James P Cannon, the founder of the American Trotskyist movement and a close collaborator of Leon Trotsky, wrote this book as part of the struggle against the petit-bourgeois opposition led by Max Shachtman and James Burnham that emerged in 1939 following the signing of the Stalin-Hitler pact.
This book was written in conjunction with the political struggle waged by Trotsky against the conceptions advanced by Burnham-Shachtman, who declared the Soviet Union could no longer be defined as a workers state, albeit degenerated.
In this work Cannon takes up the organizational conceptions advanced by the petit-bourgeois minority, demonstrating that they had nothing in common with the Leninist conception of the Marxist party.
In particular, it took up the claim advanced by the minority that the majority headed by Cannon was an example of “bureaucratic conservatism.”