ABSTRACT

Knowing now the repulsiveness of the regimes built by dedicated followers of Marxism as they understood it, we cannot in conscience simply be satisfied with the view that Marx would have vehemently opposed that end result because, at the very least, it savaged the democracy he fought for, and greatly increased, rather than diminished, the alienation he had dedicated himself to overcome. Socialists are, rather, obliged to clarify what kind of society was in fact created in their name and, among other factors, to analyse what part, if any, Marx’s theories played in that outcome. Three Hungarian dissidents, Ferenc Feher, Agnes Heller and George

Markus, who migrated to Australia in the late 1970s, wrote a book on the subject, Dictatorship Over Needs: An Analysis of Soviet Societies, in which they identified the existence of three major theories on the type of society that was in fact created, which they rejected and then formulated their own.1 Though their conclusions remain open to challenge, they were well equipped for the task they set themselves because of their long experience of life in a socialist society, and because they were, as they describe themselves, ‘former Communist theoreticians’ in the Budapest School.2 This was not a formalised institution, but referred to a body of people that gathered around the socialist philosopher, Georg Lukács.3