Marx through the Eyes of an East European Intellectual

摘要

Deep impressions were made on my thinking by great historical events: the war in my country, the Holocaust, liberation from Nazi rule, the arrival of the Communist Party and its socialist system, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution (and its defeat and the restoration of the socialist system), experiments in the 1960s with market socialism and socialism with a human face and the failure of these, the collapse of the socialist system and the return of the capitalist system, dictatorship's replacement by democracy, and the financial and economic crisis of today. [...] I do not think that I am wrong to say that most politicians, commentators, and social scientists have associated the concept of "capitalism" with Marx and his school for a long time, along with the contrast between the real capitalist system and the new world of the socialist system, still only predicted and desired in Marx's time.