No "peaceful road"
When Khruschev sent in the tanks and heavy artillery he killed any hopes of a self-reform of the leadership after the death of Stalin.
Far from being pressurised to the left by the revolutionary mass moment of the workng class. the Moscow Budapest bureaucracies had for most part moved to stamp on the revolt. while Nagy and a handful bureaucrats had shown their inability to express, let alone lead, the struggles of the workers.
The most central political lesson of the Hungarian experience was that it underlined the correctness of Trotsky's analysis that the working inevitably run into conflict with bureaucracy. and that insurrectional overthrow bureaucracy by mass action political revolution - could establish workers' democracy and workers' states in place of the Stalinist travesty.
The need for a revolutionary to political revolution
Moscow and the
"left"
of class must the only the of that the
- leadership based on a firm healthy of grasp fight for confirmed in the 1956 events - both in the
Hungary involvement resistance revolt challenge state working to the office. The despite property
Trotsky ago, political
Stalinism to spearhead the political revolution was also
Arned Hungarlan workers 1956 tumultuous mass actions of and in the bureaucratic manoeuvres that headed off the Polish mass movement.
In each case, despite the high profile of intellectuals and technical staffs, the central core of the to Stalinism was the industrial working class: this has again been seen in the Solidarnosc struggles in Poland since 1980. The strategic task of political revolution is to link this with other sections of the oppressed in the establishment of new organs of working class power that can the bureaucratic state machinery at every level. It is also vital to organise resistance in the ranks the armed forces; only on this basis will it be possible to smash the reactionary machinery that represses the class, and replace it with genuine workers' democracy.
There is no "peaceful", reformist road ousting of parasitic bureaucracy whose only hold on power and privilege depends upon clinging to
"deformed workers states". resting on nationalised relations which must be defended against imperialism, are not "almost workers' states". but alien. repressive police regimes qualitatively different from a healthy workers' state.
In saluting the courage and sacrifice of the Hungarian workes of thirty years
Marxists today must commit themselves to complete the task which that Revolution began - the overthrow of Stalinism as part of the world wide struggle for working class power.