems of economic organization and say that Soviets "had to make capitalism first because you can't just go from feudalism to socialism" which is also missing the point because it paints the capitalist stage itself as contributing a necessary character or the like (and also misrepresents pre-revolution Russia as fully feudal and agrarian, when it was actually an underdeveloped industrial capitalist state, albeit one that was rather far behind the other great powers in many respects), when the actions the early Soviets took were much more pragmatic and grounded in the material realities on the grounds.
I may also have worded my take on it poorly: what I mean is that I don't believe the early Soviets were just dogmatically following a prescribed order of development (which I've seen people misrepresent the NEP as before), but instead acted pragmatically based on their material limitations, that the regulated capitalism of the NEP wasn't because private enterprise is universally necessary to go from underdeveloped aristocratic capitalism to socialism but because the Soviet state itself had not yet established the sorts of central planning institutions and the logistics chain to support them that they would later rely on.
you yourself pointed out that these were the limitations of the time and the particular level of development, contradictions, material conditions and foreign position the ussr found itself at the time. And Lenin thouroughly talked about these things in any of his writtings in that era and maybe that specific passage seems that way to you cause it specificaly talks about a nep style direction economicaly. Also Tax in kind is an amazing work to read thats often ignored by people. But in general Lenin never pretended the USSR economy was something that it wasnt. He never said to the people "we have achieved socialism and smashes capitalist production" or "we will be able to do so in the near future". He is just describing and accepting a reality and his desciptions of it and of soviet economy in that post revolution era are honest but also changing a lot year by year cause a lot of huge shit and shifts were happening so you cant parse some general underlying tactic or economism from just what he wrote in lets say 1921 regarding something.
Perhaps my reading of it is colored by how people tend to talk about that quote, either pointing to it to claim the later Soviet model of centrally planned state-owned businesses with a quasi-market system was "state capitalist" because Lenin used that term for the long-since-ended NEP, or to try to argue an idea of a strict progression through systems of economic organization and say that Soviets "had to make capitalism first because you can't just go from feudalism to socialism" which is also missing the point because it paints the capitalist stage itself as contributing a necessary character or the like (and also misrepresents pre-revolution Russia as fully feudal and agrarian, when it was actually an underdeveloped industrial capitalist state, albeit one that was rather far behind the other great powers in many respects), when the actions the early Soviets took were much more pragmatic and grounded in the material realities on the grounds.
I may also have worded my take on it poorly: what I mean is that I don't believe the early Soviets were just dogmatically following a prescribed order of development (which I've seen people misrepresent the NEP as before), but instead acted pragmatically based on their material limitations, that the regulated capitalism of the NEP wasn't because private enterprise is universally necessary to go from underdeveloped aristocratic capitalism to socialism but because the Soviet state itself had not yet established the sorts of central planning institutions and the logistics chain to support them that they would later rely on.