ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on socialist commodity production to show more deeply the theoretical untenability and the practical harm done by the view that has hitherto prevailed concerning commodity problems under socialism. It shows that the development of Czechoslovakia was favourable under the specific initial conditions, but that it changed at a certain point to an economically negative development which necessarily resulted in the events in 1962–63. Socialist economic theory is of extraordinary importance for the socialist economy, more so than any theory has ever been for any society in history. Changing over to genuinely planned management and a consistent use of socialist market relationships is a condition for a lasting improvement in a socialist economy. Karl Marx and B. Engels, the founders of Marxist economic theory, were the first to express their views on the fate of commodity-money relationships in a future socialist society, foreseeing that socialism would logically come into being.
