People of the Revolution and the USSR

French Communist Party (PCF) Western Marxist theorists 1913–2006 ○ Natural causes

French Marxist economist who theorized the USSR as state capitalism and shaped Third World development economics

'Control by the producers over their conditions of existence requires the development of entirely new social relations.' — Economic Calculation and Forms of Property (1971)

French Marxist economist. Founder of CEMI, he pioneered Soviet planning studies and served as economic advisor to Nasser, Nehru, and Ben Bella. In the 1963 Cuban 'Great Debate' he opposed Che Guevara's centralized industrialization, arguing for decentralized planning with market elements. Drawn to Maoism, he collaborated with Althusser to critique Marxist 'economism,' insisting socialism requires active political reshaping of social relations, not mere state ownership. His Class Struggles in the USSR (1974–1982) theorized the Soviet Union as state capitalism; Le Monde (1972) called him 'the most visible Marxist in the capitalist world.'

Western Marxist theorists 1926–2003 ○ Natural causes

A non-dogmatic Marxist who reflected on the Prague Spring

He argued that the Prague Spring was buried again after 1989, following its burial under the Husák regime.

Karel Kosík was a Czech philosopher who reworked Marxism as a philosophy of human praxis and concrete historicity. His major work, Dialectics of the Concrete (1963), placed Marx in dialogue with Heideggerian phenomenology and earned international recognition. A leading intellectual of democratic socialism during the Prague Spring, he was expelled from the Communist Party and excluded from university life during normalization. After 1989, he argued that the memory and emancipatory promise of the reform had been buried first by the Husák regime and again by the neoliberal order, making him central to debates over the event’s legacy.