This text presents Egon Bondy’s political thought at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, with special focus on his texts “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat” and “2000” (both written in 1949/1950), which represent one of the first expressions of Marxist criticism of Soviet-type society after 1948 in Czechoslovakia. The introductory study analyses Bondy’s evaluation of the Soviet Union as “fascism in its most advanced form”, and the implications of the fusion of economic and political power. It also points to the continuity of this type of Marxist criticism with earlier critiques written by Josef Guttmann and Záviš Kalandra in the 1930s and 1940s, while also pointing out how these texts by Bondy in some ways anticipated his later analyses from the 1960s, in which he understood Eastern Bloc regimes as examples of state capitalism. Following this introduction, we print a revised and annotated edition of Bondy’s “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” and Petr Kužel (ed.),
The following text introduces Josef Guttmann’s critical analyses of Soviet society as a new class society that substantially differs from both socialism and capitalism. Between 1937 and 1944, Guttmann published three essays whose novelty has been largely overlooked in existing scholarship, although the essays represent the very first Czechoslovak analyses of their kind. The overall political, intellectual, and biographical context of Guttmann’s theoretical contributions is sketched out in this introductory text as well, and Guttmann’s subsequent articles on the topic are discussed as well. Following this introduction, the author provides an annotated Czech translation of Guttmann’s most elaborated essay, which was published in Dwight Macdonald’s radical journal politics under the title “The Soviet Union: A New Class Society.” Focusing on the Soviet economy, Guttmann tried to demonstrate how much Soviet society was plagued by oppression, inequality, unfreedom, and acute economic contradictions. Far from embodying the Marxist idea of socialist society as a free association of direct producers, Soviet society was based on a historically new mode of production in which the bureaucracy established itself as a new ruling class. Following this introduction, we print a revised and annotated edition of Guttmann’s “The Soviet Union: A New Class Society.” and Pavel Siostrzonek (ed.)