The Breznev-doctrine

[SacRedMan]

The intervention from August '68 by the USSR to beware socialism from the attacks of capitalism was called by Tito the Breznev-doctrine. But the USSR never accepted the name 'Breznev-doctrine' What happend in 1968 and 1956 was a reaction from the principals of internationalism and socialism, according to Breznev. Tito still called the intervention a period in the USSR than van be called 'Breznev-doctrine'.

What is your opinion about this?

(I hope the text is clear as crystal and that there is a possibility for a discussion)

[Omsk]

Well,lets make it a little more clear:

I dont know where did you get Tito on this,but nevermind,the Brezhnev doctrine was first explained by S. Kovalev in a September 26, 1968 Pravda article.

More precise:
"When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries.

My opinion on this doctrine?It was just a political and dimplomatic move,not some far-reaching principle.

If you think i am going to defend Brezhnev,or anyone else at that matter,your wrong,if you think im going to cry about 1968,your wrong.

[SacRedMan]

Well,lets make it a little more clear:

I dont know where did you get Tito on this,but nevermind,the Brezhnev doctrine was first explained by S. Kovalev in a September 26, 1968 Pravda article.

More precise:

My opinion on this doctrine?It was just a political and dimplomatic move,not some far-reaching principle.

If you think i am going to defend Brezhnev,or anyone else at that matter,your wrong,if you think im going to cry about 1968,your wrong.

I got this from the book "Eurocommunism and Western marxism" But it's a very rare book published in 1979 and I forgot to mention S. Kovalev on this.

[manic expression]

When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries.

IMO, pretty much common sense for any socialist.

[Khalid]

When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries.

IMO, pretty much common sense for any socialist.

Agreed. The doctrine itself is absolutely correct. USSR's actions in 1968 can be debated.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries.

IMO, pretty much common sense for any socialist.

(1) How can a "country" be socialist when socialism in the Marxist formula is an explicitly post-nationalist ideology?

(2) Even assuming that Stalin's "socialism in one state" is actually possible, were these countries really "Socialist" to begin with in any real sense of the word, especially after the USSR's intervention?

(3) Yes countries need to respond to a threat to revolutionary governments, but is the use of a tank division to rush protests really the best solution, especially in the long-term? Hungarian and Czech "Communism" fell, in part because many saw the political model as an extension of Soviet geopolitical and military interests and not a genuinely indigenous political force.

[manic expression]

(1) How can a "country" be socialist when socialism in the Marxist formula is an explicitly post-nationalist ideology?
Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.


(2) Even assuming that Stalin's "socialism in one state" is actually possible, were these countries really "Socialist" to begin with in any real sense of the word, especially after the USSR's intervention?
I would say so. In my view, capitalism was abolished, working-class vanguards controlled the state. It's no coincidence that capitalist countries spent most of their energy trying to demonize and destroy these states.


(3) Yes countries need to respond to a threat to revolutionary governments, but is the use of a tank division to rush protests really the best solution, especially in the long-term? Hungarian and Czech "Communism" fell, in part because many saw the political model as an extension of Soviet geopolitical and military interests and not a genuinely indigenous political force.
That is an important point. I would have preferred, for instance, that Hungarians lead the way in reliberating their country from the rebels, but in all honesty it's hard to hold it against them when Hungarian socialists were being lynched in the streets and hunted down by roving gangs of reactionaries. Soviet tanks in Budapest restored order and dignity to the country, and we can stop kidding ourselves because it had long before then stopped being a "protest". I haven't studied Prague so closely, but I do not believe it was as violent as all that, and lots of Warsaw Pact forces took part, not just Soviet troops (IIRC, Polish troops took the lead).

In the end, I think that when progressives are being attacked brutally (especially true in Budapest), when progressive reforms are being rolled back in favor of NATO-friendly, capitalist party-friendly reaction...those with the power to do something should do it. Forget about offending the sensibilities of those who don't like Russians, stopping an ugly, anti-socialist situation was 100x more important IMO.

[Renegade Saint]

Of course this whole discussion is based on the lie that Czechoslovakia was attempting to reestablish capitalism, when in fact they were just trying to move to a more responsive and democratic socialism-Socialism with a human face.

[Q]

Of course this whole discussion is based on the lie that Czechoslovakia was attempting to reestablish capitalism, when in fact they were just trying to move to a more responsive and democratic socialism-Socialism with a human face.

While the attempt by Dubček was commendable - and no doubt very threatening to the regime in Moscow - I doubt it would have actually made any genuine impact. Communism is something the working class should want in order to be a real vehicle of self-emancipation. It cannot be implemented from above.

That said, I'm unfamiliar with how much popular support and workers self-initiatives there were in Czechoslovakia at the time.

[Tim Cornelis]

I would say so. In my view, capitalism was abolished, working-class vanguards controlled the state.

A workers' state is a state controlled by the workers/working class, not by a vanguard of the working class.

Marxism 101


It's no coincidence that capitalist countries spent most of their energy trying to demonize and destroy these states.

Which tells us nothing.

[manic expression]

A workers' state is a state controlled by the workers/working class, not by a vanguard of the working class.
A vanguard of the working class is simply the most politically advanced and involved workers organized in a group.


Which tells us nothing.
It might tell you nothing.

[Q]

A vanguard of the working class is simply the most politically advanced and involved workers organized in a group.

You're mixing up pre-revolutionary times with post-revolutionary.

Vanguards are a natural phenomenon under capitalism due to alienation to the majority of our class, which demotivates and depoliticizes them. A tendency towards making humans into things. Under these circumstances a party of the vanguard of our class is needed in order to try and organise the whole class in our project for human liberation through fighting for communism. The party's goals are simple: Form our class into a self-aware class-collective wanting socialism and thus form it into a ruling class. Ein Klasse für sich as Marx phrased it.

However, once the working class as a class-collective has taken power, the party itself transforms in its essence: From a party fighting for social power for the majority of our class, to a social organisation (or, more probably, a collection of organisations) where the majority of the population is organised into self-activity and democratic control over society.

In other words: The party that got build within capitalism as a necessary step to form our class, collapses within socialism within society itself. A party that fossilises and remains in control distinct to society itself is merely a bureaucratic dictatorship, like all so-called "socialist" countries were and are. A regime where not the working class rules, but where the bureaucratic regime rules in its own interests, like we see today for example in China where the regime has adopted its own version of capitalism.

I'll also refer to my blogposts here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=6359) and here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=6435), where I talk about the battle for democracy and the negation of democracy and where I explain what a genuine vanguard is, in combination with its party.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries.

IMO, pretty much common sense for any socialist.

No. No internationalist (and by extension, Socialist) would think of Socialism and Capitalism in terms of 'countries'. Ridiculous.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

A vanguard of the working class is simply the most politically advanced and involved workers organized in a group.




You trying to tell us that, 50+ years after the Russian Revolution, with all the advances and supposed advances the USSR made (economically and politically respectively, I would say), the most advanced sections of the Russian working class were Kosygin, Brezhnev, Chernonko, Andropov, Gorbachev and Yeltsin? Give me a break. They don't really even count as members of the working class.

[Q]

Brezhnev ... Gorbachev

As an aside, "Gorbachev" is a very common translation error. Brezhnev (Бре́жнев​) is correct, but "Gorbachev" (Горбачёв) is actually Gorbachov, as the ë is an "o" sound.

It is always correctly translated in Dutch, I don't know why it is always wrong in the English speaking world.

[manic expression]

You're mixing up pre-revolutionary times with post-revolutionary.
I read your whole post so I'm not cherry-picking this, but I think this is the most important point of disagreement. You would say that class conflict continues after the DotP is established, correct? If so, then the dynamics for a vanguard are still there, are they not? You say that the party will collapse, but until class struggle is won, I see no reason why it should. There are still capitalist forces to resist, still socialist construction to be done. The vanguard party is the best known form of organizing for these issues.

I don't agree that the parties of socialist Europe were "distinct to society itself". Those parties were involved in a great deal of society, some would say most aspects of life, and saw a pretty high percentage of direct involvement from the workers (over 20% of workers were party members in the DDR, etc.).


No. No internationalist (and by extension, Socialist) would think of Socialism and Capitalism in terms of 'countries'. Ridiculous.
Borders don't stop existing after working-class revolution, especially when capitalist countries still exist. If workers take power in one country and are still under capitalist rule in another, are we supposed to pretend that the distinction doesn't exist?


You trying to tell us that, 50+ years after the Russian Revolution, with all the advances and supposed advances the USSR made (economically and politically respectively, I would say), the most advanced sections of the Russian working class were Kosygin, Brezhnev, Chernonko, Andropov, Gorbachev and Yeltsin? Give me a break. They don't really even count as members of the working class.
Leaders don't count as "sections"...

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

A vanguard of the working class is simply the most politically advanced and involved workers organized in a group.


And how are they selected as the leadership of the working class and its vanguard? By mass working class action and bottom-up decision making, or by Soviet military intervention?


Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.


I would say so. In my view, capitalism was abolished, working-class vanguards controlled the state. It's no coincidence that capitalist countries spent most of their energy trying to demonize and destroy these states.


I agree with Goti-a Vanguard =/= The working class. Any vanguard party which forgets this is doomed to fail. The decay of Eastern European socialism, and the eventual push to restore Capitalism, shows that by the 80s the ruling parties were utterly alienated and that false consciousness in the working class was more or less the norm in that part of the world.

This is especially true in countries where socialism was imposed by an outside force, IE the Soviet army which swept through Nazi-occupied territory, and not from a domestic, popular revolution based on working class action.



That is an important point. I would have preferred, for instance, that Hungarians lead the way in reliberating their country from the rebels, but in all honesty it's hard to hold it against them when Hungarian socialists were being lynched in the streets and hunted down by roving gangs of reactionaries. Except not all of the protesters in Hungary were pro-fascist reactionaries by any means. Of course Hungary was just recovering from a fascist dictatorship and so there would be some residual action by reactionaries but many of the protesters and anti-soviet political leaders were everyday workers and even socialists! On the other hand many of the pro-Soviet Hungarian "Socialists" who were being fought against were not as much a movement developing from indigenous working class action but an authoritarian group with a secret police force whose violent excesses were responsible in part for the dissent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demands_of_Hungarian_Revolutionaries_of_1956




We demand the immediate evacuation of all Soviet troops, in conformity with the provisions of the Peace Treaty.
We demand the election by secret ballot of all Party members from top to bottom, and of new officers for the lower, middle and upper echelons of the Hungarian Workers Party. These officers shall convene a Party Congress as early as possible in order to elect a Central Committee.
A new Government must be constituted under the direction of Imre Nagy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imre_Nagy): all criminal leaders of the Stalin-Rákosi era must be immediately dismissed.
We demand public enquiry into the criminal activities of Mihály Farkas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mih%C3%A1ly_Farkas) and his accomplices. Mátyás Rákosi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A1ty%C3%A1s_R%C3%A1kosi), who is the person most responsible for crimes of the recent past as well as for our country’s ruin, must be returned to Hungary for trial before a people’s tribunal.
We demand general elections by universal, secret ballot are held throughout the country to elect a new National Assembly, with all political parties participating. We demand that the right of workers to strike be recognised.
We demand revision and re-adjustment of Hungarian-Soviet and Hungarian-Yugoslav relations in the fields of politics, economics and cultural affairs, on a basis of complete political and economic equality, and of non-interference in the internal affairs of one by the other.
We demand the complete reorganisation of Hungary’s economic life under the direction of specialists. The entire economic system, based on a system of planning, must be re-examined in the light of conditions in Hungary and in the vital interest of the Hungarian people.
Our foreign trade agreements and the exact total of reparations that can never be paid must be made public. We demand to be precisely informed of the uranium deposits in our country, on their exploitation and on the concessions to the Russians in this area. We demand that Hungary have the right to sell her uranium freely at world market prices to obtain hard currency.
We demand complete revision of the norms operating in industry and an immediate and radical adjustment of salaries in accordance with the just requirements of workers and intellectuals. We demand a minimum living wage for workers.
We demand that the system of distribution be organised on a new basis and that agricultural products be utilised in rational manner. We demand equality of treatment for individual farms.
We demand reviews by independent tribunals of all political and economic trials as well as the release and rehabilitation of the innocent. We demand the immediate repatriation of prisoners of war (World War II (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II)) and of civilian deportees to the Soviet Union, including prisoners sentenced outside Hungary.
We demand complete recognition of freedom of opinion and of expression, of freedom of the press and of radio, as well as the creation of a daily newspaper for the MEFESZ Organisation (Hungarian Federation of University and College Students’ Associations).
We demand that the statue of Stalin, symbol of Stalinist tyranny and political oppression, be removed as quickly as possible and be replaced by a monument in memory of the martyred freedom fighters of 1848-49.
We demand the replacement of emblems foreign to the Hungarian people by the old Hungarian arms of Kossuth. We demand new uniforms for the Army which conform to our national traditions. We demand that March 15th be declared a national holiday and that the October 6th be a day of national mourning on which schools will be closed.
The students of the Technological University of Budapest declare unanimously their solidarity with the workers and students of Warsaw and Poland in their movement towards national independence.
The students of the Technological University of Budapest will organise as rapidly as possible local branches of MEFESZ, and they have decided to convene at Budapest, on Saturday October 27, a Youth Parliament at which all the nation’s youth shall be represented by their delegates.

Some of these demands were a tad nationalistic, and not all were socialist per se, but most were not reactionary but progressive reforms. What we see in these demands and what I have read elsewhere is a sense of popular alienation from the ruling party leadership cadres and their enforcement mechanisms, i.e the secret police, not a desire to restore Capitalism. Perhaps that was what NATO wished would happen, and perhaps there were large sectors of the bourgeoisie (or ex-bourgeoisie) clamoring for that, but it was not the necessary outcome nor was it necessarily what all the people protesting in the streets or setting up worker's councils wanted.

The USSR used Capitalism as a boogeyman much as the USA used Communism as a boogeyman to repress the CRM-there were, of course, communists within that movement and they even played a crucial, essential role, but they were never the majority.


Soviet tanks in Budapest restored order and dignity to the country, and we can stop kidding ourselves because it had long before then stopped being a "protest". Only a bottom-up movement by workers, peasants or other oppressed classes can restore dignity to a country. Having a political system imposed by outside forces instead create the social circumstances whereby the masses instead resent it. 35 years later the pro-Soviet party was toppled by angry people who resented the earlier Soviet intervention, and because of false consciousness thought that a Western-style economic model was the only alternative. In other words, the "Vanguard party" in Hungary was not really such, and was a body alienated from the working class which too few workers ever identified with to rule without outside intervention.

As to whether it was still a "protest", it is often the case that when faced with violent repression from secret police forces, that protesters take up arms. Whether or not to call it a "protest" still is an issue of semantics.


I haven't studied Prague so closely, but I do not believe it was as violent as all that, and lots of Warsaw Pact forces took part, not just Soviet troops (IIRC, Polish troops took the lead).
I don't see why it should matter that Polish soldiers took the lead, all Warsaw Pact governments were dependent on Soviet support to varying degrees and also probably saw that if Prague became a genuine socialist and democratic experiment, that it would have contributed to toppling their regimes too.



In the end, I think that when progressives are being attacked brutally (especially true in Budapest), when progressive reforms are being rolled back in favor of NATO-friendly, capitalist party-friendly reaction...those with the power to do something should do it. Forget about offending the sensibilities of those who don't like Russians, stopping an ugly, anti-socialist situation was 100x more important IMO.This isn't about the sensibilities of those who don't like Russians, it's about the arrogance of a top-down approach to creating a Socialist society and how a model which treats the working class in a paternalistic manner is an utterly unsustainable one in the long run.


Now, you are right that any real socialist political administration/government/state/whatever should have intervened in 1956 Hungary to ensure that the revolution did not swing to the right. A counter-revolution in such circumstances is always a possibility, but there were far, far better means of doing that than invading with tanks. However, those means would have required actually reaching out to those on the streets and trying to encourage working-class consciousness as opposed to occupying the place with tank divisions.


I read your whole post so I'm not cherry-picking this, but I think this is the most important point of disagreement. You would say that class conflict continues after the DotP is established, correct? If so, then the dynamics for a vanguard are still there, are they not? You say that the party will collapse, but until class struggle is won, I see no reason why it should. There are still capitalist forces to resist, still socialist construction to be done. The vanguard party is the best known form of organizing for these issues.
Well, in that case they weren't "socialist" countries but statist countries which claimed to offer a socialist haven for the workers in some kind of hazy future. You are confusing millenarian politics with socialist organizing, and in this respect I see no difference between supporting a Stalinist-style Vanguard party and supporting those religious groups who are promising the kingdom of heaven on earth if you just give them a few more dollars. Certainly, history has thus far proven that both are equally ineffective, even "unscientific" if we're going to go there.

There are many factions often in the so-called vanguard, how is the "right" one chosen? By the one which understands and is least alienated from the local indigenous working class (including migrant workers, minority groups, etc), or the one which has foreign support and aid from a large political entity claiming to be "socialist"?

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Borders don't stop existing after working-class revolution, especially when capitalist countries still exist. If workers take power in one country and are still under capitalist rule in another, are we supposed to pretend that the distinction doesn't exist?


Leaders don't count as "sections"...

A country can only be Capitalist. A country cannot be Socialist, because it will still (unless you believe in Juche-style autarky) have to trade with Capitalist nations and thus participate in the Capitalist system of wage labour, trade and exploitation.

So, when you talk of a Socialist country you are actually identifying a misnomer. A country can be ruled by Socialists, can be moving towards Socialism and its population can be pushing it towards Socialism, but a country in itself cannot be Socialist.

Don't give me a cop out answer. Leaders individually may not count as sections, but they are part of a section. Why don't you just admit that your logic re: the vanguard being the highest part of the working class is just flawed and is proved as such by clowns and self-enrichers like the Brezhnevites.

[manic expression]

I agree with Goti-a Vanguard =/= The working class. Any vanguard party which forgets this is doomed to fail. The decay of Eastern European socialism, and the eventual push to restore Capitalism, shows that by the 80s the ruling parties were utterly alienated and that false consciousness in the working class was more or less the norm in that part of the world.
Well the vanguard is part and parcel of any conscious working class, so I do not think there is such a difference as you say.


This is especially true in countries where socialism was imposed by an outside force, IE the Soviet army which swept through Nazi-occupied territory, and not from a domestic, popular revolution based on working class action.
So workers aren't supposed to fight for the liberation of their sisters and brothers in capitalist/fascist-occupied areas? Socialism "imposed by an outside force" is just another way of saying solidarity.


Except not all of the protesters in Hungary were pro-fascist reactionaries by any means. Of course Hungary was just recovering from a fascist dictatorship and so there would be some residual action by reactionaries but many of the protesters and anti-soviet political leaders were everyday workers and even socialists! On the other hand many of the pro-Soviet Hungarian "Socialists" who were being fought against were not as much a movement developing from indigenous working class action but an authoritarian group with a secret police force whose violent excesses were responsible in part for the dissent.
I didn't say all of them, but a great deal of them were pro-imperialist and others were even pro-fascist. As for the "socialists" in the rebels, it's hard for me to believe that when people like Walesa portrayed himself as a "socialist" all the way to the bank.

You talk of Hungarian socialists not being "indigenous", and I have no idea what that's supposed to mean. The Hungarians who fought for the socialist state were just as much Hungarians as their opponents...the only difference is that those who supported the state were pursuing the interests of the working-class of their nation.

As for the charge of "authoritarian", all states are authoritarian, even working-class ones. It's not much of an issue from my point of view. Lastly, we can hardly consider the AVH a "secret police force" when everyone knew what they were and where their offices were located.


Some of these demands were a tad nationalistic, and not all were socialist per se, but most were not reactionary but progressive reforms.
It was window dressing...actions speak louder than words, and the actions of the rebels was to lynch socialists and engage in vigilante revenge against people they didn't like. Their other actions included legalizing clearly pro-capitalist parties and promoting them in broad daylight, as well as contacting NATO agents and trying to get arms and supplies dropped into the country (which was going to be carried out had the Soviet-led reliberation not occurred).


Only a bottom-up movement by workers, peasants or other oppressed classes can restore dignity to a country. Having a political system imposed by outside forces instead create the social circumstances whereby the masses instead resent it. 35 years later the pro-Soviet party was toppled by angry people who resented the earlier Soviet intervention, and because of false consciousness thought that a Western-style economic model was the only alternative. In other words, the "Vanguard party" in Hungary was not really such, and was a body alienated from the working class which too few workers ever identified with to rule without outside intervention.
When a country is overrun by reactionary forces, it often takes an act of solidarity from the workers of another country to free them from such degradation. When the anarchists of Catalonia marched to fight for the freedom of Zaragoza, were they guilty of "imposing" a system "by outside forces"?


The USSR used Capitalism as a boogeyman much as the USA used Communism as a boogeyman to repress the CRM-there were, of course, communists within that movement and they even played a crucial, essential role, but they were never the majority.
Are you claiming capitalism is not a threat to the working class? Capitalism has proven itself a true danger to workers everywhere. I trust you agree with this.


As to whether it was still a "protest", it is often the case that when faced with violent repression from secret police forces, that protesters take up arms. Whether or not to call it a "protest" still is an issue of semantics.
I don't think it's semantics for the people on the other side of the "protestor's" gun barrels.


I don't see why it should matter that Polish soldiers took the lead
So why condemn Soviet interference specifically?


Now, you are right that any real socialist political administration/government/state/whatever should have intervened in 1956 Hungary to ensure that the revolution did not swing to the right. A counter-revolution in such circumstances is always a possibility. But there were far, far better means of doing that than invading with tanks. However, those means would have required actually reaching out to those on the streets and trying to encourage working-class consciousness as opposed to occupying the place with tank divisions.
Mikoyan thought something similar, and objected to how strongly Soviet forces fought into Budapest. It's true that more conciliatory measures should have been taken. However, not using such force would have been quite a risk, a swift defeat of the rebellion was a positive outcome. Ultimately, this isn't a question of using tanks or using something else, it's a question of whether or not it was necessary and/or justified.


As an aside, "Gorbachev" is a very common translation error. Brezhnev (Бре́жнев​) is correct, but "Gorbachev" (Горбачёв) is actually Gorbachov, as the ë is an "o" sound.
Yeah...although I thought the ë was more of a "yo" sound myself.

[manic expression]

A country can only be Capitalist.
So France didn't exist before 1789?


A country cannot be Socialist, because it will still (unless you believe in Juche-style autarky) have to trade with Capitalist nations and thus participate in the Capitalist system of wage labour, trade and exploitation.

So, when you talk of a Socialist country you are actually identifying a misnomer. A country can be ruled by Socialists, can be moving towards Socialism and its population can be pushing it towards Socialism, but a country in itself cannot be Socialist.
I disagree. There's nothing against trading with capitalist countries...so long as the workers control what is exported and imported there is no problem.

Technically, someone visiting from another country and spending any money counts as "trade", so your logic would say that tourism should be illegalized.


Don't give me a cop out answer. Leaders individually may not count as sections, but they are part of a section. Why don't you just admit that your logic re: the vanguard being the highest part of the working class is just flawed and is proved as such by clowns and self-enrichers like the Brezhnevites.
Yes, they are part of the section, sure...but I'm not sure what you're trying to prove by mentioning their names. Brezhnev made mistakes and errors and was prone to all sorts of self-glorification, but his individual actions do not and cannot determine the character of an entire country.

[Q]

I read your whole post so I'm not cherry-picking this, but I think this is the most important point of disagreement. You would say that class conflict continues after the DotP is established, correct? If so, then the dynamics for a vanguard are still there, are they not? You say that the party will collapse, but until class struggle is won, I see no reason why it should. There are still capitalist forces to resist, still socialist construction to be done. The vanguard party is the best known form of organizing for these issues.
Yes, the class struggle continues, but takes a very different form than that under capitalism. When the proletariat is the ruling class, the "big" bourgeoisie will almost immediately cease to exist as a distinct class, due to the fact that private property is abolished and thus the social character of the economy can actually bloom through genuine control by society in the interests of society at large.

However, the class struggle does continue as the "small" bourgeoisie and those middle-layers that hold monopolies over certain knowledge and capabilities, will remain in existence for some time and can only be absorbed into the working class part by part.

However, this doesn't mean that we need a one-party state, but a semi-"state", where there already exists a radical democracy where the working class already rules by the mere fact that they are the vast majority in society. The party can help in building that radical democracy by providing such structures, but by doing that it is already in a process of collapsing within society itself, thus negating itself.


I don't agree that the parties of socialist Europe were "distinct to society itself". Those parties were involved in a great deal of society, some would say most aspects of life, and saw a pretty high percentage of direct involvement from the workers (over 20% of workers were party members in the DDR, etc.).

The reason why membership was high was because it was attractive to become a member, because that meant a secure and steady career. Party membership was not open to any proletarian, but only to those allowed to become a member, those people which has a good perspective of becoming a valuable addition to the bureaucratic regime. Anyone causing trouble, dissent or showing any kind of original thought were not allowed.

So yes, about 20% of the population where party members, but they lived within a bureaucratic nightmare of total Stasi control. A bureaucratic regime cannot operate in any other way.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Well the vanguard is part and parcel of any conscious working class, so I do not think there is such a difference as you say.


Except there is not necessarily one "vanguard" as much as there are conflicting elements, one of which may come in and dominate the other groups claiming to be a "vanguard". And that does not speak at all to the level of alienation between the working class and the vanguard.



So workers aren't supposed to fight for the liberation of their sisters and brothers in capitalist/fascist-occupied areas? Socialism "imposed by an outside force" is just another way of saying solidarity.
Of course it was necessary for the Red Army to liberate Hungary from the fascists, however that does not change the fact that afterwards, Soviet foreign policy interests and not the working class came to dominate affairs in Eastern Europe which then caused resentment.



I didn't say all of them, but a great deal of them were pro-imperialist and others were even pro-fascist. As for the "socialists" in the rebels, it's hard for me to believe that when people like Walesa portrayed himself as a "socialist" all the way to the bank.
Yes, and many "Socialists" in these Stalinist-backed Eastern European parties were claiming to be "Socialists" too, all the while eying the day in which they could mop up tons of privatized assets. I see no reason to believe that the self-proclaimed "Vanguard" which you're upholding was any more socialist.



You talk of Hungarian socialists not being "indigenous", and I have no idea what that's supposed to mean. The Hungarians who fought for the socialist state were just as much Hungarians as their opponents...the only difference is that those who supported the state were pursuing the interests of the working-class of their nation.
Who decided to make those particular socialists who you claim to uphold the real representatives of the working class or its interests?

Being an "indigenous" revolution means that political, industrial and economic organizing involving the local working class, which raises the consciousness of that group, was a necessary component in the coming of socialism to a particular area. This was unlike the Warsaw Pact countries, where the power base behind the ruling elites was not in the factories within their own borders but in Moscow and the Soviet army bases. The working class in Hungary was given a quasi-statist system calling itself "Socialist" by the Red Army-what reason was given to them to trust those given power? They were alienated from the decision that brought that particular vanguard to dominate the state-that's the essence of the problem with this top-down Stalinist model.



As for the charge of "authoritarian", all states are authoritarian, even working-class ones. It's not much of an issue from my point of view. Lastly, we can hardly consider the AVH a "secret police force" when everyone knew what they were and where their offices were located.
Even if they weren't secret, they were still police and they still used tactics which terrified not only the "guilty" but the innocent. If the AVH arrested, abused and mistreated people, then like folks everywhere, the Hungarians were right to go after them. It is strange how you stand up for the cops as long as they are cops employed by a group of people claiming to be a "Vanguard".

If you don't like the word "Authoritarian" (all states rest on authority, however not all see the maintenance of the authority of a particular political clique as the "telos" of their regime) then "Tyrannical", to use a word of the ancient Greek politics, or "Oligarchical". The point is that state authority was seen as just in of itself, and that popular complaints against state authority were presumed to be illegitimate.



It was window dressing...actions speak louder than words, and the actions of the rebels was to lynch socialists and engage in vigilante revenge against people they didn't like. Their other actions included legalizing clearly pro-capitalist parties and promoting them in broad daylight, as well as contacting NATO agents and trying to get arms and supplies dropped into the country (which was going to be carried out had the Soviet-led reliberation not occurred).
The USA has "legalized" socialist movements, that hardly makes it a Socialist country. Likewise, allowing a movement which calls itself "capitalist" is very different from actually being a "socialist" country. Venezuela has legalized Capitalist groups too, should Cuba invade it to make sure it becomes more socialist? On the other hand, we know that there were worker's councils being set up in Hungary, something which is a necessary feature of real socialism but was sorely lacking in Eastern Europe.

It is also strange that you are more worried by the establishment of a Capitalist political party than by the establishment of large-scale private Capital in a place like China.


When a country is overrun by reactionary forces, it often takes an act of solidarity from the workers of another country to free them from such degradation. When the anarchists of Catalonia marched to fight for the freedom of Zaragoza, were they guilty of "imposing" a system "by outside forces"?
Except the anarchists of Catalonia were not standing in the way of local working class mass action.



Are you claiming capitalism is not a threat to the working class? Capitalism has proven itself a true danger to workers everywhere. I trust you agree with this.
Of course, just as Communism is a threat to the ruling class. However, the PRESENCE of Communists or Capitalists within a movement does not necessarily mean that the movement embraces either ideology as such.



I don't think it's semantics for the people on the other side of the "protestor's" gun barrels.
I'm guessing it was an issue of semantics, however, for those wrongly imprisoned or tortured by the AVH, or executed after a show-trial. A violent state is going to produce violent protests.



So why condemn Soviet interference specifically?
Because the USSR was by far the dominant force in Eastern European socialism, to the point where its State interests overrode those of the working class in the neighboring states.



Mikoyan thought something similar, and objected to how strongly Soviet forces fought into Budapest. It's true that more conciliatory measures should have been taken. However, not using such force would have been quite a risk, a swift defeat of the rebellion was a positive outcome. Ultimately, this isn't a question of using tanks or using something else, it's a question of whether or not it was necessary and/or justified.
Except the crushing of the revolt only increased resentment towards the USSR and their own so-called "Socialist" state, and the self-elected vanguard. If you were right, the Hungarian people today would not be so steeped in false consciousness as they are. The so-called Vanguard would have actually been representative of its people, and would have either been no counter-revolution or there would have been far more working-class resistance during and after.

The reality is that such an intervention, especially when there are civilian casualties, will only drive a deeper divide between the "vanguard parties" and the working class.



Yes, they are part of the section, sure...but I'm not sure what you're trying to prove by mentioning their names. Brezhnev made mistakes and errors and was prone to all sorts of self-glorification, but his individual actions do not and cannot determine the character of an entire country.No but they are indicative of the class nature and interests of the ruling class and the extent to which the ruling "Vanguard" has in fact become isolated and alienated from the working class which they claim to represent.

[Omsk]

Anyone causing trouble, dissent


In the case of the DDR,that is completely normal.Especially because the DDR had imperialist troops on its borders,and it faced economic problems,sabotage,and a huge number of young people who were going to the west,after they passed trough proper education.



it was attractive to become one, because that meant a secure and steady career Party membership was not open to any proletarian, but only to those allowed to become a member, those people which has a good perspective of becoming a valuable addition to the bureaucratic regime


How are you so sure of this?How can you know that?You come from the Netherlands,what do you know about the former socialist bloc and the generall life in it,other than political texts writen by people from the west?

What you just wrote is completely untrue,everyone was able to join the party (in my country for example) ,but not all were allowed to advance,the majority of the ones who were in the party had little or no benefits,exept,for instance,a company-party vacation.

This "party myth" is complete fiction and is completely idiotic.Like the "religion was supresed myth".Nowdays,political parties are a billion times more needed if you want to advance in carrier.

If you dont know enough about a subject,please,dont post things like that...

[Q]

How are you so sure of this?How can you know that?You come from the Netherlands,what do you know about the former socialist bloc and the generall life in it,other than political texts writen by people from the west?

What you just wrote is completely untrue,everyone was able to join the party (in my country for example) ,but not all were allowed to advance,the majority of the ones who were in the party had little or no benefits,exept,for instance,a company-party vacation.

This "party myth" is complete fiction and is completely idiotic.Like the "religion was supresed myth".Nowdays,political parties are a billion times more needed if you want to advance in carrier.

If you dont know enough about a subject,please,dont post things like that...

The "you haven't been there, so shut up" meme really gets old. But if you want to know, one of my sources is Hillel Ticktin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillel_H._Ticktin) who lived in the USSR for several years. He founded the Critique (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_(Journal_of_Socialist_Theory)) journal where he studied the Soviet society indepth and came to the conclusion, among other things, that it was essentially a non-society kept together by an all-powerful bureaucracy (http://vimeo.com/29505740). Of course there are others, but Ticktin does make a mark above the average writer.

Of course, if you have other independent thinkers that I could read, it'd be appreciated.

[manic expression]

Except there is not necessarily one "vanguard" as much as there are conflicting elements, one of which may come in and dominate the other groups claiming to be a "vanguard". And that does not speak at all to the level of alienation between the working class and the vanguard.
Of which elements do you speak?


Of course it was necessary for the Red Army to liberate Hungary from the fascists, however that does not change the fact that afterwards, Soviet foreign policy interests and not the working class came to dominate affairs in Eastern Europe which then caused resentment.
I don't agree...the Soviet Union made a commitment to working-class rule in the areas it liberated. That takes internationalism.

There was "resentment" in the form of regurgitated anti-Russian chauvinism (oh, and people pissed off that they have to live in the same apartment complexes as Roma-Sinti, a policy rapidly reversed after the collapse), but even today many in Hungary, Germany and elsewhere look back on the socialist era very positively. As one example, much is made of Russian being taught to schoolchildren in the Baltic states, and yet no one complains when the same is done today when it's English. To conclude: Russian influence = tyranny; American influence = normal...at least according to the voices of Central/Eastern Europe, the imperialist media.


Yes, and many "Socialists" in these Stalinist-backed Eastern European parties were claiming to be "Socialists" too, all the while eying the day in which they could mop up tons of privatized assets. I see no reason to believe that the self-proclaimed "Vanguard" which you're upholding was any more socialist.
Careerism is always an issue, there are going to be opportunists in a successful government be it communist-led or anarchist-led (I suspect this is a bitter pill for our anarchist friends to swallow, but in my eyes it's true). However, while I do agree that such individuals helped destroy European socialism eventually, this doesn't condemn the progress achieved by the system at large.


Who decided to make those particular socialists who you claim to uphold the real representatives of the working class or its interests?
Well, there's no one to make these judgments from on high, but I would submit their defense of an existing socialist state as good evidence.


Being an "indigenous" revolution means that political, industrial and economic organizing involving the local working class, which raises the consciousness of that group, was a necessary component in the coming of socialism to a particular area. This was unlike the Warsaw Pact countries, where the power base behind the ruling elites was not in the factories within their own borders but in Moscow and the Soviet army bases. The working class in Hungary was given a quasi-statist system calling itself "Socialist" by the Red Army-what reason was given to them to trust those given power? They were alienated from the decision that brought that particular vanguard to dominate the state-that's the essence of the problem with this top-down Stalinist model.
Hungarian communists were from Hungary, and were involved in activities based firmly in the Hungarian workers. Further, I would argue that the power base of any state or government has something to do with military force. Moscow wasn't in control of what was happening in Hungary, the Hungarian communists appealed to Moscow for help, which was well within their rights at that point.


Even if they weren't secret, they were still police. If the AVH arrested, abused and mistreated people, then like folks everywhere, the Hungarians were right to go after them. It is strange how you stand up for the cops as long as they are cops employed by a group of people claiming to be a "Vanguard".
Socialist states, just like any industrialized society, have a need for police...criminals aren't going to go away after the capitalists are out of power, and if anything criminals are the first people the capitalists bribe to cause trouble for worker states (as the bourgeoisie says, "half the rabble can be paid the murder the other half"). As such, police forces are entirely reasonable for a worker state to create and maintain.

The AVH's offices were under siege when the first shots were fired, and there is still very little way to say for sure who fired first. I think that if the AVH was anywhere near as horrible as you make them out to be, they would have machine-gunned the whole crowd...except they didn't, even at risk of their own skins, which tells us that they weren't at all the type of group you're making them out to be.


All states are authoritarian (that's why the state needs to wither away), but the levels of authoritarian brutality vary.
Brutality varies, sure. We can say precisely the same for "rebels" as well as states.


The USA has "legalized" socialist movements, that hardly makes it a Socialist country. Likewise, allowing a movement which calls itself "capitalist" is very different from actually being a "socialist" country. Venezuela has legalized Capitalist groups too, should Cuba invade it to make sure it becomes more socialist? On the other hand, we know that there were worker's councils being set up in Hungary, something which is a necessary feature of real socialism but was sorely lacking in Eastern Europe.
The bourgeoisie has little interest in the murmurings of the dispossessed, the capitalist stands aloof to whispers of disobedience. Only when the left gets stronger does the force of the state come down upon the heads of revolutionaries like a ton of bricks. The Black Panthers, Young Lords and CPUSA (back when they were actually communist) learned this.

Worker states, however, are not aloof to the political opinions of workers. They can and should take an active role in this matter, and promoting capitalist parties usually isn't a good way to do that.

Nevertheless, the "councils" you allude to were collaborating with the CIA and their own documents show this.


It is also strange that you are more worried by the establishment of a Capitalist political party than by the establishment of large-scale private Capital in a place like China.
I am worried by capital in China and I object to it strongly. The CPC rank-in-file still have the ability and interest to turn this back, and that is where we must look to.


Except the anarchists of Catalonia were not standing in the way of local working class mass action.
That aside, were they not justified in marching to liberate the workers of another region (and another nation when they moved out of Catalonia).


Of course, just as Communism is a threat to the ruling class. However, the PRESENCE of Communists or Capitalists within a movement does not necessarily mean that the movement embraces either ideology as such.
I do not point to a mere presence, I point to the pervading actions and direction of the movement as a whole. It wasn't progressive.


I'm guessing it was an issue of semantics, however, for those wrongly imprisoned or tortured by the AVH, or executed after a show-trial. A violent state is going to produce violent protests.
What instances are you talking about? Fascists in Hungary who presided over a frenzied genocide fest as Nazi power was being chased to its death were tried and punished for their crimes, but surely we should not use this to say AVH members deserved to be killed by roving mobs.


Because the USSR was by far the dominant force in Eastern European socialism, to the point where its State interests overrode those of the working class in the neighboring states.
It was a strong friend, but it was a friend nonetheless. It would have been amiss to not intervene, as it would be in no benefit to the workers of Hungary to fall to the Radio "Free" Europe fan club (forgive the hyperbole, but R"F"E and its promises of a US invasion were huge in fanning the flames of the revolt).


Except the crushing of the revolt only increased resentment towards the USSR and their own so-called "Socialist" state, and the self-elected vanguard. If you were right, the Hungarian people today would not be so steeped in false consciousness as they are. The so-called Vanguard would have actually been representative of its people, and would have either been no counter-revolution or there would have been far more working-class resistance during and after.

The reality is that such an intervention, especially when there are civilian casualties, will only drive a deeper divide between the "vanguard parties" and the working class.
Be that as it may, the alternative was far worse. The USSR and its Hungarian comrades did what it could with an already-ugly situation, and the outcome was never going to be ideal, but the city had fallen and decisive action was needed to save Hungarian socialism. Still, the steps taken after the reliberation of the country were not unwise, and the new government did set out to try to heal those wounds.

IMO, you are also being a bit too deterministic. Parisian consciousness some decades after the fall of the Commune was worse than false, much of it was baying for Jewish blood in the Dreyfus Affair. Does that mean the Paris Commune was "alienated" and "divided" from the workers? I think not, and I think it just means that in the wake of working-class defeats reactionary ideas tend to have a field day. It's just more evidence of why the Soviet reliberation was so important.


No but they are indicative of the class nature and interests of the ruling class and the extent to which the ruling "Vanguard" has in fact become isolated and alienated from the working class which they claim to represent.
Even if we accept that the vanguard was to some extent isolated and alienated, does that mean that it and everything it achieved for its class (because, let's not forget, parties do not hang in the air above classes) should be opposed? And I ask that you please consider carefully the nightmare of the collapse of socialism when answering that.

[manic expression]

Yes, the class struggle continues, but takes a very different form than that under capitalism. When the proletariat is the ruling class, the "big" bourgeoisie will almost immediately cease to exist as a distinct class, due to the fact that private property is abolished and thus the social character of the economy can actually bloom through genuine control by society in the interests of society at large.

However, the class struggle does continue as the "small" bourgeoisie and those middle-layers that hold monopolies over certain knowledge and capabilities, will remain in existence for some time and can only be absorbed into the working class part by part.

However, this doesn't mean that we need a one-party state, but a semi-"state", where there already exists a radical democracy where the working class already rules by the mere fact that they are the vast majority in society. The party can help in building that radical democracy by providing such structures, but by doing that it is already in a process of collapsing within society itself, thus negating itself.
Agreed on the "big bourgeoisie" within the borders of working-class liberation, but what about beyond those borders?

And no, it doesn't mean we need a one-party state, but that was the form of the worker state that made the most sense to countries still reeling from the ravages of rampant fascism. While what you might call "radical democracy" is a worthy goal, and while I myself promote the Cuban model which sees far more day-to-day democracy, I do not wish to play Monday Morning Quarterback with those who saw the horrors of WWII and wanted desperately to defend the progress they made since then. That was the type of state constructed by the workers right after they were freed from Nazi oppression, and I think we at least owe it to them to not denounce them for it.


The reason why membership was high was because it was attractive to become a member, because that meant a secure and steady career. Party membership was not open to any proletarian, but only to those allowed to become a member, those people which has a good perspective of becoming a valuable addition to the bureaucratic regime. Anyone causing trouble, dissent or showing any kind of original thought were not allowed.I can't help but disagree here. Everyone had a "steady career" in socialism, and that's not an exaggeration. As a citizen of a socialist country, you would have had without exception access to training for a lifelong career, something very few workers in those countries have today. As Omsk pointed out, the "perks" were pretty limited at best.

There were also all sorts of disagreements. Mikoyan, for instance, was absolutely enraged by the Soviet intervention in Hungary and threatened to resign. The very existence of Nagy and the rest of the socialist world's willingness to give his platform a try in the early stages of the revolt (a willingness that changed as he lost control of the situation and began presiding over a virtual handing over of the country to NATO influence) prove that dissent was doing OK in the parties of socialist Europe.

Appearances can be deceiving, and the respect shown to democratic centralism probably made those parties seem far more monolithic than they really were. Remember that not long after Hungary's reliberation, "Goulash Communism", something quite different from the rest of socialist Europe, would be put in place.


So yes, about 20% of the population where party members, but they lived within a bureaucratic nightmare of total Stasi control. A bureaucratic regime cannot operate in any other way.While the aggressive western capitalists heaped riches and praise upon former SS officers, the Stasi was making sure the DDR stayed a peaceful, prosperous and progressive country. It might have been a nightmare for former Nazis and reactionaries who tried to flee to occupied Berlin because they wanted to live on US imperialism's paycheck and avoid military service, but it defended a society that was worth defending.

[Renegade Saint]

We demand general elections by universal, secret ballot are held throughout the country to elect a new National Assembly, with all political parties participating. We demand that the right of workers to strike be recognised.

That fact that this needed to be demanded at all tells you all you need to know about the extent to which countries like Hungary were 'workers' states".

[Omsk]

The "you haven't been there, so shut up" meme really gets old. But if you want to know, one of my sources is Hillel Ticktin who lived in the USSR for several years. He founded the Critique journal where he studied the Soviet society indepth and came to the conclusion, among other things, that it was essentially a non-society kept together by an all-powerful bureaucracy. Of course there are others, but Ticktin does make a mark above the average writer.


Well,from the article you linked,it seems that your source was a marxists intelectual,and i quote from the article:



. He then lived and studied in the Soviet Union, where his PhD thesis, which was critical of official Communist Parties, was rejected. In 1965 he began teaching at Glasgow University, which later appointed him Professor of Marxist Studies.In 1973 he co-founded Critique, a Journal of Socialist Theory.


I talked with hundreds of people who were,some of them,just workers,factory workers,soldiers,school cleaners etc etc,on the other hand,some of them had a much greater knowledge of the state of things and were generally better informed and more read about the states they themselves lived in, than Hillel H. Ticktin.

I dont want to be disrepsectful,but some posts need corection.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Of which elements do you speak?


There were tons of non-Stalinist Communists ... for instance, Trotskyists.



I don't agree...the Soviet Union made a commitment to working-class rule in the areas it liberated. That takes internationalism.
No, it made a commitment to rule by a vanguard which it appointed.



There was "resentment" in the form of regurgitated anti-Russian chauvinism (oh, and people pissed off that they have to live in the same apartment complexes as Roma-Sinti, a policy rapidly reversed after the collapse), but even today many in Hungary, Germany and elsewhere look back on the socialist era very positively. As one example, much is made of Russian being taught to schoolchildren in the Baltic states, and yet no one complains when the same is done today when it's English. To conclude: Russian influence = tyranny; American influence = normal...at least according to the voices of Central/Eastern Europe, the imperialist media.
People don't resent English-language classes because American Imperialism is not so historically relevant in that part of the world. Russian Imperialism is. Russian chauvinism was a serious problem. But also so was a viewpoint which saw the material interests of those in the USSR's vanguard party as the prime concern. On the other hand, in a place where American or British Imperialism is relevant, English is often resented as a language. In India for instance, there were many who wanted Hindi to be primary because English was the language of the Empire (ultimately they lost the debate because of resentment by non-Hindi non-English speakers). It's all about the geographic and historical context.



Careerism is always an issue, there are going to be opportunists in a successful government be it communist-led or anarchist-led (I suspect this is a bitter pill for our anarchist friends to swallow, but in my eyes it's true). However, while I do agree that such individuals helped destroy European socialism eventually, this doesn't condemn the progress achieved by the system at large.
Of course it condemns the "progress" achieved by that system! We're back at square one! In fact it's even worse, because the USSR's exploitation of the vanguard parties back then means that today there are few serious Leftist movements in that part of the world with a mass following.



Well, there's no one to make these judgments from on high, but I would submit their defense of an existing socialist state as good evidence.
Defense of a state is never good evidence, as it raises the question as to whether they are supporting the working classes of that state or the elite as a political unit.



Hungarian communists were from Hungary, and were involved in activities based firmly in the Hungarian workers. Further, I would argue that the power base of any state or government has something to do with military force. Moscow wasn't in control of what was happening in Hungary, the Hungarian communists appealed to Moscow for help, which was well within their rights at that point.
But Hungarian workers were not active in the process which brought that particular vanguard to power. Should the Red Army have liberated Eastern Europe? Of course! Should the Red Army have then claimed that the regimes in Eastern Europe which it installed were "Socialist" and deserved protection? Not so much. It's a well-known fact, as much as anything else, that the USSR under Stalin was very particular about what kind of vanguard to allow in power ... Trots, anarchists and so on were routinely repressed, not because they weren't communists or couldn't be effective members of the vanguard but because they were a challenge to the current group of bureaucrats.

"The Hungarian communists" appealed to Moscow for help ... tell me, who decided who was a Hungarian Communist and who wasn't? Was it the USSR's government? If so, that is quite convenient.



Socialist states, just like any industrialized society, have a need for police...criminals aren't going to go away after the capitalists are out of power, and if anything criminals are the first people the capitalists bribe to cause trouble for worker states (as the bourgeoisie says, "half the rabble can be paid the murder the other half"). As such, police forces are entirely reasonable for a worker state to create and maintain.
And popular anger at police forces is reasonable for the working class to express, especially a police force responsible for torture, show trials or political exile.



The AVH's offices were under siege when the first shots were fired, and there is still very little way to say for sure who fired first. I think that if the AVH was anywhere near as horrible as you make them out to be, they would have machine-gunned the whole crowd...except they didn't, even at risk of their own skins, which tells us that they weren't at all the type of group you're making them out to be.
So the AVH has a better human rights record than the PRI's Mexico, Ben Ali, Gaddafi, Mubarak or Assad. That still means they could have been exceedingly brutal.



Brutality varies, sure. We can say precisely the same for "rebels" as well as states.Except the rebels, unlike the state, lack a command and control network and commit their brutality in response to state brutality.



The bourgeoisie has little interest in the murmurings of the dispossessed, the capitalist stands aloof to whispers of disobedience. Only when the left gets stronger does the force of the state come down upon the heads of revolutionaries like a ton of bricks. The Black Panthers, Young Lords and CPUSA (back when they were actually communist) learned this.

Worker states, however, are not aloof to the political opinions of workers. They can and should take an active role in this matter, and promoting capitalist parties usually isn't a good way to do that.

Nevertheless, the "councils" you allude to were collaborating with the CIA and their own documents show this.
The proletariat has little interest in the murmurings of angry ex-bourgeois people too. If the working class has real class consciousness it can stop a bourgeois takeover without relying on a foreign invading army.

The councils may have had members collaborating with the CIA ... some mosques have members collaborating with al Qaeda, but that does not make all Muslims terrorists. The USSR played that same kind of obnoxious "you're with us or against us" game to defend the intervention.



I am worried by capital in China and I object to it strongly. The CPC rank-in-file still have the ability and interest to turn this back, and that is where we must look to.
You object to it strongly, but I'm guessing you'd agree that the proper response would not be for a foreign army to come marching through with tanks but instead for the working class to take real action. A military invasion is not a revolution, insofar as a military invasion does occur the invading soldiers are not the revolutionaries but the workers who then have the opportunity to seize the means of production for themselves under a democratic council (not some creepy overpaid bureaucrat with various special privileges)



That aside, were they not justified in marching to liberate the workers of another region (and another nation when they moved out of Catalonia).
Hopefully the anarchists of Catalonia could have moved into areas without the smothering paternalism exhibited by the USSR. If not, then they would have been in the wrong.



I do not point to a mere presence, I point to the pervading actions and direction of the movement as a whole. It wasn't progressive.
I see the same aspects in the fossilized Stalinist bureaucrats who denied workers the right to go on strike or organize democratic councils independent of the State.



What instances are you talking about? Fascists in Hungary who presided over a frenzied genocide fest as Nazi power was being chased to its death were tried and punished for their crimes, but surely we should not use this to say AVH members deserved to be killed by roving mobs.
A police force can accuse people and even convict them of being a fascist, but that doesn't make them actually a fascist. False imprisonment and torture was one of the things that had infuriated people with the Soviet-installed system.



It was a strong friend, but it was a friend nonetheless. It would have been amiss to not intervene, as it would be in no benefit to the workers of Hungary to fall to the Radio "Free" Europe fan club (forgive the hyperbole, but R"F"E and its promises of a US invasion were huge in fanning the flames of the revolt).
Again, there were better ways to intervene.



Be that as it may, the alternative was far worse. The USSR and its Hungarian comrades did what it could with an already-ugly situation, and the outcome was never going to be ideal, but the city had fallen and decisive action was needed to save Hungarian socialism. Still, the steps taken after the reliberation of the country were not unwise, and the new government did set out to try to heal those wounds.
It obviously didn't do a good enough job of healing the wounds, nor did it save socialism in the hearts of the Hungarian working class.



IMO, you are also being a bit too deterministic. Parisian consciousness some decades after the fall of the Commune was worse than false, much of it was baying for Jewish blood in the Dreyfus Affair. Does that mean the Paris Commune was "alienated" and "divided" from the workers? I think not, and I think it just means that in the wake of working-class defeats reactionary ideas tend to have a field day. It's just more evidence of why the Soviet reliberation was so important.
Except the Commune was crushed brutally, while the Hungarian "worker's" party remained in power for decades longer. Were the Vanguard in question truly socialist, false consciousness would be a distant memory after the 3 and a half decades between the intervention and the ultimate collapse of the regime.



Even if we accept that the vanguard was to some extent isolated and alienated, does that mean that it and everything it achieved for its class (because, let's not forget, parties do not hang in the air above classes) should be opposed? And I ask that you please consider carefully the nightmare of the collapse of socialism when answering that.No they don't hang in the air above their class ... in this case the class was the bureaucrats and the state bourgeoisie.

And as I replied earlier, considering we are today back at square one with a fully Capitalist Hungary (which is today actually flirting with neo-fascism), yes we can oppose what that party did. And this is considering the nightmare of the collapse of Socialism which actually did occur under the watch of the very same "Vanguard".

[Q]

Well,from the article you linked,it seems that your source was a marxists intelectual,and i quote from the article:



I talked with hundreds of people who were,some of them,just workers,factory workers,soldiers,school cleaners etc etc,on the other hand,some of them had a much greater knowledge of the state of things and were generally better informed and more read about the states they themselves lived in, than Hillel H. Ticktin.

I dont want to be disrepsectful,but some posts need corection.

I'm sorry, but your only retort is to refer to some vague "workers" you happen to have spoken and a childish attack on Ticktin being an intellectual? If you don't have any independent sources, please stop posting yourself because otherwise this is no longer any kind of scientific endeavor to reach clarity and truth, but a petty exchange of opinions (like, sadly, the vast majority of these threads).

Of course I'm not dissing on any workers who had lived in these countries, and I would very happy to read anything they wrote, firsthand. This is how science works: peered information.

[Lucretia]

Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.


I would say so. In my view, capitalism was abolished, working-class vanguards controlled the state. It's no coincidence that capitalist countries spent most of their energy trying to demonize and destroy these states.


That is an important point. I would have preferred, for instance, that Hungarians lead the way in reliberating their country from the rebels, but in all honesty it's hard to hold it against them when Hungarian socialists were being lynched in the streets and hunted down by roving gangs of reactionaries. Soviet tanks in Budapest restored order and dignity to the country, and we can stop kidding ourselves because it had long before then stopped being a "protest". I haven't studied Prague so closely, but I do not believe it was as violent as all that, and lots of Warsaw Pact forces took part, not just Soviet troops (IIRC, Polish troops took the lead).

In the end, I think that when progressives are being attacked brutally (especially true in Budapest), when progressive reforms are being rolled back in favor of NATO-friendly, capitalist party-friendly reaction...those with the power to do something should do it. Forget about offending the sensibilities of those who don't like Russians, stopping an ugly, anti-socialist situation was 100x more important IMO.

It is important to place these comments in the context of manic expression's false equation of "socialism" with state control of the economy, which he views as somehow inherently antithetical to capitalist processes of exploitation. And he thinks regimes, if they were at one point in time supported by the majority of workers, have what Trotsky dismissively called a permanent "birthright of infallibility" to be called socialist, no matter how the state's management of the economy changes, so long as it is state bureaucrats - and not some 19th century top-hatted firm owner - overseeing economic exploitation. The problem with this view, as Trotsky noted, was that "the state and the bureaucracy are thereby taken not as historical processes but as eternal categories."

[Ismail]

That fact that this needed to be demanded at all tells you all you need to know about the extent to which countries like Hungary were 'workers' states".Not necessarily.

As Bill Bland once noted in the case of Albania:

With the abolition of the exploitation of man by man, workers in Socialist Albania receive the full value of the labour they perform – either directly in wages, or indirectly in social services. Thus, were the oil-workers, for example, to go on strike for higher wages, this demand could only be met by raising the incomes of the oil-workers above the full value of their labour, and reducing those of other sections of the working class below the full value of their labour. In other words, the oil-workers would be exploiting their fellow workers, Nevertheless, in Socialist Albania the primary function of the trade unions remains to defend and improve the wages and working conditions of their members.This was also an argument used under Lenin and Stalin. For instance in Soviet Communism Sidney and Beatrice Webb write (Vol. I, 1936, p. 172): "It has taken nearly a decade to persuade the strongest defenders of trade unionism that its function as an 'organ of revolt' against the autocracy of each capitalist employer, and as an instrument for extracting from his profits the highest possible wage for the manual workers whom he employed, has passed away with the capitalist employer himself. It required long-continued instruction to convince all the workmen that when they, in the aggregate, had the disposal of the entire net product of the nation's combined industry, it was not in the 'profits' of each establishment, but in the total amount produced by the conjoined labours of the whole of them, that they were pecuniarily interested; and that what trade union organisation had to protect was, not so much the wage-rates of the workers in particular industries, as the earnings, and, indeed, the whole conditions of life, inside the factory and outside, of all the wage-earners of the USSR."

Of course working-class struggle against state-capitalism is a different matter.

Anyway, as for the "Brezhnev doctrine," it was a reactionary doctrine which cemented Soviet social-imperialist control over the Warsaw Pact. Hoxha denounced it quite openly and Albania withdrew from the Warsaw Pact in response to the invasion of Czechoslovakia. As in Hungary in 1956, the Soviet revisionists promoted the very same forces that later came out and advocated outright bourgeois liberalism and anti-communism. Once they began to naturally gravitate towards the West, the Soviets reacted in order to maintain state-capitalism as opposed to market-capitalism.

Hoxha, for instance, recalled a 1956 meeting in Hungary shortly before the uprising:

We talked again about the grave situation that was simmering in Hungary. But it seemed that they had lost their sense of direction. I said to them: “Why are you acting like this? How can you sit idle in the face of this counter-revolution which is rising, why are you simply looking on and not taking measures?

“What measures could we take?” one of them asked.

“You should close the ‘Petöfi’ Club immediately, arrest the main trouble-makers, bring the armed working class out in the boulevards and encircle the Esztergom. If you can’t jail Mindszenty, what about Imre Nagy, can’t you arrest him? Have some of the leaders of these counter-revolutionaries shot to teach them what the dictatorship of the proletariat is.”

The Hungarian comrades opened their eyes wide with surprise as if they wanted to say to me: “Have you gone mad?” One of them told me:

“We cannot act as you suggest, Comrade Enver, because we do not consider the situation so alarming. We have the situation in hand. What they are shouting about at the ‘Petöfi’ Club is childish foolishness and if some members of the Central Committee went to congratulate Imre Nagy, they did this because they had long been comrades of his and not because they disagree with the Central Committee which expelled Imre from its ranks.”

“It seems to me you are taking the matter lightly,” I said. “You don’t appreciate the great danger hanging over you. Believe us, we know the Titoites well and know what they are after as the anti-communists and agents of imperialism they are.”

Mine was a voice in the wilderness. We ate that ill-omened dinner and during the conversation which lasted for several hours, the Hungarian comrades continued to pour into my ears that “they had the situation in hand” and other tales.

In the morning I boarded the aircraft and went to Moscow. I met Suslov in his office in the Kremlin....

“We cannot agree with your judgements over the Hungarian question. You are unnecessarily alarmed. The situation is not as you think. Perhaps you have insufficient information,” and Suslov talked on and on, trying to “calm” me and convince me that there was nothing alarming in the situation in Hungary....

“In regard to what you say, that the counter-revolution is on the boil,” said Suslov, “we have no facts, either from intelligence or other sources. The enemies are making a fuss about Hungary, but the situation is being normalized there. It is true that there are some student movements, but they are harmless and under control. The Yugoslavs are not operating there, as you say. You should know that not only Rakosi but also Gerö have made mistakes. . .”

“Yes, it is true that they have made mistakes, because they rehabilitated the Hungarian Titoite traitors who had plotted to blow up socialism,” I interjected. Suslov pursed his thin lips and then he went on:

“As for Comrade Imre Nagy, we cannot agree with you, Comrade Enver.”

“It greatly astonishes me,” I said, “that you refer to him as ‘Comrade’ Imre Nagy when the Hungarian Workers’ Party has thrown him out.”

“Maybe they have done so,” said Suslov, “but he has repented and has made a self-criticism.”

“Words go with the wind,” I objected, “don’t believe words. . .”And in 1969 (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hoxha/works/1969/01/10.htm) on the Soviet claims of Czechoslovak revisionism:

When the Czechoslovak revisionists speak of "grave errors in the past," "distortions of democracy and violations of legality" and use them to blacken and undermine the gains of socialism, this, according to the Soviet leaders, is "diabolic tactics" of the enemies of socialism. But did the Khrushchevite clique not pursue precisely these "diabolical tactics" in the Soviet Union? The attacks and calumnies made by the Khrushchevites against the heroic past of the Soviet Union outdid even those of the most rabid imperialist enemies of the Soviet Union. Nobody has discredited the Soviet Union more than the Khrushchevite clique. The "secret" report of the 20th Congress is a document which is known to everybody and Khrushchev's successors have never, in the slightest, put this document in doubt. Their manoeuvres in publishing some writing or in producing some film showing the great historic role of J. Stalin during the great patriotic war, cannot conceal their out-and-out treachery towards the ideas and the activity of Stalin. They are only a testimony to the fact that Stalin is always alive in the minds and the hearts of the Soviet men and women, and are aimed at throwing dust in the eyes, and at quelling the resistance of the Soviet people towards the Khrushchevite clique which has buried the glorious historic period of the Stalin leadership.

Just as demagogical on the lips of the Soviet revisionist renegades, are their slogans about the necessity of intensifying the struggle against the bourgeois ideology and its efforts for the "erosion of socialist ideology," "against a multiplicity" of socialist ideologies and of socialism as a social order. Today they accuse the Czechoslovak revisionists of having had opened the doors to the flood of western ideology, of making efforts to liquidate the foundations of socialist ideology, of advocating a new model of socialism which is not based on Marxism-Leninism, etc. By rising against these "sins" of the Czechoslovak revisionists, the Soviet newspaper Pravda discovered America for the second time, as it were, pointing out that "there is not and there can be no socialism without the leading role of the Communist Party, armed with the ideas of Marxism-Leninism," that "there can be no other form of socialism since the birth and development of scientific socialism, no 'other' socialist ideology which is not based on Marxism-Leninism can exist in our times." (see Pravda of September 19 and 22, 1968).

Of what fight against bourgeois ideology can the Soviet revisionists speak while revisionism is nothing else by a manifestation of the bourgeois ideology in theory and practice, while egoism and individualism, the running after money and other material benefits are thriving in the Soviet Union, while careerseeking and bureaucratism, technocratism, economism and intellectualism are developing, while villas, motor-cars and beautiful women have become the supreme ideal of men, while literature and art attack socialism, everything revolutionary, and advocate pacifism and bourgeois humanism, the empty and dissolute living of people thinking only of themselves, while hundreds of thousands of western tourists that visit the Soviet Union every year, spread the bourgeois ideology and way of life there, while western films cover the screens of the Soviet cinema halls, while the American orchestras and jazz bands and those of the other capitalist countries have become the favorite orchestras of the youth, and while parades of western fashions are in vogue in the Soviet Union? If until yesterday the various manifestations of bourgeois ideology could be called remnants of the past, today bourgeois ideology has become a component part of the capitalist superstructure which rests on the state capitalist foundation which has now been established in the Soviet Union.

As to the criticism against the "multiplicity" of socialist ideologies and of socialist orders," it is the Soviet leaders themselves that have wiped out in theory and practice any distinction between socialist ideology and bourgeois ideology, between the socialist order and the capitalist one. It is precisely the Soviet revisionists who have declared, and continue to declare, that many countries newly liberated from the colonial rule of imperialism and in which the bourgeoisie and landlords and their reactionary ideology are dominating, have embarked on the road of socialism or are building socialism. Does this not indicate that the Soviet leaders themselves are advocating the possibility of transition to socialism without the leadership of the working class, of its revolutionary party, and of the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, in other words, the possibility of transition to socialism under the leadership of non-proletarian classes and parties, that there exist, thus, several kinds of socialism and several kinds of socialist ideology?
Of course this whole discussion is based on the lie that Czechoslovakia was attempting to reestablish capitalism, when in fact they were just trying to move to a more responsive and democratic socialism-Socialism with a human face.Apparently that "human face" could be found in Sweden, since that's what he said Czechoslovakia should base its economy and society after in 1990. He was commended for this "bold" and "humanist" stand by Gorbachev, who concurred.

[Renegade Saint]

The notion that workers in any socialist country received (or even theoretically received) the 'full value' of their labor is absurd in the extreme. Lenin even countered this anarchist notion in State and Revolution, saying

The means of production are no longer the private property of individuals. The means of production belong to the whole of society. Every member of society, performing a certain part of the socially-necessary work, receives a certificate from society to the effect that he has done a certain amount of work. And with this certificate he receives from the public store of consumer goods a corresponding quantity of products. After a deduction is made of the amount of labor which goes to the public fund, every worker, therefore, receives from society as much as he has given to it.

Even theoretically there's no way for every labor to receive full value under socialism (if you mean socialism as a transition stage from capitalism to communism), because the money for roads, schools, hospitals, etc, is coming from somewhere.

What's more, the idea that any of the 'socialist' countries of the past century had reached a stage where everyone received the full value if their labor is assuming that they had actually achieved communism, which is mind-bogglingly stupid.

In short, your argument that crushing strikes in socialist countries is a-OK because the workers already receive their fair share is based on patently absurd assumptions.


Apparently that "human face" could be found in Sweden, since that's what he said Czechoslovakia should base its economy and society after in 1990. He was commended for this "bold" and "humanist" stand by Gorbachev, who concurred.
Who's "he"? Dubcek? I'm pretty sure he wasn't the dictator of the Prague Spring and didn't speak for everyone. It's also very possible that his views changed between 1968 and 1990. The Soviet crushing of the spring disillusioned a lot of people in Czechoslovakia with socialism.

[Ismail]

In short, your argument that crushing strikes in socialist countries is a-OK because the workers already receive their fair share is based on patently absurd assumptions.It isn't "my" argument. It was the argument, evidently, of Albanian trade unions officials who talked with Bill Bland.

The workers received the 'full value' of their labor by the fact that the work they put into production was remunerated both in terms of wages and in terms of a higher quality of life for the whole of society (including, presumably, they themselves), whereas under capitalism surplus-value is appropriated by the capitalists and used to generate profit. The policies of Lenin and Stalin made clear that strikes which were based on demanding higher pay to the detriment of other sectors of the economy clearly had a negative impact on the whole point of social production.


Who's "he"? Dubcek? I'm pretty sure he wasn't the dictator of the Prague Spring and didn't speak for everyone. It's also very possible that his views changed between 1968 and 1990. The Soviet crushing of the spring disillusioned a lot of people in Czechoslovakia with socialism.It's just a strange coincidence, then, that "socialism with a human face," or "national roads to socialism" in general tend to approximate to social-democracy in effect, from Dubček and Gorbachev admiring Scandinavian countries and the Israeli kibbutz movement, to Tito, Togliatti and Khrushchev calling for "polycentrism" in attaining "socialism" and these three becoming the predecessors in effect for the Eurocommunist movement.

Socialism already has a human face, for it heralds the liberation of all mankind and truly expresses the aspirations of all conscious persons. The USSR under Lenin and Stalin, and Socialist Albania, represented examples of the humanity of socialism.

[Renegade Saint]

The policies of Lenin and Stalin made clear that strikes which were based on demanding higher pay to the detriment of other sectors of the economy clearly had a negative impact on the whole point of social production.
Pretty sure that's the same logic of capitalist arguments against strikes.


Socialism already has a human face, for it heralds the liberation of all mankind and truly expresses the aspirations of all conscious persons. The USSR under Lenin and Stalin, and Socialist Albania, represented examples of the humanity of socialism.
If those are examples of the "humanity of socialism" no wonder people prefer Scandinavian social democracy.

[manic expression]

There were tons of non-Stalinist Communists ... for instance, Trotskyists.
And how were the Trotskyists in action (not in theory)?


No, it made a commitment to rule by a vanguard which it appointed.
It appointed Nagy?


People don't resent English-language classes because American Imperialism is not so historically relevant in that part of the world. Russian Imperialism is. Russian chauvinism was a serious problem. But also so was a viewpoint which saw the material interests of those in the USSR's vanguard party as the prime concern. On the other hand, in a place where American or British Imperialism is relevant, English is often resented as a language. In India for instance, there were many who wanted Hindi to be primary because English was the language of the Empire (ultimately they lost the debate because of resentment by non-Hindi non-English speakers). It's all about the geographic and historical context.
The funny thing about India is a lot of southern Indians think English needs to stay a national language because Hindi represents the north and not the south while English is a neutral tongue.

As for US imperialism not being relevant, tell me which you're more likely to find in Budapest today: signs and products in English or in Russian? A McDonald's or a joint selling borscht and blini? TV shows from the US or from Russia? I rest my case. Central/Eastern Europe is positively inundated with American culture as a sign of US dominance and there's nary a protest from all the fretting voices who so passionately hated "Russian tyranny". What crock.


Of course it condemns the "progress" achieved by that system! We're back at square one!
Because that system wasn't well defended enough. Paris went back to square one and then some after 1871, but that doesn't condemn the Commune. Spain went back to square one after 1938, but that doesn't condemn all the revolutionaries who fought and struggled there.


Defense of a state is never good evidence, as it raises the question as to whether they are supporting the working classes of that state or the elite as a political unit.
You've never shown us the distinction.


But Hungarian workers were not active in the process which brought that particular vanguard to power. Should the Red Army have liberated Eastern Europe? Of course! Should the Red Army have then claimed that the regimes in Eastern Europe which it installed were "Socialist" and deserved protection? Not so much. It's a well-known fact, as much as anything else, that the USSR under Stalin was very particular about what kind of vanguard to allow in power ... Trots, anarchists and so on were routinely repressed, not because they weren't communists or couldn't be effective members of the vanguard but because they were a challenge to the current group of bureaucrats.
I reject the notion that Hungarian workers weren't "active" in fighting fascism. In the pogrom frenzy of the Arrow Cross, many Hungarians went above and beyond the call of duty to try to save those targeted. After the liberation, Hungarians took up all sorts of important positions in the rebuilding of their country and the establishment of a progressive order. Why do you ignore these incredible contributions?

Stalin may have been particular but all visionaries are. And I don't recall any multitude of anarchists or Trotskyists in Hungary in 1945.


"The Hungarian communists" appealed to Moscow for help ... tell me, who decided who was a Hungarian Communist and who wasn't? Was it the USSR's government? If so, that is quite convenient.
Actions show us who was a communist and who wasn't. It wasn't just the USSR's government that made this observation, but the DDR, the PRC, Yugoslavia and others. Remember this was after Tito had denounced Stalin's leadership and just before the Sino-Soviet split.


And popular anger at police forces is reasonable for the working class to express, especially a police force responsible for torture, show trials or political exile.
What popular anger? A mob in a city center? That's hardly evidence for that.


So the AVH has a better human rights record than the PRI's Mexico, Ben Ali, Gaddafi, Mubarak or Assad. That still means they could have been exceedingly brutal.
My point is that if the claims against the AVH were true, what happened would have never happened. It is good that we are both recognizing that. Further, what "exceeding" brutality are you talking about?


Except the rebels, unlike the state, lack a command and control network and commit their brutality in response to state brutality.
The brutality shown to defenseless socialists in the streets of Budapest exposes only the mentality and intentions of the rebels.


The proletariat has little interest in the murmurings of angry ex-bourgeois people too. If the working class has real class consciousness it can stop a bourgeois takeover without relying on a foreign invading army.
I disagree, the proletariat must take an active interest in the murmurings of its enemy, lest those murmurings grow louder. Again, we cannot be deterministic: there is no law of physics that states a conscious working class can stop any bourgeois takeover no matter what...as discomforting as the notion may be, these things are solved by force and force is quite the ambivalent agent.


The councils may have had members collaborating with the CIA ... some mosques have members collaborating with al Qaeda, but that does not make all Muslims terrorists. The USSR played that same kind of obnoxious "you're with us or against us" game to defend the intervention.
Muslims have no organizational unity. The committees that some here so glowingly referred to did.


You object to it strongly, but I'm guessing you'd agree that the proper response would not be for a foreign army to come marching through with tanks but instead for the working class to take real action. A military invasion is not a revolution, insofar as a military invasion does occur the invading soldiers are not the revolutionaries but the workers who then have the opportunity to seize the means of production for themselves under a democratic council (not some creepy overpaid bureaucrat with various special privileges)
The situations are so dissimilar that I don't think it constitutes an effective allusion. Working-class rule is still enshrined in PRC law and in its structures, that is the matter at hand. In Hungary, working-class rule had fallen apart and action was needed to save socialism.

You might think this wasn't something worth saving, but to anyone who did, I do not think you can condemn them on the grounds of "intervention" alone. Any ideology would do the same for its own comrades, and we can expect no less from the better among us.


Hopefully the anarchists of Catalonia could have moved into areas without the smothering paternalism exhibited by the USSR. If not, then they would have been in the wrong.
What paternalism? If the anarchists in Spain had tanks they would have (and damn well should have) employed them to smother Franco and his fascists.


I see the same aspects in the fossilized Stalinist bureaucrats who denied workers the right to go on strike or organize democratic councils independent of the State.
Workers striking in socialism is tantamount to workers striking against themselves...of course that's impermissible. Any council independent of the worker state is also counterproductive.


A police force can accuse people and even convict them of being a fascist, but that doesn't make them actually a fascist. False imprisonment and torture was one of the things that had infuriated people with the Soviet-installed system.
In all honesty, that's a myth perpetuated by the enemies of those socialist states. Sure, it might have held true in some ways during the purges, but outside of those periods, hardly.


Again, there were better ways to intervene.
Yes, perhaps that is so, but decisiveness was needed.


It obviously didn't do a good enough job of healing the wounds, nor did it save socialism in the hearts of the Hungarian working class.
Socialism fell in Hungary because it was falling everywhere else. It's hard to pin it on what happened in 1956.


Except the Commune was crushed brutally, while the Hungarian "worker's" party remained in power for decades longer. Were the Vanguard in question truly socialist, false consciousness would be a distant memory after the 3 and a half decades between the intervention and the ultimate collapse of the regime.
Only a difference in the manner of the fall, not the matter of the fall itself. And again, you can't say this would be this and that would be that, it's deterministic. Vanguards can't solve everything; we're talking about class vs class, not angels vs demons. The republics of Europe were once swallowed up by monarchical powers...it doesn't mean republicanism was deformed or lost its way.


No they don't hang in the air above their class ... in this case the class was the bureaucrats and the state bourgeoisie.
How is that a class?


And as I replied earlier, considering we are today back at square one with a fully Capitalist Hungary (which is today actually flirting with neo-fascism), yes we can oppose what that party did. And this is considering the nightmare of the collapse of Socialism which actually did occur under the watch of the very same "Vanguard".
That's only more evidence of how important it was to decisively defend socialism instead of sitting around and going "oh, what's a little imperialist collaboration anyway?" Whether you admit it or not, the liberation of 1956 stopped that nightmare from happening...had the same actions been taken against counterrevolution later on, socialism would have been saved and no nightmare would have happened.

[manic expression]

It is important to place these comments in the context of manic expression's false equation of "socialism" with state control of the economy, which he views as somehow inherently antithetical to capitalist processes of exploitation. And he thinks regimes, if they were at one point in time supported by the majority of workers, have what Trotsky dismissively called a permanent "birthright of infallibility" to be called socialist, no matter how the state's management of the economy changes, so long as it is state bureaucrats - and not some 19th century top-hatted firm owner - overseeing economic exploitation. The problem with this view, as Trotsky noted, was that "the state and the bureaucracy are thereby taken not as historical processes but as eternal categories."
How was Hungary in 1956 different in terms of class positioning from Hungary in 1949? It's not a "birthright of infallibility", it's what the country was at the time.

[Ismail]

Pretty sure that's the same logic of capitalist arguments against strikes.Really? I don't recall any capitalist saying that strikes are bad because they hurt egalitarianism or disrupt the work of a five-year plan (since wages are decided in the course of economic planning.)

Lenin in 1921:

As long as classes exist, the class struggle is inevitable. In the period of transition from capitalism to socialism the existence of classes is inevitable; and the Programme of the Russian Communist Party definitely states that we are taking only the first steps in the transition from capitalism to socialism. Hence, the Communist Party, the Soviet government and the trade unions must frankly admit the existence of an economic struggle and its inevitability until the electrification of industry and agriculture is completed—at least in the main—and until small production and the supremacy of the market are thereby cut off at the roots.

On the other hand, it is obvious that under capitalism the ultimate object of the strike struggle is to break up the state machine and to overthrow the given class state power. Under the transitional type of proletarian state such as ours, however, the ultimate object of every action taken by the working class can only be to fortify the proletarian state and the state power of the proletarian class by combating the bureaucratic distortions, mistakes and flaws in this state, and by curbing the class appetites of the capitalists who try to evade its control, etc. Hence, the Communist Party, the Soviet government and the trade unions must never forget and must never conceal from the workers and the mass of the working people that the strike struggle in a state where the proletariat holds political power can be explained and justified only by the bureaucratic distortions of the proletarian state and by all sorts of survivals of the old capitalist system in the government offices on the one hand, and by the political immaturity and cultural backwardness of the mass of the working people on the other.

Hence, when friction and disputes arise between individual contingents of the working class and individual departments and organs of the workers’ state, the task of the trade unions is to facilitate the speediest and smoothest settlement of these disputes to the maximum advantage of the groups of workers they represent, taking care, however, not to prejudice the interests of other groups of workers and the development of the workers’ state and its economy as a whole; for only this development can lay the foundations for the material and cultural welfare of the working class. The only correct, sound and expedient method of removing friction and of settling disputes between individual contingents of the working class and the organs of the workers’ state is for the trade unions to act as mediators, and through their competent bodies either to enter into negotiations with the competent business organisations on the basis of precise demands and proposals formulated by both sides, or appeal to higher state bodies.

In cases where wrong actions of business organisations, the backwardness of certain sections of workers, the provocations of counter-revolutionary elements or, lastly, lack of foresight on the part of the trade union organisations themselves lead to open disputes in the form of strikes in state enterprises, and so forth, the task of the trade unions is to bring-about the speediest settlement of a dispute by taking measures in conformity with the general nature of trade union activities, that is, by taking steps to remove the real injustices and irregularities and to satisfy the lawful and practicable demands of the masses, by exercising political influence on the masses, and so forth.

One of the most important and infallible tests of the correctness and success of the activities of the trade unions is the degree to which they succeed in averting mass disputes in state enterprises by pursuing a far-sighted policy with a view to effectively protecting the interests of the masses of the workers in all respects and to removing in time all causes of dispute.The trade unions, people's courts and party committees in the factories were supposed to be more than adequate for solving any labor disputes.

[Agathor]

It's no coincidence that capitalist countries spent most of their energy trying to demonize and destroy these states.

Nike spends most of it's energy trying to destroy Adidas.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

And how were the Trotskyists in action (not in theory)?


There were enough all over the world for the USSR to deem it worthwhile to use Comintern to control the parties. Anyhow, many of the "rebels" were Communists from within the party as well as outside. That's why they set up worker's councils!



The funny thing about India is a lot of southern Indians think English needs to stay a national language because Hindi represents the north and not the south while English is a neutral tongue.

As for US imperialism not being relevant, tell me which you're more likely to find in Budapest today: signs and products in English or in Russian? A McDonald's or a joint selling borscht and blini? TV shows from the US or from Russia? I rest my case. Central/Eastern Europe is positively inundated with American culture as a sign of US dominance and there's nary a protest from all the fretting voices who so passionately hated "Russian tyranny". What crock.
Of course its inundated with American culture, but resentment towards foreign imperialism takes time to build. It doesn't appear overnight. The point is that Russian Imperialism had a much more direct as well as a longer history, especially in places like the Baltic states, but also in Hungary after 1956.



Because that system wasn't well defended enough. Paris went back to square one and then some after 1871, but that doesn't condemn the Commune. Spain went back to square one after 1938, but that doesn't condemn all the revolutionaries who fought and struggled there.
The commune and spain were defeated by military force, whereas Eastern Europe collapsed from its own internal contradictions. Why wasn't it defended? Because the working class didn't see it as a system worth fighting for. They were too alienated from the form of self-proclaimed socialism which existed at the time.



You've never shown us the distinction.
The distinction between the party structure elite and the working class is based on the fact that the party elite have structural benefits from political connections and unique access to the economic planning process, which they have an interest in protecting, which the working class lacks.




I reject the notion that Hungarian workers weren't "active" in fighting fascism. In the pogrom frenzy of the Arrow Cross, many Hungarians went above and beyond the call of duty to try to save those targeted. After the liberation, Hungarians took up all sorts of important positions in the rebuilding of their country and the establishment of a progressive order. Why do you ignore these incredible contributions?

Stalin may have been particular but all visionaries are. And I don't recall any multitude of anarchists or Trotskyists in Hungary in 1945.
There were non-stalinist socialists, including many of those supporting those worker's councils.

As for Hungarian workers fighting fascism, that's different, that wasn't a socio-economic revolution that was partisan resistance. They're two different things. The point is that the working class had never seized the MoP and realized their own power.



Actions show us who was a communist and who wasn't. It wasn't just the USSR's government that made this observation, but the DDR, the PRC, Yugoslavia and others. Remember this was after Tito had denounced Stalin's leadership and just before the Sino-Soviet split.
Yes and you need a certain standard by which to judge those actions. You look at the USSR's actions and see socialism, I don't. So clearly actions alone are not sufficient.



What popular anger? A mob in a city center? That's hardly evidence for that.
And I suppose Occupy is not at all indicative of social discontent with Capitalism in America ... just a mob in the city center.



My point is that if the claims against the AVH were true, what happened would have never happened. It is good that we are both recognizing that. Further, what "exceeding" brutality are you talking about?
Not at all, Mubarak's soldiers were brutal yet that did not stop protesters from holding the city center.



The brutality shown to defenseless socialists in the streets of Budapest exposes only the mentality and intentions of the rebels.
Or mob violence is mob violence. Jews were persecuted by mobs during the French revolution, does that mean that the French revolution was essentially antisemitic? And were these people killed for being Socialists or for being toadies of an unpopular regime who happened to be socialist?



I disagree, the proletariat must take an active interest in the murmurings of its enemy, lest those murmurings grow louder. Again, we cannot be deterministic: there is no law of physics that states a conscious working class can stop any bourgeois takeover no matter what...as discomforting as the notion may be, these things are solved by force and force is quite the ambivalent agent.
All I'm saying is that the proletariat giving the bourgeoisie the same kind of civil liberties which exist in a bourgeois society which exist for proletarian movements is not some great betrayal of Socialism.



Muslims have no organizational unity. The committees that some here so glowingly referred to did.
How would they have carried out a directive to kick out all CIA spies? Who would have passed it? The situation in Hungary was not directed centrally.



The situations are so dissimilar that I don't think it constitutes an effective allusion. Working-class rule is still enshrined in PRC law and in its structures, that is the matter at hand. In Hungary, working-class rule had fallen apart and action was needed to save socialism.

You might think this wasn't something worth saving, but to anyone who did, I do not think you can condemn them on the grounds of "intervention" alone. Any ideology would do the same for its own comrades, and we can expect no less from the better among us.
Bourgeois rule over the MOP is enshrined in the class nature of the PRC's leadership. Meanwhile, workers actually had authority over the planning of their society in Hungary.



What paternalism? If the anarchists in Spain had tanks they would have (and damn well should have) employed them to smother Franco and his fascists.
You're getting confused. Obviously the anarchists should have obliterated Franco. The question is whether, after obliterating Franco, that they IMPOSE their particular revolutionary model on the "liberated" areas or allow those areas to develop their own socialist revolutionary model which suits local conditions.



Workers striking in socialism is tantamount to workers striking against themselves...of course that's impermissible. Any council independent of the worker state is also counterproductive.
Workers striking in "socialism" is "impermissible"? That makes no sense! How else can workers voice the fact that they have become alienated from the governing bodies and the economic planning process? How else can they voice the concern that this is no longer a society which they recognize as "socialism"?

As for worker's council's independent of the state, that is not true at all, it's the only real way to build a socialist state where workers of all economic sectors can participate and have their interests heard.



In all honesty, that's a myth perpetuated by the enemies of those socialist states. Sure, it might have held true in some ways during the purges, but outside of those periods, hardly.
Hungary was just recovering from a purge in the early 50s.

Nor is "well it was just a purge" a good excuse.



Socialism fell in Hungary because it was falling everywhere else. It's hard to pin it on what happened in 1956.
It played a role, especially in discrediting the legitimacy and democratic nature of the model in the long run.



Only a difference in the manner of the fall, not the matter of the fall itself. And again, you can't say this would be this and that would be that, it's deterministic. Vanguards can't solve everything; we're talking about class vs class, not angels vs demons. The republics of Europe were once swallowed up by monarchical powers...it doesn't mean republicanism was deformed or lost its way.
vanguards can't solve everything, but in thirty years a moderate advance in class consciousness would have been expected. A proletarian state should not need to rely on its military to stay in power, it should be able to rely on the fact that the working class sees it as within their interests to maintain the state. That was not the case in the 80s anywhere in Eastern Europe, and that is the fault of those Soviet-backed vanguard parties.



How is that a class?
Any group of people with unique economic privileges and a particular relationship to the management of the means of production are a class.



That's only more evidence of how important it was to decisively defend socialism instead of sitting around and going "oh, what's a little imperialist collaboration anyway?" Whether you admit it or not, the liberation of 1956 stopped that nightmare from happening...had the same actions been taken against counterrevolution later on, socialism would have been saved and no nightmare would have happened.Say what you will about the uprising of 1956, it was far more radical than the one of the 80s. The one in the 1980s really did bring back Capitalism in full force, but without worker's councils and a planned economy, and with far too many today associating socialism with tank divisions.

[Lucretia]

How was Hungary in 1956 different in terms of class positioning from Hungary in 1949? It's not a "birthright of infallibility", it's what the country was at the time.

If I understand your reasoning correctly, it goes something like this. The Russian Revolution of October 1917 established a workers' state with the widespread support of the industrial proletariat and, to a lesser extent, the peasantry. The state then proceeded to establish a collectivized economy under the leadership of the popularly supported and trusted Bolshevik government. Decades later, the Soviet government, still proclaiming to be Bolshevik and to be operating in the workers' interests but no longer operating with any kind of clear mandate or support from the people (for more on this fact, see Jeffrey Rossman's book Worker Resistance Under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor) (http://books.google.com/books?id=X09ZuZG_JNwC&printsec=frontcover)set up a government in Hungary, a country it had been militarily occupying since the end of World War II. This occurred through massive repression and coercion, and without the validation of any organs of working class power such as soviets or trade unions. Yet because the Soviet Union was still exercising its eternal birthright, dating back to 1917, its establishment of a puppet regime in Hungary, by which the economy would be similarly collectivized (but completely outside of democratic control), was what you would term the spread of socialism, a victory of proletarian power.

In this analysis we see present both key theoretical errors I noted earlier: your tendency to equate a collectivized economy under state authority as socialism, which results from your refusal to view state control as variable in its meaning--for a state, as Trotsky noted, is a historically changing process that might either reflect or contradict the will of the people. When it manages the economy in lieu of the people, without popular support or trust, in a way that requires disciplining and coercing the workforce on the shop floor, and it is able to exercise this political power because of its economic control over society, what we clearly have is a class society, not a socialist one. In Hungary this was the case in 1949 as well as in 1956.

[manic expression]

The Hungarian government wasn't established by Soviet fiat, it was established through the full participation of Hungarian workers. The People's Republic of Hungary was created by an act of the Hungarian parliament in its passage of the new constitution in 1949.

[Ismail]

Lucretia, how would you describe Albania, which had no Soviet troops whatsoever and which had national liberation councils be set up during the war as the basis of a new state power?

Hoxha in his memoirs did note that in Romania, for example, the situation was quite bad; the communists there were very weak and bourgeois forces were quite strong in the 40's and 50's. Hoxha noted that, "Regardless of what the Rumanian leaders claimed, the dictatorship of the proletariat was not operating in Rumania and the Rumanian Workers' Party was not in a strong position. They declared that they were in power, but it was very evident that, in fact, the bourgeoisie was in power. It had industry, agriculture and trade in its hands and continued to fleece the Rumanian people and to live in luxurious villas and palaces. Dej personally travelled in a bullet-proof car with an armed escort, which showed how 'secure' their positions were. Reaction was strong in Rumania and, had it not been for the Red Army, who knows how things would have gone in that country." (The Khrushchevites, pp. 156-157.)

[Lucretia]

The Hungarian government wasn't established by Soviet fiat, it was established through the full participation of Hungarian workers. The People's Republic of Hungary was created by an act of the Hungarian parliament in its passage of the new constitution in 1949.

This is like saying that the Holocaust involved the full participation of Jews, gypsies, and slavs. Yeah, they participated "fully" all right, under deception, coercion, and violence. Line up to enter the camps "voluntarily" -- or else.

Hungary held a relatively open parliamentary election in 1945 in which the freeholders' petty bourgeois party won the vast majority of support, with the communists falling way behind with something like 17% of the vote (behind the social democrats). Following this the communist party used the Soviet occupation forces to insinuate themselves as "coalition partners" in that government. But as one scholar has noted, by early 1949 "it had become clear that the Front [Hungarian Independent People's Front, the "coalition" controlled by the communist party] was to act as a vehicle for destroying the remaining parties rather than bringing them together." The party then acted to silence all opposition to its unitary rule, with the government proceeding to hold another election -- the one you mentioned taking place in 1949 -- in which the communist party was the only party allowed to nominate candidates. The result was predictable, the communists receiving 96% of the vote. A pretty dramatic turn-around from the election four years prior, without any massive uprising in popular organization or revolutionary drive for proletarian power. Gee, I wonder how that happened.

You once again make an elementary theoretical error in abstracting a formal mechanism of operation -- the act of voting in this case rather than the act of the state managing the economy -- from its political and social context in a way which obscures rather than clarifies how it is operating, its class content. A bureaucratically stage-managed election is as far from proletarian democracy as a bourgeois stage-managed election is. Yet all three involve the casting of votes.

And once more, your only real reply to the historical facts can be to insist that sham elections were excusable because they were orchestrated by a party that had an eternal birthright of legitimacy as bearers of proletarian interests and revolution. I will not repeat the absurdity of such a position.

[Lucretia]

Lucretia, how would you describe Albania, which had no Soviet troops whatsoever and which had national liberation councils be set up during the war as the basis of a new state power?

Hoxha in his memoirs did note that in Romania, for example, the situation was quite bad; the communists there were very weak and bourgeois forces were quite strong in the 40's and 50's. Hoxha noted that, "Regardless of what the Rumanian leaders claimed, the dictatorship of the proletariat was not operating in Rumania and the Rumanian Workers' Party was not in a strong position. They declared that they were in power, but it was very evident that, in fact, the bourgeoisie was in power. It had industry, agriculture and trade in its hands and continued to fleece the Rumanian people and to live in luxurious villas and palaces. Dej personally travelled in a bullet-proof car with an armed escort, which showed how 'secure' their positions were. Reaction was strong in Rumania and, had it not been for the Red Army, who knows how things would have gone in that country." (The Khrushchevites, pp. 156-157.)

Hi, Ismail. Thank you for your interest in learning about my views on this matter. To answer your question satisfactorily, I would have to do more research on the history of that question than I have been able to do up to this point. But to provide you some degree of response: the way to determine whether a country was under workers' control or not is to assess historically the degree to which workers actually had control over the state and economy. Or if the state was temporarily engaging in some substitutionist practices (which to some degree is unavoidable), the extent to which these substitutions were carried out with the tacit approval of workers who still identified with the government, or whether they were carried out on the basis of the substituting bureaucrats' control over economic resources. This, of course, would be a Marxian class analysis of the society, and there is no cut-and-dry formula for determining in advance which countries were actually transitioning to socialism or not simply on the basis of the presence of "elections" or of state management of the economy.

[Ismail]

As a note here is a more detailed view of Romania given by Hoxha in relation to his 1948 visit to Bucharest, this time in his book The Titoites, pp. 511-515:

At the airport of Bucharest we were met by Dej, Anna Pauker, the Soviet ambassador and some other comrades. As far as I remember, we still did not have an embassy in Bucharest, nor the Rumanians in Albania. The formalities had not been completed and the relations between our countries of people's democracy in the first period of Liberation were still not fully subject to diplomatic rules, but continued in an informal way. In our country everything was in order, the people's power had been established on sound constitutional foundations, while in Rumania no. It took Rumania some time to liquidate the monarchy and King Michael, the powerful capitalist relations which still existed, the remnants of Antonescu's fascist Iron Guard, which were still active at the time of my stay at Bucharest, etc. The decisive factor in the liberation of Rumania and the liquidation of these dangerous remnants was the Soviet army. All the rest was just tales and boasting of Gheorghiu-Dej....

I got into a big Soviet ZIS car together with Dej. The others got into cars, too. When I was to enter the car the driver opened the door for me and I did not notice that it was an armoured car. I saw this when I got out and opened the door from inside. Never before had I had the occasion to see such a thing, although I had read in newspapers and books that such cars were used by kings and dictators to protect themselves from attempts on their lives, and by gangsters to protect themselves from the attacks of the police. Once in the car, it seemed to me I was not in a car, but in a real arsenal: both on my side and Dej's side we had a German twenty-round automatic pistol, each with two spare magazines, under our feet we each held another German twenty-round pistol with spare magazines and, of course, the guard and the driver had the same.

I said to Dej as a joke: "We can fight for 20 days with these weapons" ... My impression was not good, not because Dej had thought about taking measures for defence, but because those measures were excessive. They showed either that the Rumanian comrades were as frightened as rabbits, or that the situation in their country was by no means as calm as they tried to make out....

Thus, I was left alone with my hosts and the French interpreter whom Dej left me.

After lunching together with our hosts I went to take a rest. Everything in this village home was clean, quiet and attractive. This helped me overcome my boredom from remaining alone and would allow me, in the quiet of the night, to classify the materials and opinions which I would present in the meeting with Vyshinsky and Dej. During lunch and in the afternoon, after my rest, I took the opportunity to talk with my hosts and to learn about the situation in the country to the extent that they knew it and were able to answer my questions.

"The situation is not yet completely clear," said the mother, "but we are masters of it. We drove out the king and liberated the country thanks to Stalin's Red Army. Another advantage from this was that the country was not burnt and devastated except for a few things; our industry is running. Our country is fertile, but from now on it will become more fertile and more prosperous. To tell you the truth," continued the old lady, "the economy is still not in the hands of our state, the capitalists are still very much alive, the big and medium merchants have their property, exploit it freely and live well, even though our state levies taxes on them.

"When I have the opportunity to meet Dej," continued the old lady, "I ask him, 'What are you doing? Are you still leaving these capitalists and the wealthy of the land who sucked our blood, who were supporters of the Germans and of Codreanu and the [I]Conducator (Antonescu) who sent our boys to burn Russia and be killed there?'

'Be patient,' Dej replies, 'everything will come in its own time.'"
Hoxha also noted how the Romanians did a rather mediocre job of deposing the monarch, allowing him to take his property and freely denounce the new republic in exile after three years of allowing said monarch to exist and wield power.