Charles Bettelheim

Charles Bettelheim (20 November 1913 – 20 July 2006) was a French Marxian economist and historian, founder of the Center for the Study of Modes of Industrialization (CEMI: Centre pour l'Étude des Modes d'Industrialisation) at the EHESS, economic advisor to the governments of several developing countries during the period of decolonization.

The family had to leave France after the beginning of the First World War in 1914.

The Bettelheims lived in Switzerland then in Egypt.

In 1922, Charles Bettelheim returned to Paris with his French mother, during which time his father, who was living in Egypt, committed suicide.

In Cuba, Bettelheim recommended a diversified economy, based on agriculture, prudent industrialization, broad central planning, mixed forms of property ownership with market elements—a pragmatic strategy similar to the "New Economic Policy" begun in Russia by Vladimir Lenin in 1922.

Opposing Guevara, Bettelheim argued (in line with the last writings of Stalin) that the "law of value" was the manifestation of objective social conditions which could not be overcome by willful decisions, but only by a process of long-term social transformation.

This debate demonstrated the profound differences which, from then on, separated Bettelheim from Marxist "orthodoxy", which considered Socialism as the result of "the development of maximum centralization of all forces of industrial production".

For Bettelheim, socialism is rather an alternative voice in development; a process of transformation of social understandings.

Inspired by the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the thought of Mao Zedong, and in cooperation with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, Bettelheim was opposed to "economism" and to the "primacy of the means of production" of traditional Marxism: against the idea that socialist transformation of social bonds was a necessary effect of the development of the forces of production (liberating those bonds from them, according to Marxist orthodoxy, since private property dominates them in "bourgeois" society), he affirmed the necessity for actively and politically transforming social connections.

In his book Economic Calculations and Forms of Ownership (Calcul économique et formes de proprieté), Bettelheim re-thinks the problems of transition to socialism, while criticizing the supposition that nationalization and state ownership of the means of production was already "socialist"—it is not the legal form of property, but true socialization of the web of production, which characterizes such a transition; the crucial problem in socialist planning is the replacement of the form of "value" with the development of a method of measurement which takes into account the social utility of production.

In China, Bettelheim had the impression that he was in the process of witnessing just such a process of transformation.

After Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Charles Bettelheim broke away from his familiar environment, first joining the "Young Communists" (Jeunesses communistes), and subsequently the French Communist Party.

In addition to his studies in philosophy, sociology, law and psychology, he also learned Russian.

In July 1936, he arrived in Moscow with a tourist visa.

Thanks to his mastery of the language, he was able to get a resident permit for five months, during which time he worked as a tourist guide, and later on with the French edition of the Moscow Journal, and finally at Mosfilm, where he directed film dubbing.

His experiences during his Moscow stay, in the anxious atmosphere at the beginning of the "purges" and the trials of the Bolshevik leaders who opposed Joseph Stalin, made him keep a critical distance from the Soviet Union, without actually abandoning his Communist convictions.

He was excluded from the Communist Party for his "slanderous" remarks.

In 1937, he married a young militant Communist, Lucette Beauvallet.

During the German occupation, he cooperated with the French Trotskyists (the Internationalist Workers Party).

His decision to choose economics as a profession was not an easy one, since at that time economics was considered a minor science; however, inasmuch as he had become so knowledgeable about the Soviet Union and about economic planning, Bettelheim was able to fill a gap.

After World War II, he became an official in the Ministry of Labor.

In 1948 he entered the "Sixth Section" of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE).

In the Fifties, Bettelheim began his international activities as an advisor to the governments of Third World countries; he was the spokesperson for Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, for Jawaharlal Nehru in India, and for Ahmed Ben Bella in Algeria.

In 1956, he endorsed the De-Stalinization inaugurated by Nikita Khrushchev at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, as well as the 1965 economic reforms conceived by Soviet economist Evsei Liberman, suggesting a decentralization of decisions made within the planning leadership.

In 1958, he created an institutional base for his research by founding the CEMI.

In 1963, Che Guevara invited him to Cuba, where he participated in a "grand debate" on socialist economics.

In the Cuban debate of 1963, Bettelheim was opposed to the voluntarist ideas of Che Guevara, who wanted to abolish free market and the production of merchandise through a very rapid and centralized industrialization, morally mobilizing "the new man."

Bettelheim took a position against this plan, to which Fidel Castro had also subscribed: both Che Guevara and Castro preferred the monoculture of sugar as the basis of Cuban economy, rather than a strict analogy to the economy of the Soviet Union.

In 1966, Bettelheim was particularly interested in China.

He helped the Union of Young Communists (Marxist–Leninist) with theoretical planning, without being directly affiliated with the organization.

In his capacity as President of the Franco-Chinese Friendship Association (Association des amitiés Franco-Chinoises), he visited the People's Republic of China numerous times, in order to study new methods of industrial development created by the Cultural Revolution.

Bettelheim was impressed by the implementation of the Angang Constitution in the factories he visited and the high levels of political consciousness among workers and cadre.

He was very influential in France's New Left, and considered one of "the most visible Marxists in the capitalist world" (Le Monde, 4 April 1972), in France as well as in Spain, Italy, Latin America, and India.

Henri Bettelheim, the father of Charles Bettelheim, was a Viennese Austrian of Jewish origin, and a representative of a Swiss bank in Paris.

From 1980 onward, Bettelheim fell more and more by the wayside—a result of the profound political changes in the Third World—and, in Europe, of the decline (and eventual dissolution) of "hard-line socialism", which rendered "obsolete" any debate over the paradigms of development in the Southern countries, in an atmosphere of planned economy independent of the world market—an economy to which Bettelheim had contributed so much.

Bettelheim has written a book of memoirs which has remained unfinished.

Until his death, Bettelheim lived in Paris.

He did not publish anything in his later years.

His student and long-time colleague Bernard Chavance is among the leading exponents of Regulation theory.

Despite his negative experiences in Moscow, Bettelheim retained a favorable attitude towards Soviet socialism until the Sixties, citing the economic accomplishments of the Soviet Union, which he appreciated from an independent point of view.