Around the 1970s, the French Left has organised lively intellectual and political debates about the possibilities and conditions of a self-regulating socialism. The socio-economic conditions and metamorphosis of this anti-state and anti-capitalist intellectual movement is worth the scrutiny. The question of the retrospective analysis is whether the principle of self-regulating radical social organisation can be incorporated into the current alternative social movements.

The study presents the four main approaches in the historiography of Stalinism, summarising features of the system along the modernisation school, the totalitarian paradigm, various revisionists, and the main theses of the authors of the civilisation theory. Although scientific aspects increasingly come before in the examination of the Stalin phenomenon, in the environment of global capitalism, the research of state socialism is effected on the long run by the choice of accepting or rejecting socialism as a new civilisation.

The history of the theory and practice of the voluntary productive associations – so-called co-operatives – in a nutshell; from the early capitalist association forms to the organisation of the solidarity (social) economic sector of the European Union.

"What you will read here is another piece to the story of a failure" – introduces the author his article written in 1982 about the Polish crisis, originally published in a Transylvanian samisdat journal. This piece is a relevant document of the leftist state socialism criticism of the period, which is today often kept silent about or even denied.