"… the world is today full of people inventing histories and lying about history and that's largely because the people who do this are not actually interested in the past. What they are interested in is something which will make the punters feel good" – said the renowned British Marxist historian in the interview of The Observer upon the publication of his memoirs.

There have been many scapegoats found for one of the worst environmental disasters of the last decades. The "accident" of the oil tanker Prestige, however, was not a coincidence, but the necessary consequence of the unregulated – laissez-faire – globalised economic system, which can happen again any time.

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.