Vassar College Faculty Meeting
September 28, 1988
IN MEMORIAN
Eugen Loebl
1907 - 1987
Eugen Loebl was born on May 14, 1907 in the village of Holiò, in the Hungarian part of the Austrian Empire. After World War I it became a part of the newly created the nation of Czechoslovakia. He started his education in Holiò and then went on to study in Vienna, two and a half hours away, at the University for Welthandel (World Commerce) and later completed his economic studies in Prague at Charles University, where he also subsequently taught.
Although Eugen came from a religious background, he was not a “pratiquant,” and unlike his brother who was an ardent Zionist, Eugen went directly into politics. As a child he had noticed the gap between peoples’ religious beliefs and their acts. And in the political sphere, the acts of cowardice and accommadtion to the rising Nazi movement were even more troubling. In vienna he and other Jewish students were beaten by brown-shirted Nazis who stalked the halls of the university. He was shocked that this could be allowed to happen, and in his mid-twenties he joined the Czechoslovakian communist party because it was the only group that was seriously resisting the rise of Naziism.
Eugen was a very bright young man and he rose quickly within the party’s ranks. By the time of World War II and the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, he found himself in London
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with the provisional Czechoslovakian government in exile, where
he served as economic adviser to Jan Masaryk, the minister for
foreign affairs, and in the immediate postwar years as
representative of Czechoslovakia in the United Nations Relief and
Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Toward the end of the
war, when the defeat of Hitler seemed inevitable, Eugen was sent
from London to Prague in a roundabout way with plans for the new
government. The path to Prague was via Turkey and then through
most of the back part of Russia on train. On the last leg of the
trip Eugen shared a train compartment with a Russian general who
forced him to drink down toast after toast of vodka and black
pepper to the Russian nation, to the Czech nation, to the armies,
to the generals that led them, and on and on until Eugen became
deadly sick. when he finally arrived in Prague, somewhat wobbly,
he found the war had ended and the Czech exile government already
installed.
As close as Eugen had been to Jan Masaryk, he could never
bring himself to discuss the death of his friend in the
communist takeover of the Czech government -- whether he fell or
was pushed out of the bathroom window. Whenever asked about it
he went into a pained silence, and one soon sensed it was a topic
not to be pursued. In the new communist government Eugen became
deputy minister of trade. It was in this capacity that Eugen
made a fatal mistake. The Czech government in exile had
rovisionally agreed (at a time when Czechoslovakia was still
occupied by Soviet troops) to provide the Soviet Union with
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uranium ore at cost plus 10 percent. After the war, in 1947,
Eugen headed a Czech delegation that met with Foreign Trade
Minister Anastas Mikoyan and Deputy Prime Minister Krutikov to
renegotiate the terms of the earlier agreement. Eugen suggested
that the Soviet Union pay Czechoslovakia at world market prices
for the ore. That was the beginning of Eugen's downfall. Years
later, after his release from prison and his rehabilitation as
Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Bratislava, Eugen asked
his research staff to calculate the difference between the prices
the Soviet Union actually paid and the world market price for
uranium ore. For the period 1945 to 1965 the difference exceeded
one billion dollars.
The tragedy of Eugen Loebl is best explained by a book
published early in the postwar years under the title The God That
Failed, with Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender,
and others as contributors. Eugen was arrested on November 24,
1949 and was brought to trial in 1952 along with Rudolph Slansky,
the Secretary—General of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, and 12
other defendants. In the Slansky trial of 1952 Eugen saw his
great hope, the thing he most believed in turned into an
instrument of terror. He later came to think that the failure
was built into the system of Marxism; that betrayal of the
revolution was inevitable; that the system itself was fatally
flawed and inhuman. And he spent the rest of his life making
amends for his earlier beliefs by writing books and articles, by
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testifying before Congressional Committees, and by taking to the
lecture circuit in Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Brazil and India.
Eugen set out the story of the 1952 Slansky Trial in his
book Stalinism in Prague. In it he repudiated Koestler's thesis
in Darkness at Noon, based on the trial of Nikolai Bukharin in
1939, that confessions were made out of a sense of party loyalty
and political need. One confessed, according to Eugen, simply
because one had no other choice. Of the fourteen defendants,
eleven were Jewish. And of the 11 not one was a Zionist. Yet
the accused were charged with conspiring to promote world Jewish
domination and of trying to sabotage socialism in order to align
Czechoslovakia with the West. The charges were espionage, high
treason, and sabotage. All were regarded as “Trotskyite,
Titoite, Zionist and bourgeois-national traitors in the service
of the U.S. imperialists and under the direction of Western
espionage agencies." All confessed after extensive grilling and
torture by Czech and Russian interrogators. In particular, Eugen
Loebl was accused of being an Israeli agent. The shipment of
arms in 1947 to Israel from the Skoda plant in Czechoslovakia was
seen as part of an international Zionist plot. Of the fourteen
charged, only three survived -- Artur London, Vavro Hajdu, and
Eugen Loebl. The rest were executed.
Eugen spent eleven years in jail, five of them in solitary
confinement. It was while in solitary confinement, with no books
and no writing material at his disposal, that he began rethinking
his Marxism and committing his new thoughts to memory. The
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critical fault he found in Marxism was its dependence on a
primitive labor theory of value based on manual labor. It was
while in jail that Eugen devised his notion of "mental" labor,
which became the basis of all his subsequent thought in the field
of economics.
With the rise of Khrushchev to power and his repudiation of
Stalin in 1956, rehabilitation became a possibility, but Eugen
was not to be released from jail until five years later in 1961.
For two years after his release he worked as a wrapping clerk and
was not rehabilitated until 1963. At that time, Alexander
Dubcek, the head of government, insisted that Eugen be given a
responsible position in government. He was assigned by the
bureaucracy to the central bank of Bratislava with the
expectation that he would fail. Instead, he excelled and was
shortly made deputy director of the bank. The "Spring Thaw" of
1968 saw the end of "socialism with a human face" and the brutal
reimposition of Stalinism in the Eastern European countries.
Russian tanks rumbled through Prague's Wenceslas Square in August
of 1968 and Eugen fled to the West.
It was on January 24, 1969 that President Alan Simpson
announced the appointment of Eugen Loebl as Dexter M. Ferry, Jr.,
Professor of Economics and Political Science at Vassar College,
where he stayed as a member of the economics department until his
retirement in 1975 at the age of 68. He was an active member of
the department of economics and a major participant in the
Critical Thought program of Science, Technology and Society. He
proved to be an inspiring teacher and his classes were extremely
popular with the students. It was while at Vassar that he put
down in writing his major thoughts on mental labor. His book
Humanomics: How We Can Make the Economy Serve us -- Not Destroy
gs was widely reviewed and endorsed by such prominent writers as
Alvin Toffler, Peter F. Drucker and Michael Novak. It was a
controversial book that recommended the doing away of income
taxes, the imposition of stiff value added taxes on the products
consumed by the rich, and placed human values at the center of
the economy -— which in his view was done neither by capitalism
nor by communism. Above all, the one thing he most wanted was to
remove economists from the center of decision making. "I think
all economists," wrote Eugen, "should be given five years of
solitary confinement. Half of them might radically rethink their
ideas, and the other half would at least be out of circulation
where they could do no harm."
His biggest success was in India in 1978 where Prime
Minister Moraji Desai not only endorsed the book but was
photographed prominently holding it out for the benefit of the
photographers -— and the book. So much publicity was received
Eugen's ideas in India that a group was formed to promote them
(which still continues to function), and the Dalai Lama invited
Eugen to visit with him. It turned out the Dalai Lama was
interested in combining the religion of Tibet with the teachings
of Marx -- in the hope of finding some way of ending his exile in
India by compromising with the Chinese communists. Eugen was
by
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appalled by the idea and severely lectured the Dali Lama on the
impossibility of doing so, as he did, on another occasion, to
Marxist catholic clergy in Brazil on the impossibility of
combining christianity with Marxism. But while he was in India
his hosts were alarmed at his being constantly followed by agents
of the Czech and Russian embassies -- so much so that they
appealed to the Indian government for his protection. It was
with considerable relief that his official host kissed him
goodbye at the airport.
In his retirement years, from 1975 to 1987, he attended a
conference on human rights in Madrid and travelled extensively in
Europe and Latin America. He also served as a consultant to
Denison Mines, the world's largest uranium mine in Canada, run by
the Slovakian multi-millionaire, Stephen Roman, with whom he
wrote a book, The Responsible Society. Less than a year before
his death, Eugen travelled to Vienna where a television
documentary was being made on the psychological effects of his
imprisonment and interrogation (The Confession). Eugen played
himself in the documentary, and in prison uniform spent hours
walking the prison corridors and reliving his past. The TV
documentary was broadcast on June 13, 1987, two months before
his death. It was also broadcast in the Czech language.
The last project Eugen Loebl worked on was the problem of
Peace and Freedom, to which he was convinced he had the answer.
His views attracted considerable interest in West Germany, where
his papers on peace and freedom are to be deposited, in India,
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and among some deputies in France. All his other papers will be
deposited at the Libraries of Columbia University.
Eugen Loebl suffered his first heart attack in 1961, one
week after his release from prison. He had a second, and minor,
attack in 1983. With the passage of years he had, at times,
difficulty in breathing, and in 1987 he decided to undergo bypass
surgery at the age of 80. He went into it with courage and was
sure that it would turn out all right. He made rapid progress
the first two weeks after the operation, but the trauma of the
operation, in conjunction with his diabetes, proved too much. He
died at home in New York on August 8, 1987, leaving behind a son
in Switzerland from his first marriage, and his second wife of
eighteen close and very happy years, the artist, well known and
well loved in Vassar circles, Greta Schreyer.
The extraordinary life of an extraordinary man had come to
an end. Throughout his life, Eugen was "engagé." He was not
content to sit on the sidelines watching developments from the
safety of his classroom, as so many academic "seminar Marxists"
are want to do. He was a warm and caring man who, though
"engage,” never allowed his critical faculties to be subordinated
to an external dogma. To have known Eugen was to have basked in
his warmth, his bubbling enthusiasm, and his eternal optimism and
belief in the possibility of a better world.
Respectfully submitted
For the epartment of Economics
Stephen Rousseas