ABSTRACT
This chapter presents critical consideration to the views of the Soviet working class which have been developed within Marxism. The first place to look for useful insights would now seem to be the texts of those who have consistently stressed proletarian autonomy and the subversion of wage-labour, such as the council communists, Situationists, and Autonomists. Working within the overall theoretical area as communist, these tendencies’ most influential theorists have always kept in sight the importance of practical class antagonism. The chapter shows that the number of substantive Marxist contributions to an understanding of the relationship between the history and nature of Soviet political economy and the history and nature of working class struggle is very small. Credit for being the first to insist that the nature of the Soviet system necessarily implies the reality of class struggle must go to Raya Dunayevskaya in the 1940s.
