Post-Revolutionary Society

In this collection of articles, reviews and speeches written in the mid-1960s through 1980, Monthly Review’s founder, Paul Sweezy, discusses the development of societies, mainly within the former USSR, after Marxist revolution. Why did these societies develop as they did – situated, as they were at the time, in countries that were no longer capitalist, but also apparently not moving toward an ideal form of communism?

At the time, Sweezy wrote that Post-Revolutionary Society was more “concerned with what post-revolutionary society, exemplified mainly by the Soviet Union, is not, rather than what it is….it is neither capitalism nor socialism as these social formations have been traditionally understood by Marxists, nor is it, as Trotskyists maintain, a transitional society between the two which has been temporarily stalled by a bureaucratic deformation. It is, in my opinion, a society with enough basic differences from both capitalism and socialism to be considered and studied as a new social formation in its own right.”