GoaRedStar
29th March 2006, 00:23
A great article from the ICC.
From World Revolution 9, December 1976
(Originally entitled ‘Hungary ’56: the spectre of the workers’ councils’)
Twenty years after the workers’ revolt shook Hungary in 1956, the vultures of the bourg*eoisie are ‘celebrating’ the anniversary in their usual style. The traditional bourgeois press waxes nostalgic about the heroic resis*tance of the ‘Hungarian people’ against the’ horrors of ‘Communism’, while at the other end of the bourgeois political spectrum, the Trotskyists wistfully recall the insurrection as a “political revolution for national independence and democratic rights” (News Line, October 1976). All such reminiscences merely describe the appearance of the up*rising and thus mask and distort its real meaning. The 1956 uprising in Hungary, like the strikes which occurred in Poland in the same year and more recently in 1970 and 1976, are not the expressions of the will of the ‘people’ of Eastern Europe to reform ‘Commu*nism’ or reform the ‘deformed workers’ states’. They are the direct result, of the insoluble contradictions of capitalism in Eastern Europe and the whole world.
The crisis in the eastern bloc, 1948-1956
The establishment of the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe after World War II was the response Russian capital made to the intensification of imperialist rivalries on a world scale. The Berlin blockade, the Korean War, the emergence of the Cold War expressed the continuing tension between the two imperialist giants, Russia and America, which had come to dominate the world after the war. Russia, always on the defensive because of America’ economic superiority, was forced to turn the countries of Eastern Europe into economic and military ‘buffers’ against the West. To ensure the stranglehold of Russian capital over these economies, the rigid political apparatus of Stalinism had to be imposed on them. The total statification of these regimes was accelerated by the weak*ness of their economies in the wake of the war. But the Stalinist system was even imposed in countries like Czechoslovakia which had ‘enjoyed’ the blessings of demo*cracy before the war. The Stalinist charac*ter of these regimes is inseparably bound up with economic domination by Russia; to challenge one means challenging the other. The events of 1956, like those in Czechoslo*vakia in 1968, show the narrow limits of ‘liberalization which the Kremlin will tol*erate among its ‘satellites’.
In the years 1948-53, the pressure of inter-imperialist competition impelled the Russian bloc to embark upon a new phase of frenzied accumulation. Heavy industry and military production were increased rapidly at the expense of consumer goods and working class living standards. On top of this Russia exacted an enormous tribute from its clients by means of unequal exchanges, Russian-owned companies, etc. This brutal ‘partnership’ had its economic and military expression in COMECON and the Warsaw Pact. In political terms this period of ‘siege economy’ was accompanied by massive repression both against the workers and the old bourgeois parties in addition to a series of purges and show trials of dissidents within the bureaucracy itself; Slansky in Czechoslovakia, Rajk in Hungary, and so on. These barbarous charades were aimed at suppressing any tendencies toward ‘Titoism’ within the national bourgeoisies of Eastern Europe. Titoism functioned simply as a catch-phrase to denote any striving toward national self-assertion on the part of the local bourgeoisies.
The economic weakness of the Russian bloc compared to the West explains why the, work*ing class in the East did not begin to bene*fit from the post-war reconstruction until it was almost over. In order to ‘catch up’ with America on the military level (the only one on which Russia can hope to rival the US), the bourgeoisie of the Russian bloc had to keep wages down and expand heavy industry as quickly as possible. In the period 1948-53, workers’ living standards all over the Eastern bloc dropped below that of the pre-war level; but Russia emerged from this period with her H-bomb and her Sputniks.
Nevertheless, profound economic strains began to appear inside the bloc as the markets of COMECON reached saturation point, and as the working class began to grow increasingly restless, provoked by this vicious assault on its living standards. It was becoming more and more necessary for the siege to be lifted and for Russia to ‘open out’ onto the world market. In Eastern Europe relaxa*tion of a similar kind was also necessary, but required a certain loosening of Russian control over the economies of her satellites.
The death of Stalin in 1953 happily coincided with the general need of capitalism in the Russian bloc to ‘loosen up’ both politically and economically. The social conflicts which had been festering under the surface now burst out into the open. A ‘liberal’ faction of the bureaucracy began to emerge, calling for a relaxation of economic and political despotism and a re-orientation in foreign policy. Such measures were defended as the only way of restoring profitability and keeping the proletariat in line. This latter requirement was startlingly emphasized by the outbreak of mass workers’ revolts in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and even in Russia (at the huge Vortuka slave labour camp).
In Russia, the death of Stalin was followed by faction fights which ended in the victory of the Khrushchev ‘revisionist clique’ at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956, where the crimes and excesses of the Stalin era were denounced before an astonished-world. The new line announced by Khrushchev promised a return to proletarian democracy, to be accompanied by an international policy of ‘peaceful co-existence’ in which Russia would restrict itself to economic and ideo*logical competition with the ‘capitalist West’.
In the countries of Eastern Europe, the ‘liberal’ tendency in the bureaucracy inevi*tably expressed its desire for some kind of economic independence from Russia. It was a major problem for the ‘liberals’ to know how far they could safely press their national*istic impulses, but at first the Russians actively encouraged programmes of cautious reform in the satellites. In Hungary in 1953 the arch-Stalinist Rakosi was advised by Malenkov to take a back seat to the reformer, Imry Nagy. Nagy demanded a slow-down in the expansion of heavy industry, more emphasis on consumer production, a suspension of the collectivization campaigns in the country-side, and an easing of the control of ‘cul*ture’. In the next few years the Hungarian bureaucracy was torn by the ensuing conflict between the ‘conservatives’ entrenched in the police and the party hierarchy and the ‘reformers’ based in the lower echelons of the bureaucracy, the factory managers, etc. At the same time the liberalization of the arts gave birth to a national movement of artists and intellectuals whose desire for national independence and ‘democracy’ went considerably beyond the programme defended by the Nagy faction of the bureaucracy.
Despite the cautious nature of Nagy’s ‘NEP’, the Russian bourgeoisie very quickly decided he was proceeding at too brisk a pace. In 1955 he was relieved of his post as Prime Minister and the unpopular Rakosi again took over the reins of power. But the Russians and their lackeys had set something in motion which was difficult to control. The protest movement of artists, intellectuals, and stu*dents continued to grow. In April 1956 the Petofi Circle was formed by ‘Young Communist’ students. Ostensibly a cultural discussion group, it soon became a type of ‘parliament’ for the whole opposition movement. Official censure of this movement simply gave impetus to it.
In June 1956 the workers of Poznan in Poland staged a mass strike which quickly assumed the character of a local insurrection. Though rapidly and brutally repressed, the revolt led to the triumph of the ‘reformists’ in Poland under the leadership of W. Gomulka. Like his successor Gierek in 1970, the ‘leftist’ Gomulka appeared as the only figure capable of maintaining control over the working class on his ascension to power.
The convulsions in Poland gave a dramatic push to the developments in Hungary. The uprising in Budapest on October 23 followed a mass demonstration, originally organized by the students, ‘in solidarity with the people of Poland’. The intransigent response of the authorities, who called the demonstra*tors ‘fascists’ and ‘counter-revolutionaries’ the bloody repression meted out by the AVO (the secret police), and last but not least, the fact that the ‘student’ demonstration was swollen by thousands and thousands of workers, turned a peaceful protest demanding democratic reforms and the return of Nagy into an armed insurrection.
The class character of the Hungarian uprising
This is not the place to go into all the events which led from the uprising of October 23 to the final Russian intervention that claimed the lives of thousands of people, the majority of them young workers. We simply want to consider the general character of the revolt in order to rescue it from the terrible confusions which surround it.
As we have seen, opposition to the Stalinist ‘old guard’ expressed itself in two ways. The first was from within the bourgeoisie itself, led by liberal bureaucrats and supported by rather more radical students, intellectuals, and artists. They stood for a more democratic and more profitable form of state capitalism in Hungary. But the ‘other opposition’ was the spontaneous resistance of the working class to the mon*strous exploitation imposed on it. And as could clearly be seen in East Germany and Poland, this resistance was a potential menace not to one or other faction of the ruling class, but to the survival of capi*talism itself.
In Hungary these two movements ‘came together’ in the uprising. But it was the intervention of the working class which transformed a protest movement into an in*surrection, and it was the infection of the workers’ insurrection with all the democra*tic and nationalist ideology of the intel*lectuals which was to weaken and confuse the proletarian movement.
The workers ‘joined’ the protest movement out of instinctive hatred for the Stalinist regime and because of the intolerable condi*tions they were forced to live and work under. Once the workers threw their weight into the movement it assumed a violent and intransigent character which no one had bargained for. Although many different ele*ments took part in the fighting (students, soldiers, peasants, etc) it was overwhelm*ingly young workers who in the first days of the uprising, destroyed the first contingent of Russian tanks sent to Budapest to restore ‘order’. It was primarily the working class which disintegrated the Hungarian police and army and armed itself to fight the AVO and the Russian Army. When the second wave of Russian tanks arrived to crush the uprising, it was the working class neighbourhoods which had to be smashed to rubble because they were the main centres of resistance. And even after the restoration of ‘order’ and the installation of the Kadar government, even after thousands of workers had been massacred, the proletariat continued to resist by waging a number of bitter strikes.
The most powerful expression of the prole*tarian character of the revolt was the appearance of genuine workers’ councils all over the country. Elected at factory level, these councils linked whole industrial areas and cities, and were without doubt the organizational focus of the entire insurrec*tion. They took charge of organizing the distribution of arms and food, ran the general strike, directed the armed struggle. In some towns they were in total and undis*puted command. The appearance of these soviets struck terror into the hearts of the ‘Soviet’ capitalists and no doubt tinged the ‘sympathy’ of the Western democracies with unease about the excessively ‘violent’ character of the revolt.
But to sing the praises of the Hungarian workers’ struggles without analysing its extreme weaknesses and confusions would be to betray our task as revolutionaries, which is not to passively applaud the struggles of the proletariat but to criticize their limi*tations and point out the general goals of the class movement. Despite the fact that the workers had de facto power in wide areas of Hungary during the uprising, the 1956 rebellion was not a conscious attempt by the proletariat to seize political power for itself and build a new society. It was a spontaneous revolt which failed to become a revolution because the working class lacked a clear political understanding of the historic goals of its struggle.
In an immediate sense, the main obstacle to the development of a revolutionary consciousness by the Hungarian workers was the immense barrage of nationalist and democratic ideology which was thrown at them from all sides. The students and intellectuals were the most active disseminators of this ideo*logy, but the workers inevitably suffered from all such illusions themselves. Thus instead of asserting the autonomous inter*ests of the proletariat against the capi*talist state and all other classes, the councils tended to identify the workers’ struggle with the ‘popular’ struggle to reform the state machine to achieve ‘national independence’. National independence is a reactionary utopia in the epoch of capitalist decadence and imperialism. Instead of calling - as the soviets in Russia in 1917 had done - for the destruction of the bour*geois state and the international extension of the revolution, the councils limited them*selves to demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops, an ‘independent socialist Hungary’ under the leadership of Imre Nagy, freedom of speech, self-management of the factories, and so on. The methods of struggle utilized by the councils were implicitly revolution*ary, expressing the intrinsically revolu*tionary nature of the proletariat. But the goals they adopted all remained within the political and economic framework of capi*talism. The contradiction the councils found themselves in can be summed up in the following demand put forward by the Miskolc workers’ council.
“The government must propose the forma*tion of a Revolutionary National Council, based upon the workers’ councils of the various departments and Budapest, and composed of democratically elected dele*gates from them. At the same time the old parliament must be dissolved.” (Quoted in Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe by Chris Harman, p. 161)
The Miskolc council is expressing here its hostility to the bourgeois parliamentary system, and alongside other councils, it also protested against the reappearance of the old bourgeois parties. Such positions reflect a groping towards the political power of the working class organized in its councils. Yet we can see at the same time the terrible consequences of the mystifica*tion that the Stalinist state somehow already belonged to the working class, no matter how ‘bureaucratically deformed’. This illusion prevented the councils from taking the really vital step which would have made the uprising into a proletarian revolution: the annihilation of the whole bourgeois Stalinist state machine, both its ‘conservative’ and its ‘liberal’ wings. But instead of taking this step, the councils posed their demand for the dissolution of parliament and the setting up a central workers’ council to the government of Imre Nagy, i.e. to the very force that they should have been obliterating! Such illusions could only lead to the crushing of the councils, or to their integration into the bourgeois state. It is to the credit of the majority of the workers’ councils that they either went down fighting or dissolved themselves when they saw that there was no prospect of any further struggle and that they were doomed to become rubber stamping organs for the Kadar government.
CONTINUE HERE
http://en.internationalism.org/node/1738
From World Revolution 9, December 1976
(Originally entitled ‘Hungary ’56: the spectre of the workers’ councils’)
Twenty years after the workers’ revolt shook Hungary in 1956, the vultures of the bourg*eoisie are ‘celebrating’ the anniversary in their usual style. The traditional bourgeois press waxes nostalgic about the heroic resis*tance of the ‘Hungarian people’ against the’ horrors of ‘Communism’, while at the other end of the bourgeois political spectrum, the Trotskyists wistfully recall the insurrection as a “political revolution for national independence and democratic rights” (News Line, October 1976). All such reminiscences merely describe the appearance of the up*rising and thus mask and distort its real meaning. The 1956 uprising in Hungary, like the strikes which occurred in Poland in the same year and more recently in 1970 and 1976, are not the expressions of the will of the ‘people’ of Eastern Europe to reform ‘Commu*nism’ or reform the ‘deformed workers’ states’. They are the direct result, of the insoluble contradictions of capitalism in Eastern Europe and the whole world.
The crisis in the eastern bloc, 1948-1956
The establishment of the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe after World War II was the response Russian capital made to the intensification of imperialist rivalries on a world scale. The Berlin blockade, the Korean War, the emergence of the Cold War expressed the continuing tension between the two imperialist giants, Russia and America, which had come to dominate the world after the war. Russia, always on the defensive because of America’ economic superiority, was forced to turn the countries of Eastern Europe into economic and military ‘buffers’ against the West. To ensure the stranglehold of Russian capital over these economies, the rigid political apparatus of Stalinism had to be imposed on them. The total statification of these regimes was accelerated by the weak*ness of their economies in the wake of the war. But the Stalinist system was even imposed in countries like Czechoslovakia which had ‘enjoyed’ the blessings of demo*cracy before the war. The Stalinist charac*ter of these regimes is inseparably bound up with economic domination by Russia; to challenge one means challenging the other. The events of 1956, like those in Czechoslo*vakia in 1968, show the narrow limits of ‘liberalization which the Kremlin will tol*erate among its ‘satellites’.
In the years 1948-53, the pressure of inter-imperialist competition impelled the Russian bloc to embark upon a new phase of frenzied accumulation. Heavy industry and military production were increased rapidly at the expense of consumer goods and working class living standards. On top of this Russia exacted an enormous tribute from its clients by means of unequal exchanges, Russian-owned companies, etc. This brutal ‘partnership’ had its economic and military expression in COMECON and the Warsaw Pact. In political terms this period of ‘siege economy’ was accompanied by massive repression both against the workers and the old bourgeois parties in addition to a series of purges and show trials of dissidents within the bureaucracy itself; Slansky in Czechoslovakia, Rajk in Hungary, and so on. These barbarous charades were aimed at suppressing any tendencies toward ‘Titoism’ within the national bourgeoisies of Eastern Europe. Titoism functioned simply as a catch-phrase to denote any striving toward national self-assertion on the part of the local bourgeoisies.
The economic weakness of the Russian bloc compared to the West explains why the, work*ing class in the East did not begin to bene*fit from the post-war reconstruction until it was almost over. In order to ‘catch up’ with America on the military level (the only one on which Russia can hope to rival the US), the bourgeoisie of the Russian bloc had to keep wages down and expand heavy industry as quickly as possible. In the period 1948-53, workers’ living standards all over the Eastern bloc dropped below that of the pre-war level; but Russia emerged from this period with her H-bomb and her Sputniks.
Nevertheless, profound economic strains began to appear inside the bloc as the markets of COMECON reached saturation point, and as the working class began to grow increasingly restless, provoked by this vicious assault on its living standards. It was becoming more and more necessary for the siege to be lifted and for Russia to ‘open out’ onto the world market. In Eastern Europe relaxa*tion of a similar kind was also necessary, but required a certain loosening of Russian control over the economies of her satellites.
The death of Stalin in 1953 happily coincided with the general need of capitalism in the Russian bloc to ‘loosen up’ both politically and economically. The social conflicts which had been festering under the surface now burst out into the open. A ‘liberal’ faction of the bureaucracy began to emerge, calling for a relaxation of economic and political despotism and a re-orientation in foreign policy. Such measures were defended as the only way of restoring profitability and keeping the proletariat in line. This latter requirement was startlingly emphasized by the outbreak of mass workers’ revolts in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and even in Russia (at the huge Vortuka slave labour camp).
In Russia, the death of Stalin was followed by faction fights which ended in the victory of the Khrushchev ‘revisionist clique’ at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956, where the crimes and excesses of the Stalin era were denounced before an astonished-world. The new line announced by Khrushchev promised a return to proletarian democracy, to be accompanied by an international policy of ‘peaceful co-existence’ in which Russia would restrict itself to economic and ideo*logical competition with the ‘capitalist West’.
In the countries of Eastern Europe, the ‘liberal’ tendency in the bureaucracy inevi*tably expressed its desire for some kind of economic independence from Russia. It was a major problem for the ‘liberals’ to know how far they could safely press their national*istic impulses, but at first the Russians actively encouraged programmes of cautious reform in the satellites. In Hungary in 1953 the arch-Stalinist Rakosi was advised by Malenkov to take a back seat to the reformer, Imry Nagy. Nagy demanded a slow-down in the expansion of heavy industry, more emphasis on consumer production, a suspension of the collectivization campaigns in the country-side, and an easing of the control of ‘cul*ture’. In the next few years the Hungarian bureaucracy was torn by the ensuing conflict between the ‘conservatives’ entrenched in the police and the party hierarchy and the ‘reformers’ based in the lower echelons of the bureaucracy, the factory managers, etc. At the same time the liberalization of the arts gave birth to a national movement of artists and intellectuals whose desire for national independence and ‘democracy’ went considerably beyond the programme defended by the Nagy faction of the bureaucracy.
Despite the cautious nature of Nagy’s ‘NEP’, the Russian bourgeoisie very quickly decided he was proceeding at too brisk a pace. In 1955 he was relieved of his post as Prime Minister and the unpopular Rakosi again took over the reins of power. But the Russians and their lackeys had set something in motion which was difficult to control. The protest movement of artists, intellectuals, and stu*dents continued to grow. In April 1956 the Petofi Circle was formed by ‘Young Communist’ students. Ostensibly a cultural discussion group, it soon became a type of ‘parliament’ for the whole opposition movement. Official censure of this movement simply gave impetus to it.
In June 1956 the workers of Poznan in Poland staged a mass strike which quickly assumed the character of a local insurrection. Though rapidly and brutally repressed, the revolt led to the triumph of the ‘reformists’ in Poland under the leadership of W. Gomulka. Like his successor Gierek in 1970, the ‘leftist’ Gomulka appeared as the only figure capable of maintaining control over the working class on his ascension to power.
The convulsions in Poland gave a dramatic push to the developments in Hungary. The uprising in Budapest on October 23 followed a mass demonstration, originally organized by the students, ‘in solidarity with the people of Poland’. The intransigent response of the authorities, who called the demonstra*tors ‘fascists’ and ‘counter-revolutionaries’ the bloody repression meted out by the AVO (the secret police), and last but not least, the fact that the ‘student’ demonstration was swollen by thousands and thousands of workers, turned a peaceful protest demanding democratic reforms and the return of Nagy into an armed insurrection.
The class character of the Hungarian uprising
This is not the place to go into all the events which led from the uprising of October 23 to the final Russian intervention that claimed the lives of thousands of people, the majority of them young workers. We simply want to consider the general character of the revolt in order to rescue it from the terrible confusions which surround it.
As we have seen, opposition to the Stalinist ‘old guard’ expressed itself in two ways. The first was from within the bourgeoisie itself, led by liberal bureaucrats and supported by rather more radical students, intellectuals, and artists. They stood for a more democratic and more profitable form of state capitalism in Hungary. But the ‘other opposition’ was the spontaneous resistance of the working class to the mon*strous exploitation imposed on it. And as could clearly be seen in East Germany and Poland, this resistance was a potential menace not to one or other faction of the ruling class, but to the survival of capi*talism itself.
In Hungary these two movements ‘came together’ in the uprising. But it was the intervention of the working class which transformed a protest movement into an in*surrection, and it was the infection of the workers’ insurrection with all the democra*tic and nationalist ideology of the intel*lectuals which was to weaken and confuse the proletarian movement.
The workers ‘joined’ the protest movement out of instinctive hatred for the Stalinist regime and because of the intolerable condi*tions they were forced to live and work under. Once the workers threw their weight into the movement it assumed a violent and intransigent character which no one had bargained for. Although many different ele*ments took part in the fighting (students, soldiers, peasants, etc) it was overwhelm*ingly young workers who in the first days of the uprising, destroyed the first contingent of Russian tanks sent to Budapest to restore ‘order’. It was primarily the working class which disintegrated the Hungarian police and army and armed itself to fight the AVO and the Russian Army. When the second wave of Russian tanks arrived to crush the uprising, it was the working class neighbourhoods which had to be smashed to rubble because they were the main centres of resistance. And even after the restoration of ‘order’ and the installation of the Kadar government, even after thousands of workers had been massacred, the proletariat continued to resist by waging a number of bitter strikes.
The most powerful expression of the prole*tarian character of the revolt was the appearance of genuine workers’ councils all over the country. Elected at factory level, these councils linked whole industrial areas and cities, and were without doubt the organizational focus of the entire insurrec*tion. They took charge of organizing the distribution of arms and food, ran the general strike, directed the armed struggle. In some towns they were in total and undis*puted command. The appearance of these soviets struck terror into the hearts of the ‘Soviet’ capitalists and no doubt tinged the ‘sympathy’ of the Western democracies with unease about the excessively ‘violent’ character of the revolt.
But to sing the praises of the Hungarian workers’ struggles without analysing its extreme weaknesses and confusions would be to betray our task as revolutionaries, which is not to passively applaud the struggles of the proletariat but to criticize their limi*tations and point out the general goals of the class movement. Despite the fact that the workers had de facto power in wide areas of Hungary during the uprising, the 1956 rebellion was not a conscious attempt by the proletariat to seize political power for itself and build a new society. It was a spontaneous revolt which failed to become a revolution because the working class lacked a clear political understanding of the historic goals of its struggle.
In an immediate sense, the main obstacle to the development of a revolutionary consciousness by the Hungarian workers was the immense barrage of nationalist and democratic ideology which was thrown at them from all sides. The students and intellectuals were the most active disseminators of this ideo*logy, but the workers inevitably suffered from all such illusions themselves. Thus instead of asserting the autonomous inter*ests of the proletariat against the capi*talist state and all other classes, the councils tended to identify the workers’ struggle with the ‘popular’ struggle to reform the state machine to achieve ‘national independence’. National independence is a reactionary utopia in the epoch of capitalist decadence and imperialism. Instead of calling - as the soviets in Russia in 1917 had done - for the destruction of the bour*geois state and the international extension of the revolution, the councils limited them*selves to demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops, an ‘independent socialist Hungary’ under the leadership of Imre Nagy, freedom of speech, self-management of the factories, and so on. The methods of struggle utilized by the councils were implicitly revolution*ary, expressing the intrinsically revolu*tionary nature of the proletariat. But the goals they adopted all remained within the political and economic framework of capi*talism. The contradiction the councils found themselves in can be summed up in the following demand put forward by the Miskolc workers’ council.
“The government must propose the forma*tion of a Revolutionary National Council, based upon the workers’ councils of the various departments and Budapest, and composed of democratically elected dele*gates from them. At the same time the old parliament must be dissolved.” (Quoted in Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe by Chris Harman, p. 161)
The Miskolc council is expressing here its hostility to the bourgeois parliamentary system, and alongside other councils, it also protested against the reappearance of the old bourgeois parties. Such positions reflect a groping towards the political power of the working class organized in its councils. Yet we can see at the same time the terrible consequences of the mystifica*tion that the Stalinist state somehow already belonged to the working class, no matter how ‘bureaucratically deformed’. This illusion prevented the councils from taking the really vital step which would have made the uprising into a proletarian revolution: the annihilation of the whole bourgeois Stalinist state machine, both its ‘conservative’ and its ‘liberal’ wings. But instead of taking this step, the councils posed their demand for the dissolution of parliament and the setting up a central workers’ council to the government of Imre Nagy, i.e. to the very force that they should have been obliterating! Such illusions could only lead to the crushing of the councils, or to their integration into the bourgeois state. It is to the credit of the majority of the workers’ councils that they either went down fighting or dissolved themselves when they saw that there was no prospect of any further struggle and that they were doomed to become rubber stamping organs for the Kadar government.
CONTINUE HERE
http://en.internationalism.org/node/1738