Rothbard’s essay is a short policy intervention written at the moment when Soviet-style legitimacy was visibly collapsing in Eastern Europe. Its purpose is not to prove that socialism has failed, but to ask what institutional steps can actually undo it. He treats the desire for markets as no longer confined to dissidents: even many communist officials, entrepreneurs, and ordinary citizens now want a rapid move toward private property.
They are convinced that socialism doesn’t work, and are anxious to get, as quickly as possible, to a society of private property and a market economy.
This atmosphere, for Rothbard, exposes a weakness in Western anticommunist thought. Conservatives had studied communism as an enemy system, but had not seriously prepared a theory of transition once that system began to dissolve.
Unfortunately, innumerable conservative institutions and scholars have studied East European Communism in the past 40 years, but precious few have pondered how to put desocialization into effect.
The essay distinguishes liberalization from true privatization. Rothbard regards many reforms as obvious: legalizing black markets, permitting currency exchange, ending price controls, removing production controls, and reducing taxes. But none of these measures settles the central issue, because the main assets of socialist economies remain state-owned. Desocialization therefore requires not only freeing exchange but assigning ownership.
He rejects the simple proposal that the state sell its enterprises. In a socialist economy, citizens generally lack the funds to purchase assets the state has monopolized, and Rothbard also denies that the state has a rightful claim to the proceeds. Sale would treat the government as legitimate owner of property he regards as coercively held.
The easy answer—sell them, either on contract or at auction—won’t work here.
Nor is managerial autonomy enough. Letting state managers set prices or operate more independently leaves unresolved who owns the enterprise, who bears losses, and who receives gains. For Rothbard, markets require definite private titles, not merely decentralized administration.
His preferred solution follows Paul Craig Roberts’s revolutionary formula: land should go to peasants and factories to workers, while acknowledging that many assets cannot simply be restored to pre-communist owners. This is not meant as egalitarian redistribution but as a way to create determinate claims where state ownership has obliterated ordinary title.
The major complication is the ruling class. Rothbard accepts that the nomenklatura controls the transition machinery and cannot be ignored without risking sabotage or violence. His practical answer is to “buy them off” through stock ownership alongside workers. This is morally imperfect, but he treats it as a possible price of peaceful and rapid desocialization.
He also rejects Roberts’s lottery proposal for distributing ownership. Although later market exchange might move assets toward efficient owners, Rothbard argues that the initial assignment cannot appear arbitrary. Private property must begin with some recognizable connection to justice, especially for people injured by communist rule.
But the trouble here is that Roberts ignores the hunger for justice among most people, and particularly among victims of communism.
The essay’s lasting significance is its insistence that post-socialist transition is not merely a matter of proclaiming “free markets.” It requires a politically feasible and morally intelligible conversion of state assets into private property. Rothbard’s central claim is that desocialization must be rapid, but also that its first titles must be legitimate enough for the new market order to endure.
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