The nature of the Soviet Union and its economy has been one of the most vexed questions in the realm of those who lay claim to the Marxist tradition. Even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the issue has retained relevance – not merely as a historical question, but as one that sheds ample light on the immediate aims of the proletarian movement, the nature of communist society, and even the fundamentals of the critique of capitalist society. From the moment it was founded, the Soviet Union (then still the RSFSR) was a lightning rod of controversy within the working class movement. For Karl Kautsky and other "orthodox" Marxists from the Second International, the Bolsheviks' endeavour was crooked from birth, having skipped over the necessary bourgeois stage of capitalist development. For the revolutionary Marxists who flocked to the Third International, the system of soviet democracy brought about by the working class in Russia was an example of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the tradition of the Paris Commune. However, even after the counter-revolution had triumphed and the soviets had been emptied of their proletarian content, the new ruling class in Russia, hiding behind Marxist slogans, continued to assert that this system remained essentially the same and that the working class were somehow still in control. To maintain this during the twists and turns of the Stalinist era required doing serious violence to Marx's theory. Those who think socialism is when a party clique centrally plans capitalist development, or that nationalisation is equivalent to socialisation, still carry those deep wounds. This is further complicated by the fact that the majority of the critique of the Soviet Union in the Marxist sphere (at least in the Anglophone world) has come from Trotskyists who have been wedded to Trotsky's ossified formulations of "deformed" and "degenerated" workers' states. Even those who have found these terms insufficient have still been hamstrung by their inability to see Trotsky's willing role in the counter-revolution, producing theories which fundamentally serve to obscure Marx's critique of capitalism.

A Marxist Analysis of the Soviet Economy by Erwan Moysan, recently published by Routledge, has the immense strength of cutting through a century of turgid debate and providing a clear and fresh view of the issue. The author begins by reminding the reader of Marx's view on several essential issues: that capital is a social relation based on the estrangement of the worker from the conditions of their own labour and that capitalist accumulation is the intensification of the relationship; that capital has to be viewed as a totality rather than as a collection of individual capitals to grasp how it really works; that there is a distinction between the abolition of individual private property and of private property as class property; that competition of capitals is what executes the inner laws of capitals, rather than competition being a synonym for capitalism itself; and finally that the question of the existence of classes should not be sought in juridical terms or the existence of certain professions, but rather the underlying relations of production.

Furthermore, the description of socialism according to Marx and Engels – of a global society without classes, states, wage labour, commodity production, or money – is stressed.

The book applies these fundamentals of a Marxist orientation to argue convincingly that the Soviet Union – from its Tsarist predecessor, to the period of "war communism", to the NEP, to the full development of the Stalinist state capitalist system and its eventual decline – was a capitalist economy according to the Marxist definition. In distinction to those who argue that the development of industry was key to the building of socialism or that a non-imperialist capitalism was present, it is shown that the Soviet Union was both a developing capitalist economy and subject to the same imperialist impulses as other capitalist nations.

All in all, what this book makes abundantly clear is the absolute chasm that separates Marxism from Stalinism. One is the ruthless critique of capitalist society from the point of view of the international working class. The other is a grotesque parody that christens all the marks of capitalist society with Marxist names. Under this rubric, class domination, wage labour and commodity production become socialism, and the interests of the nation-state become those of the international working class.

The Soviet Union may have ceased to exist, yet the poisonous legacy of its apologists lives on. This book serves as an essential rejoinder to those so-called Marxists who wish to model the socialism of the future on the "socialism" of the past. Furthermore, in laying out so clearly the fundamentals of Marxism in relation to its most famous "experiment", this book will hopefully help somewhat to lighten the "nightmarish weight of dead generations" on the brains of those who are perplexed by what the Soviet Union was.