Lessons from Hungary
EDITORIAL Q: When is a workers' state not a workers' state? A: When its leaders change their minds!
Anyone believing this to be the case will be quite happy to accept without batting an eyelid the abrupt announcement by acting Hungarian President Matyas Szuros that the People's Republic' has now become simply a republic, based on bourgeots democracy.
Those of the Stalinist persuasion - not least those tankies' who welcomed or have subsequently defended the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary - will find these events harder to swallow or explain. Anyone thinking the post-war regimes in Hungary, like those of other East European countries were in fact 'socialist countries' ruled by the working class has been having a hard time of it lately.
Not only do the workers when asked invariably give the ruling Stalinist bureaucracies the thumbs down, but the Stalinist leaders themselves, after decades of unimaginably incompetent and brutal mismanagement and ineptitude that have made their "socialist' economies the basket-cases of Europe, are now leading disciples of Thatcherite views on the market economy, privatising state enterprises, setting up stock exchanges, opening the once 'planned' economies to external capitalist investment and encouraging small businesses.
However a closer look at the origins of the Hungarian ‹People's Republic' gives more of an insight into the apparent riddle of why the workers are not up in arms opposing those who are dismantling the edifice of their "socialist country'.
In the inter-war years, the Hungarian regime under Admiral Horthy formed an alliance with Nazi Germany, and declared war on the USSR: it was invaded by the Red Army in 1944. The Hungarian Communist Party, illegal for 25 years, numbered only a dozen in 1942 and a few thousand in 1944: yet by the end of 1945 it had swollen to 500,000 members, recruiting wholesale among the police, the military and former fellow travellers of the Horthy regime and the fascist Arrow Cross.
The 1945 elections, organised under Red Army occupation were permitted by Stalin only on the basis that whoever won, the Communist Party would control the Ministry of the Interior, and thus the secret police. In the event the CP won only 17 percent of the vote, trailing far behind the right wing Smallholders Party which took 59 percent. A coalition government was formed with Smallholders Party leaders as President and Prime Minister; but the Ministry of the Interior began work on lining them up for a show-trial, driving many right wingers out of the country. The CP pieced together a new electoral front which secured 60 percent of the vote in 1947 (though the CP share was only 22 percent). A social democrat took over as President - and then in 1948 the CP forced the Socialist Party into a merger, to form the grotesquely misnamed Hungarian Workers Party.
Despite the rampant economic crisis (the exchange rate at one point hit the quadrillion to the pound level), nationalisation of much capitalist property began very late, with the banks nationalised only in January 1948 and major industry that spring. In the summer of 1949 a huge purge of the Stalinist party began, which was to expel 150,000-200,000 members and form a monolithic Stalinist bureaucracy, devoid of any political independence from the Kremlin or the Party's central leadership. Only in August 1949 was a new constitution adopted similar to those elsewhere in Eastern Europe, symbolising the fact that the power and property of the old capitalists and landlords had been overturned: but throughout the process the workers had played no active role and never held power in their hands.
Hungary's now disbanded People's Republic has therefore never been popular or democratic. It was not a healthy proletarian revolution that went wrong, but the deformed offspring of a bureaucratic and military process carried through under the eyes and guns of the secret police holding files on at least 10 percent of the entire Hungarian population), the Kremlin, and Stalin's Red Army.
Though the nationalisation of industry and the massive, overdue land reform which at last eradicated feudal relations in Hungary represented historic progress, the way they were achieved created a negative impact on most Hungarians and the international working class. The regime could never claim the popular base that characterised the Yugoslay regime (resting on mass Communist-led partisan struggle), or Castro's regime in Cuba.
Trotsky, writing in 1940 of the possibility that Stalin's Red Army might overturn capitalist property in Eastern Poland, warned that:
"The primary political criterion for us is not the transformation of property relations in this or another area, however important these may be in themselves, but rather the change in the consciousness and organisation of the world proletariat, the raising of their capacity for defending former conquests and accomplishing new ones. From this one, and the only decisive standpoint, the politics of Moscow taken as a whole completely retains its reactionary character and remains the chief obstacle on the road to world revolution'.
(In Defence of Marxism)
Far from being 'almost' a revolutionary workers' state, the Hungarian People's Republic was something qualitatively different, a Jeformed workers' state, a nationalised economy which had never known proletarian political power, carrying all of the reactionary weight of bureaucracy of the later degenerated Soviet Union but none of the revolutionary strengths that could win the loyalty and commitment of the masses.
Khruschev's 1956 invasion to repress the mass working class upsurge - and similar brutish action by Moscow to contain movements in East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia - did nothing but reinforce the profound alienation of the people from the 'People's Republics':
Now the very different tactics of Gorbachev: have lifted the threat of Soviet military intervention in Eastern Europe - and pulled the rug from under former stooge Stalinist regimes.
Yet as the Polish Socialist Party (Democratic Revolution) points out in its analysis of the new Polish government (in this journal), the new processes of change are still being decided and imposed on the working class from above. The fight for workers' control as a basis for genuine socialist planning would be as tough in a bourgeois democratic Hungary as it is now: the workers who have never held power in their hands would still not be allowed to set the agenda for change.
Revolutionaries will take heart from the fact that in the strug gles against Stalinist bureaucratic regimes throughout Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union itself, and also in China in the prelude to the Beijing massacre, the workers are recognising the need to build trade union organisations to defend themselves and their interests as a class. Within such struggles, the fight for a revolutionary programme aimed to take power from the bureaucrats and place it in the hands of genuine workers' councils is the best answer to those who fear the possible restoration of capitalism.
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