Almost three decades have passed since the end of the USSR and the regimes of the so-called "real socialism" in Eastern Europe. Now, the analyses and discussion do not concern the fact itself, that these regimes collapsed. It has shifted to the search for the causes of this collapse, to the "why", to what went wrong...

The value of Tony Cliff's book (first published in 1955) is that it can provide answers to these questions because it analyzes Stalin's Russia and its successors as part of the global system, a form of capitalism. It starts from the premise that the socialist project was not a "lost cause" from the beginning, from the 1917 revolution, but was lost with the triumph of Stalin and the violent overthrow and dismantling of the achievements of October.

Cliff's theory is relevant because it preserves concepts such as socialism and the workers' state from distortions and ideological attacks by the bourgeoisie. We need this legacy in the 100 years since the Russian Revolution. It is the necessary tool for the Left that aims to provide a revolutionary way out of the crisis of the system.