Remembering Hungary 1956

[blake 3:17]

So how does our side respond to this?

Bush: Hungary proof Liberty cannot be denied (http://www.budapestsun.com/full_story.asp?ArticleId=%7BB71919BAD0554F45B76B83 2E60DF3663%7D&From=News)

And in Pravda:

1956 anti-communist uprising commemoration takes place in Poznan
Front page / World
06/28/2006 13:18 Source:


President Lech Kaczynski was joined by counterparts Horst Koehler of Germany, Laszlo Solyom of Hungary, and Vaclav Klaus of Czech Republic to remember clashes that broke out between workers and communist militia in June 1956 in the western Polish city.




With a military band playing, Kaczynski gave a red-carpet welcome to his fellow presidents in the picturesque old town square. Later, they were to take part in a Mass and then wreath-laying ceremony at a monument to the victims of the uprising. Pravda story. (http://english.pravda.ru/news/world/28-06-2006/82621-Poznan-0)

[More Fire for the People]

The Hungarian Uprising is generally treated as a capitalist revolution in US History books. The workers' councils 'never happenend'.

[RevSouth]

The irony of the situation is Bush probably doesn't know it was a leftist revolution.

[bcbm]

Hungary '56 was a fascist, anti-semetic reactionary revolt that deserved to be crushed!!


...Just thought I'd beat the Trots to it.

[Raubleaux]

It was a reactionary, anti-Semitic counterrevolution. There was a thread a while back in the history forum where I talked about this at length and none of the fake socialists on this board could muster a coherent response.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Yeah.. people do tend to forget that Nagy's regime wanted to establish a "multi-party democracy" (bourgeois democracy?).. to take a "neutral stance" between the socialist camp and the imperialists.. and, as I've read, even asked imperialist countries to step in on their side when the USSR invaded.

[Wanted Man]

Originally posted by Lennie [email protected] 29 2006, 09:51 PM
Yeah.. people do tend to forget that Nagy's regime wanted to establish a "multi-party democracy" (bourgeois democracy?).. to take a "neutral stance" between the socialist camp and the imperialists.. and, as I've read, even asked imperialist countries to step in on their side when the USSR invaded.
Funny how that goes, huh?

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

This is from the recent issue of the SWP (US)'s paper:

1956 Hungarian revolution sought
to strengthen gains of workers state

BY ARRIN HAWKINS
When U.S. president George Bush visited Hungary in late June, he referred to the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian workers revolt as part of his propaganda to draw in the former Soviet-bloc government as a closer ally of Washington’s “war on terror.”

“I am here to celebrate the 1956 revolution,” he said in a meeting with Hungarian leaders. Bush claimed that the popular uprising against the Stalinist bureaucratic regime in Hungary was a revolt against “communist dictatorship.” He lauded the government in Budapest today for deploying troops as part of imperialist-led occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Hungarian officials pledged commitment to this alliance with Washington.

Bush’s remarks about the 1956 events were a falsification of history, however. The millions who rebelled in Hungary were not seeking to restore capitalism, with which they had had bitter experience, especially under fascist rule. They were fighting against bureaucratic abuses, for democratic rights, and to increase their control over the country’s affairs.

A working-class political revolution was the last thing the imperialist rulers wanted. Unable to reimpose capitalism there, they counted on Moscow to crush the Hungarian revolution.

Sought to strengthen historic gains
Working people in Hungary were building on the gains of the Russian Revolution and its extension. In October 1917 workers and farmers in Russia, led by the Bolshevik party, took power and overturned capitalist rule. Under socialized means of production and a planned economy, Russia, previously one of the most backward countries in Europe, rapidly industrialized. Working people made giant social strides.

In the early 1920s, however, under the pressures of imperialist assault and isolation, a privileged bureaucracy developed in the Soviet Union. Following V.I. Lenin’s death, this rising middle-class caste headed by Joseph Stalin usurped political control, defeating communist working-class opposition. The Stalinist leadership reversed the Bolsheviks’ working-class internationalist course and imposed police-state repression, bureaucratic mismanagement, and subordination of foreign policy to Moscow’s narrow priorities. It could not, however, overturn the socialized property relations.

After World War II, in face of renewed imperialist aggression, Moscow organized the overthrow of the tottering capitalist regimes in East Europe as a defensive “buffer zone.” Working people in those countries mobilized, under Stalinist constraints, to expropriate the capitalists and landlords. Bureaucratically deformed workers states were established, including in Hungary.

Too weak to launch a hot war, the imperialist powers waged a “cold war” against the workers states. They put military and economic pressure on the bureaucratic regimes to crack down on the struggles of working people.

In the early 1950s, working-class demands for better living conditions and relaxation of the totalitarian regime forced the Nikita Khrushchev leadership in Moscow to make concessions, known as “de-Stalinization.” Emboldened, workers in the region pressed for more. A working-class revolt erupted in East Germany in 1953. In June 1956 a general strike in the Polish city of Poznan led to a nationwide uprising. The hated Kremlin-backed leader was replaced by Wladislaw Gomulka, who instituted a few democratic concessions and called for some independence from Moscow.

Inspired by the Polish revolution, Hungarian workers and students, including many Communist Party members, began to stage meetings demanding democratic rights and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. Under mounting pressure, Matyas Rakosi, known as the “Stalin of Hungary,” was forced to resign his post in July.

Mass uprising, workers councils
Working people created their own organizations, including workers councils in the factories, neighborhoods, and army. They fought for better living conditions and wages and an increased say in the trade unions. They demanded legal recognition of the workers councils as permanent political bodies with authority in the management of the factories.

On October 23, hundreds of thousands poured into the streets. They defended themselves from police-state repression. A crowd tore down the notorious statue of Stalin in the capital. In response, the Hungarian CP leadership appointed Imre Nagy prime minister, who favored reforms and formerly held this post.

The Soviet regime, falsely claiming that the revolt was an imperialist-inspired “counterrevolution,” responded by sending troops into Budapest. In response, the masses took up arms in self-defense, spearheading an uprising. Workers launched a general strike. Large sections of the Hungarian army went over to the revolution. Some Soviet soldiers began to express sympathy with the rebels’ cause.

Nagy abolished the hated Secret Security Police. He called for the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The troops were redeployed to the provinces.

In its Nov. 5, 1956, issue, the Militant quoted an on-the-scene news report that described “a parade of workers’ delegates from the provinces…each presenting its set of demands of the new Budapest government.” It reported that “revolutionary councils in control of several large provincial towns” were “busy clapping into jail local officials of the Hungarian Workers (Communist) party and of the security police.”

An October 25 wire dispatch reported that a rebel radio station demanded “that the top positions of the state and the Communist Party be filled with men devoted to the principle of proletarian internationalism and respectful of Hungarian traditions.”

On November 4, Moscow sent back troops and tanks into Budapest. Nagy, who had promised “free elections” and repudiated the Warsaw Pact, was arrested. The Soviet-led forces unleashed a bloodbath. Thousands were killed, wounded, or jailed. Working people put up heroic resistance despite being overwhelmed by a vastly superior military force. They continued the general strike, issued leaflets, and protested the arrests. Resistance by the workers councils was crushed within two months.

Contrary to the cynical lies peddled both by imperialist and Stalinist representatives, the Hungarian workers and students did not want to go back to the capitalist past. They fought to strengthen their workers state and historic gains. The 1956 Hungarian revolution showed that the future lies with socialism.

http://www.themilitant.com/2006/7027/702750.html

[Cheung Mo]

Of Nagy, Ceausescu, and Dubcek, Ceausescu was the only one who was pro-American instead of neutral.

He was also the only Stalinist.

[Red Heretic]

Originally posted by [email protected] 29 2006, 08:39 PM
It was a reactionary, anti-Semitic counterrevolution. There was a thread a while back in the history forum where I talked about this at length and none of the fake socialists on this board could muster a coherent response.
I fail to see how the Hungarian revolt could be a counter revolution, when it was a revolt against Nikita Khruschev, who restored capitalism in the Soviet Union.

I will admit I'm somewhat fuzzy as to my views on the Hungarian revolution, but I think it's important to understand that the real counter revolution occured when Khruschev came to power.

[RedJacobin]

This is probably a dumb question,

What's the connection/relationship between Hungary 1956 and Prague Spring 1968?

Were they similar or not?

[GoaRedStar]

I post this awhile back on this thread

http://www.revolutionaryleft.com/index.php...8028&hl=hungary (http://www.revolutionaryleft.com/index.php?showtopic=48028&hl=hungary)


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

[Janus]

What's the connection/relationship between Hungary 1956 and Prague Spring 1968
Well, Hungary was more of a revolt while Prague Spring was a time of "political liberalization" and loosening of restrictions that occured over a longer period.