One of the arguments that apologists for Soviet behaviour make is that in an imperfect world there are ‘tradeoffs’ between procedural and substantive rights. The US tradition emphasizes rights of speech, assembly, petition, and due process but does not guarantee the economic rights that Franklin Roosevelt talked about almost forty years ago. There is no right to decent housing, medical care, or an anxiety-free old age, and the absence of these rights causes widespread suffering in the world’s richest land. In the worker’s state, on the other hand, the mobilization of the society to provide these rights and continued vigilance against ‘class enemies’ requires some restriction on procedural rights, but the reward is the ‘freedom from want’ that Roosevelt promised. The evidence from the Soviet Union makes it totally clear that the dichotomy between procedural and substantive rights is nonsense. One cannot exist without the other. The primary message of the worker dissidents is that they are suffering depriva¬ tion of economic rights and when they ask redress they suffer deprivation of political rights. While the leaders have done a great deal better than US politicians in sharing more limited wealth more equitably, the notion that there is a decent minimum guaranteed to every citizen is a myth. The official Soviet poverty level is 50 rubles a head. Pensioners in 1974 averaged 40. Forty per cent of 10,000 working class families surveyed in Leningrad fell below the poverty level. Free nurseries are available for about one third of the children of pre-school age. Inflation is expressed in food shortages and sudden inexplicable jumps in official prices. Services are inadequate. There are water and sewage problems. None of this should astonish. It is remarkable how far a back¬ ward country racked by years of civil war and a catastrophic experience in World War II has come in sixty years. What is astonishing, however, is that the society depends upon the continued exploitation of the workers for whom it presumably exists, and other than to arrest, harass, fire, or incarcerate them in mental hospitals, has found no way to deal with their legitimate grievances. These insights from Soviet factory life in the book show how some of the worst features of capitalist production — speed-ups, pilfering, bribery have ended up in the workers’ state, but added to these, is a brutal ban on free organizing of the workplace