CHARLES BETTELHEIM, a Paris economist, counted the Indian liberation leader Jawaharlal Nehru among his personal friends, and Chou Enlai, the Chinese Premier under Mao, Ho Chi Minh, the leader of Vietnam’s communist revolution, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian leader, and the South American revolutionary Che Guevara among his hosts and clients.
As a Third World development expert, Bettelheim was the paid adviser to the governments of India, Egypt, Cuba and a number of African states as they were throwing off their French and British colonial yokes. Throughout the l950s and l960s he became the dominant planning expert in the Third World.
Bettelheim owed his access to these leaders to the fact that he shared their basic economic and political ideology. He was a committed Marxist, like Ho Chi Minh and Chou Enlai, while Nehru and Nasser had a sneaking admiration for Karl Marx and his ideas. His Marxism, combined with his masterly grasp of every detail of development planning, gave Bettelheim an unrivalled influence and near iconic status.
But Bettelheim never became “one of them”. He retained his status as an independent adviser because, while he travelled the Third World dispensing advice, he was firmly anchored in Paris as an academic economist. For some three decades from l948 he was the director of studies at the prestigious École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and he wrote some 30 books on the subjects of planning and development. Some became standard texts in applied economics far beyond the Marxist world.
Bettelheim won the respect of fellow economists because his first loyalty was to the facts and free, unfettered research. That led him ultimately to subject the whole of Marxist orthodoxy to a fresh and rigorous scrutiny. With that he deprived some of Marx’s cherished teachings of their intellectual respectability, and, in a four-volume study of the Soviet economy, which he entitled Les Luttes des Classes en URSS (The Class Struggle in the Soviet Union), published over nine years from l974 to l983, he was one of the first to expose both the weaknesses and the actual Marxist unorthodoxy of the Soviet economic regime. His final verdict on it was: “The Soviet economy is merely party capitalism.”
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His incorruptible intellectual integrity also led to an early break with the Communist Party, which he had joined as a student, in 1935, from the French Young Communists. A year later he spent five months in Moscow and witnessed the first of Stalin’s show trials, which profoundly shook his faith. In l937 he was suspended from the French Communist Party because of his “anti- Soviet mindset”.
Bettelheim spent most of the war years in a Trotskyist resistance group, and then left politics for academic freedom. By then he was fascinated by the economics of all totalitarian regimes and he published a classic study also on the German economy under Nazism. It is largely due to his work that the Soviet and Nazi economic models are now dismissed as two of the spectacular failures of the 20th century.
Charles Bettelheim, development economist, was born on November 20, 1913. He died on July 20, 2006, aged 92.