This book offers a new interpretation of the USSR's birth, evolution,and death. We rely on the available literature in important ways. However, the "surplus" theory of class e find in Marx and use to analyze Soviet history differs sharply from the theories used by both its defenders and its critics. Thus, our focus on the multiple class structures that interacted across Soviet history enables us to extract and construct an argument not found in the available literature.
That argument develops two
especially controversial points: (1) that a particular kind of capitalist class compriesd the actual class content of Sovite "socialism," and (2) that communism occurred only in very limited, subordinated realms of the Soviet economy and took the from o fa communist kind of class structure. Our stress on class builds on earlier work ( Resnick and Wolff 1986,1987). Therefore, below,we only summarize the distinctive"surplus" concept of that we deploy throughout. Applying our class analysis to communism, to a state form of capitalism,and to Soviet history continuess the effort to insert class---in its particular "surplus" definition--into both popular and scholary discourses on how societies work and especially on how they ought to be changed. Confrontations between capitalism twentieth-century history. In highlighting certain class dimensions of the lessons and legacies of those confrontations, we hope thereby to give this century's confrontations a more deleoped class consciousness.
Part 1 Communism
Part 2 State Capitalism
Part 3 The Rise and Fall of the USSR