East Europe “State Capitalist” says ex-bureaucrat

Referring to Russia and Eastern Europe in a recent article in The Times, Dr. Ota Sik, a Deputy Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia under Dubcek now in exile in Switzerland, wrote: “The system has become state capitalist, or state monopolistic, not socialist” (October 4).

Sik joins the former Vice-President of Yugoslavia, Milovan Djilas, in being an ex-State-capitalist bureaucrat who has come to recognise the class character of the regime of which he was once a privileged member.

Sik is no Socialist, however. Quite the contrary. He is the leading theorist of “market socialism” and so a leading distorter of Marxian economics. An opponent of bureaucratic state capitalism, he advocates instead competition between independent enterprises run by “elected supervisory councils”, a kind of “workers-controlled capitalism”. Marx would have regarded such a system as absurd since he was well aware that Socialism necessarily involved the complete abolition of the market and its replacement by democratic planning solely for use.

All the same, Sik’s (admittedly somewhat confused) recognition of the state-capitalist nature of Russia and Eastern Europe is a step in the right direction, and a sign that there will be others still in these countries who realise this too.