Marx Was Right. His Own Disciples Proved It

The article shows how, after the regime's fall, roughly 1.7 million members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ) confirmed Marx's own thesis that social being determines consciousness — when the economic base shifted from planned to market, former Marxists transformed within months into ardent champions of the free market, epitomized by the economists of the ČSAV Forecasting Institute (Komárek, Klaus, Zeman). Drawing on Marx, Hoffer, and Žižek, the author argues that this "turning of coats" was not a dramatic conversion but merely a change of ideological costume over the same cynical subject, and recalls a June 1989 survey according to which only 46% of the party's members would have joined again.

The concept, structure, and editorial line of the article are the work of the author... — but first, the translation you asked for:

In August 1989, the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) discussed an alarming report on the state of its membership base. The average age of a party member had passed 45, and one in five was over sixty. Of just under 1.7 million members and candidates, not even half would have joined the party again. The party was aging, losing its appeal, and it knew it.

Three months later it lost its monopoly on power. Within a year, hundreds of thousands of members had fled it.

What followed would have pleased Karl Marx more than the entire Paris Commune. Roughly 1.7 million people who had spent twenty years studying Marxism-Leninism at party trainings, attending membership meetings, and paying their dues did exactly what the first chapter of every Marxist textbook predicts: when the economic base changed, they adapted their consciousness to it.

Marx wrote it in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness." The former communists did not quote this sentence — they embodied it. And with such elegance that Marx could have added it as an illustrative example.

**15% of the adult population looks for a new superstructure**

First the numbers, because without them every irony is mere rhetoric.

As of 1 October 1989, the KSČ (including the Slovak KSS, which was its territorial branch) registered a total of 1,617,863 members and 79,882 candidates. Czechoslovakia had roughly 15.6 million inhabitants, of whom about 11.2 million were over the age of 18. The share of communists in the adult population was therefore approximately 15%.

But — as a report to the Presidium of the Central Committee from that same year pointed out — a fifth of the members were over 60. These were people who had joined the party in the 1950s and 1960s, survived the purges after 1968, and no longer had any career reason to leave their membership. Nor to keep it. They were either committed Marxists or people for whom the party card had become part of their identity, like a tram pass.

If we subtract the pensioners, roughly 1,358,000 economically active communists remain. Measured against the economically active population of the ČSSR (roughly 8.19 million), that gives 16.6%. About one in six working citizens of Czechoslovakia held a red party card in their hand.

And then they put it down. Some cautiously. Others with an ostentatious gesture. And the cleverest swapped it for another — of a different color, with a different logo.

**The Institute of Forecasting: a laboratory of conversion**

Nowhere was the transformation from Marxists into monetarists more visible than at the Institute of Forecasting of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (ČSAV). This institution, established in 1984 as the Forecasting Cabinet of the ČSAV on the basis of ČSSR Government Resolution No. 10/1983 and renamed the Institute of Forecasting in 1986, was not a dissident cell. It was an elite establishment of the regime whose employees drew markedly above-average salaries — director Valtr Komárek earned almost three times the average wage at the turn of 1984 and 1985, they traveled to the West and studied Western economic literature. All with the party's approval and at the party's expense.

Komárek studied at the Economic Institute in Moscow and in the 1960s served as an adviser to Ernesto Che Guevara in Cuba. Václav Klaus, who joined the institute in December 1987, was not a member of the KSČ — but he was not a dissident either. He was a researcher in the gray zone, whom the StB (State Security) kept in its files under the cover names "Kluk" and "Rek" as a vetted person. His colleague at the institute was Karel Köcher, the only confirmed Eastern Bloc agent to penetrate the CIA — a man exchanged in February 1986 on the Glienicke Bridge for the Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky.

The total number of people who passed through the institute over the course of its existence reached 289 names, as documented by a roster in the Archive of the Academy of Sciences — of whom, at its peak (1988–1989), around 120 researchers worked there. From this relatively small circle came one future president (Klaus); another president (Zeman) joined the institute only after the revolution, in 1990. In total, the Institute of Forecasting produced more than seven ministers and two central-bank governors. Most had gone through Marxist training. And almost all of them became zealous champions of the free market after November 1989.

Marx would have smirked. This, after all, was exactly how it was supposed to work.

**Anatomy of an ironic proof**

The irony operates on three levels, each of them Marxist.

First: the base really did determine the superstructure. When the economic system changed from centrally planned to market-based, the ideological "superstructure" — convictions, attitudes, party affiliation — adapted within months. Those who had preached historical materialism demonstrated it through their own behavior.

Second: ideology served class interests. Marx argued that the dominant ideology of every era is the ideology of the ruling class. The nomenklatura's transition to capitalism revealed that their "communism" had been — for most, though not all — a tool for preserving privilege, not an expression of authentic conviction. A June 1989 survey by the Institute for Public Opinion Research (ÚVVM) confirmed it: even among party members themselves, the prevailing view was unequivocally that joining the party was motivated by the advantages membership provided.

Third: primitive accumulation proceeded exactly as Marx described. The voucher privatization, designed by Dušan Tříska — a former StB collaborator and the son of a prominent communist family — and run by the non-member Klaus, can be interpreted as what the Marxist geographer David Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession: the transfer of public property into private hands. The sociologists Gil Eyal and Iván Szelényi, in their book Making Capitalism Without Capitalists (Verso, 1998), found that 40% of the economic elite of post-communist Czechia consisted of people who had also been members of the elite under socialism. Capitalism was being built without capitalists — but with former communists.

**The true believers: Hoffer's "believers" in action**

And what of those who did not turn their coats?

Miloš Jakeš died in 2020 at the age of 97, a committed communist. In the longitudinal documentary Milda (2017, directed by Pavel Křemen) he appears as a man utterly incapable of self-reflection — an ideological fanatic who did not budge an inch from his convictions. The building of socialism remained his life's achievement, and what he regretted most was that the party "had not fought harder."

In his posthumous memoirs Až po mé smrti (Only After My Death), Vasil Biľak expressed the conviction that socialism would be rehabilitated once again. As a member of parliament, Marta Semelová defended Gottwald and called the 1968 invasion "international assistance."

Eric Hoffer, in his classic work The True Believer (1951), formulated the thesis that all mass movements are interchangeable — the true believer is attached not to a doctrine but to the structure of belief. Most KSČ members behaved exactly as Hoffer described: once communism collapsed, they embraced neoliberalism as a new "holy cause" — often with the zeal of converts. Those who remained with Marxism represent a psychological minority: people for whom ideological identity matters more than material interest.

Paradoxically, in doing so they confirm Marx's thesis from the opposite direction. Marx would say that their consciousness survives because their social existence has not changed — they remained in the preserved environment of the KSČM (Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia), where the old social relations still held. The average age of KSČM members in 2013 was 74.

**Žižek and cynical ideology: they knew what they were doing**

Slavoj Žižek — himself a former member of the League of Communists of Slovenia — offers the most elegant explanation of the entire paradox. In The Sublime Object of Ideology he argues that modern ideology does not work through naive belief but through cynicism: the subject knows very well what they are doing, and yet they do it.

Under late communism, people knew the ideology was false but acted as if they believed — they marched in parades, spoke up at meetings, quoted the resolutions of party congresses. Under post-communist capitalism, the same cynical structure operates with different content. The turning of coats is thus not a dramatic conversion but merely a change of ideological costume over the same cynical subject.

Žižek would add that this is precisely why the Czech transformation was so smooth. There was no need to change the people — it was enough to change the slogans.

**46 percent**

In closing, one number that is worth the whole article.

In June 1989 — five months before the Velvet Revolution — the Institute for Public Opinion Research conducted a survey among KSČ members. Asked whether they would join the party again, 46% answered yes. Almost a third said no. A quarter did not know.

Half the membership base of the ruling party did not identify with its program. A report to the leadership warned: "These tendencies may manifest very unfavorably in the event of complex domestic political situations."

And Marx — were he alive — would have nodded his head. Not because he would have approved of what happened. But because he had predicted it. The only thing he did not predict was that his most zealous disciples would also be his best proof — and that they would furnish that proof by betraying him.

The article draws on primary sources: Štverák, F.: Schematismus k dějinám KSČ 1921–1992 (National Archives, 2010); Pažout, J.: Vnitřní podoba KSČ v období tzv. normalizace (Paginae historiae 27/1, 2019); Zpráva o vývoji členské základny za rok 1988 (NA, KSČ-ÚV, ref. no. ÚV 86/1989); the June 1989 ÚVVM survey; Eyal, G., Szelényi, I., Townsley, E.: Making Capitalism Without Capitalists (Verso, 1998); Vaněk, M.: Vítězové? Poražení? (Prostor, 2005).

The concept, structure, and editorial line of the article are the work of the author, who prepared the content outline, set out the key theses, and directed the entire creative process. Generative AI (Claude, Anthropic) was used as a tool for research, fact-checking, and fleshing out the author's draft.

The author continuously edited the outputs, verified the key findings, and approved the final version. No part of the text was published without human review. All factual data were verified against the publicly available sources cited in the text.

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