The Burning Paths to the Future

On 1 June 1960, eight years before the Prague Spring, seven party members and antifascists sent an open letter to the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party. They called the system by its name, "bureaucratic state socialism", and demanded a return to democracy inside the Party and in society. Benjamin Varon was one of the seven.

He paid for it. He lost his Chair of Political Economy, was interned with his family in a remote village in Northeastern Bulgaria, and was barred from teaching and research until December 1989.

This book opens with that letter and the documents around it, among them what Todor Zhivkov himself later wrote about it. It continues with the essays Varon published between 1994 and 2004: on why hired labour is legally and historically illegitimate, on the Third Way, on globalization and the social state, on NATO's war against Yugoslavia, on whether pro-Nazi Bulgaria had its Holocaust, and on what could come after capitalism.

Varon criticised real socialism from the left and never stopped being a socialist. "I have a thousand reasons to detest the brutality of real socialism," he wrote, "but I cannot think of a single one that puts an equality sign between the villains, the distortions, the crimes, and socialism."

The texts are selected from his earlier books Paths (1999, 2000, 2001) and Capitalism - Antagonist of Humankind (2004). Translated by Julia Stefanova and Stefana Roussenova. Published in memoriam by his daughter, Dr. Raymonda Varon.