ABSTRACT
In recent decades, sections of the left in the United States and Western Europe have tried to provide a theoretical underpinning for their political positions toward the USSR and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe (and Asia), positions in which the balance of interpretation has leaned toward the negative. This has resulted in essentially two approaches (with, of course, variations of emphasis within each approach). They are, first, the "capitalist restoration" view, which holds that capitalism either has been, or is in the process of being, restored in the USSR in the historically specific form of "state capitalism" in which bourgeois relations of exploitation adopt the form of state ownership. The second approach is the "bureaucratic-exploitative" one, which designates the ruling bureaucracy as a class with the power to extract surplus value, that is, establish itself in an exploitative relation to the subordinate working class within what must be considered a novel exploitative mode of production, different from capitalism or any other established social form.
