Egon Bondy

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.”