Capital and workers struggles in Hungary from the 1950's to today
hungary / romania |
economy |
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Friday April 29, 2005 23:53 by ? - Barricade Collective
Hungarian anarchists on the transformation from state capital to the EU
A detailed study of the transformation of the Hungarian economy from the perspective of the Hungarian working class from the 1950's to today. Also sketches out the oppositional proletarian movements that existed in the post 1956 period. Ends with a description of the agricultural struggle that EU excession has given rise to.
A detailed study of the transformation of the Hungarian economy from the perspective of the Hungarian working class from the 1950's to today. Also sketches out the oppositional proletarian movements that existed in the post 1956 period.
This translation has been modified for for Anarkismo.net to make it more readable. The original can be found at http://www.angelfire.com/co4/tamtsih/english/progress_report.htm Explanations in [ ] have been added to this version.
Progress report Beyond the Carpathians, the nightmare
begins
by Barricade Collective*, March of 2005
The position of the Hungarian working class is rather bad. Bad,
because a big part of the Hungarian wage-workers - a big part of the
exploited working class is fooled by democratic illusions; bad,
because the working class can be divided by nationalism and
manipulated by conflicts of interests. Everybody defends his/her
sovereign territory separately, defends his/her alienated and
impoverished life, defends his/her everyday existence with its
illusions in reality, all that leads to the acceptance of the
ideology of the bourgeois political forces.
The Kadar system played a decisive role in the process which has
led to what we regard as such a pessimistic situation. [Janos Kadar
became the Russian approved head of the state after Russian tanks had
crushed the reforming regime of Imre Nagy in 1956. He resigned as
leader of the Hungarian Communist Party in 1988]
It's paradoxical but true that more and more people weep back to
Kadar's capitalism, under which the working class applied the 'order
of self-censorship' to itself. Though its gray and boring
totalitarianism, in which the proletariat lost its autonomous
character and the Bolshevik party regarded it as a 3-years-old stupid
child, the Kadar epoch had its specific logic: 'keep your trap shut,
then we'll give you bread and butter, beer and medicine, party
membership card and relative certainty of existence, cheap
opportunity for education'. And they also gave prohibitive zones
which became taboos, and if somebody crossed into them, then he/she
could easily find himself/herself beaten up and in a mental hospital.
They provided both physical and intellectual poverty, and a
'proletarian-killer' view on the future, which seemed to be perfect
and lulled the workers to sleep. Kadarian capitalism tried to leach
away every really human desire, and once more: it gave us everything
which it could give: poverty, opportunity of integration and knout [a
whip used for lashing prisoners]. Well, here is the 'merriest
barrack'.
After the workers uprising in Eastern Berlin [1953] there were
also workers protests in Hungary (this was before Kadar). In Csepel
(a southern workers' suburb in Budapest) there was a strike of
200-300 metal workers, against the bad living conditions. There were
also 'disturbances' in Ozd, Diosgyor and in several places in the
Great Plain. In the summer of 1954 there were again sporadic strikes.
After 1956, the real working-class movement was cut down, turned into
a museum object and was expelled by the state to the 'blank' pages of
the censored course books. The resistance ranged as far as 1956, but
after that it was defeated and became isolated. But, of course, it
didn't cease to exist, although after 1956 the dumb and defeated
working class in Hungary not only went back to the 'death factories'
and workshops, but it also subordinated itself to a 'higher will':
the party which could calmly sit in the power so far as the more
modern and active form of capitalism didn't move to this area. The
conflicts of the fifties calmed down at the end of the spring of
1957. The repressions and executions had begun, a revolutionary of
the Tuzolto street group (one of the most important militant groups
in 1956), Istvan Angyal was executed by the bolsheviks in 1958.
We enumerate some examples from the history of the proletarian
protest movements, which show that it wasn't possible to silence
fully the voices of discontent. There was an amnesty in 1960, this
'limited pardon' was given also to those who were imprisoned for '56,
but not to all of them. In the jail of Vac the political prisoners
started a hunger strike, but they stopped this activicity because of
its pointlessness. In 1966, the Vietnam Solidarity Committee (which
was organized under the aegis of KISZ, the official bolshevik youth
organisation) held an illegal demonstration on May Day. At the end of
the year, the organisation was dissolved. In 1967, young 'new left'
activists organized demonstrations again at the embassies of the
western countries. Maoists were arrested in 1968: they were accused
of organizing an illegal party. In 1970 at the
Lenin-centenarium in a commemoration, the students, organizing
the programme, highlighted 'improper citates' from Lenin's texts. On
the 21st of March (the day of the proclamation of the Hungarian
Soviet Republic in 1919), 1971, 'new left university students' wanted
to organize a demonstration with red cockades - because of this, they
had to abandon their studies. (An excellent revolutionary film about
1919, entitled 'Agitators', has been kept in a box by the authorities
for 30 years.) In 1971, on the 6th of October, several young people
gathered together in the Museum garden (a place in Budapest where the
revolution in 1848 had begun) and talked about 'those living in
misery in basement flats'.
Let's stop for a minute here! It is important to mention that
during the Kadar regime, on 15th of March and 23rd of October there
were always larger or smaller demonstrations and protests 'in the
name of liberty and independence', in the depth of which there was
hidden the desire of breaking out from the helpless and impoverished
worker's position. These demonstrations continued also after the
change of power, but now with the logos and slogans of nationalism.
In 1973, new leftist Lukacsists - who had close relationships to the
Praxis Circle in Yugoslavia - were kicked out of their jobs and from
the party, because of their critical activity. The party constantly
fights against the leftist intellectuals, it is enough to point out
the rows around the study 'Piece rate' of Miklos Haraszti or the book
of Konrad and Szelenyi about the new ruling class. In the summer of
1979 there was a raising of prices on foodstuffs.
The workers of the Csepel Iron and Steel Works put a slice of
bread-and-dripping (typical proletarian food of those times) into the
hand of the Lenin statue in front of the factory. After the 1980
strike in Gdansk, information circulated in Budapest which said, that
'there was an action also in Csepel'. Another rumor talked about a
strike which lasted 3 days - Kadar also went there to establish
order. After a month, the planned raising of prices (again on
foodstuffs) was cancelled, as a worker said: 'they were afraid that
here also something can happen'. In October of 1980 there was a
wage-strike in the china factory of Hodmezovasarhely and the
officials quickly distributed 1000-1000 forints among the workers. On
the 3rd of October 1980 on a building in Kispest, an oil-fired stove
exploded. The workers had already long grambled about the poor
circumstances. From 190 workers 34 (!) went on strike.
We pick out some jokes from that period:
"It is 40 kilogramms and eats grass. What is it?
- We will be it next year."
"The skeletons meet in 1980. One asks the another: 'Did you die
before or after the raising of prices?'
- Me? I am still alive."
And for the last one: "They raised the prices of bread, meet and
milk. What will be raised next time?
- Barricades!"
In 1981, 52 working women in a poultry processing factory in
Szabolcs refused to do overtime which wasn't reported earlier. In the
spring of this year meetings were held in several universities in
Hungary, and there was some talk of establishing independent students
organizations - this could also flirt with the memories of 1956 and
1968.
In the September in 1982, when the new tarifs of the public
transport came into effect, the workers of the Taurus Tyre Factory in
Szeged refused to work. The biqwigs again intervened and they
promised wage-increase.
From the sixties, the class struggle, the fight agains alienation
is unambiguously present in the films and literature and in the
bolder and bolder sociographies and political writings. We could
illustrate this with a lot of films, poems, essays, but we citate
only one sentence from a writing of Zoltan Zsille from the seventies,
which speaks for itself: "The workers state monopolized the right for
itself, to impose the costs of the maintenance and the development of
the society to the working class."
In a 1982 issue of the Beszelo samizdat (illegal newspaper), a
proletarian was asked whether it is possible to have in Hungary such
events as in Poland.
He said: "If the economic situation is getting worse in such a tempo
then yes." And it DID get worse (but instead of the uprising, came
the change of power and the era of modernization of capital), and
this process was accompanied by the law about 'work-shyness': if
somebody was caught in the act of 'idling' then he found himself
behind bars. The ashes of 'comrade Trotsky' laughed as they saw this
late bolshevik realization of the 'militarization of labour', about
which he wrote so poetically. The real class-fighter literature was
harassed by the authorities. It wasn't possible to read the analyses
about 1956: you didn't have access to them neither in the bookshops
nor in the libraries. But an underground left opposition emerged,
which - although it was democratic - propagated the history of the
Eastern European proletarian struggles. This way a few people could
read the non-censored writings on these struggles.
Here are some examples of the writings which were published within
that framework:
- the book of Bill Lomax about 1956,
- the 'Kronstadt Diary' of Alexander Berkman,
- the documents of the workers' uprisings in Poland
- a publication about the proletarian action in Berlin in 1953.
In 1988 there was a demonstration of 10000 people on 15th of March
in which a speaker cheered the Polish Solidarity and the 'friendship
of the peoples around the Danube'.
Then the epoch of the power change begun. The economy of the USSR
was bankrupted, it became uncompetitive and decomposed. The
circulation of the capital with regulation by the state lost the
concurrency struggle and the classic but modernized capitalism took
its place. The working places were sold out from beneath the feet of
the workers. And the - state capitalist bolshevik home of calmness
and protection - was succeeded by more violent economic compulsions.
The sharks of capital fired the elderly wage-workers who had been
socialised in the 'peace period' from their jobs, modernized
capitalism changed the structure of production and made it faster,
while the institutionalized working class movement, having lost its
ground, mourned for its tyrans. In a huge series of documentary
films, the so-called Ozd-series - the peak of which is the epoch of
the power-change - , the camera recorded the new talk: "How it has
happened, why it has happened?" asks the wife of Istvan Andras.
There is no job, no idea, anything...
In spite of being 40 years old, we are here as the very picture of
misery. Our lives are stolen._Instead of the Punchinellos decorated
with the red star, the mummies of the partystate, the scene of our
life is now occupied by the next capitalist company. The chilling
cabaret of the 'people's democracies' and the COMECON was changed by
the performance of the more classical, but more rational - for the
ruling class - model of capitalist production. Between 1989 and 1992
the empire of the Warshaw Pact collapsed, but this was not the
process of capitalist restoration, as the Marxist-Leninist like to
emphasize, but the rationality of capital fighting its way through.
The economy - which was influenced by the bolshevik parties -
couldn't bear the competition with the more advanced western
currents. It is enough to remember the violent maintenance of the
loss-making companies and branches, or of those services, which
'because of ideological reasons' remained free or very cheap. The
history of the running into debt is long, and it would be interesting
to write a whole chapter about it...
The answers of the disordered working class to the modernized
capitalism remained mainly reformist. The deformed 'traditions of the
workers councils' revived. These weren't revolutionary at all, and
didn't oppose capitalism absolutely. They accepted the framework of
the capitalist order, and at every occassion they made pacts with the
bourgeoisie. In their cases we cannot speak of real
self-organization, because these miserable exhibitions emerged under
the supervision of the authorities. The further commercionalisation
of the workers' self-management by nationalism and by 'tamed
self-consciousness' weakened the working class, which had already
been in a pathological state. But it felt that something is very
wrong. The fall of its living standard: the gradual decrease of the
average salary, the gigantical rise in prices - these processes had
to alert the proletariat and bring it round from its state of
suspended animation.
The dividing techniques of capitalism usually work, the
individualism of 'me and me' can be successful for a time, but the
increasing poverty is felt even by the atomized and separated working
class, and although a lot of the bigger factories and furnaces were
closed, although the unemployment is greater and greater, the ghettos
of misery force the proletariat into a common space of living: packed
like sardines they live in miserable flats, streets, alleys, squares.
You see!
In the November of 1990 as an answer to rising fuel prices the
so-called 'taxi drivers' blockade broke out, which went beyond the
narrow professional line, and thousands of proletarians joined the
wave of protest. And then they stayed on the streets not because of
their dissatisfaction with the fuel prices, but because of their
common life, the hopelessness and misery of their exploitated
proletarian life, their alienated and destroyed everyday life. The
euphoria of the power-change and the mystical promise of the 'new and
better life' were already smashed by the necrophylic reality of
capital.
The proletarian who wanted to protest and tramp enjoyed the
blockade which reached the whole country: there were no red lamps, no
spiteful car-beasts, no mass misery and controller on the public
transport, no being late for the work-place - instead of this, there
is the solidarity of the 'people of the streets': workers and working
women talking, small and large discussions, with glasses and with
beard, the army of those who cook and bring food, the remained
conscious glances of the housing estates, from the suburbs and from
the hearth of the city, merry and want to live - just like a
genre-painting from 1956... The street belongs to us, but not
entirely...
The protest hadn't become general and didn't become a
revolutionary uprising. We can remember that the minister for home
affairs didn't know what to do, and trembling in the window of the
parliament, he considered using force against the protesters.
Negotiations started for the 'coordination of interests', and with
this also the retreat of the working class, which - because of the
lack of organisation and further development of consciousness -
returned to the home of racks and workbenches... Paralyizing the
roads, the protest movement gave only the keynote, but didn't go
further, and the suffocated wave of protest started to retreat.
Left-wing and right-wing goverments come and go, the amplifying
nationalism brought about fascism and the bourgeoisie are rejoicing
over the corpse of the proletariat. No, it is not 1933, or 1921 in
Russia when they thought we had been beaten and we capitulated. In
the first part of our report we made a draft outline of the
attributes of the Kadar regime which are still in effect. The
demonstrations and the strikes still exist, but they are accompanied
by the capitalist 'solidarity_'(integration) of the left- and
right-wing of the parliament. The real manifestations of proletarian
discontent are weak and are developing in accordance with the
interests of the capitalists. The 'civil movement' is growing
stronger and stronger but they are lobbying to the left- or
right-wing forces. One can see the realties every day: the
wage-workers in the hospitals want to go on strike, the drivers of
the BKV (Budapest Transport Company) have just got their wages raised
before which they were threatening strike. The bourgeois are pointing
to each other and talking bullshit about corruption, golden
handshakes, the merging of the power spheres and the maffia
The demonstrations of the working class are organised under the
aegis of the trade unions, using mainly democratic and nationalist
paroles, about the security of existence, for the worn-out picture of
the future and the idle bourgeois are just laughing to themselves.
But let us cite some of the examples of the labour demonstrations
nowadays. In the first day of July, 1994 the Cyclon-Berstal factory
in Berettyóújfalus was occupied by the workers of the
plant, but that experiment of self-management has failed because it
has gone for the democracy of capital. There were also demonstrations
in the Vasas mines near Pécs before that, and in
Biharkeresztes, the workers of the Steel Production Ltd. wanted to
occupy the factory in order to hinder privatization - but finally
they did not perform the occupation. Also in August, 1994 the proles
living under the minimum living standards in Miskolc held a peaceful
demostration. In May, 1994 the workers of the Berva factory in Eger
held a demonstration in Budapest. In 1995 there were strikes at the
electricity companies in Tiszalök and Paks. Also in this year 60
000 public health workers demonstrated at the Parliament, in the 15th
of November 70 thousand people marched on the street against the
education laws, in 15th of December this was followed by the
demonstration of the educators [teachers?] in terms of tolerance.
In the autumn of 1996 the workers of the car parts company
'Hammerstein' wanted to establish a trade union, but the bosses have
nosed it out and fired the initiators. Also in 1996 the youth
organisations organised a demonstration against the school fees, but
soon the truth unveils and the negotiation with power turns out
clearly. In 1997 the meat industry workers in Szekszárd held a
demonstration. In the same year in Tolnanémedi a blocade was
formed against the reduction of the number of hospital beds, but then
the rage calms down very soon. In the beginning of 1998 protesting
demonstrations are held under the influence of the trade unions
(public health, post office, energy industry etc.) In the beginning
of April, 1998, Salgótarján the proles waiting for
their grants attacked the post office which had refused to pay them -
we have no information about other events.
The struggle in the countryside
The farmers demonstration has just ended, and the tractors of the
bourgeoisie of the countryside decorated with flattering tricolors
are hitting the road again. These vehicles are mainly the monsters of
the ruling class forced on the faster. But still generally in the
Hungarian proletarian reports there is little information about the
life of the working class of the country side. Naturally, the
transition here was also accomplished, just like in the cities, but
the poverty and the sad hungarian reality remained. The wage-workers
of the Hungarian villages lost their foothold as the state coops were
abolished, because it had turned out that the collectivised
agriculture doesn't meet the requirements of the new era.
According to an agrarian study, there is not enough capital for
the reschedulement, the structure is wrong, the technical and
technological system is obsolete. The redistribution of private
property has begun again, the nationalist political chess games is
reinforced, and due to the fresh laws about compensation and the
privatizations, the well-known signs saying: 'Private property!
Crossing is forbidden!' have appeared on the fields and the forests
again. In the Kadar era the lords were organizing big hunts in the
forests and closed big forest areas by special squads - this hobby
has been continued also in the new era, accompanied by the habit of
putting up signs like this. The temporary power of the bourgeoisie
has decreased the agricultural grants, the export-import grant system
has been transformed, and the ruling class, in spite of its
nationalism, in many cases, preferred the 'external product' to the
'home product'. Capital always goes where its interest leads it and
the hungarian Fascism still could not understand this clear logic -
for its self-defence the 'network of Hungarian products' was
established. This 'great' and 'exciting' race theory of theirs has
been extended to almost everything, that's how that the phenomena of
the Hungarian forest, Hungarian wood, Hungarian milk was created -
and this mythology has produced something useful for us, too, because
in fact, the authentic Hungarian jerk, the self-conscious Trianon
hick has appeared - a charmingly stupid and silly mastodon, an
artificially produced operette-archetype, an authentic characteristic
of the era.
In 1988 there were 1335 co-operative farms in Hungary. In spite of
the transition, their number have increased, but this fact is
deceptive: in 1988 they employed 1088 thousand people (most of which
were proletarians), a big part of whose lost their jobs until the
middle of 1993. Unemployment grew to huge dimensions. The old-new
bourgeoisie started to buy up the lands, and the less purchasable
land remained, the more the value of land rose. According to a
reliable source, the value of the co-operative wealth was 260 billion
forints, which was 15 percent of the value of the national-bourgeois
property. In 1993 the obligation to provide employment ceased to
exist, and suddenly 300 000 people remained without jobs. The
household plot became forbidden (the people try to evade the law). In
fact, apart from the spectacle of the 'rich Hungarian soil', for the
agricultural workers remained only the eternal proletarian lease -
misery. The dynasties of small and large farmers - which we can know
from the works of the 'peasant writers', who wrote about the
Hungarian countryside during the fascist period - returned, and the
army of wage-workers, begging for work in order to exist, went from
the slave of the state yo become the slave of the 'gentry-bourgeois'.
In this situation, those individual producers who work without
employing alien labour, are exceptions to some extent. They also
demonstrate together with the farmers but for different reasons: they
would like to avoid starvation, misery and the coffin. The situation
gradually becomes worse and worse. The are stories about a one-legged
beggar who had also his second leg cut off, believing that this way
people become more charitable. Is this the absurdity of capitalist
world? - No, this is the reality of capitalism. The positions of the
landowner-bourgeoisie also got worse, and after the entry of Hungary
into the EU they will drop behind in the concurrency struggle, and so
they protest against the loosing of their footing. That's why the
tractors were rumbling on the streets of Budapest. The farmers'
demonstrations take place regularly, there was hardly a spring in the
past few years, when they could calmly go hunting. The failed 'Small
Farmers' Party' dissolved into the various far right parties, the
'peasant king' József Torgyán (the former leader of
this party) 'sacrificed his political career' and now he is a lawyer
again, leaving the ruling class of the countryside without a chief.
The demonstrations of the last year were continued this year in
February, the executioners of the working class of villages gasp for
breath, they started to feel fear from becoming proletarianized, so
they jumped - or let their wage-workers jump - for the tractors.
The army of the millionaire farmers (owing more than 30-35
hectares of land) blames the left-wing government for its position,
for the fall of its living standard, for the narrowing of its
markets. Of course, they must call the whole of their class to
account for all this (this is a typical case of big fish versus small
fish), but how could they do this? And even if they would manage to
do so - we have nothing to do with this. We are not disturbed by the
fact that the hyenas of capital gobble up each other. But first of
all we have to pay the prices of bread, of meat and of milk, and we,
the proletarians are obliged to pay for the inner quarrels of the
bourgeoisie. So the working class must wake up and not demand, but
destroy the empire of capital. In the concurrency struggle of the
accumulation and distribution of capital, once more the living space
of the working class becomes smaller and smaller. The class of the
paupers, the landless agricultural proletariat thinks to be tied to
its 'masters', and expects help from them. But it's time to come
round for our class: we can expect from the capitalists and their
system only humiliation, frozen potato and vegetables, plonk and bad
tobacco, raising of prices and the rape of proletarian women, high
taxes, exorbitant electricity bills, ruined human relations, wasted
life, alcoholism, suicide, unemployment, homelessness, alienation and
other beautiful life-elixires...
We have already referred to the 'peasant writers': in the realism
of their descriptions we can meet also our present reality. The
right-wing oppositional parties in the parliament and their fascist
squads egg the farmers against the government. The farmers are their
puppets, and the propaganda slogans of the next year's elections
already loom ahead. The left-wing government stole what it could
steal, and 'forgot' to share the juicy titbit with the opposition.
Many people think that 'the farmers are the victims of the agrarian
politics of the EU'. This is not true, they are the victims of the
capitalist system - they lose the concurrency struggle and grow poor,
they are the beggars of tomorrow. But once more: we don't have
anything to do with the problems of any part of the bourgeoisie. A
recent analysis says: "Their production is more expensive, because
they are necessarily short in capital, in buildings, in equipment, in
expertise. Their characteristics are the big demand on capital, high
manufacturing cost, low efficiency, and they aren't capable of
producing high quality unified commodities in a big extent. They
swallow up the money of the taxpayers just like a bottomless barrel."
That's why they demand the EU-subsidies, which is distributed now by
the left-wing government. They will receive (or, at least, they seem
to receive) 74 billion forints from the EU-source and 92 billions
from the governmental budget. It would be urgent for them, but the
government ran into debt and pays gradually - in this way it fills in
the gap which occured after their stealings...
In our writings we usually called the capitalism of Kadar 'state
capitalism'. In the reality, this is not a correct concept, since in
the Formula 1 of capitalism the workshops are above the state power,
and the state can only try to sit on them and rule the movement of
capital. This was the main reason for the collapse of the bolshevik
area. The 'domino principle' works: if the economy is not prosperous,
we will be the victims. In spite of this, we are not interested - as
the social democrats like to tell - in the establishment of the
'welfare system'. But how did the old communist saying go: The
proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains!
Barricade Collective, March of 2005
This translation has been modified for for Anarkismo.net to make it more readable. The original can be found at http://www.angelfire.com/co4/tamtsih/english/progress_report.htm Explanations in [ ] have been added to this version.