Hungary 1956: Revolution or Counter Revolution?

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You are being delusional. In capitalism, just as long as you born into a bourgeois family, you will be successful. Everyone else is condemned to a life of stagnant wages, soaring inflation, overpriced housing, overpriced education, and overpriced medical care.

Yes because Bill Gates
George Zimmer
Ralph C. Wilson, Jr.
T.J. Hearn
Clarence Decatur Howe

amongst MANY others.

Yes Capitalism at its core is wrong, but credit should be granted to those who strive for greatness when they have nothing. What your saying is no different than McCarthyism at its core, and that is worse than Capitalism. Branding something senselessly is for morons.

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There is no direct comparison to be made between the events of 1956 and those of the Iraq War

The rough point I was making was that the USSR said that Hungary was a free country and America is saying that Iraq is a free country. Both of those countries don't/didn't have autonomy.

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There is no direct comparison to be made between the events of 1956 and those of the Iraq War, unless the 1956 events you're talking about were those of the Suez Crisis. The USSR was not 'invading' Hungary for economic gain; it was preserving its geopolitical interests, and, as history would prove (by the events of the late 1980s and early 1990s) preserving socialism.

Comrade soviet78 above is entirely correct. Plus, the USSR did not invade Hungary whatsoever. It was entitled to deploy troops in Hungary according to the Warsaw Pact treaty. Janos Kadar's brand of revisionism was tolerable, but Imre Nagy's blatantly pro-western outlook was unacceptable for the interests of the Hungarian people. It must be taken into consideration that numerous members of the State and Party issued requests to the USSR for assistance in suppressing the counter-revolution.

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Yes Capitalism at its core is wrong, but credit should be granted to those who strive for greatness when they have nothing. What your saying is no different than McCarthyism at its core, and that is worse than Capitalism. Branding something senselessly is for morons.

Some Communist you are. You should train as an attorney and represent your pals at Enron. Your defense of capitalism is unscrupulous.

The vast majority of the members of the bourgeoisie have inherited their status. Just observe every single one of our presidents from Washington to the Roosevelts to the Bushes. Pay attention to the "Great Sovet Encyclopedia". "Conservative" parties in the West are big-bourgeois; they represent the factory owners and landlords. Socialist parties are petit-bourgoeis. Communist parties are always working-class. Have you even received a Marxist education, comrade canuck ?

You can start with reading various documents at www.marxists.org

You could have gone to USSR for scientific socialism training if it existed today But we'll have to settle for alternatives.

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Plus, the USSR did not invade Hungary whatsoever. It was entitled to deploy troops in Hungary according to the Warsaw Pact treaty.

They had announced their withdrawal from the Pact - they were no longer apart of it. Yet the soviets still intervened with a massive invasion.

This is the cause given by Wikipedia:

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Economic collapse and low standards of living provoked working class discontent, which was visible during soccer riots. Peasants were unhappy with land policies. The Communist Party was unable to unite its reformist and Stalinist wings. Journalists and authors were upset with their working conditions, and took control of their trade union. Students were upset with academic conditions and University entrance criteria and established independent student unions. Nikita Khrushchev's speech on the Soviet government under Stalin caused much debate within the elite of the Hungarian communist party. As the Hungarian communist party was blinded by leadership debates, the population took action.

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Bravo on quoting such an opinionated piece from Wikipedia

Opinionated eh? Well are you going to show how opinionated it is by attempting to disprove some of the problems that were obviously present in the state under the soviets? Especially:

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Economic collapse and low standards of living provoked working class discontent, which was visible during soccer riots. Peasants were unhappy with land policies.

Manipulation or not, it seems that all was not well in this soviet utopia - so there was overwhelming change.

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Economic collapse and low standards of living

Does your source show anything on this??? How were the living standards poor?? Compared to what were they poor? What entrance criteria did the students not like?

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Does your source show anything on this??? How were the living standards poor?? Compared to what were they poor? What entrance criteria did the students not like?

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Theft was a necessity for workers to compensate for socialist living standards. These had dropped by 17-20% in the years 1949-53 as a result of an idiotic 'Five-Year Plan’ devoted to heavy industry and steelworks in a largely agricultural country with no iron ore or coking coal. 3 Similarly, the imposition of co-operatives on unwilling peasants led to a fall in their meagre incomes, and 1952 saw the worst ever yields in Hungarian agriculture. Official statistics revealed that while 15% of the population was above the 'minimum* standard of living, 30% were on it and 55% below. A day's pay for a state farm worker wouldn't buy a kilo of bread; in 15% of working-class families not everyone had a blanket; one in every five workers had no winter coat. 4

http://af-north.org/other%20pamphlets/1956.htm

zzzing!

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"Home page of the Anarchist Federation in the north of England"

zzzing! Roll eyes

Do you deny the statistics altogether?


I will not try to debate your other points due to my limited knowledge on that area of world history - but I still see injustice in that the soviets seemed to have their own interests in mind rather then the people of Hungary.
While I do agree that the period following the revolution under János Kádár was quite prosperous in terms of living standards, I still do not think that the counter-revolution was a legitamate enterprise.
If the soviet union knew of the possible deception from 'political and economic minorities and elites', they should have warned them of the danger and stayed out of it, instead of launching a full blown invasion which killed thousands of Hungarians and alienated many others from the soviets.

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where university students and intellectuals demanded political liberalisation. In the countryside farmers demanded a return to private ownership of farm property.

So what should have been the proper Marxist-Leninist response to this?

Which farmers wanted a return to private ownership? Kulaks? What was the concrete nature of these demands? How many? If just some speak up, do we all just bow and say, well, of course, ok, go ahead and privatize? Why were they demanding this?

Which class forces did the university students and intellectuals represent? I want a class analysis, not weeping nationalism.

Andrei Mazenov wrote:

Hungary is a complex case, that underscores how fragged up conditions were in eastern Europe.

On one hand, the political systems in Eastern Europe were imposed from outside, and often had only shallow roots among the people (East Germany and the Balkans were exceptions)

Sources please. I'm not doubting you, I would just like to understand this in greater depth. How was there imposition from outside? My understanding is that the Red Army helped eliminate fascism in these countries, and the fascists and their collaborators made up a great amount of the capitalists, resulting in a situation akin to China's nationalizing the bureaucratic capitalists.

Weren't multiple parties allowed? Stalin sure didn't seem to press the revolutionary proletarian line very publicly in these areas. Was that a mistake? Should more revolutionary action on the part of the Red Army have taken place, to give it less "shallow roots"? Was the "united front" strategy a way of slowing down revolutionary forces that would have planted deeper roots? Were things wishy-washy such that when some form of proto-socialism got set up the people weren't as behind it?

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The various local rulers in Eastern Europe found themselves imposing things with a harsh hand, and then when Krushchev came to power in the USSR and announced a blossoming of all things bourgeois -- it blew the lid off of things in Hungary.

What was happening that these rulers were not following the mass line? What were the conditions that they were resorting to commandism? What role did Stalin have in all this? (I'm not entirely certain Stalin handled the Eastern European situation correctly. It looks like at times he placated the Allies a little too much. Although he warned against overconfidence in socialism, perhaps he at times demonstrated it, too.)

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The uprising there was deeply reactionary and pro-imperialist -- but under conditions where it developed a real mass support. The forces they revolted against WERE themselves revisionist -- even though the Communist forces of the world had not yet understood or analyzed that the rise to power of Krushchev (and his followers throughout eastern europe) represented the final and thorough restoration of capitalism.

That seems a little cartoonish to me : "the final and thorough restoration of capitalism". I mean, come on. If you want to argue that the Kosygin reforms were a step back to NEP-style state-capitalism that was then expanded, and that this took place under increasing petty-bourgeois/technocrat presence in the party -- and further, that because this strata/class was increasingly in charge of that state-capitalism they in fact began a transformation into a state-bourgeoisie --- that is one thing. I'm not arguing against anti-revisionism. I'm arguing for careful statements. There was a big, big difference to the USSR under Krushchev and Brezhnev, and the post-capitalist "final and thorough restoration of capitalism" in that/those country/ies. A huuuuge difference that has meant untold misery and loss of health and lives. Did Krushchev and Brezhnev put the revolution on ice? Cold, cold ice? In order to freeze a socialist shell into a comfortable little reified structure that could cubbyhole privilege? Very arguably. Did this reification, slamming down on forward-movement, increasingly turn that socialist shell into something more and more hollow, with posts being filled by parrots lifelessly repeating dogmatic ideology? Certainly. But let's be materialists here and differentiate between the "final and thorough restoration of capitalism", and a severe, right-deviation in a country that takes thirty years to finally fully degenerate ... And ... if the party elite had chosen Glushkov's Industrial-Internet, who knows what forces would have shifted in that updating of the productive forces? (No, I'm not putting the productive forces first, but it's nevertheless basic enough to Marxism that new productive forces can encourage social changes, and those social changes may have shifted the balance of forces in the country.)

Could you speak about the real mass support that developed, and why the masses rallied around the reactionary, imperialist line? Was it because there was no authentic revolutionary vanguard around which to rally?

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The Chinese Communist Party (under Mao) did not support the Krushvhevite reforms, and they did not approve of many of the methods used throughout Eastern Europe. Their own approach to similar problems was not to organize some huge military clampdown -- but to call for ways to "expose our dark side openly from below." (as Mao put it).

This does seem like a much better method. Would you be willing to quote CPC documents that speak to this?

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Clearly Communists are not, and should not be, naive; there are times when you need to use the army to suppress reactionary uprisings and attempts at power. That, after all, is one reason that socialist revolutions need armies. At the same time, things have gone very bad if the socialist forces find themselves principally relying on the armed suppression (by police or armies) of major chunks of the population.

I couldn't agree more. What could genuinely socialist forces have done to lift up the kernel of genuine working-class ferment?

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If the Red Army was to completely and totally defeat the Nazis, they couldn't have simply stopped at the USSR's borders; they had to go to Berlin itself, bring Hitler to his grave, and wipe away Nazi power in Eastern Europe. In doing so, the Soviets decided that instead of just giving power in Eastern European countries back to their old ruling classes, that instead they should put into power the Communist parties of those respective nations. Today, we look back and see that this move didn't exactly work the way it was intended to do: firstoff, there were powerful revisionist (phony Communist) trends and people within both the Eastern European parties and within the Red Army itself. Second, there was little popular basis among the masses for these Communist/Socialist parties (minus a few countries, like Yugoslavia and such) which made socialism in these countries basically imposed from the top-down

Would you say the revisionism in these Communist parties was a result of the United Front line? What, in your opinion, was the genesis of this revisionism? I do know that the war was so engulfing that even in the Red Army -- not to mention the USSR as a whole -- there was a severe lessening of ideological struggle during the war, although they tried to restore this afterwards.

Weren't there multiple parties -- albeit all communist-friendly ones -- allowed here, as an outgrowth of the anti-fascist coalitions?

How could it be that Communist parties did not practice a mass line? Where are the sources to begin to put all of this together?

What, in your opinion, would have been the proper approach? I would assume a vanguard was needed to lift the people out of years of fascist propaganda, which, although they may have opposed it, still may have affected them, misinformed them, etc?

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Nevertheless, this does open up some questions for debate: if a socialist country today were caught in a similar situation, what would be the best way to handle restoring power in liberated countries where there is little basis for socialist transformation?

Mao's strategy of telescoping the democratic revolution into a socialist one, under the leadership of the Party?

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The worker's councils established in the Revolutionary Hungarian state defined their duties as such:

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1. To approve and ratify all projects concerning the enterprise;
2. To decide basic wage levels and the methods by which these are to be assessed;
3. To decide on all contracts involving the export of goods;
4. To decide on the conduct of all credit operations;
5. To control the hiring and firing of all persons employed in the enterprise, and
6. To appoint the director of the enterprise, who is to be responsible to the workers’ council.

On #3, what does this mean? Does this mean they intended to abrogate the socialist state's monopoly on foreign trade? Or something else? Because if the former, wouldn't that alone have opened up the country to capitalist fractionation, akin to what happened in Yugoslavia?

And what I don't see in this list is what was going to happen to the profits of the enterprise -- where did that go? Because that makes all the difference in whether the enterprise becomes a corporation or not -- even if it is a worker-democratic corporation. And did they intend to function under a plan?

Bendeguz wrote:

Tell me Soviet_Guy, are you yourself Hungarian? Do you have your entire extended family in Hungary? Do you go to visit them every 2 years? Do your ‘Hungarian Friends’ even live in Hungary? Do you actually know anything about the Hungarian psyche?


I think not, for than you would not sound so boisterous…

This is 100% irrelevant. That may sound harsh, but just "being somewhere" does not guarantee against superficial impressions and analyses. How many U.S. events -- mediated through the U.S. media -- has the US population "witnessed" or "experienced" that they nevertheless know very little about -- even if they think they know a lot about it? No investigation, no right to speak. That has to remain a fundamental principle.

I'm not saying Hungarians don't matter. I'm not saying their opinions are of no merit whatsoever. I'm saying what's fundamental is an analysis along class lines. Identity-politics and nationalism do not impress me.

Based upon what I've read in this thread, I feel that the Soviet military jumped the gun in reacting to the situation. I think that each indivisual nation should have self determination in taking their own path in building socialism. And that at any rate, the Hungarian Communist forces, including AVO, should have been sufficient in suppressing any reactionary elements that might pose a threat to the social order. But with that being said, not to simply come across as a Bulverist, but has anyone looked at what ideology is identified in Bendeguz's profile? I don't see how his stated fascism is any better that Rakosi's Stalinism. And as I mentioned above, reactionary elements, such as fascists, should've in my opinion been completely suppressed by Avo. The motivation for such fascist opposition to Rakosi would not be any valid point that his regime was unduly repressive, but likely the fact that Rakosi was born a Jew, and his given surname was originally "Rosenfeld". In other words based upon anti-semitism, rather than being authenticly pro-democracy. I'm not suggesting that all of the insurgents were like this. But it certainly does make one wonder about at least some.

Let's see... do I support the workers and peasants of Hungary, many of whom formed popular resistance groups against the Nagy revisionism and fought for Socialism for weeks before the Soviets intervened? Do I support the idea that allies should come to eachother's aide, which in this case means that the threat of destroying Socialism had to be removed?

Or do I support the maniacs who released the Arrow Cross fascists from the prisons, opened the Party to them, organised street gangs to hang, shoot, torture and mutilate at random in the streets of Budapest, only to let their bodies rot in the gutter afterwards?

Is this really a question? if anything, the clique around Krushchev waited too long to come to the aide of Hungary. Countless lifes were lost because of Krushchev's late reaction.

Hungarians revolutionaries also made a lot of atrocities (hangings even) before soviet troops enter Budapest