Introduction

Abstract

Among the most significant of recent development within the European reformist left has been the explicit abandonment by the French Communist Party (P.C.F.), at its Twenty-Second Congress in January/February 1976, of the Marxist concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This theoretical rupture clearly corresponds to the political practice of the P.C.F. and its sister parties, geared as they are to the progressive transformation of the bourgeois state through the election of successive ‘left’ government, supported from below by the ‘mass pressure’ of an amorphous and undefined popular movement. Eurocommunism’s Fabian strategy, and its repudiation of the conception most central to the theoretical practice of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, are, however, indissolubly bound up with what has for decades constituted the major obstacle to socialist revolution in the West: the existence of societies which, while formally proclaiming their incarnation of socialism, are characterised by signal inequality, an absence of any effective democracy, and continuing deficiencies in the supply and quality of many basic consumption goods.¹ Any attempt to comprehend and transcend this conjuncture must necessarily start from an analysis of the Soviet Union itself, as the first social formation in which capitalism was overthrown, and in whose deformed, and deforming shadow all subsequent anti-capitalist upheavals have inevitably occurred: this is the object of the book.