Mandel discusses the collapse of Soviet socialism on the one hand. He states that the collapse would be foreseen after the development of the world centres diverted from the earlier heavy industry-centred model. He expounds his standpoint that – perhaps with the exception of Hungary – Eastern Europe does not have many chances for the successful integration into the capitalist world system (but rather for sinking back to a semi-colonial state). On the other hand, he also analyses the crisis of the capitalist economy. One form of its expressions is the debt trap.

In connection with four books, the author outlines his opinion that one of the preconditions of the renewal of the left wing is the necessary breach with the opportunism of the representatives who have become officials.

The author starts out from the social democratic features and inclinations of the Kadar system which is in a way connected with our previous issue. Then he describes briefly the history of social democracy from the point of view of the efforts of the working class to get to power, ranging from the move­ment at the end of the last century starting out from the principle of mixed ownership, the Bernstein-Kautsky controversy about the issue of compro­mise to the balking of the movement during fascism and

The author provides a portrait of the somewhat forgotten left wing, social democratic leader, Pal Justus. Justus who was sentenced to life imprison­ment by Rákosi, criticised the then policy of the Hungarian Communist Party from the left, from a basis of principles of consistent, Marxist principles. By presenting Justus's main ideas of principle, the author warns that social de­mocracy does not only contain the social democratic right, the revision of the Marxist concepts but – in a significant trend – also the consistent re­presentation of exactly these concepts. A topical message of Justus is that social democracy is not one single ideal: the bourgeois and the so­cialist ideas of democracy represent two rival concepts.