ABSTRACT
Pre-war experience in both Poland and Czechoslovakia had made the liberation movements extremely wary of ‘statism’. The new nationalized industries were under no circumstances to be run like the old State Monopolies, nor like the mixed or all-State industrial concerns of the depression period. Here there could be no ‘cold socialization’ of the losses of friendly concerns by a friendly government, with yet more powerful interests freely operating outside, and the whole bound together by cartel agreements. Still less were the new industries to form part of the government public service apparatus, like the post office. The laws on the status of nationalized enterprises explicitly stated that they were to be organized into national corporations operating on a commercial basis. ‘The Board of Management and the Director shall run the national enterprise with the care of good businessmen,’ says the Czech law. The enterprises were to pay regular taxes and possess their own legal personality, including the right to own property. The State assumed no legal responsibility for their debts. In all these technical respects the conception of the nationalized enterprise in the planned economies closely resembled the ‘public corporation’ conception familiar to Britons after the war.
