For the well-financed enemies of Marxism, the death of the USSR proves that capitalism is inherently superior to socialism. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union’s apologists still talk of betrayal, of bureaucratic degeneration, even of violations of socialist democracy. Though the Soviet Union was born of an epochal revolution, by the 1930s there existed the extreme opposite of any kind of working class state power. Workers were atomised, exploited and unable to act as a class. True, there was negative workers’ control, but certainly not a trace of democracy. Unsurprisingly then, workers did not defend the system. So why did the USSR collapse? Of course, the world’s leading imperialist powers were instinctively hostile. Fundamentally though, there existed a contradiction in the Soviet product itself, a contradiction between use-value and target-value, which directly manifested itself in a contradiction between quantity and quality. Jack Conrad uses the logic of Marxism to lay bare the Soviet Union’s inner laws. Having done that, we begin to understand why the system showed such initial dynamism and yet inevitably tended towards stagnation and eventual collapse. This is the first of four books.