#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #HUNGARY #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) avtonom: On the 65th anniversary of the workers' revolution in #Hungary in 1956 by Michael Shraibman [machine translation]

 What was the economic reason for the rapid self-organization of the Hungarian

working class and its transition to self-government in October - November 1956?
Much has been written about the deepest social revolution in the history of the
20th century - the workers' council revolution in Hungary in 1956, but there is
interesting research by economists on this score. ---- The 1956 revolution was
fueled by rapid industrialization amid falling living standards... The goal of
the Hungarian Bolshevik regime, within the framework of the plans established by
the USSR (USSR troops controlled Eastern Europe), was to increase the production
of weapons, which was required for the growing confrontation between the USSR and
its satellites with the United States. In order to increase the production of
weapons, it was necessary to develop heavy industry, and Hungary, by the way,
which had a developed industry before, began to rapidly industrialize,
increasingly turning into a country of coal and steel. Along with the industries
traditional for this country, the Leninist regime built a powerful metallurgical
industry. Signs of war hysteria were the fact that heavy industry grew the
fastest (66 percent) and light industry the slowest (20 percent).

Where did the working hands come from? The regime of Mathias Rakosi, the regime
of the Hungarian Bolsheviks, turned the Hungarian peasantry into workers. Over 10
years, industrialization has led to the fact that the share of GNP created by the
industrial proletariat has grown by about 20 percent, amounting to 65% of the
GNP. 300 thousand peasants migrated to cities (the entire population of Hungary
was about 7 million, of which about half lived in the countryside). Another
source of the formation of an industrial working class is likely to have been
massive repression. According to the data cited by the Russian historian R.
Pihoya, 600 thousand Hungarians (8-9% of the country's population),
representatives of different social strata, were subjected to repression. Many of
them were forcibly sent to work in mines and factories.

National income per capita in the first third of the 1950s grew by about 30%,
reaching levels well above the pre-war level (before World War II). However, the
income level of the population did not grow, but fell!

The reason was huge deductions from income and very high investments in the
further growth of the industry. The workers were simply taken away from what they
created, directing funds to industrialization - it was carried out at the expense
of the working class. It was real over-exploitation . Effective demand in the
early 1950s was constrained by the continuous rise in consumer prices and the
issuance of Plan and Peace Loan bonds, the subscription to which was supposedly
voluntary, but in fact mandatory. Thanks to various measures of the state, the
real income of workers and employees in 1952 was only two-thirds of what it was
in 1938, while in 1949 this share was 90%! There was a more or less general
impoverishment and proletarianization (transformation into impoverished workers
of factories and plants) of the population of Hungary.

There were other reasons for the decline in living standards. Hungary paid
reparations to the post-war Soviet regime. She was initially obliged to pay the
Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia an amount of $ 300 million over six
years (a colossal amount at that time). In practice, the cost of these
reparations has doubled due to the sharp rise in prices in the world market, so
that the effort required has held back the country's economy for several years.
The armistice agreement obliged Hungary to supply the Soviet troops stationed
there. Another consequence of the war was that factories, plants and real estate,
previously fully or partially owned by the German side, became the property of
the USSR. In the late 1940s, it became possible to buy out these enterprises by
the Hungarian government, but many of them operated as Soviet-Hungarian joint
ventures for a number of years. The Hungarian economy incurred additional costs
of $ 150-180 million. All these commitments taken together meant that the
Hungarian state had to allocate more than a third of its expenditures to fulfill
international reparations obligations in 1945-48.

In addition, the regime relied on the development of heavy industry (metallurgy,
mechanical engineering), largely ignoring light industry (production of consumer
goods for society, such as clothing). At the same time, peasant farmers were
forcibly driven into the local analogue of state-owned enterprises - collective
farms. They fled from the village, 600 thousand hectares of fertile land were
empty. The chaos of the planned economy - the command economy (where the
bureaucratic apparatus of the state acted in the role of the owner of factories
and land - in the role of the exploiter, appropriating the results of someone
else's labor) led to a chronic deficit and crises in public supply. The queues
for scarce products grew: many things the population needed were simply not
enough. Various sectors of the economy did not coordinate their efforts well.
Therefore, in 1951, it was necessary to introduce rationing of bread, sugar,

The events of June 1953 (Imre Nagy's "New Deal") did not radically change these
processes (there was a slight reduction in the disparities between prices and
wages). But when Nagy fell in the spring of 1955, the situation more or less
continued where it ended in the summer of 1953.

But here's what else is interesting. One of the significant changes, largely
determined by the political sphere, was a radical change in the distribution of
income and the ratio of wages between various social and professional groups.
Traditional inequality has eased. In other words, workers and specialists found
themselves in a similar position.

And finally, taking away from workers more and more funds that were invested in
industrialization, which led to a drop in the quality of life, the regime was
limited in its ability to stimulate workers to work more efficiently through
higher wages and real incomes . Therefore, workers and specialists were forced to
work with the threat of fines and reprisals. The mass repressions in Hungary
carried out by the Communist Party were not only a political mechanism that
attacked critics of the regime, but also a way of intimidating the working class,
a way of mobilizing it for factory work.

So what happened in the end? Although different regions of the country developed,
70% of Hungary's industry was concentrated in Greater Budapest, the capital of
the metropolitan area. The population of the Budapest metropolitan area was about
2.5 - 3 million people - almost 40% of the country's population. There were about
a million industrial workers in the capital. Their concentration in large
factories, labor productivity and skills rose, and incomes fell. At the same
time, the economic situation of workers and specialists was leveled and evened
out, who were equally outraged by the continuing decline in the quality of life
against the background of economic growth, as well as repressions. The city was
turning into a powder keg. In the end, an armed workers' uprising broke out in
Budapest, which was then joined by other regions of the country, and there were
also strikes.The workers put forward demands for self-government at the
factories, and this happened faster and easier than in the Russian revolution of
1917-1921, because in this case the specialists (engineers and technicians) were
on their side. The result was the deepest social revolution in the history of the
planet - within a few weeks, the workers created elected councils and took over
all the major factories in the country. They also created the Central Workers'
Council of Greater Budapest to coordinate economic and political activities. In
the CRS, delegates from factories were elected, usually highly skilled workers
and engineers, whose activities were controlled by grassroots councils /
assemblies - workers removed delegates who took too much on themselves, as he
recallsjournalist Bill Lommax. This unique revolution defeated the Bolshevik
regime inside the country and was suppressed only by the forces of the
interventionists - the army of the USSR.

Of course, the Hungarian revolution was pregnant with different possibilities.
While the workers were creating barricade and factory councils and building
self-governing socialism, reactionary crowds in several villages and townships
attacked the Jews. In addition, some of the rebels sympathized with the
conservative anti-socialist movement led by Cardinal Mindszenty. Like the Commune
of Paris in 1871, seized by national-patriotic feelings and the desire to fight
the Germans (Franco-Prussian war), the Hungarians were seized by national
liberation ideas in relation to the USSR and its army, which was suppressing the
uprising. (Criticism of the USSR did not necessarily have to acquire a
national-patriotic character). Some of the workers advocated the total power of
the system of free Soviets, while others believed that along with the Soviets, an
ordinary parliamentary system was needed.

However, the desire of society for self-governing socialism was so strong that no
group dared to put forward openly anti-socialist demands. This is indicated by
Tamás Kraus, a modern Hungarian Marxist historian and professor at the University
of Budapest, in his article " On the Hungarian Workers' Councils of 1956 ".

Thus, as a result of the combination of a number of factors, primarily related to
the economy, Hungary in 1956 experienced the deepest social revolution in
history. Like all social revolutions, it was a class uprising of the working
class, and its core was the movement for self-government in factories and for the
seizure of power in the country by the elected bodies of workers' self-government
- the Soviets. There have never been any other social revolutions besides class
ones in history and probably never will be.

Materials on related topics
Workers' Councils (Anton Pannekoek). This is an article by Anton Pannekoek, a
supporter of Workers' Council Communism. In it, he explains why only workers'
councils (not parties and not trade unions) are the organization that makes it
possible to make the transition to a classless and stateless society (communism).

About Hungary in 1956 and the nature of this revolution

Interview with worker activist Henri Simon, participant in the 1968 French
Revolution . About how the trade unions suppressed the 1968 revolution, why the
trade unions are bad and have nothing to do with the struggle for labor
self-government.

May-June 1968, on the French Revolution in the 20th century . Research by Charles
Reeve

Historians about the 1921 Kronstadt uprising

History of Communism of Workers' Soviets in Germany

https://avtonom.org/author_columns/k-65-y-godovshchine-revolyucii-v-vengrii-v-1956-godu
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