Letter: Hayek or Marx? (1991)

Letter to the Editors from the June 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

In response to an invitation to send information on the market economy to an address in Czechoslovakia, a Socialist Party member sent a recent issue of the Socialist Standard. He received the following reply from the Czech Minister in charge of privatisation:

Having received your letter and given it the consideration it deserves. I would simply inform you that you should continue in your efforts to establish “Socialism” in England so long as you care to continue in a morally and practically suspect endeavour. Your knowledge of Czechoslovakia, her social conditions and history appear inadequate to allow us to take your officious comments as anything more than calculated drivel or utter self-delusion.

Events in the Persian Gulf have shown that it is unnecessary to comment upon the article "Another War for Oil” except to consign it to one of the above-mentioned categories.

Finally, I have read the works of Karl Marx and may say that, after a lifetime of experience in the application of some of his musings, I don't think much of them, nor do I consider Marx to have been a very good student of human nature. I strongly urge you to broaden your viewpoint. 1 suggest you begin with the works of Friedrich von Hayek. Afterwards, if you wish to discuss rather than polemicize, write me again.

Dr. Tomáš Ježek

Minister of Czech Republic 

for National Property Administration 

and its Privatization

Reply:

We publish this letter to record the sort of ideas held by those who have taken over from the state capitalist dictators who used to govern countries like Czechoslovakia. Clearly, they have unbounded optimism in the ability of private enterprise capitalism to improve conditions in their part of the world. Some of them may be able to line their own pockets and become private capitalists, but the majority of the population will not benefit. Capitalism, whether in its private or its state form, can never solve the problems that confront wage and salary workers as these arise out of the very nature of capitalism as a system that exploits wage-labour for profit. The private capitalists whose interests the likes of Dr Jezek represent will prove to be just as harsh taskmasters as the old state-capitalist bureaucrats who have been thrown out.

The letter also illustrates the harm that the previously-existing state capitalist regimes in Eastern Europe have done to the cause of genuine socialism. They had nothing whatsoever to do with socialism nor even with Marx, but were anti-socialist dictatorships in which an élite of Party bosses ruled over and exploited the working class. The trouble was that they called themselves "socialist" and, as a result, millions of workers all over the world have been put off the whole idea of socialism.

In a sense it is understandable that those workers who were the victims of these régimes should react with hostility to the very word "socialism" and should have illusions that "capitalism" will do better. Life itself will teach them about private enterprise capitalism. As to socialism, we would urge them to overcome their understandable prejudice against the word and to investigate what it originally meant: a classless society of social equality based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production—which they know from their own experience never existed under the regime which both their previous masters and their new masters lyingly told them was socialism.

Editors.