Life in hungary during communism

[billydan]

so what was life like in Hungary during communism?

[Brutus]

so what was life like in Hungary during communism?
Why Hungary in particular?

[billydan]

ive just been interested in hungary and its my favorite Warsaw pact country

[Fourth Internationalist]

There has never been communism in Hungary.

[Brutus]

There has never been communism in Hungary.

Yes. Communism is classless and stateless

[billydan]

Yes. Communism is classless and stateless
oh so like a syndicalist society?

[REV3R]

Hungary was never a communist state, peoples idea of communism is very off if one thinks it was.

[Fourth Internationalist]

what about the Warsaw pact Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia,Romania and Poland were they never true socialist/communist countries

No, they were never socialist nor communist. The USSR and all its satellite nations had a state capitalist system (http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1941/ussr-capitalist.htm).

[billydan]

that's a very good article thanks

[Brutus]

oh so like a syndicalist society?

Ermm. There's more to it than that.
You'll notice that the USSR never claimed to have communism- it claimed to be socialist: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/12/05.

[Fourth Internationalist]

that's a very good article thanks

You can check out her other works if you like, she is a very good writer in my opinion. The rest of the Marxists Internet Archive is also filled with great works, by both Marxists, anarchists, and other socialists.

[Brutus]

No, they were never socialist nor communist. The USSR and all its satellite nations had a state capitalist system (http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1941/ussr-capitalist.htm).

Capitalistic measures were introduced in the soviet union near immediately after the death of Stalin. That is to say, openly capitalist measures, just to avoid the Stalin debate

[Nevsky]

Can't someone just answer his question without the communism/socialism/state capitalism/whatever nitpicking?

[Fourth Internationalist]

Ermm. There's more to it than that.
You'll notice that the USSR never claimed to have communism- it claimed to be socialist: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/12/05.

By the way, billydan, pretty much every country that has claimed to be socialist has never had socialism. They were mostly state capitalist, party dictatorships.

[Fourth Internationalist]

Can't someone just answer his question without the communism/socialism/state capitalism/whatever nitpicking?

No. We can't. The differences between these words and what they represent need to be known. Calling places like the USSR communist would mean as communists we want what the USSR had, and that their system is our final goal.

[Brutus]

By the way, billydan, pretty much every country that has claimed to be socialist has never had socialism. They were mostly state capitalist, party dictatorships.

Actually, Stalin's USSR was democratic.
http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv11n2/darcy.htm
http://www.unz.org/Pub/AmQSovietUnion-1938oct-00059

But back on topic.

Originally, communist party ruled Hungary focused on industrialisation and militaristic policies, so commodities were rather scarce. This rather authoritarian society ultimately lead to the Hungarian revolution in 1956, which was crushed by soviet tanks and troops. Hungarian society afterwards was much better: military spending was drastically scaled down; lots of commodities were produced, and it was probably the most liberal of the eastern bloc countries.

[billydan]

yeah last night i was watching a lot of stuff about the Warsaw pact and it looked very depressing for some reason

[rednordman]

I don't really care for the whole 'state capitalism' argument, even if there is some truth to it. Sure there was loads bad about the old Warsaw pact countries but what interests me more are the little snippets that actually worked and made like better for people who lived there. Obviously on the scales things weighed more towards the bad. But certain things which where good definitely existed. In other words, it was not a total disaster.

Now please get back to answering OPs question and stop turning it into an sect war.

[Fourth Internationalist]

Now please get back to answering OPs question and stop turning it into an sect war.

We already did, I believe. So yes, now we march onto the Great Battle of Sectarianism! :D

[Captain Ahab]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbSV6kuZJ8Y
This video shows some footage of everyday life in the republic. Might give you an idea.

[Geiseric]

Seriously state capitalism is a meaningless term. The state owned all of the property and used it in an utilitarian, militaristic way due to being surrounded by enemies. The actual economy of the Warsaw pact was drastically different from today's state capitalist eastern Europe. Because all capitalism relies on the state. If the mode of production wasnt aimed at profit entirely and if private ownership was illegal it was not capitalism.

[goalkeeper]

Ok so in Hungary after the 1956 failed uprising the Soviets gave the Hungarians freer reign in deciding economic affairs so long as they did not question the political structure and loyalty to the USSR. Hungary introduced more market reforms much more and quicker than other Warsaw Pact states and slowly eroded away central planning so much so that by the end some historians question whether or not we can still call it a planned economy. This improved life by allowing for more consumer goods to be accessed but also meant greater economic instability for some. Hungary was one of the places where you could have access to better consumer goods. In Romania, it was an established tradition for people on boarder towns to cross over into the border in Hungary and purchase goods to bring back to either sell on black-market or consume themselves. There was also the case of conspicuous consumption, where Romanians would go to Hungary to purchase cans of coca cola (as it was more available in Hungary) which would only be drunk when guests were over - suppose that tells you more of Romania though.

On the issue of calling it "communism", I think all Marxists agree it was not communism as such, but clearly what the OP means and most people when they talk of "Communism in Eastern Europe" mean the regimes of Communist Party dictatorships of the 20th century. While we should correct people, it would be nice for threads like this to actually address the question as well, not just a bunch of people saying "wasn't real communism so whatever" and not offering any information on Hungary.

[Tim Cornelis]

Now that this thread has descended to this, I might as well respond. But next time when someone asks a question about a 'communist state' or country you might want to use neutral wordings. For instance, "Cuba is not and was not a communist country. Nor has any country self-identified as communist. They called themselves socialist. Different tendencies use different words to describe the mode of production they had, left-communists and anarchists tend to call it state-capitalist, while Marxist-Leninists tend to consider them socialist. As for your question..."


Seriously state capitalism is a meaningless term. The state owned all of the property and used it in an utilitarian, militaristic way due to being surrounded by enemies. The actual economy of the Warsaw pact was drastically different from today's state capitalist eastern Europe. Because all capitalism relies on the state. If the mode of production wasnt aimed at profit entirely and if private ownership was illegal it was not capitalism.

I think this rests on a miscomprehension of what is meant by state-capitalism. Of course, the state plays an important role in all capitalisms, but calling the Soviet Union 'state-capitalist' does not preclude other variants of capitalism to rely on the state, albeit in a different role. Insisting that the economy was used in a "utilitarian" and "militaristic way" does not change the mode of production -- obviously, the actual dynamics of society override the intent behind it. As for your objections that it wasn't a profit-based economy and private ownership was illegal, by the sake token does a government-owned business in the Netherlands have a non-capitalist mode of production? You might say it's not big enough for it to be so, but then it's a question of scale, and how many government-owned businesses should there be for there to be a non-capitalist mode of production? Such a demarcation seems arbitrary to me.
State-capitalism means the state has monopolised capitalist relations, such as that of commodity production and wage-labour. Which applies to the Soviet Union, but not to the Netherlands.
Additionally, are you sure there were not profits in the Soviet Union? Even by Stalin's own admission there was:


In this connection, such things as cost accounting and profitableness, production costs, prices, etc., are of actual importance in our enterprises. Consequently, our enterprises cannot, and must not, function without taking the law of value into account. (ch. 4, Economic Problems of Socialism in the Soviet Union)
If this were true, it would be incomprehensible why our light industries, which are the most profitable, are not being developed to the utmost, and why preference is given to our heavy industries, which are often less profitable, and some-times altogether unprofitable. (ch. 4, Economic Problems of Socialism in the Soviet Union)

[goalkeeper]

It is also worth pointing out that Hungary was dependent largely upon at first Soviet loans and then Western loans for its modestly comfortable standard of living, soon becoming trapped in a cycle of debt.

[Geiseric]

Good luck trying to profit when half of the economy is the military, unless they sold T34s and weapons for profit I'm not sure how that was a sound capitalist economic plan to make 1/8th of the globe and half of Europe a veritable fortress. You would assume that allowing finance capital to invest in russia would allow the state capitalists to expand commodity production in order to increase exports (as czar Nicholas did) but that also didn't happen past the N.E.P. which was the actual state capitalist phase before collectivization.

[Tim Cornelis]

Good luck trying to profit when half of the economy is the military, unless they sold T34s and weapons for profit I'm not sure how that was a sound capitalist economic plan to make 1/8th of the globe and half of Europe a veritable fortress. You would assume that allowing finance capital to invest in russia would allow the state capitalists to expand commodity production in order to increase exports (as czar Nicholas did) but that also didn't happen past the N.E.P. which was the actual state capitalist phase before collectivization.

None of this refutes anything I wrote. If you're going to claim a hypothesis/theory is stupid or nonsensical, then at least use proper arguments to back this up. You're calling the NEP "the actual state capitalist phase" but haven't even refuted my arguments that post-NEP period was state-capitalist too. Many of your claims do not even relate to the issue of state-capitalism at all, as if having a large military is somehow evidence capitalism did not exist.
Military spending of the USSR was around 14% of the GDP in the 1950s, and US sources put military spending at 15-17% (http://www.mongabay.com/history/soviet_union/soviet_union-defense_spending_military_economics.html) in the 1980s. Would pointing out that Eritrea has its military expenditures at 20% of its national GDP be evidence suggesting you can't be profitable in Eritrea? Of course not. This does not relate at all to the profitability of domestic enterprises, to commodity production, and wage-labour as it all prevailed in the domestic economy of the Soviet Union (or Eritrea for that matter). Whether private individuals or the state, both unaccountable to the workers, own and control the means of production, does not change the fundamental underlying relations of production.
My question for you, is a government-owned business in the Netherlands a non-capitalist mode of production? Does the state ownership of oil manufacturing companies in Saudi Arabia mean its oil industry is non-capitalist?

[goalkeeper]

Good luck trying to profit when half of the economy is the military, unless they sold T34s and weapons for profit I'm not sure how that was a sound capitalist economic plan to make 1/8th of the globe and half of Europe a veritable fortress. You would assume that allowing finance capital to invest in russia would allow the state capitalists to expand commodity production in order to increase exports (as czar Nicholas did) but that also didn't happen past the N.E.P. which was the actual state capitalist phase before collectivization.

Talk specific to Hungary in this thread. Please, lets not have a rehashing of "What was the USSR?".

Warsaw Pact Hungary have private domestic capital operating within its borders (small business was legal, and over 30,000 existed in the 1980s). State industries were much more autonomous then those found in other states, with managers of enterprises able acquire raw materials and labour themselves. Prices were deregulated with the state only fixing roughly 1000 good prices meaning millions of other prices were left to enterprises to set. At the same time, private capital was sucking it dry through exorbitant interest rates on loans. Was this a deformed workers state in the sense Trotskyists talk of still?

[Rafiq]

Everyone shut the hell up and answer the question. There is nothing wrong with calling Communist countries Communist. They were. They were ruled by self declared Communist parties and so on. That was the classification for a Communist state by the U.S. : a state in control by Communists, not an entirely different mode of production. And yet your ideological utopian insecurities blind you all from seeing this. There were characteristics thay distinguished Communist states from liberal states and fascist states, that made them their own exclusive variant of the capitalist mode of production in a rhetorical sense. I hate this simplistic "state capitalist" analysis: lal da burgazie was da state same ting. No. This is a shrewd liberalist conception of class relations "da rulers vs da people" or "da 99% vs da 1%" and so on. Enough. It almost sickens me.

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[Rafiq]

No sane person, not even their respective party-rhetoric has ever denied these states were not outside capitalism. They were, allegedly in "transitional phrases" and so on, but we all know this to be bullshitm

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[vizzek]

I hate this simplistic "state capitalist" analysis: lal da burgazie was da state same ting. No. This is a shrewd liberalist conception of class relations "da rulers vs da people" or "da 99% vs da 1%" and so on. Enough. It almost sickens me.

how is it "liberalist" to think that the soviet union was state capitalist? I think juust about every liberal out there thinks that the USSR was socialist. also, attempting to satirizing an argument isnt a sufficient argument in its own.


No sane person, not even their respective party-rhetoric has ever denied these states were not outside capitalism. They were, allegedly in "transitional phrases" and so on, but we all know this to be bullshitm what about the "degenerated workers state" people? what about the stalinists?


Seriously state capitalism is a meaningless term. The state owned all of the property and used it in an utilitarian, militaristic way due to being surrounded by enemies. The actual economy of the Warsaw pact was drastically different from today's state capitalist eastern Europe. Because all capitalism relies on the state. If the mode of production wasnt aimed at profit entirely and if private ownership was illegal it was not capitalism.

this is the analysis of someone who's just glanced at the term "state capitalism" and ended it there. maybe you should try actually looking into some state capitalist theory, because it is nowhere near as simplistic as you're making it out to be.