His belief actually required that capitalism be developed to its maximum extent before socialism was even possible. This theory had to be dropped in order to explain how stages of economic development could be skipped thereby allowing Lenin to make the claim he was "Marxist."
Just so. I remember attending a meeting of the Milton Seminar in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the USSR.
This is actually a pretty moderate group, for academia, but of course most are still leftists.
Anyway, I asked the most marxist of them what she made of the whole business. Was it a failure of Communism? She replied that Russia needed to spend the next century developing to a high state of capitalism, and then try it again. They never should have tried to take that shortcut!