Recent opinion polls show that a majority of Hungarians find life so
miserable that they would like to live somewhere else. Many consider
that life was much better before 1989 when people enjoyed full
employment and an advanced welfare system. Capitalism has destroyed all
that. However, as our correspondent points outs, what existed before was
not genuine socialism, but a Stalinist regime that people rose up
against. What is required is state ownership and planning, but under the
democratic control of the workers themselves.
Recent
opinion polls show that a majority of Hungarians find life so miserable
that they would like to live somewhere else. Many consider that life was
much better before 1989 when people enjoyed full employment and an
advanced welfare system. Capitalism has destroyed all that. However, as
our correspondent points outs, what existed before was not genuine
socialism, but a Stalinist regime that people rose up against. What is
required is state ownership and planning, but under the democratic
control of the workers themselves.
"People no
longer have job security. Poverty and crime is on the increase.
Working-class people can no longer afford to go to the opera or
theatre… TV has dumbed down to a worrying degree – ironically, we
never had Big Brother… but we have it today."
What
country is this quotation referring to and to what period? Britain,
America, anywhere in Europe? 40 years ago, 20 years ago or today? It
could be all or any of the above, but it is from an article that
appeared in the Internet edition of The Daily Mail, “Mail on line” in October 2009 and it refers to Hungary.
At that time the press was celebrating the 20th
anniversary of the “fall of communism” in Central and Eastern Europe,
but Zsuzsanna Clark, the author of this article, gave a very different
account from the usual coverage. She explained what it was like to grow
up in Hungary in the 1970’s and 80’s and compared it favourably with
life for young people in present day capitalist Hungary or even with her
adopted country of Britain, where she settled in 1999.
She wrote:
“When
people ask me what it was like growing up behind the Iron Curtain in
Hungary in the Seventies and Eighties, most expect to hear tales of
secret police, bread queues and other nasty manifestations of life in a
one-party state. They are invariably disappointed when I explain that
the reality was quite different, and communist Hungary, far from being
hell on earth, was in fact, rather a fun place to live. The communists
provided everyone with guaranteed employment, good education and free
healthcare. Violent crime was virtually non-existent…“But
perhaps the best thing of all was the overriding sense of camaraderie, a
spirit lacking in my adopted Britain and, indeed, whenever I go back to
Hungary today. People trusted one another, and what we had we shared…“One
of the best things was the way leisure and holiday opportunities were
opened up to all… My parents worked in Dorog, a nearby town, for
Hungaroton, a state-owned record company, so we stayed at the factory’s
holiday camp at Lake Balaton, ‘The Hungarian Sea’…“The
government understood the value of education and culture. Before the
advent of communism, opportunities for the children of the peasantry and
urban working class, such as me, to rise up the educational ladder were
limited. All that changed after the war…“The communists did
not want to restrict the finer things of life to the upper and middle
classes – the very best of music, literature and dance were for all to
enjoy. This meant lavish subsidies were given to institutions including
orchestras, opera houses, theatres and cinemas. Ticket prices were
subsidised by the State, making visits to the opera and theatre
affordable.”
She is not alone in having these
nostalgic sentiments today. The result of a recent Hungarian opinion
poll shocked radio audiences with 53% of those asked expressing either a
wish to leave the country or a willingness to pick up any chance of
living and/or working abroad – and this only one year into the
government of Viktor Orbán and his FIDESZ/KDNP who came into office with
a landslide two-thirds majority as the “most popular politician Hungary
has ever had”.
The last twelve months in Hungary have been a
shock for both supporters and opponents of the government. Orbán called
last year’s election a “voting booth revolution”. He took it upon
himself to use his two-thirds majority to rewrite the Constitution, to
remove the word “Republic” from the name of the country, to “reform” the
pension system, including the abolition of the right to early
retirement even for those that have already taken early retirement.
He
also took on many layers of society, starting with the press, which is
now hamstrung by a new Press Law, under which a small, unelected body,
consisting entirely of FIDESZ/KDNP appointees/members decides whether
articles, TV programmes or publications are anti-Hungarian or not.
Punishments under this law include crippling fines which would threaten
the existence of all but the most lavishly financed radio and TV
stations or newspapers. Many commentators have compared this law to the
McCarthyite witchunts searching out un-American activities in the
1950’s.
The latest section of society the government have taken on
are soldiers, police officers and fire fighters, whose pensions and
early retirement entitlements are under threat, along with their working
conditions.
Social security entitlements are being reduced and
withdrawn unless the most spurious conditions are satisfied. Disability
pensions are being reviewed with many long term unemployed threatened
with the withdrawal of their benefits unless they are prepared to join
workfare schemes.
Healthcare is severely cut, especially in the
countryside where many people are unable to travel to faraway hospitals
for treatment with the travel subsidies having also been withdrawn.
The
list is endless. The weak, the poor, the ethnic minorities are the
biggest losers of the Orbán government’s attempts at balancing the
books. Even with a lot less austerity, most people, regardless of
political affiliation, would be likely to look to the “communist” past
with nostalgia.
I grew up under the same system as Zsuzsanna,
although a couple of decades before her. I can concur heartily with her
comments praising the achievements of the Kádár regime and even those
before him in the sphere of full employment, education, healthcare and a
sense of security that most had in those days. The dark despair that
capitalism has brought and is bringing daily to Hungary and the rest of
the countries of Central and Eastern Europe contrasts starkly with
memories of no unemployment, enough spare time to have a family life and
hobbies and a hope for a better future, which most families managed to
build for in the past.
What Zsuzsanna’s article does not mention,
however, is that in spite of a better life for the majority, which many
dream about now, the years between the end of the Second World War and
the fall of what she calls “communism” were the years of a totalitarian,
one-party dictatorship, where a privileged bureaucracy ruled and the
rights of the working class to organise and run society were
non-existent. Hungary, along with all those countries in the region that
were liberated from Nazi rule by the Red Army, had seen the
establishment of regimes in the image of the Soviet Union, not the
Soviet Union as established by the Russian Revolution of 1917, not the
Soviet Union run by the soviets, led by Lenin and Trotsky, but the
degenerated Stalinist country that it became after the failure of all
the other socialist revolutions of that period and its subsequent
isolation in the world.
In post Second World War Hungary the
Communist Party ruled – in theory – in the name of the working class,
but trade unions had become part of the state apparatus and dissent was
brutally suppressed. It was precisely because of this that Hungary –
along with Poland, East Germany and others – rose and tried to throw off
this bureaucracy and take power into the hands of ordinary people in
the 1950s. Hungary, of all these countries, went the furthest in its
revolution in 1956, establishing the basics of a workers’ government, a
workers’ militia and workers’ councils in all spheres of life. It was
precisely because of this that it was brutally put down as, unlike in
Poland or Germany, no compromise could be made with an armed people on
the verge of taking power with guns in hand.
János Kádár, the
father of “goulash communism”, much beloved by Zsuzsanna Clark,
participated in that revolution, but then betrayed the thousands of
workers who fought it leaving them to their fate to die in the torture
chambers of the secret police. No subsequent liberalisation or ‘goulash
communism’ could make up for that. However, the very fact that even an
oppressive and one party state, run without democracy could achieve such
advances in its economy, industrial production, education, health,
transport and security based on state ownership of the means of
production and a plan, as Stalinist Hungary did, should give heart to
all socialists and communists within or outside of Hungary today.
Imagine
what could be achieved on the basis of genuine workers’ democracy, with
all aspects of life, industry, agriculture, culture, education, health,
transport, all services etc., run by the people, accountable to each
other in a harmonious society? It isn’t a utopia! It is the only way
forward. Owning the means of production in common, running society
democratically and in the interest of the majority is not a pipedream,
it is the only way to get rid of the Orbáns of today, the multinationals
of today, the exploiters, crooks, bankers and other leeches of today
who are standing in the way of progress, peace and our future.
From
a socialist Hungary nobody would want to emigrate, nobody would have to
fear the future for themselves and for their children. Socialism is the
only system capable of providing for all and having established it
worldwide, humanity could, for the first time in its history, call
itself civilised.
