The Russian Revolution and the subsequent establishment of the USSR as a "workers' state" has dominated political thinking for more than three generations.

In the past, it seemed enough for communists to define their radical separation with much of the "left" by denouncing the Soviet Union as state capitalist. This is no longer sufficient, if it ever was. To transform society, we not only have to understand what it is, we have to understand how past attempts have failed.

In What Was the USSR?, the Aufheben Collective explores the inadequacy of the theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state and the various versions of the theory that the USSR was a form of state capitalism.