Czech Reform
Dennis, Peggy
Czech Reform THE HUMAN FACE OF SOCIALISM: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CHANGE IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA, by George Shaw Wheeler. Lawrence Hill & Company. 170 pp. $7.50. I reviewed by Peggy Dennis The...
...In 1965, I spent seven months in Poland, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union as special correspondent for the West Coast People's World of which I was foreign editor...
...A political refugee from the Truman cold war purges, he moved his family to Prague...
...Wheeler's premise is that outmoded political dogma is straitjacketing the development of socialist growth...
...Six months is too short a time to judge the full merit or some inherent weaknesses in such an upheaval...
...The dis tinction is decisive...
...These judgments ignored then, and still ignore now, what the Czechoslovak government, Communist Party, trade unions, news media, and the majority of Czechs claimed they were trying to achieve with the introduction of the changes which brought Soviet tanks and troops into their small country...
...In all these countries except the Soviet Union, Communist Party econ omists, ideologists, and editors spoke candidly of their beliefs that the eco nomic reforms would be mere "band aids" unless the Party released its rigid administrative and political controls over the economy and all socialist insti tutions...
...that the necessary first stages of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the supreme controlling role of the Communist Party must change in both form and function as the socialist society advances through new stages of social development...
...Except in Czechoslovakia...
...Resistance to such change results in relative stagnation imposed by an entrenched bureaucracy intent upon defending its stake in a status quo which brakes socialist growth...
...I visited research institutes where I was told all the work being done there was useless if new ap proaches to politics did not progress simultaneously...
...He believes that the demands for accelerated scientific and technological development require bold approaches to a whole gamut of new problems...
...Since 1956 these problems have come to the fore openly in all socialist countries, and for a short time in the post-Stalin thaw they were debated in the whcle international Communist movement...
...It is the process, the goal, that is important...
...Czech Reform THE HUMAN FACE OF SOCIALISM: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CHANGE IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA, by George Shaw Wheeler...
...For the next twenty-three years, from 1947 to 1970, he worked at the Czechoslovak Economic Institute and was one of only three economists elected to that country's prestigious Academy of Sciences...
...The Communist Party condemned the reform program, and welcomed the military intervention by the Warsaw Pact socialist countries as an act to save socialism...
...Ms...
...An important weakness in Wheeler's presentation of that process in the economic sphere is his failure to define clearly that such matters as central planning versus decentralization, controlled versus free market conditions, the role of prices, profit, and competition are not the same under socialism as they are under capitalism...
...The State Department welcomed the crisis and deplored the intervention...
...I attended Party Ideol ogy Commissions where their members talked of the need to incorporate new thinking based on new experiences to free the party of old Stalinist concepts regarding the relationships of the so cialist state and the Party to the masses of people and their creative initiatives...
...He is now on leave, teaching in American colleges...
...But the gap between word and deed continued over the years...
...that the laws of dialectics exist under socialism no less than under capitalism...
...They moved to act on their conviction...
...In his concise and documented book, The Human Face of Socialism, George Wheeler defines the major premise of that "Czech experiment"—that is, the realities of the economics of socialism...
...Dennis is a free lance journalist based in California...
...With the credentials of a Communist Party journalist, I visited factories and talked freely with managers, trade union organizers, and workers at the machines where the practical application of the new economic reforms all of these countries were experiment ing with were explained to me...
...An American economist with the Roosevelt Administration from 1934 to 1947, Wheeler was assigned to participate in the economic denazification program in postwar Europe...
...Nothing is final, absolute, or sacred...
...However, military intervention came when the Czechoslovak Commu nist leadership moved to abolish these mutations, to move to a new stage of socialism, One does not have to agree on every single feature of either the economic or political programs instituted by the Czechoslovak leadership at the time...
...The reader should not be turned off by what appears at first to be a highly technical, statistical presentation...
...And as Stalin branded all new concepts as the work of "enemies of the people," so the Czechoslovak effort was crushed as "counter revolutionary...
...The important difference, according to Wheeler, is that after the ouster of the Stalinist Novotny regime in Prague in January 1968, "the Czechoslovak leaders had concluded that significant economic advance was not possible without fundamental political change, changes that would alter the role of the party, but strengthen it and socialism (my emphasis...
...Wheeler notes ironically that the so cialist countries did not protest the Stalinist Novotny regime which dis torted and discredited socialism with its centralized, punitive bureaucracy, its mismanagement of the Czech economy, its abuse of the norms of socialist legal ity...
...I reviewed by Peggy Dennis The Communist Party in the United States and the State Department agree in their judgments that what was involved in Czechoslovakia in 1968 was a counter-revolutionary attempt to undermine socialism and restore some form of capitalism...
Vol. 38 • March 1974 • No. 3
