Today, as it happened before, in the face of the mirage of an economy that is supposedly "unregulated" and based exclusively on "the market", the idea that there is a dichotomy, a break, a discontinuity between the norm and the market becomes stronger. But what if planning and market were not really two dichotomous terms, nor two comparable terms? What if the presence or absence of intervention in the economy did not serve as a criterion to discern different political projects and social models? What if the separation and difference between capitalist countries and countries of the so-called real socialism had not been as radical as has been claimed?

Moreover, what if the collapse of the Soviet Union had not had so much to do with a supposed obstacle to traditional market economy principles, but rather with its affirmation and maintenance at a time when those principles were being radically questioned. in the capitalist economies themselves? What if "socialism" had been built - in a contradictory way and, to this day, traumatic and brutal - where we least expected it: in the capitalist societies increasingly distant from the traditional principles of regulation (company and state) of the salary?
These are some of the questions before which the French sociologist Pierre Rolle provocatively places us in this work. A book resulting from empirical research carried out in different Russian companies in 1992 (at a time when the old Soviet productive and economic apparatus was still in force in the new capitalist Russia). The author, after providing us with a magnificent analysis of the characteristic mechanisms of the so-called "real socialism" economies, will invite us to rethink both our way of thinking about capitalist societies and their possible non-utopian alternatives of a postcapitalist nature.