Council communism is a theory of working-class struggle and revolution which holds that the means that workers will use to fight capitalism, overthrow it, and establish and administer communist society, will be the workers' councils.
Mattick analyses "the superficiality of the ideological differences between Stalinism and Trotskyism" and why "Trotsky's own past and theories", with his role in the construction of the Russian regime, "condemned 'Trotskyism' to remain a mere collecting agency for unsuccessful Bolsheviks".
In the third part of their analysis of the USSR, Aufheben examine left communist characterisations of the soviet union as "state capitalist".