Polemical essays, and the subtitle is honest. Timur Timofeyev directed the Institute of the International Working-Class Movement of the USSR Academy of Sciences-the body the Soviet state created precisely to study the world's workers-and sat as deputy chairman of the editorial commission behind the six-volume official history of the subject. If anyone in Moscow was equipped to see a workers' movement coming, it was the man who ran the institute named after it. This is his own account, in his own voice, of what the working class is, what it has become under socialism, and how its enemies misrepresent it. The essays take up the changing composition of the class under the scientific and technological revolution, the growth of white-collar and technical strata, the relation between the workers and the intelligentsia, and the condition of labour in the capitalist countries. Its polemic runs against named living opponents: the Western Marxists and ex-communists who, in the crisis of Eurocommunism, were arguing that the working class had ceased to be the agent the tradition assumed. As a statement of the Soviet answer to that argument, by the head of the relevant institute, it is the authoritative text. The book is of 1979-80: its statistics stop in 1977 and 1978, its supreme authority is the Twenty-Fifth Congress of 1976, and it does not know the Twenty-Sixth met. The one sign of a later hand is a clause dating Brzezinski's tenure to January 1981. It went into English in the single year that answered it. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
