Greetings!

[reedwolf]

Hello Everyone!

I am from Hungary and I consider myself a communist. It is a bit weird to state it as until recently (1-2 years) I've never considered communism as a viable economical system (the usual view about it being a great idea on paper but it's against human nature). As I am very curius I began to have questions: First it's got my attention that the most of the elderly don't think about the socialist age as an age of opression and poverty. On the contrary, they thought that back then people had jobs (currently there's at least 10-15% unemployment), they could travel and the people were generally much more open and nice. Then I began my research about this topic and I really got into communism. In my opinion a society where there no classes and everyone's equal is really appealing to me :hammersickle:.

As I live in a "post-communist state", the word communism and every associated term have a really bad reputation mostly due to the goverment's propaganda. Nowadays the situation is getting worse, because the people are getting more and more nationalistic (another fault of the goverment).

Anyway if you feel like you can ask me anything about the history of my homeland (more specificly the last century as it'd mostly off-topic anything else). Also I like to read about the realisation of any leftist movement (that includes socialism, anarchism etc.) so I take book recommendations about it.

[Q]

Welcome :)

If you have political questions, you can ask them in the Learning forum. That's why it's there after all!

If you have questions about your account, don't hesitate to send me a PM or ask here.

As you'll find out, there are quite a few currents within the communist movement. And there's a ton to read about any of them ;)

How's the left in Hungary?

[Alan OldStudent]

Welcome Comrade,

I'm glad you talked about how older people in Hungary remember the old days. I'm of an age that I remember the Hungarian revolution well. I don't get the idea it was an anti-communist revolution. In your experience, what do some of the older communist people from that time think of the Hungarian revolution?

Regards,

Alan OldStudent
The unexamined life is not worth living—Socrates
Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto—Violeta Parra

[reedwolf]

You've got that right. It wasn't an anti-communist movement. It was, in fact, a separatist and anti-stalinist revolution. Some would agrue that the separatist part is against the ideals of communism, but the Soviet government had full control over ours then and the people didn't like the oppresive nature of it. There were transmissions towards western countries too when the Soviet army returned, however that was made to get help to defeat the army. After the revoultion had been put a stop to it, the government went under serious reforms and the prime minister was also changed from Rákosi to Kádár, who was a marxist-leninist. The newly formed socialist govenment had many achievment in advancing the Hungarian economy in the 50s, 60s and the early 70s (for example the first television transmission in 1957 - one year after the revolution). However , in my opinion, the centralist style of the economy limited the development speed and later on it couldn't catch up with the western countries and the Soviet government still had control over the country. Up until the system change of 1989 (that's how we call the transistion to the current day capitalist system) the government called it the Counter-revolution of 1956 (as the revolution has a bit different meaning by communist standarts) and thought of it as a feedback from the people. Nowadays the current government uses it as a mean of accusing the previous system.

As for Q's question - the left basicly consists of millionares and communist-traitors (they immediately changed their political stance when the ground started to crumble under them). As an example: one of their decisions included the foreign currency based loans which caused countless problems to the Hungarian people. There's one political party, which currently has about 1,5% support, and it is one of the successors of MSZMP (the old communist government, the other one is MSZP, which caused the aforementioned problem) that has some great goals in mind like the government should take care all of the public services and multi-rate taxes. It is called the Hungarian Worker Party.