Get practical.
Be practical.
See it all for what it really is.
*************************
The Westboro Church from Topeka, Kansas is victorious over the Satanic and Queer Lying-Dead. At the Monkey Court in 'Wash This Death City', no less.
And, what is the lesson from this?
Answer: Keep the Monkeys scared -- instead of the Monkeys keeping you scared!
*************************
It is good to see that these harassments against any Human Group or Organization have come to an end -- with Victory for Humanity of course!
The 'Human Population' has been befouled and swamped and inundated with hate messages and hate propaganda, by the SQLD Medias, against one church in Topeka, Kansas for many years now. It is a church that defies all brainwashing and threats from the Satanic and Queer Lying-Dead, and insists upon saying the Truth about the Homosexual/Democrats and the Moderate/Homosexuals.
The typical Queer Attack against them (to silence the Truth) has been two-fold --
1. Smear them in every dirty way possible using all Queer Medias, until everyone who is stupid enough to watch Queer Medias is afraid to support them, or even say out loud that they "could be right". And also, queer as many churches as possible (the weak and insincere social-club churches) to make it appear to the general public that the "church going folks", and Christians of America, are actually opposed to any outward demonstrations against the Homosexual Agenda.
2. Perform a horrible brain surgery operation on the inhabitants of Topeka and Kansas. Turn both into Queer Stys of every dementia and hatred of Humans that can possibly be rammed into their heads, and performed in the streets and churches there. Thus, surrounding any source of Human Opposition and Dissent with a festering moat of bubbling and boiling hatred -- hatred by the numbers -- hatred by the marching orders -- hatred by the Voter/Followers. And, be sure to recruit as many Idiots as possible, into the hoards of the SQLD at the same time.
Now, all of that obscene and vile hatred from the so-called Homosexuals has failed.
This opinion from the Monkey Court in 'Wash This Death City' will reduce the mass hatred caused by the so-called Homosexuals, and diminish the mindless obedience to the Liberals/Democraps/Moderats (et al) in Topeka and Kansas, but it will not eliminate it entirely; because the SQLD always try to neutralize any Human Opposition by surrounding it with the agents of their fakery and pretenses and lies -- until the Humans who are opposing them are no longer visible, readable, and in contact with the rest of the Human Species.
Nonetheless, and despite what anyone has been told to think about the Westboro Church is Topeka, Kansas ...
THIS IS A GREAT BOON AND ADVANCE FOR ANY AND ALL HUMANS -- WHO HAVE THE INTELLIGENCE AND COURAGE TO PROTEST AGAINST THE SO-CALLED HOMOSEXUALS/DEMOCRATS/MODERATES/BLACK RADICALS (et al) -- AND OPENLY DEFY THE 'GENOCIDE-BY-REPLACEMENT' THAT THE SQLD HAVE ALREADY DECIDED IS THE ONLY ACCEPTABLE FATE FOR HUMANITY !!!!
If you think you are Human and you do not believe that, turn in your Human Membership Card now. We Humans have been explaining all of this to you long enough. If you still do not get the message, it is because you are not getting the message. You must be hopelessly brainwashed and programmed by the Queer Propagandists.
-----
I remember the awful day, here in Iowa, when seven bought-and-paid-for Monkey Judges (less-supreme-than-anyone-else) took the bananas and gave out a unanimous Opinion-Fart that Q&P MH (Queer and Phony Marriage-Hatred) was 'legal' in Demo-Iowa. On the scene, at the Cathouse of the Seven Monkeys -- across the street from the Statehouse -- there was only one Human being who was doing anything right. Only one Human being was there to represent the Human Species, as it had to be represented. One Man stood there, outside the Cathouse, and held up a protest sign that urged 'Quiver-the-Lilly-Liver' to oppose and ignore the orchestrated Opinion-Fart, that had just blown the windows out of the Cathouse.
Some Idiot told that Man to put away his protest sign, because it was unseemly and such things are simply not done in Iowa.
I could not believe it.
The only person who did anything right that day -- was told not to do that!
Unbelievable!
That is when I started to write messages on the Internet in earnest.
On that day, there should have been one hundred thousand angry Humans outside the Cathouse -- with protest signs -- pitchforks -- shotguns -- torches -- railroad rails -- baskets of feathers, and buckets of hot tar!!!!
The Seven Monkeys should have left Iowa the same day, tied to rails, tarred and feathered, and with signs hanging from their mouths which read -- "i tried to kill the human species".
-----
Love them , envy them, think their methods are wrong -- however you slice it -- the Human Species owes a great debt of gratitude to the Westboro Church of Topeka, Kansas -- for opening the doors and taking off our blinders, and showing the Species that it CAN, SHOULD AND MUST protest against its own annihilation.
-----
Bear in mind, the double-talk and hypocrisy of the so-called Homosexuals in all of this. Those things always use the worst possible Queers in the Universe (the scum of the Hideous Boston Horrid Zone) to make the most damaging attacks against Humanity -- such as the latest attempt to kill DOMA, which was begun by the monsters of the Hideous Boston Horrid Zone.
-----
The Liberals/Moderates/Child-Molesters/Black Radical Females/Serial Killers (et al) commit every open and awful public attack possible, against any Human Resistance that opposes their lies and the venomous spreading of their favorite mental diseases ...
while at the same time, trying to paint any Opposition to their own filth and attempted Domination Of The World as the acts of freaks and radicals and hate-mongers ...
when they know perfectly well that if the Westboro Church in Topeka wins any ground against the SQLD -- the entire Human Species will immediately benefit from it ...
so they try to portray the Westboro Church in Topeka as a bunch of horrible radicals and dangerous fanatics ...
WHILE AT THE VERY SAME TIME -- they deliberately use the Worst and most Horrible Queers in the Known Universe to maim, mutilate and kill any and every Human Value, Human Virtue, Human Tradition and Human Decency that exists -- anywhere -- at any time !!!!
The Rules According To The Dead Say: They are supposed to be allowed to utilize and magnify (to absurd proportions) any lies and schemes and deceptions and hoaxes that any Queer anywhere thinks up, to use against the Human Species ...
but at the very same time, the Human Species is NEVER supposed to utilize or take advantage of any defense tactics or techniques which any Humans think of, to protect themselves and the Human Species !!!!
They are supposed to be able to do any amount of any Evil -- while We are never supposed to be able to do anything except lose, despair, diminish, and cease to exist!
I should not have to say this, because it should be glaringly obvious -- but the People at that Westboro Church are Angels on Earth, compared to the unspeakably vile and horrible creatures of the Hideous Boston Horrid Zone !!!!!!!!!!
-----
I urge every Human Being, Human Group and Human Organization to --
TAKE FULL ADVANTAGE OF THIS CLEAR MESSAGE -- THAT NO MATTER WHAT OUR ENEMIES WANT OR SAY -- HUMANS HAVE EVERY RIGHT IN THE WORLD TO OPENLY PROTEST AGAINST OUR ENEMIES -- AND TO DEMONSTRATE FOR OUR OWN SURVIVAL, HEALTH AND WELL-BEING !!!!
*************************
Go -- Go -- Go -- Impeachment!
Meanwhile, and Erstwhile ...
Matters are truly improving for our species. Now, the first Human calls for the Impeachment of 'HObama the Magnificent Pervert' have been made, and for the best of reasons -- the deliberate and premeditated attempted-murder of the Human Species, by the execution of the Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA).
-----
Buy all means -- impeach that Puppet !
Nobody Needs That Hideous Thing -- Except The Monsters That Made It And Worship It !
Impeachment of HObama -- First Call-01
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=270077
Impeachment of HObama -- First Call-02
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=194785
Impeachment of HObama -- First Call-03
http://spectator.org/archives/2010/06/02/the-coming-resignation-of-bara
*************************
I have gone as far as I could go into an Internet search for truthful articles about this Westboro Church Victory. All of the Punk Editors in every SQLD newsrag, that has an Internet site, has given the job of reporting this story to their Pet Queer Reporters -- so there are a lot of lying and demeaning articles that have to be ignored.
Westboro Church Victory -- The Human Version-01
http://www.1310news.com/news/local/article/111109--first-snowfall-of-the-season-coincides-with-halloween
This article ends with a lie from an SQLD pervert, that tries to pretend that the Queer Lawyers of the so-called Homosexuals are not doing everything they can to harass, and intimidate, and frighten all Humans into dumb silence, on the job and off the job -- anywhere, anytime.
Westboro Church Victory -- The Human Version-02
http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2011/03/supreme-court-rules-for-westboro.html
Westboro Church Victory -- The Human Version-03
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/constitution/6532-supreme-court-rules-in-favor-of-westboro-baptist-church
Westboro Church Victory -- The Human Version-04
http://live.washingtonpost.com/westboro-baptist-church.html
----------
Westboro Church Victory -- Neutral Views-01
http://religionandamericanlaw.blogspot.com/2010/04/westboro-baptist-church-and-first.html
Westboro Church Victory -- Neutral Views-02
http://www.goddiscussion.com/41582/westboro-win/
Westboro Church Victory -- Neutral Views-03
http://www.scpr.org/news/2011/03/02/a-peek-inside-the-westboro-baptist-church/
Westboro Church Victory -- Neutral Views-04-A Report
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&articleid=20101107_18_A1_CUTLIN883443
Westboro Church Victory -- Neutral Views-05-Media DoubleTalk
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/03/02/westboro-funeral-pickets-protected-speech-high-court-rules/
Notice here, how the lying media scum are forced to support the Westboro Church; but cannot allow themselves, or anyone else, to think that the entire issue is about Speaking The Truth. Therefore, they have to label the statements by the Westboro Church members as 'inexplicable and hateful'.
You want to hear 'inexplicable and hateful'? Just listen to any 'newscast' on any Horrid Channel of the Satan Tube!
On second thought -- do not. I do not want to be responsible for any Queer Crap being put into your brains.
----------
Do you realize why so many Media Commentators call the actions of the Westboro Church 'despicable', and do not apply such language to the hideous acts of the so-called Homosexuals (while still siding with the Westboro Church)?
Answer: Because there are more so-called Homosexuals than there are members of the Westboro Church. So-called Homosexuals have a lot of money, so they can buy Politicians, Satan Tube Channels, Monkey Judges -- and Media Commentators.
Westboro Church Victory -- SQLD Version -01
http://www.kansas.com/2011/03/02/1743170/supreme-court-upholds-churchs.html
Westboro Church Victory -- SQLD Version -02
http://www.kswo.com/Global/story.asp?S=14177211
I would include more from SQLD sites, but it is all repetition of the same twisted, biased and slanted 'Yellow Press' schmaltz, from the newsrags of the Democrap/Homosexuals.
Yellow Press.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
----------
Irate Liars And Perverts Attack Westboro Church:
All Humans know that the so-called Homosexuals use every terror tactic and intimidation technique against us that they can, to include attacking our websites as often as they can. They are now attacking the Human website of the Westboro Church.
Why?
Is it because the people at the Westboro Church are dangerous green-blooded Martians with antennas and three eyes, and pose a danger to all Life on Planet Earth?
No. Of course not. The SQLD Democrat/Homosexuals are pledged to kill and exterminate all natural life forms on Planet Earth, until only Planet Sinister remains.
So ... why are the Queer Hackers of the so-called Homosexuals using the same cyber attacks against the Westboro Church, that they use against ALL HUMANS everywhere?
Could it be, because the Westboro Church is HUMAN?
Could it be?
-----
Every second of every day, Humans are the targets of hate speech, hate propaganda and hate brainwashing by the SQLD scum that own, operate and populate the Horrid Channels of the Satan Tube. But, according to them, they are never supposed to be the targets of our retribution. Never. That would not be 'fair'. Fair and Satanic.
Westboro Church Victory -- SQLD Hackers Attack Website-01
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/7796080/anonymous_allegedly_attacks_westboro.html?cat=15
Westboro Church Victory -- SQLD Hackers Attack Website-02
http://www.metafilter.com/100752/Anonymous-warns-Westboro-Baptist-Church-stop-now-or-else
*************************
AND, SURPRISE! SURPRISE! SURPRISE!
The Queer Propagandists and their 'Internet Interruption and Defecation Network' are surprisingly quiet about this -- GREAT VICTORY AGAINST THEIR MENTAL DISEASE !!!!
All that I can find on the Internet, are the old petrified droppings of their past defamations and hate attacks against the Westboro Church and its members.
As usual.
The SQLD are snakes in the grass when they lose. They always lie low and plot and plan and scheme to kill Humans again -- another day.
They are quiet because they know that at such times as these, they only have lies to tempt you with, because they have run out of Poisoned Apples -- for now.
If this is not an important victory for Humanity -- why are the enemies of Humanity already trying to pretend that it didn't happen?
*************************
How many times do I have to explain the Obvious Truth, before everyone sees it too?
*************************
P.S. For anyone who wants to know what is really happening in that Hideous Boston Horrid Zone Wannabe called 'Madison, Wisconsin' -- otherwise known as the 'Queer Socialist Empire of Madison' (and many other correct descriptions -- none complimentary) -- here is the skinny on that Democrap/Socialist/Homosexual/Liberal protest against 'HAVING TO FACE THE MUSIC' !!!!
Madison Sewage Boils Over-01
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/politics/6569-wisconsin-erupts-ground-zero-for-national-movements
Madison Sewage Boils Over-02
MassInsanity Democrap Wants Bloodshed in Madison
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703775704576162533209090102.html?KEYWORDS=wisconsin
If a Human being said such a thing -- there would be an enormous uproar of Queer Protest about it. But, if a scumbag from MassInsanity says it -- well -- that's just all right.
Madison Sewage Boils Over-03
14 Little Democrap Pissants Run For Mama-HObama Land.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704615504576172390333255496.html?KEYWORDS=wisconsin
Sickening.
Typical Demented Democraps.
Do you notice? Those punks expect to get away with such twisted and outrageous behaviors. But, if any Humans do any such things! Oh, how terrible!
I know. In their twisted brains, they think they are diverting attention away from the DOMA issue and the necessary Impeachment of HObama -- but that just makes it all the more pathetic.
*************************
Markel Peters
http://voices-of-iowa.blogspot.com/
Friday, March 4, 2011
Monday, February 28, 2011
ALERT -- TOTAL EVIL
Little Old Ladies At Church -- Do Not Read This One.
Have some Human explain it to you.
*************************
ALERT -- TOTAL EVIL !!!!
And -- it begins anew.
It is official now, and as usual it is touched off by yet another round of really sinister and squirming stabs and slashes at our Species -- by swine that are not good enough to kiss our feet. Plain Out.
The next knockdown-dragout-fight against the Satanic and Queer Lying-Dead has started.
The goals and parameters of the last fight still apply.
On the Human Side: The goal is to defend ourselves from the most anti-life and anti-matter monstrosities that have ever crawled upon, and diseased, any planet imaginable.
On the Homosexual/Democrat and Moderate/Homosexual side: The goals are -- 1. To puke out of their Rat-Poison Guts any manner of slime and vomitous dementia that they can come up with. 2. Stick electrodes in the vile mass -- zap it into motion -- and declare that it is 'alive', and therefore it deserves superior status over any and all Humans. 3. To codify into the grotesquely horrified 'Laws of DemoTopia' that their latest 'Puke-Rampant' is now 'The Rule of Law', and the 'Law of the Land'.
All of which, is foully conceived and nastily done, to the accompanying chorus of "Rule DemoTopia --DemoTopia Rule The World!" -- sung in three-tiered monkey choir by the Monkey Judges, Monkey Lawyers and Political Prostitutes of the SQLD.
Meanwhile (and Erstwhile) ...
The overall goal of all positive forces in the Universe that can be applied to this combat is, of course, to inflict permanent and irreversible damage upon the Democrat/Homosexuals and Homosexual/Moderates of Hell.
*************************
This is not just a case of really bad losers, pouting and crying and bleating for more and more perversions -- in revenge for being spanked in the Elections of 2010.
Oh no!
This is premeditated murder.
Right on schedule -- the Homosexual/Democrats are trying to undercut and destroy the Human 'Defense Of Marriage Act' (DOMA).
With the Black Puppet leading the fakery and pretend excuses.
--------------------
Is there anyone out there -- anywhere -- that does not understand this now?
The meaning of the words 'HObama the Magnificent Pervert'?
Resident HObama -- A Beast Puppet!
A 'Pervert's Pervert'!
A 'Pissant's Pissant'!
I Don't Ever Want To Hear Again -- Any Lies About That 'Thing' Not Being The Puppet Of Total Evil.
The Filthy Monkey Band is bleating out twisted songs about that pansy again, anyway. Which is to be expected, since 10 out of 10 Filthy Monkey disc jockeys are as Queer as a Three-Dollar Democrat (bleep), anyway. In such large quantities, they can only afford to give out Three Dollar (bleeps).
--------------------
The more you learn about this latest attack against us -- the more you will realize what a 'put-up con job' this is. It is entirely a Circus of Perverts.
We all know that, at some level. However, it behooves me to explain further.
Their's is a Circus of Perverts, in which all participants are pretending that an Issue is being decided by U.S. Government Officials and Courts -- and that their pre-arranged Decisions (once announced under some 'Progressive Slogan or Fakery'), is therefore 'Legal'.
When in Reality, it is entirely a rehearsed play with an All Queer Cast -- some of which are pretending to be the Plaintiffs -- some of which are pretending to be the Justice -- while some pretend to be the Government -- and some pretend to be the Courts. Queers and Carrion-Feeders, one and all.
A 'Troop', to put it in Theater Parlance. A Troop of Damned Players.
An All Queer Cast of lying vermin -- topped off by the Dancing Queen of all perversions -- HObama the Magnificent Pervert.
This is what happens when anyone votes for the Homosexual/Democrats.
*************************
It is wall-to-wall Dogs**t !!!!
*************************
This Alert is Real. It is time for Action again -- in defense of our Species. Defense of our Species, by Defense of Marriage.
The following websites will explain the details of this latest atrocity, and show you what you can do to prevent a genocidal act from being committed against our Species.
I urge all of you to take whatever time is necessary to stop this foul deed by the Democrat/Homosexuals in the so-called Department of Justice -- and by the SQLD, of course. This is one of those attempted snowball effects, designed to allow further and further monkey tricks and monkey legalities to be employed against us, by the forever-putrid Homosexual/Democrats.
The intention of this action is to nullify and destroy all of the Marriage Amendments in all of the states that now have them -- and to make it impossible to defend Human Marriage against the 'Queer and Phony Marriage-Hatred' of the so-called Homosexuals. Sponsored and fueled by the ever-lying anti-human dirtballs in the SQLD.
As you will learn, some people think this is an unexpected attack; because of the world news going on at the time, about events in North Africa.
Anyone, who has been fighting these scum for any length of time, knows that they always try to use any camouflage and any diversion tactics possible, to deflect our defenses and thus to allow them to kill our Human Values, and our Human Virtues and Human Sanities some more!!!!
Diversion tactics. Who is telling you about those 'events' in North Africa?
The SQLD Medias?
This is all typical Democrat/Homosexual backstabbing tactics.
As always - it is an orchestrated attack. The Punk Puppet-Governor of Hawaii began the death rattle of that state on the same day that the HObama Administration openly announced this latest Queer Attack against Human Marriage. In Hawaii, the Punk Puppet there put Queer Pretend-Unions into 'Law', which will allow the Democrat/Homosexuals there to later insist that they should be allowed to perform acts of 'Queer and Phony Marriage-Hatred' against all Humans in Hawaii -- because they have already been allowed to have 'Queer and Phony Civil-Unions'.
That is exactly the tactic that was used when the Homosexual/Democrats tried to kill the state of Vermont -- which is now divided between the Real Vermont of Humanity and the Asswipe Demo-Vermont. An 'Asswipe Vermont' filled with such a horde of twisted 'Sewage-on-Two-Legs' as I hope you never have to see in your lifetime.
By the way - does anyone think that it is a mere coincidence that this National Attack against the Human Species comes at the same time that Madam Gronstal, in Demo-Iowa, is trying to prevent State Senator Kent Sorenson from introducing a Marriage Amendment Bill, here in Iowa?
If there is, and that person is close to you -- you are way too close to an IDIOT.
Kent Sorenson vs Demo-Iowa
http://caffeinatedthoughts.com/2011/01/action-alert-critical-vote-on-marriage-tomorrow-in-the-iowa-senate/
--------------------
DOMA Watch
http://www.domawatch.org/index.php
DOMA 2011 - SQLD Attack
http://spectator.org/archives/2011/02/25/obama-abandons-marriage
DOMA 2011 - BACKGROUND OF ATTACK-01
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/bishops-blast-court-decision-against-doma
Yes -- as usual this attack began in the worst Queer Sewer in the world -- the Hideous Boston Horrid Zone -- as an excuse for the worst Queer Administration in the world to make an identical attack on a national scale.
Lifesitenews in Canada is under attack from the SQLD right now.
http://www.lifesitenews.com/
DOMA 2011 - BACKGROUND OF ATTACK-02 - ADF
http://blog.telladf.org/2011/02/25/its-time-to-fight-alliance-defense-fund-speaks-out-on-usdoj-refusal-to-protect-law/
DOMA 2011 - BACKGROUND OF ATTACK-03 - CITIZENLINK
http://www.citizenlink.com/2011/02/friday-five-bruce-hausknecht-on-the-defense-of-marriage/
DOMA 2011 - BACKGROUND OF ATTACK-04 - DISCUSSION
http://www.goddiscussion.com/29143/reactions-to-federal-ruling-on-doma/
DOMA 2011 - BACKGROUND OF ATTACK-05 - MASS FAMILY INSTITUTE
http://www.mafamily.org/news.php?h_id=228
--------------------
By the way -- the 'Internet Interruption and Rupturing Network' -- that the so-called Homosexuals always use in an attempt to swamp the Internet with their coordinated campaigns of lies and propaganda (thus giving IDIOTS the impression that the entire Internet Community is on their lying side) -- is full of accounts of their whines and whimpers and promises and demands to HObama the Magnificent Pervert -- to KILL HUMAN MARRIAGE !!!!
At the same time, they are all portraying the Human Reistance, and our Species, as Hate-Mongers and Bigots and (you don't want to know). That is intended to make us feel guilty and ashamed of our Defenses Against Genocide.
I would piss on all of that -- except it would short-circuit my laptop computer.
--------------------
DOMA 2011 -- CAFFEINATED THOUGHTS
http://caffeinatedthoughts.com/2011/02/obamas-picking-and-choosing-what-laws-hell-defend-and-ron-pauls-defense-of-doma/
DOMA 2011 - FRC STATEMENT
http://www.frc.org/newsroom/frc-condemns-obama-justice-department-for-abandoning-doma-urges-congress-to-intervene
DOMA 2011 - HObama - PUPPET ABOVE THE LAW
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/david-limbaugh/2011/02/28/doma-announcement-obama-not-just-above-law-he-law
DOMA 2011 - HObama - BAD PUPPET AS USUAL
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=267813
DOMA 2011 - LATEST CATHOLIC BISHOPS STATEMENT
http://www.usccb.org/comm/archives/2011/11-037.shtml
DOMA 2011 - CITIZENLINK PETITION
https://secure3.convio.net/clink/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=165
DOMA 2011 - FAMILY WATCH PETITION
http://www.familywatchinternational.org/fwi/doma_defense.cfm
DOMA 2011 - FRC PETITION
http://www.capwiz.com/frc/issues/alert/?alertid=30841516&type=CO
DOMA 2011 - HUC PAC Petition
http://www.huckpac.com/?Fuseaction=Newsroom.Article&ID=228
DOMA 2011 - NOM ALERT
http://nomblog.com/5027/
DOMA 2011 - LIBERTY COUNCIL ALERT - THE TRUTH ABOUT IT
http://www.lc.org/index.cfm?PID=14102&AlertID=1243
DOMA 2011 - CATHOLIC MAINE - THE UGLY TRUTH ABOUT IT
http://www.catholicmaine.com/?p=10330
*************************
Markel Peters
http://www.voices-of-iowa.blogspot.com/
Have some Human explain it to you.
*************************
ALERT -- TOTAL EVIL !!!!
And -- it begins anew.
It is official now, and as usual it is touched off by yet another round of really sinister and squirming stabs and slashes at our Species -- by swine that are not good enough to kiss our feet. Plain Out.
The next knockdown-dragout-fight against the Satanic and Queer Lying-Dead has started.
The goals and parameters of the last fight still apply.
On the Human Side: The goal is to defend ourselves from the most anti-life and anti-matter monstrosities that have ever crawled upon, and diseased, any planet imaginable.
On the Homosexual/Democrat and Moderate/Homosexual side: The goals are -- 1. To puke out of their Rat-Poison Guts any manner of slime and vomitous dementia that they can come up with. 2. Stick electrodes in the vile mass -- zap it into motion -- and declare that it is 'alive', and therefore it deserves superior status over any and all Humans. 3. To codify into the grotesquely horrified 'Laws of DemoTopia' that their latest 'Puke-Rampant' is now 'The Rule of Law', and the 'Law of the Land'.
All of which, is foully conceived and nastily done, to the accompanying chorus of "Rule DemoTopia --DemoTopia Rule The World!" -- sung in three-tiered monkey choir by the Monkey Judges, Monkey Lawyers and Political Prostitutes of the SQLD.
Meanwhile (and Erstwhile) ...
The overall goal of all positive forces in the Universe that can be applied to this combat is, of course, to inflict permanent and irreversible damage upon the Democrat/Homosexuals and Homosexual/Moderates of Hell.
*************************
This is not just a case of really bad losers, pouting and crying and bleating for more and more perversions -- in revenge for being spanked in the Elections of 2010.
Oh no!
This is premeditated murder.
Right on schedule -- the Homosexual/Democrats are trying to undercut and destroy the Human 'Defense Of Marriage Act' (DOMA).
With the Black Puppet leading the fakery and pretend excuses.
--------------------
Is there anyone out there -- anywhere -- that does not understand this now?
The meaning of the words 'HObama the Magnificent Pervert'?
Resident HObama -- A Beast Puppet!
A 'Pervert's Pervert'!
A 'Pissant's Pissant'!
I Don't Ever Want To Hear Again -- Any Lies About That 'Thing' Not Being The Puppet Of Total Evil.
The Filthy Monkey Band is bleating out twisted songs about that pansy again, anyway. Which is to be expected, since 10 out of 10 Filthy Monkey disc jockeys are as Queer as a Three-Dollar Democrat (bleep), anyway. In such large quantities, they can only afford to give out Three Dollar (bleeps).
--------------------
The more you learn about this latest attack against us -- the more you will realize what a 'put-up con job' this is. It is entirely a Circus of Perverts.
We all know that, at some level. However, it behooves me to explain further.
Their's is a Circus of Perverts, in which all participants are pretending that an Issue is being decided by U.S. Government Officials and Courts -- and that their pre-arranged Decisions (once announced under some 'Progressive Slogan or Fakery'), is therefore 'Legal'.
When in Reality, it is entirely a rehearsed play with an All Queer Cast -- some of which are pretending to be the Plaintiffs -- some of which are pretending to be the Justice -- while some pretend to be the Government -- and some pretend to be the Courts. Queers and Carrion-Feeders, one and all.
A 'Troop', to put it in Theater Parlance. A Troop of Damned Players.
An All Queer Cast of lying vermin -- topped off by the Dancing Queen of all perversions -- HObama the Magnificent Pervert.
This is what happens when anyone votes for the Homosexual/Democrats.
*************************
It is wall-to-wall Dogs**t !!!!
*************************
This Alert is Real. It is time for Action again -- in defense of our Species. Defense of our Species, by Defense of Marriage.
The following websites will explain the details of this latest atrocity, and show you what you can do to prevent a genocidal act from being committed against our Species.
I urge all of you to take whatever time is necessary to stop this foul deed by the Democrat/Homosexuals in the so-called Department of Justice -- and by the SQLD, of course. This is one of those attempted snowball effects, designed to allow further and further monkey tricks and monkey legalities to be employed against us, by the forever-putrid Homosexual/Democrats.
The intention of this action is to nullify and destroy all of the Marriage Amendments in all of the states that now have them -- and to make it impossible to defend Human Marriage against the 'Queer and Phony Marriage-Hatred' of the so-called Homosexuals. Sponsored and fueled by the ever-lying anti-human dirtballs in the SQLD.
As you will learn, some people think this is an unexpected attack; because of the world news going on at the time, about events in North Africa.
Anyone, who has been fighting these scum for any length of time, knows that they always try to use any camouflage and any diversion tactics possible, to deflect our defenses and thus to allow them to kill our Human Values, and our Human Virtues and Human Sanities some more!!!!
Diversion tactics. Who is telling you about those 'events' in North Africa?
The SQLD Medias?
This is all typical Democrat/Homosexual backstabbing tactics.
As always - it is an orchestrated attack. The Punk Puppet-Governor of Hawaii began the death rattle of that state on the same day that the HObama Administration openly announced this latest Queer Attack against Human Marriage. In Hawaii, the Punk Puppet there put Queer Pretend-Unions into 'Law', which will allow the Democrat/Homosexuals there to later insist that they should be allowed to perform acts of 'Queer and Phony Marriage-Hatred' against all Humans in Hawaii -- because they have already been allowed to have 'Queer and Phony Civil-Unions'.
That is exactly the tactic that was used when the Homosexual/Democrats tried to kill the state of Vermont -- which is now divided between the Real Vermont of Humanity and the Asswipe Demo-Vermont. An 'Asswipe Vermont' filled with such a horde of twisted 'Sewage-on-Two-Legs' as I hope you never have to see in your lifetime.
By the way - does anyone think that it is a mere coincidence that this National Attack against the Human Species comes at the same time that Madam Gronstal, in Demo-Iowa, is trying to prevent State Senator Kent Sorenson from introducing a Marriage Amendment Bill, here in Iowa?
If there is, and that person is close to you -- you are way too close to an IDIOT.
Kent Sorenson vs Demo-Iowa
http://caffeinatedthoughts.com/2011/01/action-alert-critical-vote-on-marriage-tomorrow-in-the-iowa-senate/
--------------------
DOMA Watch
http://www.domawatch.org/index.php
DOMA 2011 - SQLD Attack
http://spectator.org/archives/2011/02/25/obama-abandons-marriage
DOMA 2011 - BACKGROUND OF ATTACK-01
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/bishops-blast-court-decision-against-doma
Yes -- as usual this attack began in the worst Queer Sewer in the world -- the Hideous Boston Horrid Zone -- as an excuse for the worst Queer Administration in the world to make an identical attack on a national scale.
Lifesitenews in Canada is under attack from the SQLD right now.
http://www.lifesitenews.com/
DOMA 2011 - BACKGROUND OF ATTACK-02 - ADF
http://blog.telladf.org/2011/02/25/its-time-to-fight-alliance-defense-fund-speaks-out-on-usdoj-refusal-to-protect-law/
DOMA 2011 - BACKGROUND OF ATTACK-03 - CITIZENLINK
http://www.citizenlink.com/2011/02/friday-five-bruce-hausknecht-on-the-defense-of-marriage/
DOMA 2011 - BACKGROUND OF ATTACK-04 - DISCUSSION
http://www.goddiscussion.com/29143/reactions-to-federal-ruling-on-doma/
DOMA 2011 - BACKGROUND OF ATTACK-05 - MASS FAMILY INSTITUTE
http://www.mafamily.org/news.php?h_id=228
--------------------
By the way -- the 'Internet Interruption and Rupturing Network' -- that the so-called Homosexuals always use in an attempt to swamp the Internet with their coordinated campaigns of lies and propaganda (thus giving IDIOTS the impression that the entire Internet Community is on their lying side) -- is full of accounts of their whines and whimpers and promises and demands to HObama the Magnificent Pervert -- to KILL HUMAN MARRIAGE !!!!
At the same time, they are all portraying the Human Reistance, and our Species, as Hate-Mongers and Bigots and (you don't want to know). That is intended to make us feel guilty and ashamed of our Defenses Against Genocide.
I would piss on all of that -- except it would short-circuit my laptop computer.
--------------------
DOMA 2011 -- CAFFEINATED THOUGHTS
http://caffeinatedthoughts.com/2011/02/obamas-picking-and-choosing-what-laws-hell-defend-and-ron-pauls-defense-of-doma/
DOMA 2011 - FRC STATEMENT
http://www.frc.org/newsroom/frc-condemns-obama-justice-department-for-abandoning-doma-urges-congress-to-intervene
DOMA 2011 - HObama - PUPPET ABOVE THE LAW
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/david-limbaugh/2011/02/28/doma-announcement-obama-not-just-above-law-he-law
DOMA 2011 - HObama - BAD PUPPET AS USUAL
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=267813
DOMA 2011 - LATEST CATHOLIC BISHOPS STATEMENT
http://www.usccb.org/comm/archives/2011/11-037.shtml
DOMA 2011 - CITIZENLINK PETITION
https://secure3.convio.net/clink/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=165
DOMA 2011 - FAMILY WATCH PETITION
http://www.familywatchinternational.org/fwi/doma_defense.cfm
DOMA 2011 - FRC PETITION
http://www.capwiz.com/frc/issues/alert/?alertid=30841516&type=CO
DOMA 2011 - HUC PAC Petition
http://www.huckpac.com/?Fuseaction=Newsroom.Article&ID=228
DOMA 2011 - NOM ALERT
http://nomblog.com/5027/
DOMA 2011 - LIBERTY COUNCIL ALERT - THE TRUTH ABOUT IT
http://www.lc.org/index.cfm?PID=14102&AlertID=1243
DOMA 2011 - CATHOLIC MAINE - THE UGLY TRUTH ABOUT IT
http://www.catholicmaine.com/?p=10330
*************************
Markel Peters
http://www.voices-of-iowa.blogspot.com/
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
DEM REALLY UGLY WINDMILLS
Enjoying the vacation?
Well, I hope so.
I am working on several things for you, of course; but the one that involves fiction is on hold due to a decision which has to be made. If I write it (and yes -- it does include Gronk and Descendants) it would have to be written as a Real Work, and not as tripe and schmaltz-for-the-masses -- like the trash writing that is taught in the 'creative writing' courses (by Demented White Females (DWC) and horrible lesbians) at the Inversity of Mordor, in Misbegotten.
The question is -- does my readership have enough experience with, and appreciation of, Real Human Literature (never taught at Inversitys) to be able to read and understand (verily withstand and survive) my writings of fiction?
I do not want to write it under any restrictions such as 'mass appeal' and 'publication niceties'.
--------------------
Meanwhile -- now that we have all had our yearly blizzard and survived -- in these days of calm and observation -- while we are bored to death watching the Democrat/Homosexuals pretend to be nice, with smiles on one face, and stab everyone in the back, with sneers on their other face ---- and the Homosexual/Moderates try to show us their bungling stupidity and good intentions with crossed-eyes on one face, and their slimy backbiting intentions, with hissing grins on their other face ---- and 'all of them' are trying to pretend that the Human Species did NOT just gain a great victory over 'all of them' ...
in these days of brief respite and languor -- as we prepare for the next knockdown-dragout-fight against Genocide ...
I would like to take the opportunity to bring up a different matter ...
the matter of something which I have just barely mentioned in the past ...
and that is -- the degradation of the beauty of our country -- by a mass industry of ugly windmill makers.
--------------------
No more 'Beautiful State' advertising:
This is like the cutting down of the redwood forests -- except in reverse. The people who cut down the redwoods do not care about the beauty of the redwoods. The people who put up the wind generators in Iowa do not care about the Beauty of Iowa, or South Dakota, or Illinois, or Nebraska, or Indiana, or Minnesota (etc.)
I photograph Iowa a lot -- a lot more than you would imagine -- and the ability to photograph Iowa as the beautiful state it is -- is being seriously diminished by the intrusion of BUTT-UGLY WINDMILLS!!!!
Alone, one of these windmills is not so bad. In these quantities however, they are blotting out the beauty of the state. They are like giant erasers -- erasing natural beauty wherever they are planted!
A large and integral part of the rapturous beauty of Iowa is the skies of Iowa. Those skies are being blotted out by a tangle of ugly objects that only a daddy longlegs spider could love. (Pholcus phalangioides, also known as Cellar Spider)
If the Skies of Iowa are ugly -- guess what? Iowa is ugly! The big business of windmills obviously does not give a rip about Iowa, so why would they care about the Beauty of Iowa?
Now that I have said this -- those creeps will buy propagandists to advertise how much the big windmill business cares for and adores Iowa.
But, will one windmill be relocated?
No !
Will future windmill sites be created using 'Earth-o-nomics? Which is the Natural Beauty equivalent of 'Ergonomics'.
No !
I am telling you! If the brakes are not put on the mad cap construction of these windmill farms and the greedy people who would rather get richer and fatter, and live in a BUTT-UGLY IOWA ...
ALL THAT WILL BE LEFT IS A BUTT-UGLY IOWA!!!!
Get out there and look for yourselves. Many small towns are already looking like they are about to be consumed and destroyed by a platoon of Martian Machines, in a real War of the Worlds. All that is missing are the death rays and the smoke. This year I will show you some pictures of what I am talking about.
When you get out there, into the Real Iowa, and look for yourself, it will become obvious that those citified politicians in Des Moines could not care less how mangled and junky they make the Real Iowa look -- as long as they get their precious electricity at a cost they can afford. And, lay claim to electricity of their own, if needs be.
American history is replete with examples of cities destroying natural settings and natural resources, just to keep their debauchery factories and Planet Sinister operating.
The Homosexual/Democrats in Des Moines have every intention of turning the Real Iowa into a trashland of mechanical robots just to keep their sick-sick-sick sewers in Des Moines and Iowa City and Dubuque and Council Bluffs and Davenport/Bettendorf supplied with electricity. Electricity for more and more sinister and unnatural death.
Do you see any windmills planted near to and around the 'Political Beauty' sites of Des Moines? Such as the Capital building, and the Cathouse of the Four Monkeys across the street?
A place of severe and hot gaseous winds !!!!
Here are some examples of past destructions of nature and natural beauty:
Quabbin Reservoir:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quabbin_Reservoir
Quabbin Reservoir-Loss.
http://www.foquabbin.org/valley.html
Three pictures of the destruction.
http://www.westfordcomp.com/quabbin/threepix.html
-----
Sierra Pipeline -- The Los Angeles Aqueduct:
Deceptions and Threats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Aqueduct
The Waters Wars.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Water_Wars
Lake Mono - Healing the Devastation.
http://www.monolake.org/
-----
Alaska Pipeline:
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Alaska_Pipeline_System
As the pipeline is closed down, the state of Alaska is required to remove all traces of it and return the land to its natural state. Who or what, is required to remove all traces of Windmills in Iowa, when they become obsolete or uneconomical?
-----
Eminent Domain -- A Moderate/Homosexual Specialty:
If you do not cooperate with Big Business Windmills -- Political Prostitutes and Monkey Judges will make you cooperate.
Thus, it is not really your choice to begin with -- is it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain
http://www.expertlaw.com/library/real_estate/eminent_domain.html
-----
Eminent Domain Abuses.
http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=18393
http://reason.com/archives/2003/02/01/wrecking-property-rights
http://www.americasdebate.com/forums/simple/index.php/t7905.html
http://www.proconservative.net/ProConservativeX22PrivateProperty.shtml
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/lopez/research/Unleashing.pdf
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/constitution/3379-eminent-domain-and-the-kelo-echo
These are just a few examples of a very large topic. It behooves all of us to learn the many ways in which devious politicians can twist and manipulate the intentions of Eminent Domain -- such as seizing farmlands for the building of private windmills under the guise of public necessity -- which pays such politicians handsomely, of course.
-----
Eminent Domain Abuses Survival Guide.
http://www.castlecoalition.org/pdf/publications/survival-guide.pdf
--------------------
Not being one to leave you without answers: The real way to situate windmills is to consider -- 'scenic considerations'. Many 'scenic routes' will have to be eliminated and taken off the maps, now that butt-ugly windmills are spoiling the scenic views. Windmills should be situated according to two factors, given equal weight: 1 - where is the wind? 2 - where can windmills go so they do not destroy the Iowa Scene, the Scenic Beauty and Great Views of Iowa?
The talents to use for this must be artists, and nature photographers. And, by that I mean 'Artists of the People' and 'Nature Photographers of Nature' -- NOT THE BOUGHT DOGS OF BIG BUSINESS !!!!
No windmill builder is going to be able to judge the second factor. They are just laying these things out in grids, in areas where there are the two factors of sufficient wind, and greedy farmers that want to make ridiculously small annual stipends from power companies for allowing tremendous damage to be done to their part of Beautiful Iowa -- which is soon to become 'Waste Dump Iowa'.
I am reminded of a 1998 Kurt Russell film called 'Soldier', in which Russell portrays a decommissioned and murdered Special Forces Trooper named 'Todd', who is deposited onto a waste dump planet -- presumably dead. The depictions of that waste dump planet are not far-fetched. Even one-tenth of that much ruinage would turn Iowa into the waste dump area of this continent. And, if the SQLD cannot win in Iowa, they would love to bury it under their trash.
Aside from the Devil Cults of 'Wash This Death City', there are many greedy people who are looking for places to dump their garbage and wreckage and refuse -- away from where they live. If you allow Iowa to be degraded and disgraced to the point of being a mechanical junkyard in appearance -- you will give such people ample excuse to insist that since Iowa is a 'Utilitarian' and 'Disposal-Looking' state to begin with (covered with butt-ugly windmills), why should they not be allowed to discard and dispose of their wastage and trash in Iowa too!!!!
Obviously, the Iowans do not care!!!!
Unless you are totally blinded by addiction to the Satan Tube, you will have noticed by now the 'Alaskan Pipeline' mentality behind Big Business Windmills.
There ARE people like that. They WILL say that to the politicians -- and YOU will not hear it. But, YOU will suffer from the effects of it.
All of you had better start to look at those windmills and the natural beauty of your states again. With an eye towards preserving 'natural beauty for the eye'. Your eyes are connected to your brains, you know. And, whether you know it or not, your brains are connected to your souls.
We are fighting a war against the Genocide-by-Replacement of our Species -- do you think the same scum we are fighting will not try to destroy the natural beauty of our lands, and homes, and towns? By Replacement?
*************************
Markel Peters
http://www.voices-of-iowa.blogspot.com/
Well, I hope so.
I am working on several things for you, of course; but the one that involves fiction is on hold due to a decision which has to be made. If I write it (and yes -- it does include Gronk and Descendants) it would have to be written as a Real Work, and not as tripe and schmaltz-for-the-masses -- like the trash writing that is taught in the 'creative writing' courses (by Demented White Females (DWC) and horrible lesbians) at the Inversity of Mordor, in Misbegotten.
The question is -- does my readership have enough experience with, and appreciation of, Real Human Literature (never taught at Inversitys) to be able to read and understand (verily withstand and survive) my writings of fiction?
I do not want to write it under any restrictions such as 'mass appeal' and 'publication niceties'.
--------------------
Meanwhile -- now that we have all had our yearly blizzard and survived -- in these days of calm and observation -- while we are bored to death watching the Democrat/Homosexuals pretend to be nice, with smiles on one face, and stab everyone in the back, with sneers on their other face ---- and the Homosexual/Moderates try to show us their bungling stupidity and good intentions with crossed-eyes on one face, and their slimy backbiting intentions, with hissing grins on their other face ---- and 'all of them' are trying to pretend that the Human Species did NOT just gain a great victory over 'all of them' ...
in these days of brief respite and languor -- as we prepare for the next knockdown-dragout-fight against Genocide ...
I would like to take the opportunity to bring up a different matter ...
the matter of something which I have just barely mentioned in the past ...
and that is -- the degradation of the beauty of our country -- by a mass industry of ugly windmill makers.
--------------------
No more 'Beautiful State' advertising:
This is like the cutting down of the redwood forests -- except in reverse. The people who cut down the redwoods do not care about the beauty of the redwoods. The people who put up the wind generators in Iowa do not care about the Beauty of Iowa, or South Dakota, or Illinois, or Nebraska, or Indiana, or Minnesota (etc.)
I photograph Iowa a lot -- a lot more than you would imagine -- and the ability to photograph Iowa as the beautiful state it is -- is being seriously diminished by the intrusion of BUTT-UGLY WINDMILLS!!!!
Alone, one of these windmills is not so bad. In these quantities however, they are blotting out the beauty of the state. They are like giant erasers -- erasing natural beauty wherever they are planted!
A large and integral part of the rapturous beauty of Iowa is the skies of Iowa. Those skies are being blotted out by a tangle of ugly objects that only a daddy longlegs spider could love. (Pholcus phalangioides, also known as Cellar Spider)
If the Skies of Iowa are ugly -- guess what? Iowa is ugly! The big business of windmills obviously does not give a rip about Iowa, so why would they care about the Beauty of Iowa?
Now that I have said this -- those creeps will buy propagandists to advertise how much the big windmill business cares for and adores Iowa.
But, will one windmill be relocated?
No !
Will future windmill sites be created using 'Earth-o-nomics? Which is the Natural Beauty equivalent of 'Ergonomics'.
No !
I am telling you! If the brakes are not put on the mad cap construction of these windmill farms and the greedy people who would rather get richer and fatter, and live in a BUTT-UGLY IOWA ...
ALL THAT WILL BE LEFT IS A BUTT-UGLY IOWA!!!!
Get out there and look for yourselves. Many small towns are already looking like they are about to be consumed and destroyed by a platoon of Martian Machines, in a real War of the Worlds. All that is missing are the death rays and the smoke. This year I will show you some pictures of what I am talking about.
When you get out there, into the Real Iowa, and look for yourself, it will become obvious that those citified politicians in Des Moines could not care less how mangled and junky they make the Real Iowa look -- as long as they get their precious electricity at a cost they can afford. And, lay claim to electricity of their own, if needs be.
American history is replete with examples of cities destroying natural settings and natural resources, just to keep their debauchery factories and Planet Sinister operating.
The Homosexual/Democrats in Des Moines have every intention of turning the Real Iowa into a trashland of mechanical robots just to keep their sick-sick-sick sewers in Des Moines and Iowa City and Dubuque and Council Bluffs and Davenport/Bettendorf supplied with electricity. Electricity for more and more sinister and unnatural death.
Do you see any windmills planted near to and around the 'Political Beauty' sites of Des Moines? Such as the Capital building, and the Cathouse of the Four Monkeys across the street?
A place of severe and hot gaseous winds !!!!
Here are some examples of past destructions of nature and natural beauty:
Quabbin Reservoir:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quabbin_Reservoir
Quabbin Reservoir-Loss.
http://www.foquabbin.org/valley.html
Three pictures of the destruction.
http://www.westfordcomp.com/quabbin/threepix.html
-----
Sierra Pipeline -- The Los Angeles Aqueduct:
Deceptions and Threats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Aqueduct
The Waters Wars.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Water_Wars
Lake Mono - Healing the Devastation.
http://www.monolake.org/
-----
Alaska Pipeline:
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Alaska_Pipeline_System
As the pipeline is closed down, the state of Alaska is required to remove all traces of it and return the land to its natural state. Who or what, is required to remove all traces of Windmills in Iowa, when they become obsolete or uneconomical?
-----
Eminent Domain -- A Moderate/Homosexual Specialty:
If you do not cooperate with Big Business Windmills -- Political Prostitutes and Monkey Judges will make you cooperate.
Thus, it is not really your choice to begin with -- is it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain
http://www.expertlaw.com/library/real_estate/eminent_domain.html
-----
Eminent Domain Abuses.
http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=18393
http://reason.com/archives/2003/02/01/wrecking-property-rights
http://www.americasdebate.com/forums/simple/index.php/t7905.html
http://www.proconservative.net/ProConservativeX22PrivateProperty.shtml
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/lopez/research/Unleashing.pdf
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/constitution/3379-eminent-domain-and-the-kelo-echo
These are just a few examples of a very large topic. It behooves all of us to learn the many ways in which devious politicians can twist and manipulate the intentions of Eminent Domain -- such as seizing farmlands for the building of private windmills under the guise of public necessity -- which pays such politicians handsomely, of course.
-----
Eminent Domain Abuses Survival Guide.
http://www.castlecoalition.org/pdf/publications/survival-guide.pdf
--------------------
Not being one to leave you without answers: The real way to situate windmills is to consider -- 'scenic considerations'. Many 'scenic routes' will have to be eliminated and taken off the maps, now that butt-ugly windmills are spoiling the scenic views. Windmills should be situated according to two factors, given equal weight: 1 - where is the wind? 2 - where can windmills go so they do not destroy the Iowa Scene, the Scenic Beauty and Great Views of Iowa?
The talents to use for this must be artists, and nature photographers. And, by that I mean 'Artists of the People' and 'Nature Photographers of Nature' -- NOT THE BOUGHT DOGS OF BIG BUSINESS !!!!
No windmill builder is going to be able to judge the second factor. They are just laying these things out in grids, in areas where there are the two factors of sufficient wind, and greedy farmers that want to make ridiculously small annual stipends from power companies for allowing tremendous damage to be done to their part of Beautiful Iowa -- which is soon to become 'Waste Dump Iowa'.
I am reminded of a 1998 Kurt Russell film called 'Soldier', in which Russell portrays a decommissioned and murdered Special Forces Trooper named 'Todd', who is deposited onto a waste dump planet -- presumably dead. The depictions of that waste dump planet are not far-fetched. Even one-tenth of that much ruinage would turn Iowa into the waste dump area of this continent. And, if the SQLD cannot win in Iowa, they would love to bury it under their trash.
Aside from the Devil Cults of 'Wash This Death City', there are many greedy people who are looking for places to dump their garbage and wreckage and refuse -- away from where they live. If you allow Iowa to be degraded and disgraced to the point of being a mechanical junkyard in appearance -- you will give such people ample excuse to insist that since Iowa is a 'Utilitarian' and 'Disposal-Looking' state to begin with (covered with butt-ugly windmills), why should they not be allowed to discard and dispose of their wastage and trash in Iowa too!!!!
Obviously, the Iowans do not care!!!!
Unless you are totally blinded by addiction to the Satan Tube, you will have noticed by now the 'Alaskan Pipeline' mentality behind Big Business Windmills.
There ARE people like that. They WILL say that to the politicians -- and YOU will not hear it. But, YOU will suffer from the effects of it.
All of you had better start to look at those windmills and the natural beauty of your states again. With an eye towards preserving 'natural beauty for the eye'. Your eyes are connected to your brains, you know. And, whether you know it or not, your brains are connected to your souls.
We are fighting a war against the Genocide-by-Replacement of our Species -- do you think the same scum we are fighting will not try to destroy the natural beauty of our lands, and homes, and towns? By Replacement?
*************************
Markel Peters
http://www.voices-of-iowa.blogspot.com/
Monday, February 14, 2011
AREN'T ALL KISSES MUSHY? HUMAN - THAT IS.
ALL RIGHT!
OKAY!!
I GIVE IN !!!
----------
A MUSHY 'HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY KISS' -- TO ALL REAL WOMEN -- EVERYWHERE !!!!
**********
Markel Peters
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
What Do Terrorists Fear?
At the moment I am really busy with doing many things at the same time -- as usual -- but I have not forgotten my Species, of course.
I am not losing touch -- I am getting more in touch.
Something has become obvious lately, that I want to share with all Humans.
-----
Have you noticed an absence, a decrease?
Of Killer Queers and Collaborators?
It is deliberate -- per the orders of the SQLD Masters.
Threatening Hatred and Violence has been ordered to become Oozing Fakery and Whimpering -- for now.
I have written thousands of words on this blogsite, about the Human Fight against the Democrat/Homosexuals and their intended Genocide-by-Replacement of the Human Species.
The minions and Voter/Followers of the SQLD have been under orders from the Homosexual/Moderates and Homosexual/Democrats to ignore what I write -- in fact they are forbidden to read anything that I write.
However, when it comes to Fear of the Truth, the SQLD have an 'Obedience Problem'. What I write gets out to just about every person on two legs, in one way or another, and most have learned not to adulterate or change what I write.
Consequently, we can tell what reactions are happening.
Amongst the pile of refuse that is ruled by the Democrat/Homosexuals, there is one reaction that stands out above all others, and shows just how ugly and criminal the Homosexual/Democrats really are.
Three words, which I have written have had more impact upon the Moderates/Homosexuals/Lesbians/Black Radical Extremists/Liberals/Democrats (et al) than everything else I have written. An impact that leads to such tactical deceptions as Oozing Fakery and Whimpering.
Three words ... "Human Interrogation Room".
**********
Markel Peters
http://www.voices-of-iowa.blogspot.com/
I am not losing touch -- I am getting more in touch.
Something has become obvious lately, that I want to share with all Humans.
-----
Have you noticed an absence, a decrease?
Of Killer Queers and Collaborators?
It is deliberate -- per the orders of the SQLD Masters.
Threatening Hatred and Violence has been ordered to become Oozing Fakery and Whimpering -- for now.
I have written thousands of words on this blogsite, about the Human Fight against the Democrat/Homosexuals and their intended Genocide-by-Replacement of the Human Species.
The minions and Voter/Followers of the SQLD have been under orders from the Homosexual/Moderates and Homosexual/Democrats to ignore what I write -- in fact they are forbidden to read anything that I write.
However, when it comes to Fear of the Truth, the SQLD have an 'Obedience Problem'. What I write gets out to just about every person on two legs, in one way or another, and most have learned not to adulterate or change what I write.
Consequently, we can tell what reactions are happening.
Amongst the pile of refuse that is ruled by the Democrat/Homosexuals, there is one reaction that stands out above all others, and shows just how ugly and criminal the Homosexual/Democrats really are.
Three words, which I have written have had more impact upon the Moderates/Homosexuals/Lesbians/Black Radical Extremists/Liberals/Democrats (et al) than everything else I have written. An impact that leads to such tactical deceptions as Oozing Fakery and Whimpering.
Three words ... "Human Interrogation Room".
**********
Markel Peters
http://www.voices-of-iowa.blogspot.com/
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Democrap Global Warming Anyone? Democrap Unions Anyone?
Would you like some tea with your Global Warming Hoax?
I noticed that the same day the grotesque Homosexual/Democrats started their attempt to permanently queer Illinois, and to enslave all Real Humans in the Real Illinois ...
the same day they created a separate Demo-Illinois, and put into effect their Civil Unions Anti-Humanity Routine (that the SQLD always use as a leverage, to later insist that the Queers in Demo-Illinois should be allowed to have Queer and Phony Marriage Hatred (Q&P MH)) ...
Nature registered some disapproval.
Blizzards anyone?
The Global Warming Hoax has run its own putrid and lie infested course -- and now the Real Humans of the Real Illinois must suffer from the CIVIL UNIONS HOAX of the Democrat/Homosexuals!!!!
Some day the People will realize that there is no such thing as a Human Democrat.
**********
Markel Peters
http://www.voices-of-iowa.blogspot.com
I noticed that the same day the grotesque Homosexual/Democrats started their attempt to permanently queer Illinois, and to enslave all Real Humans in the Real Illinois ...
the same day they created a separate Demo-Illinois, and put into effect their Civil Unions Anti-Humanity Routine (that the SQLD always use as a leverage, to later insist that the Queers in Demo-Illinois should be allowed to have Queer and Phony Marriage Hatred (Q&P MH)) ...
Nature registered some disapproval.
Blizzards anyone?
The Global Warming Hoax has run its own putrid and lie infested course -- and now the Real Humans of the Real Illinois must suffer from the CIVIL UNIONS HOAX of the Democrat/Homosexuals!!!!
Some day the People will realize that there is no such thing as a Human Democrat.
**********
Markel Peters
http://www.voices-of-iowa.blogspot.com
Sunday, January 16, 2011
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956:
Would you like some Tea with that, my dear?
*************************
Well – if you have been waiting for someone (other than me) to explain what struggles like ours are all about – here it is!
The problem is – you might be one of those people who always fell to sleep in the History Class, in your High School. You might still be someone who falls to sleep during History Lessons.
I never could figure that out, personally. How anyone could fall to sleep, while they were being told the History of their Species, was always puzzling and seemingly impossible to me.
On the other hand, what those people thought was stimulating and exciting – I found to be almost non-existent – except in their heads. That is when I first learned about 'brainwashing'.
To make things worse, these days the Bastards and Bitches of the NEA lie about everything. Nothing but lies and SQLD propaganda leaves their mouths. They deliberately support the Bastardization and Bitchifying of Real Human History, by engendering and distributing textbooks that twist and distort and outright lie about what really happened in Human History.
So, any of their victims who do not fall asleep during the 'Revisionist' History Classes, get their heads filled with warped and demented lies – instead of the Real History.
-----
I will not pull any punches here. For some of you, reading this could be the most History you have ever read, and the most difficult. Even though it really happened, and it holds MASSIVE RELATIVITY to your own lives.
We will see. If you cannot get through this, and fall asleep, I suggest you stay that way. At least, you won't be in the way – when History happens again.
There are no guarantees – that you will awaken again.
*************************
The first part of this, is an engaging explanation of the Political Events of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, from the Socialist viewpoint. Real Socialism, not that claptrap fakery of the Homosexual/Democrats.
The second part, seems to be all about Finances and Businesses – but it is really about 'Why'. Why the first part happened at all. I would like to bring the second part to the attention of all Real Women. They need to read, and reread, that work until they understand it all. This is important. With the Democrat/Homosexuals trying to take over as many industries as they can, using any excuse that they can concoct, the lessons here about Government versus Private Industry relationships, and 'cause-and-effect', are very worthwhile to know. In that section it is not Socialism, Communism, and Capitalism that matter. Instead, it is Private Economics versus Government Economics. Use this as a starting point for such learning.
The third part is basically an advertisement. It is an explanation of why a 'tendency', or 'grouping', failed at most of its attempts to carry out Revolutions. It ends up with a dedication to continue the workers' struggle for Freedom, and so forth. However, having read the first two parts, the third part reaffirms a lot of what they said, and fills in some details.
All of it, is about Economic Revolutions.
Here in America, and wherever we fight the Satanic and Queer Lying-Dead, it is not an Economic Revolution which we need. Our need is much more dire and traumatic. We are fighting the Extinction of our Species, by Replacement -- Genocide by Replacement.
What we need is a Revolution Level Event, to erase the terrible threat of Genocide from our doorsteps, our minds, and our futures.
Most of all, to protect our children from the SQLD.
By learning how past Revolutions happened, and worked, and should have worked between Political and Economic Systems that are so different from your own; and to learn how people over there describe their own plights, and hopes, and turmoils; and how they go about solving their own problems – YOU can better understand your own problems, and learn how to deal with them more clearly and efficiently.
Study Them.
Know Yourself.
-----
At this time it is most appropriate to study this Reality, especially in light of the complete fakery that is going on today in American Politics. Recently, someone who is supposed to be a Communist (or a sympathizer) has shot a group of people in Arizona.
As the Japanese say -- "We at least have the decency to shoot ourselves. In America, when someone is totally disgraced or despondent, they climb on top of a roof, and shoot everyone else!"
The SQLD and their Democrat/Homosexual swine already hate the State Politicians in Arizona anyway, and they are always looking for any way to denounce and discredit the creatures that they perceive as Political Rivals ...
So ...the Homosexual/Democrats are blaming this latest 'Public Target Range' (American Style) on Arizona Politicians, and that Lying Backstabber-Bitch Sarah Palin. We have already denounced and thrown that bitch out of the Human Species for supporting the Gross Puppet of DemoIowa -- 'Il Duce Branstad'.
It is a lying scumbag politician. Which is exactly why it is being attacked and blamed for this latest American TV Event.
It IS a lying scumbag politician -- and that is why it is perceived as a danger, and a threat, by the lying scumbag politicians of the SQLD.
For all of us -- the entire TV Event is nothing more than the ugly sight of slavering and biting dogs in a dogfight -- mad dogs fighting mad dogs.
Anyone who would see Sarah Palin as a threat -- must be a rabid dog and murderer -- that views Palin as a rival rabid dog and murderer.
Thus, they are fighting over what?
Answer: The Grand Deluxe Dog Kennel.
-----
What most of my readers do not understand, is that the creatures which commit all of these endless lies and defamations and social atrocities (each time there is an opportunity such as a TV Event to utilize), exist to do so. They are not like Human Beings. They do not have Human Lives. They do not have Human Loves, and Human Thoughts and Human Hopes for a better future.
They are Propaganda Dogs. Nothing more. Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.
They are technically called 'Politicists, and Lobbyists, and Managers.'
But, at no time in History have they been anything better than dogcrap on a hot sidewalk, on a stinking summer's day.
Socialist, Communist, Capitalist, (whatever) -- they are all the same.
*************************
I have been forced to correct the punctuation of the original works of this message. When I write something for the Species it is edited about six times, before I release it. That is because the flow and comprehension is so important in my writings – which are admittedly complicated to read sometimes.
These works below, appear to be either transcriptions by someone other than the original writers, or were only edited once, or both. Their meanings are clear, but the punctuation is not up to Species Standards. I have tried to clean up the punctuation as much as possible, with the aim of making these works more readable.
Only once, have I had to make an omission here. It was a sentence that had no meaning; either because the writer thought he put all of the words in there that he intended to, and did not (which is a danger in all writing), or it was garbled during transcription. I took it out because it was utterly meaningless. By that I say, it had no sense due to being incomplete. Usually, if a word or two are missed somehow, you can tell what they had to be, because enough of the sentence still remains to declare its intention. The sentence which I removed was too incomplete for even that kind of repair.
These works use 'English' english, and to keep with the original intent I have not allowed my spell checker to change that into 'American' english.
I have included at the end of this, a Glossary for those of you, who have no idea of what the heck these people are talking about.
-----
This is about the Real Stuff. Not the fake and phony Candy-Ass substitutes that the Homosexual/Democrats are today. This is about Real Socialism versus Real Communism, both of which fear Real Capitalism.
It is obviously written by Real Socialists and Real Communists, and has a tint of their bias throughout. However, I can tell that a major effort was made to just state the facts, as they were seen from their position. There is some mockery of their opponents herein, but not too much – and nothing even close to what I usually do against the Democrat/Homosexuals (et all). And of course, no indication that Capitalism is anything other than 'The Unthinkable Disaster'.
The writers of these works made an effort to be objective enough, so as to make this worthy of historical consideration. Not being Historians themselves, they wanted these writings to merit historical approval, and a place in written history. They have succeeded.
-----
From our own experiences with fighting the SQLD, and the Cowardly Moderates, these words come to life with meanings and relevancy.
Add to that -- the fact that many of the hopes and aspirations, and greeds and betrayals, and promises and backstabbings that occurred during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; reflect directly in the events of our own situation today, under the Tyranny of the Satanic and Queer Lying-Dead of DemoTopia -- and these accounts become worth their weight in literary gold. Especially, the first one by Dave Hughes.
-----
Also, with all of the talk these days about the Homosexual/Democrats trying to make America into a Socialist country, when in Reality they cannot even make themselves into any semblance of Humans (not even for propaganda purposes), it is appropriate to take a look at just what the Hell a Real Socialist is, and how they think.
-----
As I have indicated, the people who wrote these accounts were not literary experts like Dostoevsky – otherwise these treatises would be 600 pages long and as strenuous as an 'Iron Man Contest' - but they are written with obvious sincerity.
There are words used in these texts, that are spelled the same as some of the words on this Continent; such as 'Democrat'. That is where the similarities end, however.
----------
Putting it very generally .. the History of Human Civilization ... that stuff the NEA does not want you to know about ... was basically a sequence of Economic Arrangements ... sometimes in competition ... usually in succession, often violent succession.
One such Economic Arrangement was called the Tsarist Empire of Russia. It was the result of many Good Things now gone bad, and many Bad People taking advantage of the Bad Things.
Ivan (the Terrible), and Peter (the Great) were both Tsars and were largely responsible for the creation of a 'Modern Russia'; but by the turn of the Twentieth Century the Russia they had created would have disgusted both of them. Neither would have tolerated it.
The Economic Arrangement in Russia, at that time, was unsuitable to many of the working inhabitants of the country.
*****
Excerpted from Wikipedia --
Long-term causes:
Despite its occurrence at the height of World War I, the roots of the February Revolution traced much further back in time. Chief among these was Imperial Russia's failure, throughout the 19th and early 20th century, to modernize its archaic social, economic and political structures whilst maintaining the stability of ubiquitous devotion to an autocratic monarch. As historian Richard Pipes writes, "the incompatibility of capitalism and autocracy struck all who gave thought to the matter".
Among the key problems facing Russia in the decades before the February Revolution were, therefore: an inefficient, autocratic political structure, complicating attempts at reform; an overwhelmingly rural population (83% were peasants in 1897); economic and technological backwardness relative to Western European powers such as Britain and France; an outdated and disorganized army; a corrupt bureaucracy.
From these conditions sprang considerable agitation among the small working and professional classes. This tension had erupted into general revolt with the 1905 Revolution, and did so again under the strain of total war in 1917.
Short-term causes:
The revolution was provoked not only by Russian military failures during the First World War, but also by public dissatisfaction with the way the country was being run on the Home Front by Tsarina Alexandra Fyodorovna of Hesse and Tsar Nicholas's ministers, and the economic challenges Russia faced fighting a Total War.
In August 1914, all classes supported and virtually all political deputies voted in favour of the war (despite calls from "defeatists", including Lenin of the Bolshevik party, that it was not a war worth fighting). The declaration of war was accompanied by a wave of jingoism and flag-waving, which served to effect a temporary moratorium on internal strife. After a few initial victories, such as in Galicia in 1915 and with the Brusilov offensive in 1916, the Tsar's armies were confronted with a number of very serious defeats. Nearly six million casualties had been accrued by January 1917. Mutinies sprang up more often (most due to simple war weariness), morale was at its lowest, and the (newly called up) officers and commanders were at times very incompetent. Like all of the major armies, Russia's armed forces suffered from inadequate supply. The pre-revolution desertion rate ran at around 34,000 a month. Meanwhile, the wartime alliance of industry, Duma and Stavka (Military High Command) started to work outside of the Tsar's control.
In an attempt to boost morale and to repair his own reputation for being weak, Nicholas announced in the summer of 1915 that he would become the new Commander-in-Chief of the army, in defiance of almost universal advice to the contrary. The result was disastrous on three grounds: firstly, it associated the monarchy with the unpopular war; secondly, Nicholas proved a poor leader of men on the front line, often irritating his own commanders with his interference; and thirdly, whilst at the front, he was unavailable to govern.
On the home front, a famine was looming and commodities were becoming scarce due to problems with the overstretched railroad network. Meanwhile, refugees from German-occupied Russia came in their millions. The Russian economy, which had just seen one of the highest growth rates in Europe, was blocked from the continent's markets by the war. Though industry did not collapse, it was put under considerable strain and when inflation soared, wages could not keep up.
*****
To combat these conditions of repression, and the inhumanities that came with them, a set of ideas (which later developed into the Communism we know about) was unleashed, later to branch out into World Socialism. Both of which went sour, fast. Nonetheless, they have both had ENORMOUS effects upon the lives of every living Human Being, and will continue to do so.
Considering that such TREMENDOUS ramifications have resulted from the creation of Communism and World Socialism, it is an act of Insanity, or the result of terrible oppression, not to be familiar with the Who, What, Where, When and Why of it all.
Yes, a lot of it was unpleasant.
It still is unpleasant.
So, learn about it – and make it more pleasant – because it can hold no surprises for you.
The October Revolution in Russia during 1917, was the spark that set off the next Economic Succession there. Otherwise known as the Bolshevik Revolution, it wiped out the Capitalistic Arrangement of Tsarist Russia, and pitched the country into a battle of Revolutionaries versus Counter-revolutionaries (who wanted the Old Days and the Old Ways and the Old Profits back).
In the Western World, Joseph Stalin is sometimes mentioned as the Communist Leader of the Twentieth Century, and Mikhail Gorbachev is mentioned as the man who dissolved the Soviet (Communist) Empire – at the insistence of Ronald Reagan – but beyond that, the events of Russia and Eastern Europe from the year 1900 to today are almost totally unknown in the Western Countries.
That is the result of a deliberate news blackout by the Satanic Medias here in America, that do not want any Humans here to learn any of the lessons that the Humans over there learned – most grievously.
That is bad news. Really bad news.
It is because of that news blackout, that the discussion of any Two of the opposing Economic Theories and Arrangements, in a country which is controlled by the Third Arrangement, is always considered alien and detrimental to the point of Treason.
This naturally causes animosities and hatreds between the Three, and between any people who consciously study any one of them, or likes One more than the other Two.
Economic Theories and Arrangements tend to put people into an Inhuman Place, from which thoughts and perceptions of 'other people', as enemies, inject themselves insidiously into their unsuspecting minds. Of course, some people go to that place, just to become somebody's enemy.
-----
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, as with most Revolutions, was all about Economic Thought. It was about people who somehow equate Economic Models and Economic Theories into Social Structures; that is, their own expectations of Society; what they think their Society (and International Society) should be.
Such people strive to have too much power, so their theories will become the laws of Society too much, so the friction and competition between the Theories will grate and grind too much, so the people who have to live their 'day-to-day' lives stuck inside societies, which are controlled by those Theories too much – die too much.
Such Theorists, think that Economics should be the foundation of Society. They realize that people are important too, but they get too much entranced into, and entrenched into, the idea that Society is the battlefield for the Struggle of Economic Theories and Methodologies. In the process, the Humanity gets Crushed To Death!
World War I, was just such a battlefield over which the Struggle between Economic Ideas and Intentions was fought. World War II was the same thing, only intensified and amplified. Don't forget that the Bolshevik Revolution, and the creation of the Soviet Empire, happened in that same time period.
Economic Ideas and Theories have always been causes and excuses for Wars.
*************************
This STUDY of a struggle between Socialists and Communists (which the Capitalists won) is being presented for its instructive values only.
This is not an endorsement for any of those Economic Systems.
So, all of the Communist and Socialist and Capitalist Propagandists can let the air out of their brains again. They aren't going anywhere with this lesson.
*************************
*************************
THE HUNGARIAN Revolution OF 1956:
My own notations are enclosed in brackets – [[ ]]
By Dave Hughes, a founding member of 'Workers Power', who died in 1991. [[A complete revolutionary activist, in England, who is the best writer in the group; and as is the case with all of them, against any notion or idea of the acceptance of Capitalist Economics.]]
In October and November of 1956, the workers and students of Hungary took up arms against two successive waves of Soviet military intervention. They toppled a hated Stalinist government. They created workers' and revolutionary councils that became the real power in every factory and mine, and most localities. Only after at least 20,000 had been killed, and after the aerial bombardment of its major proletarian strongholds, was the Hungarian Revolution eventually drowned in blood.
[[Students? They had Students? How come they get to have Students – and we only get Demo/Homo Slaves with 'NEA' stamped on their brains?]]
The Hungarian uprising of 1956, contained the potential for the revolutionary destruction of Stalinism, both within Hungary and beyond its borders. It opened the prospect of destroying the political rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy, and replacing it with the direct political rule of the revolutionary proletariat.
Despite the ceaseless torrent of lies and slanders poured forth by international Stalinism, the Hungarian workers were neither agents of the restoration of Capitalism, nor the dupes of such agents. They were in their overwhelming majority determined to achieve two things. They wished to defend the socialised and planned economy against the restoration of the Capitalists and landlords, and they were determined to destroy the filthy tyranny that denied the proletariat the slightest democracy; subjecting it to a caste of highly privileged and upstart bureaucrats.
The tragedy of the Hungarian Revolution was that the workers were unable to create, in the time available, a leadership and a programme of action that could establish a government; and the armed forces necessary to defend Hungary's political revolution; and to extend it to the rest of Eastern Europe and the USSR. That the potential for this existed is clear from every serious study or eyewitness account of the events of 1956.
[[Did you get the lesson in that paragraph?]]
The falsity of the Stalinists' slanders breaks out of the vast majority of workers' statements in this period: [[stands out in contrast from]] ....
"Soviet soldiers! We the workers from the railroad factory in Gyor inform you that in our democratic state, workers are the guardians of the Socialist achievements. That means with all their might, they are speaking out against returning factories and banks to the Capitalists. At the same time we are against any Rakosite - Stalinist restoration." (Quoted in M.J. Lasky (ed) The Hungarian Revolution p 211)
The death of Stalin, in March 1953, served to destabilise the whole political system he had ruled over in the USSR, and in the 'People's Democracies' of Eastern Europe. In the highest ranks of the Kremlin there was a murderous struggle for power which, although eventually won by Khruschev, extended over several years. Berea, Khruschev, Malenkov and their rival cliques, took their battle for power onto the terrain of international politics.
[[Lesson – no one Human Leader should ever become so irreplaceable to our Species, that the loss of that Leader would paralyze or disable or scramble the Species itself.]]
As part of this factional struggle, Khruschev was obliged to denounce 'the crimes of Stalin'. In fact, he carefully restricted himself to revealing the dictator's crimes against the bureaucracy itself. The political opponents of Stalin, against whom the mass terror was unleashed - were not rehabilitated. In a laughable standing on its head of the personality cult, the slaughter and imprisonment of hundreds of thousands [[actually millions]] was passed off as the result of the evil genius or paranoia of one man. Promises were made to relax the police terror regime, to open the labour camps [[release political prisoners]], and improve living standards.
A ferment of revolt seethed through the whole Stalinist system. In the slave labour mines of Vorkuta there was a strike in the summer of 1953. In June 1951, strikes spread from East Berlin to all the major industrial centres of East Germany. The general strike was put down by Soviet troops. There were major strikes in Pilzen in Czechoslovakia, and at the giant Matyas Rakosi iron and steel plant in Csepel - the industrial centre of Budapest.
Stalin's death, the gang warfare in the Kremlin, and proletarian resistance provoked a political crisis in the ranks of Hungarian Stalinism. Since 1948, the 'Hungarian Stalin' (Matyas Rakosi) had set a course to industrialise Hungary, at break-neck speed, along the lines pioneered by the USSR in the 1930s. Workers living standards were driven down. The peasantry were driven at gunpoint into collective farms. Political repression was probably more severe then anywhere else in Eastern Europe; with the apparatus of repression being in the hands of an extremely privileged uniformed security force - the AVH. Rankers in the AVH received at least three times the average industrial wage; officers received twelve times that wage. In addition the newly established Hungarian People's Democracy was obliged to pay massive reparations to the USSR for the war that the Horthy regime had waged alongside Hitler. In 1948, 25.4% of Hungarian national expenditure went to reparations. That figure dropped to 10% in 1949.
Little wonder then, that the Rakosi regime was amongst the most hated by its own people in Eastern Europe. Fully aware of this and fearful of the consequences, the Kremlin and Malenkov in particular - moved to improve the image of the regime in 1953.
Rakosi had to stay as Party Secretary, but there was to be a new Prime Minister in the person of Imre Nagy, who was given the green light to inaugurate a 'New Course' in Hungary.
-----
Imre Nagy
NAGY'S NEW COURSE ...
Given his role in 1956 and his popularity with large sections of workers, and with oppositional intellectuals in the party, it is necessary to characterise Nagy's politics. By training, Nagy was an old Stalinist. He had spent 15 years of his life as a Comintern functionary in the USSR. On Stalin's death, he delivered the standard eulogy to Stalin as 'the great leader of humanity'.
However, within the spectrum of Stalinist politics Nagy was also decidedly a Rightist. His 'New Course' was aimed at achieving a slower pace of transition, along the lines of Russia's New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s. He attacked the politics of the Rakosi era for having more in common with the programme of the Left Opposition than with the actions of Stalin during the NEP. He was an ardent devotee of the Popular Front alliance that the Hungarian CP had maintained with peasant, social democratic and outright reactionary parties from 1944 to 1948. To that end he attempted to breathe life into the corpse of the still existent People's Patriotic Front, attempting to turn it into a mass organisation. Nagy talked openly of Hungary as having its own national road to Socialism and mused in 1955 on:
"the possibility of neutralizing Hungary on the Austrian pattern."
Nagy stands in the tradition of Hungarian and Rightist strands within Stalinism. More recently the model for his policy was Tito. However during his time in power, writers and journalists were less restricted by censorship, real wages were increased, peasants were freed to leave collective farms and the grossest trappings of Rakosi's dictatorship were scrapped.
If this alone was not sufficient to give Nagy a degree of popularity, his ousting from power by a resurgent Rakosi in January 1955, and his subsequent expulsion from the Central Committee and Party; served to provide him with the mantle of the courageous foe of the 'workers and intellectuals' of number one enemy, Matyas Rakosi.
[[This meaning is unclear. Is Nagy the courageous foe of the 'workers and intellectuals' of Matyas Rakosi? Or, is Nagy the courageous foe of Matyas Rakosi, to the 'workers and intellectuals'?]]
Matyas Rakosi
This explains why throughout 1955 and 1956 most oppositional currents in Hungary looked initially to Imre Nagy for political leadership.
Despite his best intentions, Rakosi found that he was not able to turn the clock back to the political norms of his old regime. In May 1955, Khruschev traveled to Yugoslavia to embrace and rehabilitate Tito. This immediately opened once again the cases of those thousand who had perished as the 'Tito-ite Fascists' in the various 'People's Democracies'.
In Hungary, it reopened the case of Lazlo Rajk, a prominent party leader who was shot after 'confessing' that he was an imperialist agent. The grisly story behind this was that Rajk had bravely resisted repeated torture; refusing to confess, until none other than Janos Kadar [[enter the evil villain, stage left]] (now Thatcher's favourite 'communist') went to see him, and pleaded with him to confess to save hundreds of other lives and offered him a deal - secret exile in the USSR. The confession having been, made the Stalinist gangsters kept their word as only they know how to!
[[backstabbing number one, in this account]]
In February 1956 however, the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) heard the most detailed denunciations of Stalin that Khruschev had delivered. Of necessity this fortified all opponents of the various 'Little Stalins', who had ruled in Eastern Europe. Opposition to Rakosi continued within the lower ranks of the Party. In 1956, members of the Communist Party's Youth Organisation (DISZ) reactivated a discussion circle established in 1954, under the name of the Hungarian national democratic poet of 1840 - Petofi.
The leaders of the Petofi circle included pre-war and war-time CP members, as well as young party intellectuals such a Balazs Nagy, who was deputy secretary of its provisional bureau. (In exile Balazs Nagy was later to become better know in Trotskyist circles as Michel Varga.)
[[The changing of names, depending upon situations and intentions, was not uncommon during the reign of the Soviet Empire.]]
In June 1956, the Petofi circle held a series of meetings attended by thousands, which heard Julia Rajk demand the full and wholehearted rehabilitation of her husband, and which endorsed a programme primarily demanding the freedom of the Press, and the return to power of Nagy. Rakosi ordered the Petofi circle to be closed, and seems to have been prepared for a new wave of arrests.
[[They had a Press? That's cool. All we have are newsrags.]]
-----
WORKERS ON THE MOVE ...
The workers of the People's Democracies were to prevent him. The indignation of the Hungarian proletariat was about to boil over. In June and July, there were a series of strikes in Csepel and Greater Budapest. Workers were reported to be expressing their hatred of privileged bureaucrats, by openly spitting at their limousines in the street. On the 28th July in Poland, the workers of Poznan struck, demonstrated, and were brutally fired on by the internal security forces that killed 54 and wounded at least 300. In the aftermath, the oppositional Stalinist Gomulka rode to power promising reforms and a break with the methods of the past.
Both incensed and terrified, Rakosi fulminated against the meetings of the Petofi circle as being "Hungary's Poznan", but he was unable to stop them. Neither were his Kremlin patrons convinced that he was any longer able to hold the line for the bureaucracy. In July, the Soviet leader Mikoyan visited Budapest and engineered the resignation of Rakosi, but foolishly installed as his replacement one of Rakosi's most trusted clique members, Frno Gero.
Squeezed between the restive workers, and the Kremlin's desire for a less harsh face for Hungarian Stalinism, and the Nagyite intellectual opposition; the Hungarian bureaucracy began to crack under the strain. Sharp criticism of Party policy and demands for change became increasingly vocal in the Party cells, in the working class districts.
The Party Press became increasingly open - and within its own terms - critical. On 6 October, over 200,000 people attended the public reburial of Rajk in Budapest. Students with red flags and national banners first raised a slogan that was to be heard much more frequently in the weeks ahead:
"We won't stop halfway, Stalinism must be destroyed."
Destabilisation and disorientation in the Stalinist ranks first opened the road for the student youth to organise. In mid-October, student youth in Szeged demanded the right to form their own organisation, independent of party control. They also struck against the compulsory learning of the Russian language. The students of Budapest's Technological University followed suit by calling a demonstration for 23 October in solidarity with Poland, where Gomulka was now firmly in power and had faced down Kremlin pressure.
The 23 October demonstration was the spark that lit the Hungarian Revolution. The authorities were not strong enough to ban it. Instead, they asked the Party members of the Petofi circle to lead the demonstration. The Stalinist, Antal Apro, begged wartime CP militant Tancss to assist him: "You must lead the demonstrators . . . and save the situation." (Ralazs Nagy: quoted in The Truth About The Nagy Affair 1959)
[[backstabbing number two]]
At this time the Petofi circle, composed as it was of critical Stalinists, was indeed very anxious to avoid any serious confrontation with the regime. As Balazs Nagy put it later:
"At this time, and subsequently also, the Petofi circle curbed rather than encouraged the movement, considering that the hastening of events could lead to a catastrophe."
The demonstration had an extraordinary flavour. Its members sang the Marseillaise, the Kossuth national song and the Internationale. Participants from the Party school marched with enormous portraits of Lenin and Marx. [[Not Stalin]]
The major slogans of the day were for "Nagy to power, Rakosi to the Danube" and for Soviet troops to go home.
As they became more emboldened, demonstrators pulled down red stars from the top of public buildings and ripped out the People's Democracy emblems from the centre of the Hungarian national flag. Eventually, welding workers hauled down a giant statue of Stalin and dragged it round the city behind a dustcart, eventually leaving its head outside the national theatre inscribed with the internationally understood W.C. As workers left factory shifts and joined the demonstration its ranks spread throughout the city. Troops joined the crowds and, in many cases, distributed arms.
On day one, of the Hungarian Revolution the demonstrators wrapped themselves in national colours. This was denounced over the radio by Party Chief Gero, as the demonstrators took the streets of Budapest. Gero declared on the radio:
"We condemn those who wish to spread the poison of chauvinism among our youth, and have used the democratic freedom assured to the working people by the state, to organise a demonstration of a nationalist character." (Quoted in M Molnar: Budapest1956)
[[The poison of chauvanism (as used here) is patriotism to a single Country -- which Gero condemns -- because everyone is supposed to have loyalty to the Communist State -- which includes all places controlled by Communism. This is like Arizona telling 'Wash This Death City' to "Go To Hell", and being called Chauvanists in return.]]
The Gero regime attempted a policy of using the carrot and stick. On the one hand, it called for Soviet troops to restore order in Budapest and declared martial law. On the other, it called on Nagy to head the government. It thereby hoped Nagy would be able to head off the mass movement. And indeed, he dutifully attempted to do just that, by supporting martial law, calling for order and promising, in reply, a return to his 1953 policies. Meanwhile, groups of workers were already doing battle with Soviet tanks on the streets of Budapest.
Throughout the length and breadth of Hungary, the workers replied to the Soviet intervention with strike action. By 26 October, virtually all work had stopped. Moreover, these first days saw the formation of workers' councils in every factory and mine, and also the link up of those councils into regional revolutionary committees in major industrial centres, such as Gyor and Miskolc.
-----
THE FIRST SHOTS ...
In its turn, Gero's attack served to render the crowds more angry and increase their resolve to hear their demands and arguments broadcast by the radio station. The first serious fighting took place at the radio station, where AVH guards opened fire on demonstrators, who returned fire from arms provided by fraternising Hungarian troops.
In general, the political horizons of the increasingly proletarian demonstration were fixed on the return to power of Imre Nagy. He had refused an invitation to attend the demonstration, and only belatedly agreed to address the thousands who had marched to Parliament Square calling for him to take power. His initial speech to the crowd showed just how alien his bureaucratic outlook was from that of the students and workers:
"It is by negotiation in the bosom of the Party, and by the discussion of problems, that we will travel the road that leads toward the settlement of our conflicts. We want to safeguard constitutional order and discipline. The government will not delay in arriving at its decisions." (Quoted in I Merray: 13 Days That Shook The Kremlin)
[[Lesson - that is typical 'Moderate Pabulum'. Unfortunately, Moderates are such dim-witted and short-sighted cowards, that they actually think (and can only think) that the near and close options of surrender and compromise will get them liked by enough people, that they will be permitted to stay in power and pretend to know what they are doing.]]
Yet one such speech was not sufficient to disabuse the masses of their illusions in Nagy.
-----
As stated before .. when faced with a massive demonstration, active fraternisation between workers and soldiers, and armed clashes with the AVH, the Gero regime attempted a policy of using the carrot and stick. On the one hand, it called for Soviet troops to restore order in Budapest, and declared martial law. On the other, it called on Nagy to head the government. It thereby hoped Nagy would be able to head off the mass movement. And indeed, he dutifully attempted to do just that; by supporting martial law, calling for order, and promising in reply, a return to his 1953 policies.
[[backstabbing number three]]
Meanwhile groups of workers were already doing battle with Soviet tanks on the streets of Budapest.
Throughout the length and breadth of Hungary, the workers replied to the Soviet intervention with strike action. By 20 October, virtually all work had stopped. Moreover, these first days saw the formation of workers' councils in every factory and mine, and also the link up of the foremost councils into regional revolutionary committees, in major industrial centres such as Gyor and Miskolc.
The impact of the upheaval on the bureaucracy, the security forces and the ranks of the Communist Party was immediate. In general, the officers of the hated AVH attempted to defend themselves and their barracks from the insurgents with the utmost brutality. Most dramatically, at Moson Magyarovar, the AVH let loose a hail of machine gun bullets at an unarmed and peaceful demonstration, killing around one hundred.
For the British CP's Daily Worker correspondent Peter Fryer, it was a shattering experience to see the dead and the mourners on his arrival across the Austrian frontier:
"After eleven years of 'People's Democracy' it had come to this: that the security police was so remote from the people, so alien to them, so vicious and so brutal that it turned its weapons on a defenceless crowd, and murdered the people who were supposed to be masters of their own country." (P Fryer: Hungarian Tragedy)
Little wonder then, that insurgent workers showed the least mercy for the AVH officers, and in most towns had to fight a bloody battle with them. In Miskolc, for example, the AVH attacked a proletarian crowd on 26 October. The local police handed their weapons to insurgent miners who finished off the AVH chief and the officers. In many cases the workers made a strict distinction between the AVH officers and the younger rank and filers, who were shown more mercy.
In many instances, the more hated Party officials in the localities simply disappeared or hid. However, Party members also played a leading role in the uprising itself at every level.
[[backstabbing number four]]
In the factories and mines, CP workers were active in initiating workers' councils. The leading figure in the Budapest Workers' Council Movement – Sandor Bali - had been a Party member since 1945. In proletarian Miskolc and the surrounding Borsod county, CP militants played a leading role in organising the workers' councils and in framing their demands. By 27 October, the Trade Union Council called on all workers to elect councils that would take over the tasks of management.
In addition, there were several instances of individual members from the highest ranks of the bureaucracy, going directly and actively over to the side of those who were doing battle with the Soviet troops.
Pal Maleter is the best known example. An army major and CP member since 1945, Maleter proudly sported a Soviet military decoration he received in 1944. On 24 October, he was ordered to capture the Kilian barracks, which was holding out against Soviet tanks. He described the events on Radio Budapest:
"When I got there, I discovered that the fighters for freedom were not bandits, but loyal children of the Hungarian people. I therefore informed the Ministry of Defence that I was joining the insurgents."
Yet Maleter always insisted that his struggle was for Socialism. He told foreign correspondents:
"If we get rid of the Russians don't think we're going back to the old days. And, if there's people who do want to go back, we'll see."
Reassuringly clutching his revolver he added:
"We don't mean to go back to Capitalism. We want Socialism in Hungary."
[[almost backstabbing number five – except he was up front about it. A grateful Stalinist Party, had him hanged after the Revolution.]]
While the proletarian base of the party, and certain elements of its apparatus went over to the insurrection, its leading circles sought desperately to diffuse the crisis and restabilise bureaucratic rule. In late October, as workers' councils mushroomed and the security forces melted away, this was a task they attempted to do behind Soviet tanks. However, the Nagy government was to find it impossible to restore an order to its liking, so long as it was shielded by Soviet troops. And, in turn those very Soviet troops were proving unreliable in this task.
-----
FRATERNISATION WITH SOVIET TROOPS ...
Initially the Soviet troops believed, to some extent, that they were being sent in to fight Fascists. This meant that fraternisation by workers and students was capable of having a devastating effect on Soviet troop morale. A worker recounted to Time magazine a typical instance of fraternisation:
"Our people were not afraid of the Russians, and talked to them. Some of the Russians thought they were in East Germany, and that they would soon meet American 'fascists' who had invaded the country. Other troops thought they were in the Suez Canal zone."
[[The Soviet Regime, like the Homo/Demos, used massive amounts of brainwashing and constant political programming upon everyone within its empire. If you were inside the empire you could not eat, drink, or breath without being inundated by Communists slogans and Communist ideological statements, which you were supposed to accept as gospel. Your life, was not your life -- it belonged to the State.
Just like our lives, are not supposed to be our lives -- they are supposed to belong to the SQLD.]]
The workers proceeded to explain who they really were, at which point the Soviet troops began to fraternize, with their captain throwing down his hat and affirming that the Kremlin leaders:
"Bulganin and Khruschev would rape their own mothers." (Quoted By Lasky: p 103)
Gyor and Miskolc radios - in the hands of their revolutionary committees - broadcast messages of solidarity to the Soviet troops. Miskolc declared:
"Our people did not revolt against you, but for the achievement of legal demands. Our interests are identical. We and you, are all fighting together for a better Socialist life." (ibid p116)
In Gyor, the Soviet commander even went on the air to declare:
"We will not interfere with your national political affairs... I think that the rising of the Hungarian people against the oppressive leaders is just." (ibid p112)
The authorities had to act to prevent the spread of fraternisation. On the 25 October, Soviet tanks accompanied a jubilant crowd to a demonstration in Parliament Square. That demonstration was fired on from the surrounding rooftops; Soviet tanks returned the fire. When the firing stopped, according to Bill Lomax, over 100 were killed including Soviet troops. Either the AVH or crack Soviet security units had taken this action to stop the drift towards fraternisation. In fact, fighting between the two sides became far more severe as a result of the slaughter - which both Hungarian workers and Soviet soldiers saw as the others' responsibility.
The wave of fraternisation showed that the political revolution - whilst necessarily raising certain legitimate national grievances - held the potential for becoming international, and indeed internationalist, by spreading to the Soviet Armed Forces. The bloody outcome of the Hungarian Revolution, underlines just how vital that internationalism is; if the political revolution is not to be crushed in national isolation. [[read that again]]
Despite this enormous potential, the actual politics of the workers' movement in the last days of October were those of sceptical Nagyism. The complete inadequacy of these politics was to be tragically revealed. In most areas the workers' councils busied themselves with local or factory problems, involved in maintaining the general strike, and gave different forms of critical support to Nagy. The leaders of the councils saw them as potential organs of management in the plants. They saw their committees as potential alternative local government, but blindly ceded central political power to Nagy.
This was well expressed recently by a Budapest Workers Council Militant, in Sandor Racz, who explained that it wasn't until moves were made against Nagy (by Kadar) that council activists began to think about national politics, or governmental power, as a question that concerned them directly:
"Up till then we hadn't intervened in politics, because we trusted Imre Nagy. We saw him as the political guarantee of the revolution." (Interview from Beszelo No 7: In Labour Focus Summer 1984)
This meant that while the councils pressed demands on Nagy - most importantly for Soviet withdrawal, a new government, the right to strike, and an amnesty (the 4 point programme of Miskolc in the first days of the revolution) -- and while the councils maintained the strike action until they thought they had wrung serious concessions from Nagy -- they remained hidebound by a variety of syndicalism that saw the factories as the property of the workers, and the government as the property of the national politicians. Thus a decisive struggle for workers' power -- at a time when Soviet troops were in many instances unwilling to fight, and when the Nagy government was very weak indeed -- was excluded from the agenda. There was in fact an acute crisis of leadership in the Hungarian Revolution. [[read that again]]
How did Nagy use the political initiative that the workers' movement ceded to him? Initially the authority of his government barely ran beyond the ministry buildings in Budapest. Cast in his Stalinist mould, there was no question of him conceiving of the workers' councils as an alternative base of power.
The history of Stalinism, shows it to be resolutely opposed to all manifestations of a healthy workers' democracy; so much so that it will always ally itself with reactionary and bourgeois forces, in order to subvert and destroy the potential organs of a healthy workers' state.
[[Just exactly like the Moderates, who will do anything they can in the future to disable and derail the Human Species.]]
The form that alliance took in Hungary during and after the war (in common with other People's Democracies) was a coalition with bourgeois parties, within which the Stalinists would keep a hold on the organs of security and repression. Nagy's means of defusing the political revolutionary crisis was to attempt to piece such a coalition together once again.
[[backstabbing number five]]
-----
NAGY'S COALITION GOVERNMENT ...
On 27 October, Nagy announced the formation of a new coalition government, including representatives of the historic Smallholders' Party and the National Peasants' Party. Two points must be underlined about this move. Firstly, those parties barely existed except as motley collections of ex-party leaders. Secondly, if we look at the demands being voiced in Miskolc and Gyor, while it was the case that some ex-Social Democrats were joining in the fray; calls for a coalition government or for parliamentary type elections were rarely posed in the initial documents of struggle. It was, in fact, those around Nagy who reached for the old parties and the trappings of a coalition with the ex-leaders of the bourgeois parties. This was a trusted tactic for deflecting the working class, from the fight for its own political power. [[democrat tactics]]
In turn, as the old parties were reconstituted from the top downwards, and as horse trading for office recommenced, so the call for genuine free elections was increasingly raised from within the workers' councils. After all, the Stalinists had maintained the charade of Parliamentarism, without the substance of a multiplicity of competing parties. Stalinism, could never pose the political alternative to a parliament of genuine soviet power.
[[Do not miss what that means. He is talking about multiplicityy of competing parties (democraps need not apply), that results in a healthy Parlimentarism.]]
The workers' movement, posed the potential of workers' council power. Its predominant demands included the public trial of the most murderous bureaucrats of the Rakosi regime, the replacement of those responsible for faults in the planned economy, the publication and revision of foreign trade agreements; as well as wage rises and management rights for workers' councils.
Nagy and company, tried to divert this movement into the channels of a bogus popular front coalition. In that coalition, key figures of the old Stalinist apparatus - Apro, Munnich, Horvath and Kossa - were to keep their positions. And, they were to use those positions to murderous effect later.
Many of the Stalinists around Nagy were resigned to a very significant Rightist retreat, as the road out of the crisis, and a means of aborting the political revolution. The literary theorist Georg Lukacs was Minister of Popular Culture in the Nagy government. Vikor Woroszylski, a Polish CP journalist from Nowa Kultura, describes a conversation he had with Lukacs at the time. He reports Lukacs as saying:
"Communism in Hungary has been totally disgraced. . . The working class will prefer to follow the Social Democrats. In free elections the Communists will obtain five per cent of the vote, ten per cent at the most. It is possible that they won't be in government, that they will go into opposition. But, the party will continue to exist; it will save the idea; it will be an intellectual centre, and after some years or decades from now, who knows. (Quoted in Lasky: op cit p 159)
As the political organs of a healthy workers' state were making their appearance throughout Hungary, our Marxist philosopher (Lukacs) preferred saving the 'idea' of being an opposition, in a bourgeois parliament. And, what idea did he want to save? The idea that he and his bureaucratic centre could get their hands back on power one day, once the political revolution of the Hungarian workers had exhausted itself.
Playing on the political weaknesses of the spontaneous workers' movement, Nagy was able to temporarily regain some of the political initiative. On 28 October, he requested a Soviet troop withdrawal from Hungary, and an immediate cease fire. He announced the dissolution of the AVH. On 30 October, he announced the recreation of the 1945 coalition, by inviting the Social Democrats to delegate a minister; even though that party had not yet effectively re-formed itself at a national level. The Minister of the Interior was Ferenc Munnich - one time Ambassador to Moscow of Rakosi's regime. At the same time, Soviet troops left the major industrial centres of Hungary.
The troop withdrawals were negotiated by the Soviet Ambassador, one Yuri Andropov. He had good reason to pull back the troops, since they had been infected with many of the liberatory slogans of the Hungarian Revolution. At the very same time, he liaised with Khruschev to organise the entry of fresh Soviet troops into Hungary. While Nagy's new popular front coalition was holding back the workers from a decisive show down with Stalinism, the Kremlin was preparing a deadly second strike.
[[The most brainwashed, sadistic and murderous killers are always used in the very front as Intimidators, and in reserve as Crushers.]]
--------------------
IN THE PERIOD FROM 23 OCTOBER ...
From then, until the first announced withdrawal of Soviet troops, the Hungarian working class had shown enormous strengths and a capacity for revolutionary struggle. Its councils and militia controlled the major industrial centres. It's fighting spirit and its efforts at fraternisation had undermined the morale of the Soviet troops. Yet, the mobilisations of the Hungarian working class were not without their fatal weaknesses.
The councils had the potential to become organs of direct working class power. Yet, they concerned themselves with local and factory matters, and ceded central power to Imre Nagy. Also, the fraternisation never succeeded in bringing whole units of the Soviet armed forces over to the side of the insurrection. Neither, did it win Soviet soldiers to a fight to form their own soldiers' councils. The failure to achieve these things seriously weakened the vital struggle to internationalise the Hungarian political revolution, via the ranks of the Soviet army.
It is not to belittle the heroism of the Hungarian working class, to argue that its fundamental weakness was its lack of a Revolutionary Party. Only such a party could have led the challenge for workers' power.
"The forty thousand aristocrats and fascists of the Csepel works strike on!" [[obligatory socialist enthusiasm]]
In general, at this time, militants either proposed the idea of parties as being divisive, or had illusions in one or another of the 1945 governmental parties, or favoured a coalition of such parties. Against these tendencies revolutionary Marxists, fighting for political revolution, would have fought for the councils to centralise their forces; and for a government that was directly accountable to those councils.
Such a call would have mobilised serious support amongst sections of the council militants. For example, Kiss, President of the Miskolc Workers' Council, condemned the role of the newly organised political parties, and demanded on 2 November that:
"The Government shall propose the formation of a national revolutionary council, to be supported by the departmental workers' councils of Budapest and composed of democratically elected delegates. At the same time, they shall pronounce the dissolution of the National Assembly. (Quoted in Budapest 1956, M Molner)
In the vital stages of the Revolution, such voices were in a minority in the leadership of the councils. The key task was to win that minority to the fight for political revolution, and to organise them into a Revolutionary Party.
The initial stance of the councils handed Nagy, and remnants of the old parties' leaderships, all the political initiative. This was to prove fatal for the course of the Hungarian political revolution.
[[Not to mention the 20,000 yet to die.]]
In an immediate sense, the very leaders drawn into the Nagy coalition did not demand the restoration of Capitalism. On day release from his sanatorium, Small Holders leader Kovacs, declared that
"No one must dream of going back to the World of Counts, Bankers and Capitalists. That World is definitely over."
And, while he suggested that the party programmes were now outdated, he refrained from any alternative. For the Social Democrats, Anna Kethly made a similar declaration against the restoration of the old order:
"Freed from one prison, let it not allow the country to become a prison of another colour. Let it watch over the factories, the mines and the land, which must remain in the hands of the people."
The National Peasants Party, which was to rename itself the Petofi, contained many cadrised activists who had historically been prepared to work with the CP.
Yet in offering the leaders, of these partly reconstituted parties, a governmental majority Nagy was certainly creating a potential rallying point for Capitalist restoration. The Small Holders were a traditionally rightist party, based on the richer peasants. The Social Democrats used the freedom delivered to them by the political revolutionary crisis, to dispatch Kethly to Vienna to discuss matters with the leaders of the Second International. Whatever its orientation to the poorer peasants, the Petofi Party soon announced that it ...
"Believes in private property, and advocates free production and marketing" (Quoted in The Hungarian Revolution, MJ Lasky, p218).
In the medium and longer term, each of these party leaderships would have used their power to dismantle the monopoly of foreign trade and the planning mechanisms, in the direction of restoring Capitalism for Nagy, For Lukacs and company, this was a lesser evil compared with the proletarian political revolution. The trajectory of these rightist Stalinists, confirmed Trotsky's analysis of the nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The Hungarian leadership shared the characteristic Trotsky had identified in the Soviet bureaucracy - namely a tendency to fragment under pressure, with sections of it willing to:
". . . overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back into Capitalism." (The Transitional Programme)
But, many of the Stalinists who connived in the coalition project, as an expedient means of robbing the workers of political power - Kadar for example - were also to accuse the Hungarian revolutionaries of having become the tools of counter-revolution. They were to order the slaughter of thousands of Hungarian workers on this pretext.
Jubilant and thankful ideologists of Capitalism, were lucky to seize on every meagre piece of evidence, offered up by the Stalinists, to prove their own version of the story that the Hungarian Revolution was a Capitalist, pro-Western revolution.
-----
THE FORCES OF REACTION ...
Old Reactionaries, took advantage of the revolutionary crisis to show their faces once again. In Clyur, one Somogyvari argued for the formation of a separate government which, with him at its head, would wage a Christian crusade against the USSR. Workers, from the railway wagon works ran him out of town. There is no evidence that any real delegates ever attended his Council, but the Kadar regime was to hold him up as evidence of the mounting threat of counter-revolution.
The old fascist Arrow Cross (organization) did make some re-appearance, most notably in Gyor, which was near (connected) to exile organisations over the Austrian border. There are no substantiated accounts of the Arrow Cross playing an organised or systematic role in these events. A meeting on 1 November in Budapest, which was called to reconstitute the Arrow Cross seems to have been poorly attended and chaotic.
However ex-Arrow Cross members do seem to have played a role in the slaughter of Communist Party officials at their Budapest HQ, on 30 October; along with lumpens and criminals, they killed over 25 communists and AVH conscripts and savagely mutilated their bodies. The political revolution had as one of its tasks the brutal suppression of all such reactionary forces. The Hungarian workers were more than capable of fulfilling this task. Fascists got short shrift from the workers.
The activities and slogans of the reactionary forces, must not be confused with the seemingly nationalist slogans advanced at the earliest stages of the Revolution, by the workers. The initial slogans of the October fighting, were not consciously those of political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy. The Revolution tended to express itself in the language of destroying the symbols of Soviet sponsored power, and of national independence.
The historic gain of nationalised industry had not been the work of the workers themselves, but rather that of a regime which stamped out every manifestation of proletarian democracy. The collective farms appeared to the majority of peasants as an alien imposition. Given that the red stars and the hammers and sickles that accompanied these gains, were seen as symbols of Hungary's national oppression; it is little wonder that the early revolt often expressed itself simply in terms of removing such symbols.
It would have been impossible to eject (remove) otherwise, in a World where 'Socialism' meant both the expropriation of the old owners and the imposition of a local Stalinist variant of the oppressive Russian bureaucracy.
However, the political drift of the major workers' organisations was not in the direction of unleashing Capitalist Counter-revolution. They initially saw themselves as pressure points on Nagy. All the major councils were so content with the Nagy government, and with promises of Soviet troop withdrawal, that they called for a return to work from 5 November.
-----
THE STALINISTS FIGHT BACK ...
The Hungarian workers had been lulled into a sense of false confidence. By the first days of November, Soviet troops had left the major industrial centres for their barracks. Most organisations were now prepared to back Nagy's coalition government. Janos Kadar announced on 1 November that the old Hungarian Communist Party had been dissolved, and that a new Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party was to be formed, purged of the most hated Stalinists. He announced his full backing for Nagy and the Revolution:
"In a glorious uprising the people have overthrown the Rakosi regime. It has won for our country the freedom and independence without which there can be no Socialism."
Of the insurgents he declared:
"We are proud of you, for you took your proper place in the armed uprising. You were imbued with true patriotism and loyalty towards Socialism."
Janos Kadar
However, there was mounting evidence of fresh Soviet troops entering Hungary, despite explicit denials of this by Ambassador Andropov. On 1 November, the Nagy government publicly protested at the troop movements, and repeated its demand for the withdrawal of all Soviet troops. It also announced that it was renouncing the Warsaw pact, which the Soviet bureaucracy was using as their pretext for positioning their troops. It declared that, like Austria, Hungary was now 'neutral'.
These were dramatic steps for a Stalinist to take. Neutrality had been mooted by Soviet leaders, as a model for Central Europe beyond their "buffer zone". The idea did not fall from the sky, and had been accepted as a status for Austria in 1955. However, for a Communist Party led government to declare itself neutral between Imperialism and the USSR, was evidence of its rightist course; a course that was being backed by the Social Democrats.
A proletarian political revolution would, quite justifiably, break with the Warsaw Pact which is an instrument of political repression. It (Warsaw Pact) licences the Kremlin bureaucracy to trample on proletarian democracy, anywhere in its sphere of influence. But, the political revolution would commit itself from the outset to defending all of the workers' states against Imperialism. Failure to do so would always cut the ground under attempts to internationalise the political revolution. In a purely 'national' or 'neutral' guise, the proletarian uprising of a small individual state is rendered powerless to effectively neutralise the superior military might of the Soviet Armed Forces. [[read that again]]
With tragic but typical naivety, the Nagy government reached for the United Nations as the means of defending itself, asking the next General Assembly to debate 'Hungarian neutrality'. At the same time it announced itself prepared to negotiate a troop withdrawal, and nominated a commission led by Pal Maleter to carry out the preparations. At a time when the armed working class, fighting under the banner of internationalism, was the only means of defence against the USSR, Nagy chose the path of neutralism and appeals to the United Nations. [[a Moderate blunder]]
The Soviet bureaucracy had made all of its preparations for a second attack. On 2 November, key Stalinist 'supporters' of Nagy - Kadar and Munnich - slipped away in secret. On 3 November, Maleter started negotiations with his Soviet counterparts. Agreement was reached immediately, that all Soviet troops would withdraw with military honours. Only the date of departure was left to be negotiated over dinner at the Soviet HQ.
At 11:00 pm, Maleter phoned to say the negotiations were going well. After that, contact with him was broken. At dawn, on the 4 November, a fresh wave of Soviet troops went into all the major industrial centres. Kadar and Munnich announced that they had formed a 'Revolutionary Workers and Peasants Government'; and that "acting in the interest of our people, working class and country" they had:
"requested the Soviet Army Command to help our nation smash the sinister forces of reaction, and restore order and calm in the country."
[[backstabbing number six]]
Nagy took cover in the Yugoslav embassy, urging the workers not to resist this new onslaught. The much vaunted leaders of the coalition parties were nowhere to be seen. Yet, the workers replied again with a general strike and organised military resistance. The second phase of the Hungarian Revolution had begun. The workers, arms in hand, now confronted the invasion of a new wave of Soviet troops, who had not been affected by the previous efforts at fraternisation.
At the head of the bogus 'workers and peasants government', were key Stalinist figures who had remained in Nagy's government - Horvath, Munnich, Apro, Kossa and Kadar himself. In giving time to Nagy, the workers had also been giving time to their future executioners. Kadar now denounced the workers' rising as a fascist inspired counter-revolution that, with the help of fraternal troops, they were suppressing in order to save Socialist Hungary!
[[Read that again – the Communists are crushing the Socialists in order to save Socialist Hungary.]]
The clique around Kadar cut no ice with the Hungarian workers.
-----
THE REVOLUTION DROWNED IN BLOOD ...
Posters at the giant Csepel works replied defiantly:
"The forty thousand aristocrats and fascists of the Csepel works strike on!" and:
"The general strike is a weapon, which can only be used when the entire working class is unanimous - so don't call us Fascists." (quoted in Lasky op.cit.)
Radio Rajk announced on 5 November:
"Comrades! The place of every true Hungarian Communist today is on the barricades." [[Socialists calling themselves Communists, fighting Communists at the barricades.]]
Attacked from all sides by Soviet troops and aircraft, the Dunapentele workers' council announced:
"Dunapentele is the leading Socialist town in Hungary. In this town all the inhabitants are workers and they hold power in their hands... The population of the town is under arms. . . they will not give in, because they have erected the factories and homes of the town with their own hands . . . the workers will defend the town against fascism - but also against the Soviet troops." (Quoted in B Lomax, Hungary 1956)
The Soviet troops met the fiercest resistance in the proletarian strongholds of Hungary. It was iron and steel towns like Miskole and Dunapentele, as well as mining areas like Borsod, Pees, Dorog and Tatabanya that held out the longest. It took the Soviet Armed Forces three days to take the centre of Budapest, and it was not until 10 November that Soviet troops could be fully deployed against the capital's proletarian bastion of Csepel. Even when the Soviet troops had crushed the insurrection, a total general strike continued against the occupation and its 'workers and peasants government'.
During the initial days of the second invasion, workers' councils coordinated the defence of the factories on a local basis. It was not until after most of the fighting had subsided, that delegates assembled to form a Central Workers' Council of Greater Budapest. Its leading figure was a pre-war social democrat turned Communist Party member in 1945 - Sandor Bali.
The initial intention of Bali, and his supporters, was that the Council should be a representative negotiating force for the working class, forcing maximum concessions from the Kadar regime. The general strike was seen as the most violent means of securing such concessions. Accordingly, the Council's first meeting drew up a list of demands and sent a delegation to press those demands on Kadar.
-----
THE POLITICS OF THE WORKERS' COUNCILS ...
The politics of the leaders of the Hungarian workers, in this period, were highly contradictory. A political programme was adopted at the 12 November meeting. It came from the pen of Istvan Bibo a member of the peasant Petofi Party, and one time member of Nagy's cabinet. It gives a sharp insight into the pressures towards the restoration of Capitalism, that the Nagy coalition would inevitably have come under.
It called for a multi-party system, for the restoration of the Nagy government, and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary -- which, in turn, would leave the Warsaw Pact. While calling for "legislation to secure the existence of Socialism and the protection of Communists", it also called for freedom of private ownership in land. While it defended social ownership of the banks, mines and large enterprises, it argued for the remaining factories to be taken into common ownership through workers' management, workers' shareholdership, and a profit-sharing system.
As immediate demands, the Council informed Kadar that it negotiated on behalf of the workers and took upon itself the right to call strikes. It protested at the reappearance of armed AVH units and demanded the reinstatement of Nagy, an amnesty, the withdrawal of Soviet troops and free elections. The majority of the Council were for parleying with Kadar, to restore Nagy to power from his bolt hole in the Yugoslav embassy. Only a minority agreed with the view expressed at the time by the Council's President Sandor Racz:
"We do not need the cabinet. We are, and will be, the leaders of Hungary."
Kadar played for time, stringing the Council leaders along for rounds of negotiations. He informed the first Council delegation:
"We want a multi-party system in, and an honest election. . . We (Communists) might be thoroughly beaten in the elections, but if we take on an election challenge, the Communist Party may regain its strength and obtain the confidence of the working masses." (Quoted from the Party paper, Nepszabadsag 15 November, In Lasky op.cit.)
But in the meantime, in exchange for such assurances, the workers' leaders were urged by Kadar to call off the General Strike, and use any influence they had to urge Nagy to leave the Yugoslav embassy in order to negotiate.
While the Central Workers' Council was formally adopting resolutions in favour of parliamentary democratic forms, and a mixed economy; there was a vital aspect of their politics, standing in potential contradiction to these bourgeois democratic illusions that a revolutionary Trotskyist party would have sought to relate to and extend. The front line role of the workers, and their councils, convinced proletarians and non-proletarians alike that the working class was the leading force in the Hungarian Revolution.
"The general strike is a weapon which can only be used when the entire working class is unanimous - so don't call us Fascists."
In the first phase of Resistance, it was common to read declarations from the workers announcing that the factories were theirs, while the government (or 'nation') should be ruled by others. But, faced with the second invasion the workers' leaders saw themselves as representatives of the proletariat, negotiating with an alien government. In mid-November, the duplicity of Kadar and his negotiators concentrated the minds of many more militants on the question of fighting for an alternative governmental power.
In early and mid November, there was a clear situation of dual power in Hungary. No tram could run and no factory could open without the say so of the workers' councils. The Stalinists recognised this fact. Kadar regularly negotiated with council leaders. The Soviet High Command issued those same leaders with the right to carry arms, and break the curfew. The Soviet Command even sent an observing liaison officer to the Budapest Council meetings.
There were, however, three key preconditions for resolving this dual power through a victory of workers' power over the Stalinist Armed Forces. First, a party was needed to lead the fight for such a resolution to the crisis. Secondly, the councils would have to centralise their forces into a clear and open governmental alternative. Last, but by no means least, that governmental challenge would have to project itself into an international struggle, to spread the political revolution.
Despite the absence of a Revolutionary Party, the councils did, hesitatingly and belatedly, move in the direction of centralising their power and challenging the governmental power of Kadar. On 19 November, the Budapest Workers' Council called for all provincial councils to elect delegates to a Workers' Parliament, due to meet on 21 November.
It proposed the formation of a permanent Workers' Parliament, of 156 delegates from the provinces and some of the larger factories. In turn, this was to elect a 30 strong executive from its ranks and co-opt 20 individuals from the parties, the armed forces, the police and the intellectuals. It did lay down that only parties accepting Socialism could be admitted into the executive.
The Soviet High Command and Janos Kadar acted quickly to smash this challenge. On 21 November, Soviet troops ringed the stadium where the Workers' Parliament was due to meet.
In order to remove a symbol rather than a vital force, Imre Nagy and his supporters were issued with safe conduct passes from the Yugoslav embassy on the 22 November. On leaving their sanctuary they were duly arrested and immediately departed to Romania. They were later to be hanged.
[[backstabbing number seven]]
On the 25 November, the workers' council leaders were offered a conference in the Parliament building with the leading Hungarian Stalinists in the government. At the conference, the working class was attacked for being 'confused', and the council leaders for having nothing to do with the working class. 'Workers and Peasants' Minister Marrsan rounded on the delegates who defended the actions of the Hungarian workers:
"You Russians! To think you can give us a lecture! Us! You call yourselves proles! But, what have you in common with the workers?" (Quoted in Lomax op.cit.)
Thus spoke satrap, who could now afford to publicly vent his fury against the insubordination (of the working class and its delegates) towards the bureaucratic regime of which he was a well paid agent!
Such rude treatment at the hands of the Kadar government hardened the stance of the council leaders, at a time when the Government and the Soviet troops obviously had the upper hand on the streets.
The council leaders pressed ahead with their plans to create a National Workers' Parliament which was to meet until the 23 October 1957 (the anniversary of the first fighting in Budapest), when free national elections were to be held. For well on a year, the workers' council delegates were to assume national authority until elections took place.
The Budapest Council took this stance when the balance of forces was already strongly against the workers. Their plans were not to come to fruition; but a Revolutionary Party would have had to take a stance on such proposals, at whatever stage they were advanced in a political revolutionary crisis. A Revolutionary Party, would have supported the formation of a government responsible to the councils. It would have opposed the eventual ceding of power from the councils to a parliamentary body.
Given, that the workers' illusions in Parliamentary Democracy had been strengthened as a direct result of Stalinist tyranny; and that workers therefore still called for parliamentary elections; Revolutionaries would have fought for any election to be held under the direct scrutiny of the councils themselves, and with the exclusion of all parties that did not support those councils.
Should the scheduled National Assembly have met, it would have been faced with the choice of ratifying the Central Workers' Council as the source of power, or of being sent packing as soon as possible.
The best elements of the Hungarian proletariat had, unfortunately, attempted to pose a council based government far too late in the struggle. The all encompassing repression, meant that it was difficult for these self same leaders to envisage any form of Resistance in favour of their new project - beyond silent demonstrations that turned Budapest into a ghost town, or symbolic demonstrations of wreath-bearing women.
"In this town all the inhabitants are workers and they hold power in their hands."
Despite the more militant political stance of the Budapest Council leaders, the attempt to pose a form of workers' government as an alternative to the Kadar government came far too late. On 9 December, the government arrested as many council leaders as it could. The workers of the Beloiannis factory protected Bali and Racz from arrest. But, these two accepted an offer on 11 December to leave the factory in order to meet Kadar. They were arrested in the Parliament building.
[[backstabbing number eight]]
Despite a short lived renewed general strike against the arrests, the Stalinist regime of Kadar was now firmly in the saddle. It cracked down with special courts, and extended the death penalty to those who struck or even incited others to strike. In the face of such victorious and barbaric reaction, and with its principal leaders in jail, the workers' movement came to terms with its defeat. The Central Workers' Council now called for passive resistance. On 15 January 1957, it issued a final appeal to the Hungarian workers:
"Because of the terror, however, and the death penalty even for distributing leaflets, the Council exhorts the workers to spread all news concerning the underground by word of mouth. Sabotage and passive resistance are the order of the day."
[[This is why the SQLD put 'Il Duce Branstad' in power, as Puppet Governor of Demo-Iowa]]
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WAS VICTORY POSSIBLE?
Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the Hungarian Revolution had the potential to develop into a successful proletarian political revolution against bureaucratic rule. The workers' councils and workers' militia were the embryonic organs of a healthy workers' state; where bureaucratic tyranny would have been replaced by proletarian democracy; and the planned economy reorganised under the democratic management of the workers.
Under the impact of the revolt, the Stalinist bureaucratic apparatus fragmented. Major sections of the party, particularly at a rank and file level, went over to the side of the Insurgents. But, the core of the bureaucracy remained - of necessity - intransigently opposed to proletarian democracy in all its forms.
One wing, around Nagy, offered the working class the road of a popular front coalition; built from above to derail the struggle for worker's power.
[[That is identical to what the SQLD are doing with the 'Il Duce Branstad' regime in Demo-Iowa, to derail the Real Humans of Iowa.]]
The other (wing), prepared to drown the Revolution in proletarian blood. Once again, Stalinism showed its predominantly counter-revolutionary nature. The hopes of the leaders of degenerate Trotskyism at the time (Pablo and Mandel), in a "progressive" wing of the bureaucracy, were shown to be illusory. While the bureaucracy will always fragment, no wing of it can ever be a substitute for direct organs of working class power, or the Revolutionary Party.
That the Hungarian workers were defeated does not mean that all such revolts against bureaucratic rule are doomed. Neither does it mean that the working class should forsake the goal of political revolution, in search of a reformist co-existence with the bureaucracy - what Kuron calls his 'self-limiting revolution'. What it does mean is that in the absence of a Revolutionary Leadership, the spontaneous energy of the working class is not in itself sufficient to take power into the hands of the workers.
[[Bingo! That is the crux of the problem here in America! There is no Revolutionary Leadership that is sufficient to stop the SQLD vermin! The SQLD intend to have the Republican Establishment derail the Tea Party Movement, to keep it from becoming a Revolutionary Party.]]
A Revolutionary Leadership would have battled inside the often politically confused Hungarian working class, for the councils to constitute themselves as the basis of power, and ensure that the government was directly and immediately accountable to them.
[[What an unheard of, and Non-Democrat thought! Government Accountability to the People. Who are never supposed to have a Will of the People!]]
Against those who saw it as simply a national revolt, or who put their trust in the United Nations, a Revolutionary Party would have fought to internationalise the political revolution, spreading it both to the USSR, via the Soviet Army, and to the other degenerate workers' states.
[[Trotsky argued that the Soviet state had become a 'degenerated workers state' controlled by an undemocratic bureaucracy. In other words, failed.]]
Without that internationalisation, all the odds were stacked against the Hungarian workers achieving victory. The struggles of the Hungarian working class thirty years ago [[at the time of this writing]] prove both the need for, and the possibility of, the political revolutionary overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy. They show all too clearly, as well, that the working class needs an International Revolutionary Party if it is not to be crushed by the forces of Stalinist reaction.
[[This is a blueprint for ANY struggle by an oppressed people, against any bureaucracy. In America, it is the struggle of the Humans against the Establishments.]]
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POST SCRIPT ...
The collapse of the Stalinist states in 1990-92, saw the destruction of the bureaucratically centrally planned economies, and the restoration of Capitalism in all of them, barring North Korea and Cuba. This collapse had a profound effect on World politics and the state of the working class movement. No longer could workers' parties look to a really existing Socialism abroad. No longer were national liberation movements like the PLO and Vietcong, funded by the Stalinist regimes. No longer was over a third of the World's territory excluded from Capitalist exploitation. For a period during the 1990s, as Capitalism was being restored and while the working class movement was in full retreat, there was a period that could be described as a counter-revolutionary one; the forces of reaction were triumphant, the Capitalists proclaimed the end of "history." The class struggle was over and the Capitalists had won. Or, so the story went.
But, with the revival of the World economy from the mid-1990s, as globalisation injected new dynamism into World Capitalism, the working class began to recover, albeit hesitantly, falteringly with often only small steps forward.
The PR-N believe that this transition from the defeats of the 1990s towards a new revival of working class confidence and struggle still characterises the period today - hence we describe it as a transitional period. The working class has still not recovered from the defeats of the 1970s/80s, but has only begun to recover its confidence. The growth and expansion of World Capitalism is manifest, with the development of whole new powers like China and India, and the recovery of the former workers' states, as their economies have begun to function as Capitalist ones.
It is nonsense today to speak of a period of "stagnation" or even a "tendency towards stagnation" in the World economy, in fact to do so, wilfully ignores the effects of Capitalist restoration, and gives credence to those leftists who asserted that there was no fundamental difference between the centrally planned economies of the former Stalinist states, and Capitalism itself. A mistake which World Capitalism had no intention of making.
We can continue to take inspiration from the struggle of Hungarian workers against the Stalinist bureaucracy, while recognising that in general, that is yesterday's fight, with Stalinism destroyed as a material block to the class struggle.
The initial effects have been to profoundly set back the working class struggle, but ultimately, without this bulwark of counter-revolution, when Capitalism does re-enter a period of crisis, the working class movement will be able to rebuild itself far more easily and strongly than before.
[[End Of Account]]
[[As you can tell, this was written from the viewpoint of a Working Class Warrior. I will not discard that backdrop to this, because it is part of the lesson. The lesson is the realizations and requirements that must happen, if any Corrupt Bureaucracy (aka Establishments) are to be brought to Heel and Accountability to the People.]]
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[[Now for the Economics (shame) of it all.]]
[[Beginning of Account]]
Trotskyist International No. 23, January-June 1998
In 1989, the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party voted to dissolve itself and relinquish its monopoly of power. Eight years and two governments later, many of the old Stalinist bureaucrats at that conference are at the helm of state as the country reintroduces Capitalism. Keith Harvey maps out the country's tortured journey back into the hands of Imperialism.
-----
By Keith Harvey – 1998.
In 1994 Gyula Horn, leader of the Hungarian Socialist Party, became the country's Prime Minister. Over the last four years he has been a key figure in Hungary's transition to Capitalism.
Horn's career brilliantly illustrates the truth of Leon Trotsky's view of the Stalinist bureaucracy as an "agent of imperialism in the workers' state".
[[Trotsky's revelations about Stalinism got him assassinated in Mexico City, by a Stalinist agent.]]
Forty years ago, Horn was a member of Janos Kádár's security services; which engaged in a search and destroy mission against the remnants of the workers' councils and militias that were crushed by Soviet intervention into Hungary in 1956. He helped to smash the political revolution against Stalinism.
By 1989, Horn was Foreign Minister in the Stalinist government of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (HSWP). In June that year, he sanctioned the uncontrolled border crossings to Austria that led to a breach in the Iron Curtain. Before the end of 1989 the Berlin Wall was hauled down, and the west's victory in the Cold War was complete. Thus, in his own way, Gyula Horn played a key part in precipitating the end of Stalinism in Eastern Europe.
Having once preserved the Stalinist dictatorship against workers' democracy, Horn has just completed the sale of the country's prime industrial and financial assets to western multinational companies, and turned Hungary into a dependent, semi-colonial Capitalist state.
The west is pleased with Horn's work. A year ago the Financial Times recognised the "fundamental structural changes that have put Hungary at the forefront of the fast-track reforming countries of east Europe." (1)
Indeed, it claimed then that Hungary's "transformation to a market economy is all but complete." Twelve further months of privatisation, the liquidation of ailing firms, an unrivalled stock market boom and a wave of enterprise restructuring have completed the decisive phase of Hungary's transition to Capitalism: it stands with both feet on Capitalist terrain, if a little unsteadily.
[[Note the hint of jealousy that always accompanies Socialist descriptions of Capitalist successes.]]
In order to guide the working class of Eastern Europe in the changed conditions of class struggle, we must confront the implications (of the successful restoration of Capitalism) upon Marxist theory - not just in Hungary but also in Poland and the Czech Republic.
This article is the LRCI's latest contribution to that task, and uses Hungary as its reference point, because it has advanced furthest and fastest down the path of Capitalist restoration in Central Europe.
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THE DISSOLUTION OF THE SOVIET BUREAUCRACY ...
To understand the process of Capitalist restoration (2) in Eastern Europe, it is essential to take into account the history of the states involved in that transition. Capitalism was uprooted in East and Central Europe by Stalinist administrations, in the years 1945-49. (3) Bureaucratic command economies were built on the basis of:
* nationalised industries;
* a state monopoly of foreign trade;
* the abolition of profit-driven production. (4)
The concrete tasks of the restoration process today are affected by this historical point of departure. First, those who wished to restore the profit system had to re-create a class of private Capitalist owners/managers, and a proletarian class with no access to ownership of the means of production.
[[That means, no employee-owned companies, and no employee-owned resources.]]
Second, they had to transform money from the passive instrument of accounting, that it was in the bureaucratic command economy, into a measure and store of value, and hence into profit-oriented investment capital.
Third, they had to purge and restructure the bureaucratic Stalinist state machine into one that could ensure the reproduction of all these features against Resistance, both from the working class and where necessary from deficient elements of a nascent Capitalist class. [[Non-bloodsucking Capitalists, that are not mean enough.]]
After 1989, the new Hungarian regime approached these tasks with a number of advantages. As the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) remarked, Hungary "entered the transition with particularly favourable initial conditions". (5)
After securing political stability in 1957, through outright repression, Janos Kádár embarked on a series of economic reforms which encouraged, or turned a blind eye to, small scale entrepreneurial activity. This met basic consumer needs better than the old system. [[And, made the Kadar regime richer than the old system.]]
By means of what became known as "goulash Communism", the HSWP (Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party) hoped to buy the acquiescence of the population.
After the introduction of a further round of "market socialist" reforms in 1968 (the New Economic Mechanism -NEM), the major state enterprises in Hungary ceased to be simply the property of the state, and ownership was jointly vested in the central ministries and the enterprises themselves. This gave an important share of independent control to the enterprise managers. Many decisions regarding product range and use of labour fell to them, instead of to the central planners. The central state and party bureaucrats retained control over decisions on longer term investment. But, by the 1980s the resources available to them were substantially diminished and, with this, so too was the central bureaucracy's leverage over the enterprises.
Reforms in 1984 further shifted control away from the centre. After 1984, more than two-thirds of the enterprises had ownership rights concentrated in enterprise councils - where the managers had a preponderant influence. In 1988, on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the power of enterprise managers was further increased by the Companies Act. This gave local managers the right to sell their ownership rights in the factories, and led in turn to a process of "spontaneous privatisation".
Before the collapse of the HSWP's monopoly rule, and the elections of 1990, several large enterprises had already converted themselves into joint stock companies. (6)
Hence, before the final removal from power of the ruling Stalinist caste within a degenerated workers' state [[Trotsky again]] - indeed with its active encouragement - the legal framework for the transformation of state property into industrial capital had made great strides forward, even if it still lacked a genuine social and economic content. (7)
Through these measures, the enterprise and industry strata of the economic bureaucracy were preparing themselves to inherit the fruits of Capitalist restoration.
But, in 1988 the leadership of the HSWP was captured by the "new technocrats". Rising as a result of the post-1968 market reforms, these 'communist' bureaucrats had by the early 1980s, consciously abandoned any commitment to a centrally planned economy. In 1988, they forced the resignation of Kádár and opened up multi-party discussions with opposition forces inside Hungary; with a view to abandoning the HSWP's monopoly of political and military power and arriving at a "negotiated transition".
[[Lesson-A blood-soaked and murderous regime was forced to resign by 'technocrats', described as 'communist bureaucrats'.]]
While being openly pro-capitalist, they objected to the process of enrichment by the "red managers". They preferred a more controlled process of transition, which would include foreign participation, and help for the substantial layer of Hungarian small businesses to take a large slice of privatised state assets. But in 1988, the technocrats were still too weak to stop spontaneous privatisation.
In 1989, the adoption of the Transformation Act by the dying Stalinist regime further entrenched enterprise managers' rights in return for a commitment to keep the economy going during a phase of accelerated decline; (8) a measure which effectively gave up on central planning as any kind of direct economic mechanism. This was complemented by the decline, in the late 1980s, in the amount of direct budget subsidies given to the enterprises by the central ministries. By 1988, they were down to 8% of GDP - the lowest in Eastern Europe. (9) As the central state's direction and influence shrank further, spontaneous privatisation mushroomed and the number of joint stock companies increased five-fold in the last year of the Stalinist regime. (10)
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HUNGARY AS A MORIBUND WORKER'S STATE ...
As a result of the elections of 1990, Hungary became a Stalinist state with an openly pro-bourgeois government: an unprecedented and by definition transitory phenomenon which we have defined as a 'moribund workers' state'.
Henceforth, its ruling regime was actively dismantling all the remaining centralised economic mechanisms that prevented the Capitalist law of value (11) from dominating the economic life of the country.
The Hungarian Democratic Forum (HDF) government abolished the already much weakened central ministry-based planning institutions, and removed all restrictions in the way of individual firms trading internationally. This was accompanied by the "liberalisation" - i.e. removal of state control - of prices. Both measures helped to convert money from a passive instrument into an active agent in establishing the relative exchange ratio of commodities in the market. This led, in turn, to the prices of most enterprise assets (factories, stocks etc.) being marked down as they were far less valuable than in the west.
The break-up of the existing exchange relations in the Comecon Bloc precipitated a catastrophic economic slump throughout Eastern Europe. In Hungary, output collapsed by 20% in 1990-93. (12) The main task of the new government was to ensure that the costs of this crash were borne by the working class, in the form of mass unemployment. By the end of 1993, the labour force fell by an incredible 40%. The largest 150 manufacturing firms reduced their workforce by 47% between 1989 and 1993. (13)
This massively speeded up the process of transformation of labour power into a commodity. Under the Social Relations of a degenerated workers' state, despite the existence of the "wage form" of payment, labour power did not function as a commodity, as it does under Capitalism. [[Read that again. The Real Socialist viewpoint is that Work goes from being a Right (under Socialism) to being a Commodity (under Capitalism) where it is sold, bartered, traded, exchanged, devalued, surplused, and discarded.]]
( Under the Social Relations of a degenerated workers' state) --
workers were "tied" to the enterprise. It was very difficult to sack them. So there was no system of "free labour" typical of Capitalism, which guarantees a permanent reserve army of labour that can act as a pressure on the employed labour force, to depress wage levels. On the contrary, wage levels were predetermined by the plan, irrespective of the demand or supply for any specific type of labour.
But, the mass unemployment of the early 1990s "freed" the workers from the means of production, to become a truly exploited proletariat, i.e. a class with nothing to sell but their labour power. For workers, their enterprise was the main point of access (via the trade unions) to welfare payments, housing allocation and even holiday entitlement. A key task of the regime, in a moribund workers' state, was to oversee the wholesale destruction of this welfare function of the enterprises; stripping the trade unions too of their role in distributing benefits.
Instead, in a much reduced and weakened condition, benefit distribution was transferred to the state. This process also involved turning non-wage benefits, such as housing and even some food supplies, into commodities to be bought and sold in the market, in return for a part of wages received.
This too, was pioneered by the HDF government, although as with the other countries in the region, "reform" of the pension and social security system has been one of the last elements of the welfare system to be restructured; requiring as a precondition the prior solution of another problem, the overhaul of the taxation system.
This change in taxation is crucial, since it determines the volume and rate of the new state's revenues. In a degenerate workers' state, these were derived primarily from a charge on the enterprise (a turnover tax). As part of the transition process the bourgeois government, of the moribund workers' state, has to remodel taxation so that it is primarily a charge on the working class. It does this by introducing a regressive taxation system such as a sales tax (for example, VAT or GST) as well as introducing an income tax on wages.
Naturally, all of this takes a great deal of time since the social structures, culture of acceptance, and professional skills necessary to implement it have been obliterated or driven underground for 40 years. The necessary legislation on property and contract law, and a bourgeois justice system, and an internationally recognised system of accounting - all these have to be rebuilt and then enforced.
But, all of these problems pale into insignificance compared to the task of creating a class of Capitalist property owners. While the new government inherited some of the legal framework for this from the 1980s, it had to fill it with a social content, via the privatisation of state assets. This, in turn, begged a series of questions: What kind of Capitalist class should be created and how? What should be done about the pre-war claims of old bourgeois owners? What role should foreign Capitalists play? What share, if any, should the workers have in the ownership of the new firms?
There is no "rational" solution to these questions, to be drawn out of some general model of the Capitalist economy. The answers depend upon a struggle, a struggle of existing classes and castes and of nascent ones. The outcome, reflects the residue of past struggles and their results. Because of this, each country in the region has arrived at different specific solutions.
In the case of Hungary, by the time of the negotiated agreement with the opposition forces in 1989, and the parliamentary elections of 1990, the majority of the "new technocrats" in the re-named Hungarian Socialist Party (HSP) [[they took out the Workers']] - and most of the opposition parties - had agreed on the need to establish a State Property Agency (SPA). The purpose of this was to halt and, if possible, reverse the process of "spontaneous privatisation" and the resulting enrichment of the enterprise managers. In this way the state machine hoped to regain control over the restoration process.
The first two years of the HDF government (1990-92), witnessed a sharp struggle within the state machine over the direction of Capitalist restoration, focusing on the nature and powers of the new SPA. Privatisation from below did not cease. But the SPA bureaucracy, made up of figures drawn from formally different parties (united in opposition to the enrichment of enterprise managers), fought for control over the right to sell firms.
The various parties and coalitions, in and out of government, were weak. Their economic policies did not express clearly different programmes for restoration. This reflected the fact that the multiplicity of newly created parties - made up of intellectuals, former Stalinists, small entrepreneurs and enterprise managers - did not represent stable bourgeois forces, but overlapping and sometimes contradictory programmes. In this situation the possession of control within the state machine, rather than parliament, was more decisive in influencing the form of restoration policy.
The Imperialists [[Skyscraper-building Capitalists]], recognised the importance of continuity and stability in the state machine, both before and after the formal change of ruling political parties. The 1997 Transition Report contrasts the situation in Eastern Europe to the fragmentation of the federal state in the USSR after 1991:
"The political transition…did not entail the same challenge to the capacity of the central state, enabling the key state institutions to continue to function through this transition albeit under different political leadership." (14)
The privatisation law came into force in August 1992. The battle for control resulted, in the words of one observer, in the "centralisation of the entire ownership right [which is] nothing other than renationalisation." (15)
The SPA was able to appoint the top managers in the enterprises that had been formed into companies, together with the members of the management board.
The HDF government, until its demise in 1994, spent much of its time resolving these essentially political disputes about the character of privatisation, implementing the privatisation of small-scale state property (shops, small enterprises), and legitimating the many previously illegal small businesses that mushroomed during the Kádár decades.
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CONTRADICTIONS OF THE TRANSITION PROCESS ...
As in all moribund workers' states, Hungary's new rulers had to work their way through a number of real social contradictions on the road to Capitalism. Alongside unambiguously pro-capitalist measures, they also had to carry through a series of measures that worked in the opposite direction and, for a whole period, acted to protect much economic activity from the operation of the law of value.
The bulk of material production in a moribund workers' state can become value-generating surplus, only on condition that its initially unprofitable character is sustained and reproduced for some time during the process of transition. A generalised and immediate imposition of the law of value on the entire production process in these states, would have destroyed the possibility of future surplus value creation.
The limits of the law of value at this stage, can be observed in the gradual increase in the number of loss-making enterprises in Hungary in the period 1990-92, as the real worth of assets is revealed. The opening up of the internal market to international competition soon revealed the extent of loss-making firms in Hungary. One estimate suggests that, in 1992, half of all enterprises were "drifters" (i.e. barely solvent), one-quarter healthy and capable of withstanding short-term competition, and another quarter hopelessly failing. (16)
In 1992, much to the chagrin of its western advisers, the government picked out 14 big state-owned companies for debt-relief. These employed 83,000 workers, and were responsible for a quarter of all Hungary's industrial exports at the time. The government poured in $1.7 billion of aid to keep them going, while it decided which ones could be saved in the medium term.
Inter-enterprise debt (IED) mushroomed to $5.2 billion by the first quarter of 1992, as traditional supply lines between similarly afflicted enterprises were maintained. This amounts to the extended reproduction of loss-making production in the old state sector. IED was accompanied by systemic use of non-commercial bank-lending, to replace missing government subsidies and the government itself tolerated non-payment of enterprise taxes (and energy bills), to ease the financial crisis of the lame-duck firms.
The 1990-94 government also, rather uniquely among the Visegrad countries, attempted a reflationary economic policy by borrowing abroad to keep up domestic demand. As a result, although unemployment skyrocketed, wage levels of those in work rose. By the end of 1993, they stood at 130% of the 1989 level. (17) Pensions remained pegged to real wage levels and were eroded at a slower rate than elsewhere in the region.
This reflationary programme was aimed, quite unashamedly, at keeping vast swathes of the ailing smaller domestic industries (the "drifters") afloat; not surprisingly, since these firms formed the main social base of the leading party in the government, the Hungarian Democratic Forum (HDF). [[Lesson-this is what politicians, who know what their base is, do to keep that base supporting them.]]
A further notable feature of Hungary's policy, at this time, was the way in which the government used bankruptcy laws, which they introduced in 1992. Their function under Capitalism, is to remove unprofitable sectors from the circuit of capital, and to release whatever assets can be saved from the liquidated enterprise, so that they can be used productively by another firm or bank.
The spontaneous, purely economic, movement of capital is insufficient to ensure the destruction of capital; bankruptcy is a conflict between creditor and debtor. Hence, the state must adjudicate and resolve this conflict in favour of one side or the other, usually the creditor. [[a Capitalist trick]]
When implemented, early in 1992, the bankruptcy laws were the most far-reaching in the region. They required all firms, more than 90 days in arrears, to file for reorganisation or liquidation. Over 22,000 firms did so by the end of 1993. But by mid-1994, over 95% of the firms that went through the procedures were still in business, and yet only one quarter were profitable.
The major study of this experience concluded, in 1995, that "what the system lacked and still lacks, is an efficient and dependable exit process on which creditors can rely, as the final stage in debt collection." (18)
Hungary's experience shows that a government of a moribund workers' state uses the bankruptcy legislation not to enforce the untrammelled logic of the profit system, but to protect illiquid enterprises from being destroyed. [[not-liquid]]
As Marx said, no matter what laws are on the statute book "right can never be higher than the material foundation upon which it rests." Hungary possessed neither the political balance of forces, nor the technical infrastructure, to carry through Capitalist restoration in the originally intended form.
[[Socialists and Communists always have to quote Marx – it's obligatory.]]
To put it bluntly, the new laws were used by debtors to gain protection from creditors. No bankruptcy laws in a moribund workers' state allow for creditors to initiate bankruptcy. By acting in this way, the state machine acts to prevent the law of value from being imposed, objectively impeding the transition to Capitalism, despite its subjective and strategic desires.
But, we are dealing here with a contradictory process, and the bankruptcy legislation did have effects which prepared state-owned industry for privatisation. Almost two-thirds of all the enterprises that entered into the process of bankruptcy proceedings slashed their workforce by between one-quarter and one-third as a condition for survival. This undoubtedly prepared some of them for being sold off later. But, this kind of "passive restructuring" was typical of the early years of the transition, whereby any reorganisation of production takes place on the old technical foundation; by means of wage cuts and/or mass sackings, and by finding new markets, rather than by transforming the production process with new investments in plant and machinery.
Thus we see that in the form of extended IED, a government reflation package, and bankruptcy laws "of a special type", the moribund workers' state in Hungary carried through a contradictory historical task. It protected decisive sectors of the economy from the re-introduction of the law of value, in order to ensure its introduction at a more favourable moment in the process.
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THE ROLE OF BANK REFORM ...
Major problems plagued Hungary's banking sector during the first half of the 1990s. Banking reform began in the 1980s, with the creation of five state-owned commercial banks, separated off from the central bank. Their function was to provide long-term investment finance for industry.
These banks entered the transition process saddled with non-performing loans to bankrupt industries. In 1991, the government guaranteed Ft 10 billion worth of "doubtful loans". Then, in 1992, it began the process of recapitalising these banks by siphoning off these debts and pouring in new capital, to bring their reserves up to internationally acceptable levels. Without this, the banks could not act against the ailing and failing firms which they owned, or were creditors of, for fear of forcing themselves out of business if they forced the firms into liquidation. By 1997, this amounted to a Ft 334 billion injection of capital, equivalent to 8% of the 1994 GDP.
[[1 Hungarian Forint (Ft) = 0.0047 US dollars at this moment]]
This process of recapitalisation, was carried through in the form of a tax on the future profits of the Capitalist class. It represented the nationalisation of banking debts and, as such, indicated the deepening of the Capitalist character of the state machine. The state was now proving capable of raising itself above the individual interests of any one Capitalist, and undertaking measures beneficial to the Capitalist system as a whole. This was an important measure, since it enabled the process of new production to be separated off from the burden of past production.
However, all commentators agree that in the first two years of operation, the terms of the recapitalisation programme were so lax that it did not require the banks to fundamentally change the nature of their lending operations to ailing firms. This created what is known as "moral hazard", whereby banks continued to extend bad loans in the belief that, in the last instance, the government would step in and bail them out. It therefore failed, initially, to force the banks to be an instrument in the battle to restructure the social relations of production inside the enterprises. And, it failed to force the banks themselves to become commercial, profit-oriented businesses.
By mid-1994, therefore, Hungary's economy was still structurally dislocated. There was a growing profit-oriented private sector which consisted of: newly founded private enterprises in the hands of domestic owners, newly acquired outlets of foreign multinationals, and a few commercially restructured former state enterprises. In addition, there was a sizeable "grey" sector of the economy, which delivered informal goods or activities, but did not appear in official statistics. [[the 'grey market economy']]
The non-state sector was strongly represented in retail and wholesale trade, (19) personal and business services, and light industry oriented to consumer goods. Due to slow progress with privatisation, the non-capitalist state sector continued to dominate large-scale industry (e.g. steel), together with the energy and transport sectors.
Many of these enterprises not only operated at a loss, but were not even geared to the goal of profit-making. More than half of the biggest loss-makers in state ownership, as of 1992, had still not entered into bankruptcy procedures by mid-1994. Some of them retained their monopoly position, backed by state subsidies, and were therefore not forced to change under the impact of competition.
Still more enjoyed protection because it was thought that ways had been found to make them commercially viable, under state ownership in the future. This category includes four of the original 14 state-owned giants, that the government picked out in 1992. As long as the old state sector dominated the whole economy - as long as the non-capitalist laws of this sector regulated the accumulation process of the bigger part of the economy and held the other sector in dependence and subordination - Hungary remained a moribund workers' state.
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CROSSING THE DANUBE ...
The Danube - which flows through the centre of Hungary's capital, Budapest - divides the old historic city of Buda from the commercial and industrial district of Pest. The river could easily stand as a metaphor for the transition process from degenerate workers' state to Capitalism. The Hungarian economy, after several years of lingering on the Buda bank of the mighty river, has now passed over into Pest. All the key institutions of modern Hungarian Capitalism, its stock market, major banks and MNC headquarters are to be found there.
In this process, the election of the new HSP-led coalition government in May 1994 was a watershed. The restoration of Capitalism, after all, is not a blind and spontaneous economic process. The state is the forcing house of transition, and during the last three years Horn's administration has speeded up the privatisation process, especially in the big state-owned industries and above all the banks.
By a strict tightening of the bankruptcy procedures, it has ensured the liquidation of more than half of the firms that entered into the process. Those that have survived, have been sold off to foreign multinationals, where they have been restructured through the use of new technologies rather than simply through mass sackings. And, in a marked departure to the previous administration, Horn implemented a draconian austerity programme in which he "has applied his shears to social welfare and wages." (20)
The new government showed itself to be deaf to the protests of the trade unions or small domestic producers. Horn and company, have shown themselves to be genuine "comprador" agents of multinational capital. They have proven willing, and able, to enforce the general logic of Capitalist accumulation against both small-scale private Capitalists and state-owned enterprises.
The government virtually completed the privatisation process with the 1995 Privatisation Law:
In 1990, the SPA held 1,698 enterprises for privatisation.
By May 1997, state ownership had been reduced to less than 50% in 1,489 of these. Nearly 1,000 of these were completely sold off, and only in 209 companies does the state now have a share of more than 50%.
In 1996-97, key companies such as MOL (oil) and Richter (pharmaceuticals) have gone to foreign owners.
In 1998, the government aims to have shares in only 109 firms, and intends to keep 100% ownership only in the postal service and the rail industry.
But, it is not the mere change in ownership rights that is crucial in the restoration of Capitalism. The experience of privatisation in Eastern Europe and the CIS has been quite diverse. In itself, the return of state-owned industries and banks to formally private ownership does not signify the return to Capitalism, any more than state ownership in itself signifies the transition to Socialism.(21)
If ownership rights are distributed too widely, they can impede the centralisation and concentration of capital ownership needed to effect changes of behaviour among the managers of the enterprises - most of whom are products of a different social system. This problem has slowed down the restoration process in the Czech Republic, for example, until recently.
Or, if for political reasons ownership is vested in "insiders" (i.e. managers and workers), this can slow down the restructuring process by which managers are turned into agents of capital, and workers are turned into wage-slaves exploited by capital. This has been the experience in Russia. (22)
[[This is typical of how Socialists and Communists think of the relationships between Economics and Labor, in Capitalist societies. With them, everything is always about the 'exploitation of the masses'. They are convinced that their viewpoint is right, but they never offer successful alternatives.]]
Finally, ownership may come to reside in banks which are also creditors of the mass of ailing and failing enterprises. They are reluctant to impose ruthless, profit-oriented financial restructuring on these firms for fear of provoking their own collapse. (23)
Hungary adopted a different strategy, early on. As part of its long-term openness to imperialist multinational firms and banks, Hungary had borrowed heavily in the 1970s and 1980s. Consequently, it entered the transition process after 1989 saddled with a far higher level of foreign-owned debt than anywhere else in the region - a debt totalling $17.8 billion.
The idea of raising cash to pay off this debt appealed to the leading figures in government. But, only the western multinationals had the necessary money, given the weakness of a domestic Hungarian bourgeoisie. (24)
Privatising state firms into foreign ownership gained favour for a further reason; it was a way of preventing the embourgeoisement of the enterprise managers, through spontaneous privatisation.
[[ boing! ]]
The long-term ties that multinationals had formed with the Hungarian bureaucracy, before 1989, to some degree predetermined the route taken by privatisation. As the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) notes:
"More than in any other centrally planned economy, Hungarian enterprises were extensively engaged with western companies by the 1980s, and many of these original links formed the basis of subsequent sales." (25)
The Economist noted in 1995 that:
"Western business instinctively went to invest [in Hungary] when Communism fell, because it had long been the easiest place in the old Eastern Bloc to operate in. Its system was by far the most liberal. . ." (26)
Hungary's well developed ties with Imperialism, before 1989, made the new regime very suggestible to entreaties and threats, from the battery of new inter-governmental agencies thrown up to oversee the restoration of Capitalism. And just to make sure, in 1992 the World Bank forced the HDF government to abandon any attempt at an industrial policy, that sought to restructure SPA property with a view to keeping it in state ownership.
The figures for foreign direct investment (FDI) into the country, illustrate the scale of multinational capital penetration. At $1,113 per capita Hungary has attracted twice as much FDI as the Czech Republic. Between 1989-95, it attracted a total of $11.3 billion, which amounted to one third of the total FDI that went to Eastern Europe and the CIS. And, this for a country of 10 million people.
After 1992, the multinationals bought the best, and potentially most profitable parts of Hungarian industry, for knock-down prices in recessionary conditions. Alongside this, many western companies have set up in greenfield sites in Hungary to establish a regional productive base for sales to other former Stalinist countries. These include Audi, GM, Suzuki, Unilever and Pepsi.
As a result, 49% of Hungarian manufacturing is now foreign-owned, and 70% of Hungary's manufacturing exports (aimed at the bigger markets in Central Europe and the CIS), come from companies partly or wholly owned by multinationals. (27)
Most of these "have largely set up low value-added subassembly operations", according to the Economist Intelligence Unit. (28) The head of economic strategy in Hungary's industry ministry, László Csernszky, admits that these firms "import, assemble and export with hardly a link to the local economy." (29) There is, as a result, little technology transfer or demand for domestically produced inputs. In many ways, Hungary is a carbon copy of the Irish Republic, but without the huge inward funds from the EU which have helped sustain its growth.
By undertaking a bonfire sale of industrial and financial assets, in the last five years the Hungarian government has also met two other key objectives of the restoration process:
* Finding the necessary investment capital to go beyond passive restructuring (e.g. sackings, change of product line and market direction), and into active restructuring of production technologies.
* Imposing profit-oriented behaviour on the managers of the privatised firms.
As one commentator has said:
"Virtually all cases of foreign ownership have been associated with a major investment programme. Considerable change in management structure has also taken place, with senior local managers typically being supplanted by foreign managers." (30)
In a moribund workers' state, the enterprise managers typically resist pressure to impose the "logic of capital" on the production process. They resort to maximising output rather than profit; they engage in deals with other stricken enterprises to roll over debts; they make special pleas to government for funds or plead for concessions on their tax obligations. All this reflects a corporate identity that stresses the needs of the enterprise (including its workforce), and abstracts from the class divide that separates worker from boss, under fully restored Capitalism.
While Polish and Czech owners and governments have addressed this problem too -- for example, by insisting on government or Investment Fund representatives on management boards, and by training up a new generation of bourgeois-minded managers and accountants -- the Hungarians have often imposed foreign managers upon a newly purchased firm, or set up their own operations on greenfield sites.
But, the experience of foreign management has filtered through to domestically-owned enterprises as well. The hard-to-please EBRD conceded in its latest report that:
"Available evidence reveals that strategic owners of Hungarian firms are more directly involved in management, than is the case in the normal operation of a firm in an industrialised market economy. New owners have tended to exert direct influence over the running of the firm, rather than relying on the formal structures of corporate governance, such as the General Assembly or the Supervisory Board" (31)
In other words, the private owners of Hungarian industry have broken through any insider resistance to the single-minded, profit-oriented operation of the firm, and imposed the social relations of Capitalist exploitation on the working class.
[[That means – Gone Capitalist.]]
With the country's industries enjoying a sustained recovery since 1994, and exports growing at 13% a year since then, it is clear that the majority of the country's enterprises are making an operating profit. The bankruptcy process has liquidated those that can never be profitable, and restructured and/or sold those that could; dealing with their debts along the way by negotiated settlements with creditors, and absorption of debts into the budget deficit of the government by means of successive rounds of bank recapitalisation.
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ONCE AGAIN, THE BANKS ...
The final part of Hungary's transition to newly restored Capitalism, was assured by further important changes in the relationship between the banks and the state on the one hand, and the banks and industrial capital on the other.
The banks play a critical, even decisive, role in the economics of transition to Capitalism. In the "market socialist" forms of the degenerated workers' state, the banks have no independence from the state. But, by controlling the supply of investment credit to industry, they are the key agencies of central planning. The goal of the restoration process for banks is clear. Extend commercial-based investment credit to industry, and where they are owners of industrial capital, enforce profit-maximisation behaviour. But, realising this goal is fraught with difficulty.
First, they have to gain their independence from the state so that lending is not politically directed. Secondly, they have to gain freedom from their ties to any one firm or sector of industry with which they have a privileged or unique relationship, so that they can carry out their function of aggregating and recycling total social capital to wherever it is most profitable. Thirdly, they must take a lead in the process of destruction of unprofitable output in conditions where many of the firms responsible for this output are assets on the banks' balance sheets.
To complete these tasks the government has to legislate and enforce the autonomy of the banks from the state. In Russia, this took the form of a massive growth in new banks; in Poland it involved the commercialisation of state-owned banks. But in Hungary, it has primarily occurred through the foreign take-over of domestic banks.
All five of Hungary's previously state-owned commercial banks, have now been sold to foreign banks. Now, more than 50% of banking assets in Hungary are held by foreign banks. The state's share in all remaining banks must be less than 15% by the end of 1997. These banks have taken advantage of their new asset structure and autonomy, to enforce profit-maximising behaviour inside firms they own or lend to. They have done this through direct participation in the management of the enterprise, selling off shares, varying the terms of loans and petitioning for bankruptcy.
With the widespread banking reform of 1995-97, the government has done much to ensure that surplus capital is systematically directed into spheres of investment that promise the most profitable employment of capital; irrespective of its origin in any particular line of production or in any one firm. (32) The profits from individual firms are now concentrated and centralised (together with savings of the working class), into a formally autonomous financial sector. This sector is the institutional embodiment of the power of money capital, which extinguishes all traces of its specific origin in the profits squeezed from workers at the point of production.
By redeploying capital to more profitable areas of investment, by speeding the velocity of capital's circulation (i.e. by reducing the turn-over time between production of surplus value, its realisation in profits and its reinvestment) the autonomous and privatised banks ensure the formation of an average rate of profit. They do this by ensuring that capital is allowed to move unhindered between different sectors of industry, wherever the best returns can be made. Over time this tends to lead to the equalisation of profit rates between different economic sectors. Finally, an independent banking sector assists in the destruction of irredeemably unprofitable enterprises.
When the state (Hungary) excluded itself from the political direction of the financial sector, through the 1995-97 bank privatisation process, an important stage was reached in stabilising Hungary's existence as a newly restored Capitalist country. A now autonomous finance sector (including capital markets) finally entered into an independent (but at the same time fully integrated) relationship with industrial capital, providing for the bulk of its investment needs on a commercial basis. (33)
Where the state retains ownership of industry, it does so merely as one among equals, capable of applying its own laws equally to itself and the rival Capitalists in the regulation of competition.(34)
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FUTURE EVOLUTION ...
The Economist reported in June 1997 that "Hungarian companies have been through the bankruptcy wringer. Privatisation is virtually over. And, huge foreign investment flows have sucked the survivors onto a new plane of efficiency." (35)
As a reward for its "progress" Hungary was given a seat at the top table of industrial Capitalist economies-the OECD-in 1996. In March 1994, it had already applied for EU membership. The Commission opened negotiations with Hungary on the terms for membership, and is due to issue a report on progress by the end of 1998. Already, it has made it known that "Hungary can be regarded as a functioning market economy". (36)
The restoration of Capitalism in Hungary, has been achieved at a great price for Hungary's workers. Since Horn's government came to office in 1994, real wages have fallen by a third. Unemployment in the eastern part of the country is above 15%. Many more are without work, but cannot officially appear so in a country with the harshest rules on welfare entitlement in the region. Many of those who do have a job, have more than one in order to survive. Some 20% of the population lives below the official poverty level.
"Goulash Communism" has given way to Soup-Kitchen Capitalism. The meat in the dish - the prime cuts of Hungarian industry and the banks - has been devoured by foreign multinationals. But, they were served up to the IMF, the EBRD and World Bank by one-time Stalinists who now watch, like the bloodsuckers they are, as profits drain out of the country and the national debt to the foreign bankers mounts. [[increases]]
They will demand even more sacrifices from the Hungarian workers.
In an epoch of globalised Capitalism, a country like Hungary, so weak and exposed to foreign capital movements and capricious demand for exports, is a crisis waiting to happen.
The working class of Hungary must disabuse itself of the lying promises, made in 1989, of lasting prosperity and a consumer paradise. A Capitalist Hungary is and will remain, an impoverished semi-colony of the big imperialist powers.
But, there is an alternative and Hungarian workers can discover it in their own past - though not in the Stalinist dictatorship and bureaucratic planning. The parents and grandparents of today's Hungarian workers created a heroic legacy of struggle. Twice - in 1919 and in 1956 - they created a Republic of workers' councils.
To recreate such bodies as fighting organisations for the expropriation of the foreign and Hungarian exploiters, is the first step.
The second, is to create a state of workers' councils running a democratically planned economy. That, is the way to make the country's first post-war Capitalist crisis also its last one.
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CAPITALIST RESTORATION AND THE MARXIST METHOD ...
[[This is the summary for this work.]]
[[Remember, these guys have to discuss Marx. To Socialists and Communists he is the Lawgiver.]]
This article presents a concrete application of a method the LRCI has used, to analyse the process of the restoration of Capitalism, which has been under way in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989.
We started from Trotsky's analysis of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state, and considered all the Eastern European states where Stalinist bureaucracies presided over centrally planned economies - including those with an important degree of "market socialist" decentralisation like Hungary - to be qualitatively the same as the USSR.
After the overthrow, or fragmentation, of the ruling Stalinist bureaucracies, and the dissolution of the central planning apparatus, we characterised these countries as moribund workers' states (MWS).
We defined a MWS as one in which a bourgeois restorationist government had come to power, and actively undertaken the restoration of Capitalism; but where this restoration process had not yet succeeded in "crossing the Rubicon", into an economy dominated by the operation of the law of value. The institutions of command planning were dismantled in this phase, together with the removal of Stalinist control over the apparatus of state repression. In the sphere of trade and commerce, the law of value triumphed, and a Capitalist sector of production began to grow.
The countries of Central Europe and the Baltic states passed into this stage in 1989-90. In the Commonwealth of Independent States this occurred later, in 1991-92. In some Balkan countries, the MWS-process started even later -- due to the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina -- and was halted several times. In Serbia and Montenegro bourgeois-restorationist governments have not yet been established: the rump Yugoslav republic remains a degenerate workers' state in which (like China and Cuba) the Stalinist bureaucracy is taking steps towards Capitalist restoration, while retaining a monopoly of political power.
By the beginning of 1997, Capitalism had been restored in certain parts of Eastern Europe: in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and the Baltic states. There, the social system is now one which we describe as Newly Restored Capitalism (NRC).
We have identified two phases within this transitional stage. Poland and Hungary have already entered the second phase of restoration, in which they have shown themselves to possess not only a mainly profit-making industrial sector, but an independent and dominant financial sector.
The Czech Republic displays certain defects or structural weaknesses, which remain in the application of the law of value to the whole circuit of capital. The finance sector remains partially under state control, with the result that profit-maximising behaviour is circumscribed by political considerations.
While there is a high level of product markets, at this stage there are few market institutions to mediate between enterprises and between industry and finance capital. There are relatively few bankruptcies due to the lack of creditor incentives, with the result that capital is frozen in non-performing assets. Finally, residual state ownership of banks and/or investment funds prevents effective commercially based lending from taking place.
We can expect a situation in which actual production is already governed by the law of value, whereas the investment process is still distorted, as indeed it is in other Capitalist states in extreme situations. The lack of an autonomous finance sector is an important defect, that will not allow such a system to develop beyond a certain stage. It is a deformation of Capitalism, but one that is not absolutely unique in the history of Capitalism.
In Eastern Europe, after the war, the first waves of nationalisation took place before the establishment of degenerated workers' states in 1948-51. The most important banks were statified before 1948. [[State-ified. Taken over by the State.]] In many cases, the state industries were often privileged in relation to private firms, because the labour movement (and to be sure, the Soviet Armed Forces) was in a position to put enormous pressure on the governments. This means that the point of departure for the emerging degenerate workers' states was the existence of already “deformed bourgeois states”. Rewinding the film backwards is likely to produce similarly deformed bourgeois states.
[[Note the part about Soviet Armed Forces putting enormous pressure on governments. Just what will the SQLD Armed Forces do to governments? Why do you think they want a Queer Armed Forces?
Put an already worthless and gutless and ultimately corrupted herd of turds, pretending to be a government, under the heel of a hoarde of Killer Queers pretending to be an Armed Force – and what will you get?]]
Naturally, the starting point, the institutional framework and the tempo of the transition has varied enormously in all these countries. It is impossible to describe any one of them as "typical".
Nevertheless, Hungary has gone further faster than the others. It started the process earlier, met less institutional resistance from the working class along the way; and adopted forms of ownership of capital that have allowed the new bourgeoisie to impose the law of value more completely and sooner, over decisive sectors of industry and finance. As the furthest country along the road it shows the others important features of their future.
Although qualitatively Capitalist, the system of NRC is quite different in appearance from modern Capitalism in its western form. The share of state ownership in industry (often over 30%) remains higher in most restorationist states than in the most "state capitalist" countries in Europe (e.g. Austria, and Sweden where there is a still a large state sector). State responsibility for big loss-making enterprises far exceeds what is usual in the OECD countries. Labour markets remain distorted and "rigid", in important ways unpalatable to the Capitalists.
In these respects NRC combines features of Capitalism in its infancy, and in its senility. Similar degrees of state ownership can be found in the poorest third World countries, and in war-oriented or crisis-wracked Imperialist countries. NRC represents a particular combination of "modified" Capitalism - not as it emerges from pre-capitalism, but from a failed post-capitalist social transformation.
Footnotes.
1. - "Survey of Hungary" Financial Times, 16 December 1996.
2. - Here we use the term transition process to mean the series of measures enacted since 1990 under the post-Stalinist governments, during and beyond the stage of a moribund workers' state. This is to distinguish it from the broader "restoration process" which predates 1989 and of which the Stalinist bureaucracy was the chief agent.
3. - See Workers' Power and the Irish Workers Group, The Degenerated Revolution London, 1982
4. - See "Plan Versus Market", Trotskyist Bulletin No. 9, London 1996
5. - European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), Transition Report London, 1997, p91
6. - For a full discussion see E Szalai, "Political and Social Conflicts Arising from the Transformation of Property Relations in Hungary", in Journal of Transition, June 1994 pp56-77
7. - The Economist noted that even before the Stalinists ceded power Hungary's "laws [were] half-way conducive to a market economy." Survey of Hungary", 18 November 1995
8. - Average growth between 1978-87 was 1.8% but in 1989 it was -0.7%. State investment had fallen by 10% in the previous decade and inflation was 15% and rising fast.
9. - Compare this with a figure of 20% for Czechoslovakia in 1988.
10. - E Szalai op cit p59
11. - The law of value is the Marxist term for the process by which Capitalism spontaneously reflects the amount of human labour power embodied in a commodity. See K Marx, Capital Vol. 1, Harmondsworth, 1973
12. - Labour productivity too fell for the first three years of the new government.
13. - C W Gray et al, "Hungary's bankruptcy experience 1992-93" in The World Bank Economic Review Vol 10 No3 11 1996 p442
14. - Transition Report 1997, op cit, p80
15. - Quoted in E Szalai op cit p67
16. - Business Central Europe, June 1997 p13
17. - The reverse is true for the Czech Republic. Here the regime traded off relatively low levels of unemployment against a massive drop in real wages.
18. - C W Gray et al, op cit p443/44
19. - Of the 10,423 state owned shops and small firms in 1990, 9,990 were privatised by June 1994.
20. - "Survey of Hungary", The Economist, op cit.
21. - See "Russia: death agony of a workers' state", Trotskyist International 22 for a discussion.
22. - In the case of enterprise managers they too continue to operate according to other criteria than profitability at the outset, such as revenue or output maximisation; they may also be forced to concede to the interests of their co-owners (i.e.the workers).
23. - Again, this has been the experience in the Czech Republic.
24. - "Privatisation has mainly involved selling companies off to western investors for cash", Financial Times, 16 December 1996. By May 1997 privatisation had raised $5bn for the government.
25. - Transition Report 1997, op cit p91
26. - "Survey of Hungary" , op cit
27. - Foreign-owned companies accounted for 14% of GDP in 1997
28. - Business Central Europe, June 1997 p13
29. - ibid
30. - W Carlin et al, "Enterprise restructuring in the early transition", in Economics of Transition, vol 3 (4) 1995 p449
31. - Transition Report,op cit p91
32. - Hungary is still the only country in Eastern Europe or the CIS to get full marks from the EBRD for its progress on banking reform, which entails "Significant adoption of banking laws and regulations towards BIS standards; well-functioning banking competition and effective prudential supervision; significant term lending to private enterprises; substantial financial deepening." ibid, p16
33. - Hungary had the region's most rapidly developing stock market in 1996-97. Turnover quadrupled in 1996 and market capitalisation more than doubled in the first half of 1997 before the East Asian crash affected Hungary along with all markets. Most investment for industry still comes from issuing shares and foreign owners rather than domestic banks.
34. - This system of regulation has necessitated easily available, consistent and readily understood state enforced rules for effective competition. The government has introduced a regulated market in securities and equities as well as effective registers for property claims.
35. - Business Central Europe, op cit
36. - As a geopolitical counterpart to Hungary's economic trajectory, in November 1997 a referendum delivered 80% backing for Hungary's application to join NATO - i.e. to place the defence of Hungary in the hands of US and EU imperialism.
[[End of Account]]
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[[This third work is from the viewpoint on the Revolution, from the Modern Communists. Specifically, The International Communist League.
These guys have no qualms about declaring their intentions for an October Revolution in America. Which is a lot more possible, than saying that the SQLD want to have a Revolution in America. Which would be like the bubonic plague just wanting to rearrange your body a little bit - to suit it better for the plague.]]
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The 1956 Hungarian Revolution
PART ONE:
[[The original format of this one is thick and dense. I am going to spread it out, so it makes more sense. Nothing will be lost. I am not a God-Damned Censor. You will notice, as we go through this, that these works become increasingly vitriolic towards Capitalism, and anyone who is Capitalistic. That's supposed to be us. It will be interesting to see how the 'Communists' portray the Hungarian Revolution. Especially since, technically, it was carried out against them.
Having seen the 'literature' of the time, which was almost exclusively propaganda from all sides; I can say that what you are reading here is far more sane and rational than were the bursts of Crazed Advertising, and Defamations of Character, that went on during these events themselves.
This dissertation is from the 'New Communists', the Post-Stalinist Communists, the dreamers of a True Trotskyist Communism. As you may have perceived by now – Communism did not merely happen. It was carefully orchestrated and prepared – but not carefully enough – and when it took off it was more like a chaotic explosion, than an orderly march towards a mutual destiny.
Quite frankly, the History of the Communism is absolutely "Fascinating." – as Mr. Spock would say. It exists as such a dynamic and fantastic 'Operatic Presentation' of all of the Goods and Evils of Civilization, that it is hard to find a more revealing and telling demonstration of the failures and possibilities of the Human Species anywhere. It is as though the entire Epic Spectacle was staged just for us; to evaluate and criticize and ridicule.
And, with that we come to a key point in our own History. We, of today, are the Audience to all of this. We are the Readers. We are the Students. We are the Final Chapter. If we just condemn and rebuke the participants in this Awesome Drama, and we fail to learn what must be understood, from such a Tremendous Landscape of teachings, and tragedies, and temptations and traumas – then it was all for nothing.
Without our understanding, and benefiting from, the lessons learned here – it was all just a worthless Slaughterhouse of the Insane.
It is for us – to make Sanity of it all.]]
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[[Account begins]]
This past October 23, marked the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The anniversary was celebrated internationally by bourgeois politicians and ideologues, who cynically portrayed the uprising as a precursor to the counter-revolutions that restored Capitalist rule in East Europe, and the Soviet Union in 1989-1992. Four months earlier, George W. Bush visited Budapest and laid flowers in honor of "the Hungarian patriots who tore down the statue of Josef Stalin and defied an empire."
Commemorations of the uprising were held in Budapest by the government of former-Communist, now-millionaire, Ferenc Gyurcsany; as well as by anti-government protesters, including a hefty contingent of fascist skinheads.
The depiction of the 1956 events as an anti-Communist, pro-Capitalist rebellion, which has been propagated by reactionary forces for the past half-century, is an outright lie. The Hungarian Uprising was an attempt by the working class (in a country where Capitalism had been overthrown, but political power was in the hands of a Stalinist bureaucracy), to throw off bureaucratic rule and open the road to Socialism. Workers seized the factories and mines and set up elected workers' councils (called Soviets), which were embryonic organs of proletarian political power. For weeks the workers fought courageously - by means of strikes, demonstrations and armed struggle - before this political revolution was suppressed.
The cynical misappropriation, by Capitalist spokesmen, of the uprising was skewered in a 1957 document by Shane Mage, a founder of our political tendency [[group]]:
"What a cruel, cynical joke of history this seems to be! The Hungarian Revolution is hailed lyrically by the rulers of the 'West'; the worst enemies of Socialism and of the Russian Revolution. The (same) men who surrounded the infant Soviet Republic with a 'cordon sanitaire' of steel and fire; who hailed Hitler and Mussolini as bulwarks against Bolshevism; who stood by with smiling 'neutrality' while Franco murdered freedom in Spain; whose hands are still stained by the crimes of Algeria, Suez, and Guatemala. The 'Free' World gleefully hands its poisoned bouquets to the freedom fighters of Hungary."
From "The Meaning of Two Revolutions" (reprinted in the 1959 Young Socialist Forum pamphlet, The Hungarian Revolution)
Bourgeois ideologues, [[eager to claim evidence for their assertions]] focus on isolated expressions of anti-Communism; such as some lumpen gangs calling themselves "freedom fighters", or arch-reactionary Cardinal József Mindszenty addressing the insurgents by radio. (Following the suppression of the revolt, Mindszenty spent the next 15 years holed up in the U.S. Embassy in Budapest.)
[[Which is better than being in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for fifteen years. Or, having to watch Maggots' TV for fifteen years.]]
This [[the Capitalist propaganda]], is a fundamental distortion; one that was also disseminated by Stalinist spokesmen to justify the brutal repression of the workers. As we stated in "Political Revolution in Hungary, Ten Years After" ((Spartacist [English language edition] No. 8, November-December 1966)), the slander that the Hungarian masses embraced fascists and monarchist reactionaries:
"was demolished, not only by the actions of the revolutionaries (including the violent suppression of what anti-Semitic and White Guard threats actually existed) - but also by the workers' militantly Communist aspirations and their unambiguous hatred for Capitalism."
The Hungarian working class was overwhelmingly committed to Socialism, and opposed to a return to Capitalism. In all of the workers' councils, and other proletarian bodies that arose in 1956, Communist Party members were elected to positions of leadership.
Ferenc Töke, a vice-president of the Central Workers' Council of Greater Budapest, later recalled:
"No reactionary tendency manifested itself throughout the entire strike. There was never, at any moment, a question of the former owners eventually returning" (Jean-Jacques Marie and Balazs Nagy [eds.], Pologne-Hongrie 1956 [1966]).
The Central Workers' Council of Budapest declared in a 27 November 1956 appeal to workers' councils throughout the country:
"Faithful to this mission, we defend, even at the cost of our lives, our factories and our fatherland against any attempt to restore Capitalism."
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution, was in fact a powerful confirmation of the Trotskyist understanding of the nature of the deformed and 'degenerated workers' states'. [[the classic Trotsky term]]
In the Soviet Union and East Europe before the restoration of Capitalism - as in China, North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam today - Capitalist rule was overthrown as a result of Social Revolutions. But, political power was/is monopolized by a conservative, anti-working-class bureaucracy.
The Hungarian Revolution, decisively demonstrated that the Stalinist regime represents a 'caste' [[as in 'specialized elite']] which parasitically rested upon the collectivized economy. They were not a new type of social class. Unlike the Capitalist ruling class, which in the face of Revolution inevitably unites around a program of counter-revolution, the Stalinist bureaucracy in Hungary shattered, with large sections going over to the side of the workers.
[[Note the part about the Capitalist Ruling Class (aka Establishments) uniting around a program of counter-revolution. Which is exactly why the so-called Homosexuals are infesting both the Democrats and the Republicans. The Revolution, is against them and their SQLD Masters.]]
These events caused a profound crisis in the Communist parties internationally. In Italy, the Communist Party lost some 200,000 of its members. The French Communist Party, already facing discontent over its support to the Socialist-led government (as it pursued the Algerian War), saw its share of the electorate plunge. In Britain, the Communist Party lost a third of its membership.
More than 200 CP members and ex-members, including a number of talented intellectuals, were won over by the British Trotskyist group, led by Gerry Healy. These former CPers included Brian Pearce, Cliff Slaughter, Tom Kemp and Peter Fryer, the correspondent in Hungary for the Communist Party's Daily Worker; whose first-hand observations of the events were recounted in his 1956 book, Hungarian Tragedy (see article, page 9).
With the formation of workers' soviets [[workers' groups]], Hungary entered into a period of incipient dual power; in which local workers' councils, defended by the armed masses, confronted what remained of the Stalinist repressive apparatus, which was backed by Soviet troops. Mage noted:
"The first and decisive thing about the Hungarian Revolution is that it was a workers' revolution, and the leading role of the workers was institutionally formulated by the establishment of workers' councils. Except for the Russian Army, there was in Hungary not the shadow of a social force capable of preventing the assumption of state power by the workers' councils. Thus the objective conditions for the formation of a Soviet Republic, in the event of revolutionary victory of course, were entirely favorable."
[[That is, Soviet Republic. Not, Soviet Union.]]
"The actual level of consciousness of the Hungarian workers, however, was not at the level indicated by the objective possibilities of the Revolution. In this, the Hungarian workers were like the Russian proletariat after the February Revolution. The general demand was not for all power to the workers' councils, but for 'free elections' to a sovereign parliament."
"It would, however, be a disastrous mistake to take the level of consciousness, corresponding to the struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy, as the permanent and ultimate political program of the Hungarian proletariat. The Hungarian workers wanted 'free elections', but they also wanted to preserve their own councils and extend their powers. They wanted to move forward to Socialism, not backward to Capitalism."
From "The YSL Right Wing and the Crisis of World Stalinism,"
The Hungarian Revolution; excerpted as "Pure Democracy or Political Revolution in East Europe". That was in the Spartacist pamphlet, Solidarnosc: Polish Company Union for CIA and Bankers (1981)The Birth of the Hungarian Deformed Workers State.
To understand the 1956 Hungarian Revolution requires examining the Russian Revolution of 1917 - the only successful Revolution as yet carried out by the working class - as well as its later degeneration under the Stalinist bureaucracy.
In the October Revolution of 1917, the proletariat, led by Lenin's Bolshevik Party, took state power, basing its rule on the soviets [[groups]] of workers, soldiers and peasants deputies.
[[Hence the term – 'Soviet Union' – or 'Union of Groups'.]]
The young workers' state nationalized the land, and went on to expropriate Capitalist property. The Bolsheviks understood their Revolution as the first step of the World Socialist Revolution, and founded the Third (Communist) International in 1919.
However, the immaturity and indecisiveness of Revolutionary Leadership outside Russia led to a failure to realize opportunities for proletarian Revolution. For example, a proletarian Revolution was defeated in Germany in 1918-19, and short-lived soviet republics were crushed in Bavaria and Hungary in 1919. The decisive defeat was the failure of the German Communist Party to consummate a Socialist Revolution in 1923.
The economically backward soviet workers' state (suffering under the devastation wrought by World War I and compounded by the bloody 1918-20 Civil War against imperialist-backed counter-revolution), was left isolated in the face of imperialist encirclement and a general stabilization of the World Capitalist order. Together with the decimation of the most conscious layer of the proletariat during the Civil War [[the most educated]], these factors set the stage for a political counter-revolution.
While the social foundations of the workers' state remained intact -- above all the expropriation of the Capitalist class and the establishment of a collectivized economy -- by 1924 political power was transferred from the hands of the proletariat, and its revolutionary vanguard, into the hands of a conservative bureaucratic caste headed by Stalin. From that point on, the people who ruled the USSR (the way the USSR was ruled), and the purposes for which the USSR was ruled, all changed.
Under the false dogma of "Socialism in one country," proclaimed by Stalin in December 1924, the bureaucracy accommodated the imperialist order. Correspondingly, the Comintern became transformed over time into an instrument of the bureaucracy's search for "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism. With the elaboration of the "Popular Front" line at the Comintern's Seventh (and last) Congress in 1935, the Stalinists explicitly and officially embraced the program of class collaboration with the "democratic" imperialist bourgeoisies.
Leading the fight against the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party, Leon Trotsky's 'Left Opposition' upheld the revolutionary-internationalist program of the October Revolution. In 1938, Trotsky and his co-thinkers founded the Fourth International.
Central to its program was the unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers' state against imperialism and Capitalist Counter-revolution, and the call for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy, and to restore working-class political power. Such a political revolution would be premised on defense of the socialized property forms. This is in contrast to social revolutions or counter-revolutions, which overturn existing property relations and place a different class in power.
[[The whole thing sounds like a constant ongoing battle over 'Property Rights', but it is far more complicated and sinister than that.]]
The Trotskyist analysis of Stalinism is key to understanding the creation and subsequent development of the bureaucratically deformed workers' states of East Europe.
[[This statement tells it all. The Real Socialists (Trotsky Communists) consider any Workers' State that is not run by the Workers, but is instead run by Bureaucrats, as 'Deformed' and doomed to a return to Capitalism, because all Bureaucrats are greedy and vicious scum.]]
In the closing months of World War II, in Hungary as throughout much of East Europe, large sections of society welcomed the Soviet Red Army as liberators from the nightmare of Nazi occupation, and supported the ensuing destruction of the old bourgeois order. Class-conscious workers hated the right-wing dictatorship of Admiral Miklós Horthy, who ruled Hungary during the interwar period and much of World War II. Impoverished agrarian laborers settled huge scores with the landlords in this land of feudal-derived estates.
Initially, the remnants of the bourgeoisies of Soviet-occupied East Europe, which had been discredited and shattered by the war, were not expropriated, either politically or economically. In Hungary, elections in 1945 gave a majority, in what was then a largely peasant country, to the bourgeois-clericalist Smallholders Party, which was allowed to form a coalition government with the social democrats and Stalinists. But, as elsewhere in East Europe, it was the Red Army that held the real power.
[[It was a huge mistake to include the Stalinists. Just as today, in America, it is a huge mistake to include the Homosexual/Democrats in anything!]]
Under the growing pressure of the anti-Soviet Cold War, the Stalinists in 1947-48 proceeded to expropriate the bourgeoisie in Hungary and elsewhere in East Europe, jettisoning their bourgeois coalition partners, nationalizing industry and establishing deformed workers' states, that is, societies qualitatively similar to the Soviet Union under the Stalinist bureaucracy.
-----
PRELUDE TO POLITICAL REVOLUTION ...
The 1945-48 period of the so-called "People's Independence Front" government had a significant effect on the attitudes of the Hungarian working masses. Many would later view that period favorably in comparison to the harsh Stalinist police state that came afterward; although virtually no one wanted a return of the Capitalists and large landowners. The 1945-48 interregnum also created certain left-right tensions among the Stalinists themselves. An incipient left opposition, impatient with the slow pace of social transformation, crystallized around Minister of the Interior Laszlo Rajk, a hero in the eyes of many for having fought in the Spanish Civil War, and for having been a leader of the Communist underground under the Horthy dictatorship.
At Moscow's behest, the Hungarian regime adopted a one-sided economic policy concentrated on heavy industry. This served to drive down living standards, further fueling proletarian discontent.
The fact that with the exception of Tito's Yugoslavia, the East European Stalinist regimes were imposed from without [[and not from within]] meant that they had shallower roots than in the Soviet Union. This rendered the social order in the East European deformed workers' states relatively volatile and unstable.
[[Certainly like America is unstable today, because a pack of perverts over in 'Wash This Death City', think they can force all of us to be as queer and demented as they are.]]
Facing social discontent, the East European bureaucracies began to split into Moscow loyalists, and national-liberal Stalinists more attuned to popular moods. In 1949 Tito's Yugoslavia broke from the Kremlin. With its "workers' self-management," Titoism presented itself as a more democratic and authentic form of Socialism than Stalin's Russia. Among East European Communist oppositionists, there was a tendency to idealize the Yugoslav "road to Socialism" on the one hand, and Western bourgeois democracy on the other. Fearing further splits, Stalin went into a murderous frenzy, seeking to eliminate any potential Titos elsewhere. The Polish party leader Wladyslaw Gomulka was imprisoned and placed under house arrest. Rajk in Hungary and Rudolf Slánský in Czechoslovakia were subjected to show trials, and then executed.
Following Stalin's death in March 1953, the Kremlin bureaucracy and its counterparts in East Europe embarked on a policy that has been referred to as "de-Stalinization." Moves in the direction of liberalization throughout East Europe had the effect of simultaneously opening up possibilities for mass struggle, while reinforcing illusions that, under the pressure of the masses, the Stalinist bureaucracy could carry out self-reform and become an instrument for building Socialism.
On 17 June 1953, the first incipient proletarian political revolution in the deformed workers' states broke out in East Germany. Both the Stalinist regimes, and West Germany's Capitalist rulers, portrayed the uprising as pro-Western. But, this was a lie.
Workers from the East German Hennigsdorf steel works marched through West Berlin and back to the East demanding a metal workers' government. June 17 powerfully demonstrated the potential for a slogan, later adopted by the international Spartacist tendency (now the International Communist League). A tendency for the revolutionary reunification of Germany through political revolution in the East and Socialist Revolution in the West. (For more on the 1953 events, see "The East German Workers Uprising of 17 June 1953," WV No. 332, 17 June 1983.)
[[So what was the slogan?]]
The post-1953 crisis of "de-Stalinization" had a particular impact on Hungary. Of all the Stalinist regimes in East Europe, that of Matyas Rakosi was unquestionably the bloodiest. More Communists were killed under Rakosi than under Horthy. Rakosi's widely despised political police, the AVH (a multitude of highly paid thugs), constituted fully 1 percent of the entire population of Budapest.
In 1953, to head off the pressures building up in Hungary, the Soviet leadership forced Rakosi to step down as prime minister. He was replaced by Imre Nagy, who had a reputation as a liberal Communist. Nagy proclaimed a "New Course" that included easing the pace of industrialization, lessening pressures on the peasantry and relaxing police terror.
However, Rakosi, fearing the vengeance of his political opponents, hung onto power and by 1955 managed to oust Nagy. Thus, between 1953 and 1956 the Hungarian Stalinist regime was torn by a severe polarization between the Rakosi clique, and the mass of Communist Party members who supported Nagy.
One sign of the ferment in the Communist Party was the emergence of the Petofi Circle, a grouping of dissident intellectuals and others that provided a forum for public debate, and became a hub of opposition to the Rakosi hardliners.
In February 1956, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev gave a "secret" speech to the Soviet Communist Party's 20th Congress, in which he acknowledged a number of Stalin's crimes. Four months later, locomotive workers in Poland demonstrating for higher wages and lower prices attacked the city hall, radio station and prison in Poznan. Security forces fired on them, killing over 50 workers. Poland entered into an incipient proletarian political revolution, which was headed off at the last minute by Gomulka's restoration to power. Subsequently, Khrushchev and his Kremlin colleagues did not move against Gomulka, in large part because in factories throughout the country workers' councils organized Resistance to any attempt to overturn the "Polish October."
Gomulka granted sweeping concessions, such as wage increases. But once the crisis was defused, he disbanded the workers' councils that had helped bring him to power.
Meanwhile in Hungary, 200,000 people turned out in early October for a ceremony marking the regime's "rehabilitation" of Laszlo Rajk. The mass turnout foreshadowed the revolutionary explosion later that month.
[[Literally, in those days in that regime, as in the future plans of the Democrat/Homosexual regime here, to be 'rehabilitated' into a Good Communist (or a Good Queer) meant execution and a 'Rehabilitation Funeral'.]]
-----
THE HUNGARIAN OCTOBER ...
The Hungarian Revolution, whose events were broadcast on radio and television internationally, was one of the best-documented revolutions ever. It began on October 23 with a largely student demonstration solidarizing with the victory of Gomulka in Poland, and calling for the reinstatement of Nagy as head of the Hungarian government. The Rakosi regime denounced the protest as a counter-revolutionary mobilization, and when the unarmed demonstrators marched to the radio station to protest, the AVH goons fired on them.
Hungary then exploded in a near-universal general strike, combined with military resistance to the regime. While the initial agitation was student-based, once the fighting started the core of the insurgency in Budapest and the other main centers was the workers' councils and workers' militias.
Writing about the emergence of the workers' soviets [[groups]], Peter Fryer observed in Hungarian Tragedy:
[[I have re-punctuated this one, but it is still somewhat garbled because when Ideologists write for their own kind, they assume that all kinds of shorthand and mutual idioms can be used.]]
*"In their spontaneous origin, in their composition, in their sense of responsibility, in their efficient organisation of food supplies and of civil order;
* in the restraint they exercised over the wilder elements among the youth, in the wisdom with which so many of them handled the problem of Soviet troops;
* and, not least, in their striking resemblance (at so many points) to the soviets or councils of workers', peasants' and soldiers' deputies which sprang up in Russia in the 1905 Revolution and again in February 1917;
*these committees, a network of which now extended over the whole of Hungary, were remarkably uniform. They were at once organs of insurrection (the coming together of delegates elected by factories and universities, mines and Army units) and organs of popular self-government, which the armed people trusted.
*As such they enjoyed tremendous authority, and it is no exaggeration to say that until the Soviet attack of November 4 the real power in the country lay in their hands."
Even a 1957 "Report of the Special Committee on the Problem of Hungary" by the United Nations, whose role is to provide a fig leaf for imperialist depredation, noted that the emergence of workers' councils "represented the first practical step to restore order, and to reorganize the Hungarian economy on a Socialist basis; but without rigid Party control or the apparatus of terror."
The Hungarian Army immediately ceased to be an effective force. Some sections went over to the insurgents; many soldiers turned their weapons over to the workers' militias. Militarily, the turning point of the Revolution was the attempt by the Soviet Army to capture the Kilian barracks, the main stronghold of the Hungarian Army within Budapest. The commander of the barracks, Colonel Pal Maleter, a veteran Communist, went over to the Revolution and led the forces that repulsed the Soviet attack.
Following the subsequent Soviet withdrawal from Budapest, the embryo of an effective revolutionary authority was seen in the newly established National Guard under Maleter's command, although its authority remained largely limited to the capital. In many press interviews, Maleter insisted that he was a good Communist and would remain so. Maleter's comments in one such interview are recounted in Hungary 1956 (1976) by Bill Lomax:
“If we get rid of the Russians don't think we're going back to the old days. And, if there's people who do want to go back, we'll see!” To emphasize the last remark, he reached for his revolver holster and repeated, “We don't mean to go back to Capitalism. We want Socialism in Hungary.”
Despite attempts to portray the uprising as dominated by anti-Russian nationalism, what stands out is the degree to which the insurgents attempted to fraternize with the Soviet soldiers, and the degree to which they were successful. The workers' and students' Council of Miskolc published leaflets in Russian for the Red Army soldiers declaring: "Our interests are identical. We and you are all fighting together for a better Socialist life." On October 28, the Hungarian trade-union newspaper Népszava called for the right of asylum for Soviet soldiers who sided with the workers (François Manuel, La Revolution Hongroise des Conseils Ouvriers [1976]).
There were innumerable cases in which Soviet soldiers refused to fight or sided with the insurgents. In his autobiographical work 'In the Name of the Working Class' (1986), Sandor Kopacsi, the Budapest police chief who went over to the insurgents, described a scene that occurred on October 25 when Soviet tanks encountered a crowd of demonstrators:
"A boy, undoubtedly a student, the scene took place just below us - pushed his way through the crowd to the first tank and passed something through the loophole.
"It wasn't a grenade but a sheet of paper. It was followed by others.
"These sheets, many of which my men would later collect, were tracts in Russian, composed by students in the faculty of oriental languages. They reminded the Soviet soldiers of the wishes of the Hungarian nation, and of the unfortunate role of policemen in which they had been cast. The tracts started with a citation from Marx: [[of course]] 'A people that oppresses another cannot itself be free.'
"We counted the minutes. Nothing happened.
"Then the top of the turret of the lead tank opened a little, and the commander, with his leather cap and the gold epaulettes, emerged slowly into the view of the apparently unarmed crowd. Then he flung the turret open and perched himself upon the top of his tank….
"The crowd erupted in a frantic ovation. In this jubilant atmosphere, the commander's cap was thrown into the middle of the crowd. In exchange, someone plunked a Hungarian Army kepi on his head. The crowd sang 'Kossuth's Song', and then the Hungarian national anthem. And, at the top of their voices, they cried: 'Long live the Soviet Army!'"
Moments later, Kopacsi received a report from one of his police officers: "The AVO [AVH] is firing from every roof. Now the Soviet tanks are firing on the AVO! They're defending the crowd."
Though the Stalinist apparatus had disintegrated, a short-lived government was cobbled together under Nagy. On October 28, the Nagy government announced an agreement that Soviet troops would immediately leave Budapest. Indeed, one of the reasons that the Kremlin pulled troops out of Budapest was fear of the effect of fraternization with the insurgent Hungarian masses. But, the Kremlin quickly reneged on the agreement. And on November 1, Nagy protested to Soviet Ambassador Yuri Andropov (who would become head of the Soviet Union in the early 1980s) against the entry of new Soviet troops into Hungary without his government's assent.
The new troops were not only lied to about what was happening; they were lied to about where they were being sent. A leader of the insurgents in a village in eastern Hungary recalled his encounter with the troops (Melvin J. Lasky, ed., The Hungarian Revolution [1957]):
"Some of the Russians thought they were in East Germany, and that they would soon meet American 'fascists' who had invaded the country. Other troops thought they were in the Suez Canal zone." (The Suez Canal had just been nationalized by Nasser's Egypt, which was then attacked by British, French and Israeli forces.)
At dawn on November 4, Soviet troops attacked Budapest. Despite stiff resistance, the insurrection was soon crushed. Nevertheless, the general strike continued well into December-the longest nationwide general strike in history. In this way, the proletarian centrality of the uprising was even more evident in its aftermath than during the anarchic period of the Revolution itself.
-----
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HUNGARY 1956
During his brief tenure, Nagy moved steadily to the right. He brought into his government bourgeois politicians from the "People's Independence Front" period. Nagy also declared Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, and appealed to the United Nations to defend Hungarian neutrality. The logic of Nagy's policies, had they succeeded in running their course, was to strangle the Revolution and enormously strengthen the forces of Capitalist Counter-revolution. However, Nagy, who spent his greatest efforts trying to get the workers to lay down their arms, utterly lacked control over events. While the revolutionary workers had their fair share of political confusion, their representative organs were in practice counterposed not only to the old hardline Stalinist butchers like Rakosi, but to the Nagy regime as well.
In the industrial city of Miskolc, one of the main centers of the Revolution, the workers' council sent a delegation to Nagy demanding that a new government be formed based on the existing workers' councils, not through elections to a new parliament. The Budapest Parliament of Workers Councils adopted, as its first programmatic principles, that "the factory belongs to the workers" and that "the supreme controlling body of the factory is the Workers' Council" (see Lomax, Hungary 1956). While that statement did not express the Marxist program for central economic planning combined with genuine soviet democracy, it was nevertheless incompatible with a Capitalist order and bourgeois parliamentarism.
[[This gets down to a core difference between Real Socialism and Capitalism. Namely, where is the economic planning and control done? Centrally, by the Workers, with no Bureaucrats in sight -- or Decentralized and by the Bureaucrats, with the Workers as Commodities?]]
On the available evidence, the Hungarian workers looked toward an idealized version of Titoist Yugoslavia. Tito, however, along with Mao Zedong, supported the crushing of the 1956 Revolution. Tito and Mao were quite aware of the ramifications for their own bureaucratic regimes if the Hungarian workers succeeded in taking and securing political power. Nagy had taken refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy in Budapest on November 4. But, despite an agreement for safe passage out, Nagy was arrested by Soviet forces later that month. He was eventually handed over to the Hungarian Stalinist regime under János Kádár, which executed Nagy as well as Maleter and other leaders of the Revolution in 1958.
The repression directed at the workers, however, was relatively mild. The Kádár government announced in early November that it "will not tolerate the persecution of workers on any pretext, for having taken part in recent events." But Kádár was not in control of events, and Soviet troops conducted searches for those suspected of having participated in the uprising. For the most part, the Kádár regime attempted to piece off the population by raising consumption levels under a policy that came to be known as "Goulash Communism."
[[Lesson-both the SQLD and the 'Moderates' will try this tactic of enticing different parts and pieces of the Human Species to defect, and join them as 'elite' and 'prized' allies.]]
[[To be hanged later -- per schedule.]]
What was lacking above all in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, was a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party rooted in the working class. Such a party would have had the task of winning the workers to a program of transforming the soviets [[groups]] from being organs of insurrection, to becoming the sole basis for political power in the workers' state.
It would have fought to extend the struggle for political revolution to neighboring East European countries and crucially to the Soviet Union, linking these efforts with the fight for Socialist Revolution in the Capitalist countries. This would have required politically combatting the views of Maleter, Kopacsi and others whose outlook at the time remained within the framework of Stalinist nationalism and "peaceful coexistence" with the imperialist World order.
[[Thus -- to the Real Socialist who belong to the Real Communist Party, and can never explain clearly which one they really are -- any of the leaders of the Hungarian Revolution who did not completely seek a break from Stalinist Communism (which was just Capitalism in disguise) -- would have to be shot anyway.]]
[[Well -- its better than being in the Goulash!]]
Had even a small Trotskyist propaganda group been able to intervene in this situation, it could have rapidly won an initial base among the tens of thousands of workers and radical intellectuals who saw themselves as authentic Communists. These lessons have profound significance for the remaining deformed workers' states, in particular China, which experienced an incipient political revolution in May-June 1989 and, more recently, a massive growth in defensive struggles by both workers and peasants.
[[This paragraph could have been taken right out of the ACLU Manual on how to queer all governments, and eliminate the Human Species. A copy of which I still have.]]
What Leon Trotsky foresaw, in outlining the course that a political revolution would take in the Soviet degenerated workers' states, was amply confirmed by the 1956 events in Hungary:
"When the proletariat springs into action, the Stalinist apparatus will remain suspended in midair. Should it still attempt to resist, it will then be necessary to apply against it not the measures of civil war but rather the measures of a police character….
"A real civil war could develop, not between the Stalinist bureaucracy and the resurgent proletariat, but between the proletariat and the active forces of the counter-revolution…. The victory of the revolutionary camp, in any case, is conceivable only under the leadership of a proletarian party, which would naturally be raised to power by victory over the counter-revolution."
-"The Class Nature of the Soviet State" (October 1933)
[[I am sure that any 'Collared and Leashed' Capitalist Intellectual will smear and defame Trotsky across the board, but Trotsky knew his Turf and his Intellectual Territory. What he predicted and explained about his Mental Ground was usually proven correct, with pools of spilled blood.]]
--------------------
PART TWO:
As we noted last issue, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution had an enormous impact on the left internationally. It touched off a deep crisis in many Stalinist parties, and had a major impact on Trotskyist organizations.
In the U.S., the Hungarian events led to the consolidation of a left opposition in Max Shachtman's Independent Socialist League (ISL) and its youth group, the Young Socialist League (YSL). The Shachtman tendency had broken from Trotskyism in 1940, refusing to defend the Soviet Union in World War II, and developing the position that Stalin's Russia was a new exploitative form of class society, "bureaucratic collectivism." Following their break with Trotskyism, the Shachtmanites pursued an uneven 18-year-long course to full-blown social democracy, culminating in their liquidation into Norman Thomas' Socialist Party in 1958.
In response to the prevailing pressures of the anti-Soviet Cold War, Shachtman's group, which became the ISL in 1949, moved to the right throughout the 1950s. Though still claiming to be orthodox Leninists, the Shachtmanites' program in 1956 for Hungary (for a sovereign parliament based on free elections), amounted to a call for a Capitalist Counter-revolution in the guise of "democracy."
Had this program been carried out in largely peasant Hungary, it might well have given an electoral majority to the bourgeois-clericalist Smallholders Party. This openly counter-revolutionary line was an important step in the Shachtmanites' liquidation into official American social democracy. A few years later, Shachtman himself supported President John F. Kennedy's Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
[[In the world of Communism, that was a really bad thing to do.]]
A left opposition led by Tim Wohlforth, Shane Mage and James Robertson resisted the ISL/YSL's capitulation to social democracy. In the course of this effort, these Left Shachtmanites recognized that the events of the Hungarian Revolution affirmed Trotsky's position, that the Stalinist bureaucracy was a parasitic caste -- as against Shachtman's "new class" theory (see "The Bankruptcy of 'New Class' Theories-Tony Cliff and Max Shachtman: Pro-Imperialist Accomplices of Counter-revolution," Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 55, Autumn 1999).
Having transcended Left Shachtmanism, these youth [[the YSL?]] fused with the then Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1958. An important section of the founding cadres of the SWP youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), they found themselves again in a rapidly rightward-moving party. Robertson and Mage (the latter of whom subsequently abandoned Marxism) were among those comrades who emerged as the SWP's left opposition, forming the Revolutionary Tendency (RT).
[[Yes -- it was a game of Musical Chairs. A kind of sorting out process, that was the result of so many conflicting Opinions. Apparently, none of them had any Hard Truth to benefit from.
Providing you Humans with Hard Truth, is what I am all about -- so such wastes of time and confusion do not happen to you.]]
[[This part is about what happened internally to the world of the Socialists and Communists in America and Poland, as the result of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. It is of interest, if you care about how things break apart and develope into other things.
If this does not interest you, please proceed to the heading called 'The Dead End Of Stalinism'.]]
[[You are not supposed to be reading this anyway. The creatures on the Satan Tube, that want to own your brains, will not like it.]]
Beginning in December 1963, Robertson, Mage and other RTers were bureaucratically expelled from the SWP. This grouping was the embryo of what became the Spartacist League, which was founded in 1966. (Wohlforth, acting as a tool for Gerry Healy, head of the Socialist Labour League in Britain, provoked an unprincipled split in the RT in 1962; and went on to serve as Healy's toady, as head of the Workers League.
Wohlforth more recently emerged as an abject apologist for U.S. Imperialism, calling in 1993 for American intervention in Bosnia under the headline "Give War a Chance" [In These Times, 26 July 1993].)
Another consequence of the impact of the Hungarian Revolution, on the left in the U.S., was the formation of a pro-Stalinist faction, led by Sam Marcy, in the SWP. The Marcy group, forerunners of the Workers World Party (WWP), provided a sophisticated apology for the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. Unlike Stalinist hacks, such as the Communist Party's Herbert Aptheker, whose book 'The Truth About Hungary' portrayed the beginning of the Revolution as the work of counter-revolutionaries organized by Washington -- the Marcyites did not attempt to prove that the revolt was some deep-laid imperialist plot.
The main Marcyite document, V. Grey's "The Class Character of the Hungarian Uprising" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 18, No. 1, January 1957), begins:
"On October 23 the students and workers of Budapest demonstrated for a liberalization of the totalitarian Stalinist regime. Contrary to their own desires, the demonstration was swiftly converted into a full-scale, nation-wide counter-revolution throughout Hungary".
If the workers and intellectuals in the decisive battleground of the uprising were against a counter-revolution, then how did such a "conversion" come about? Grey argued that the workers, lacking a Revolutionary Party, had no understanding of the need to defend the gains of the deformed workers' state:
"The only consciousness was for 'freedom'. But, freedom from what? Freedom to do what? Their first duty was to keep the proletarian dictatorship. Apparently, nobody understood this."
The Marcyites' position boils down to the idea that, in the absence of a pre-existing Trotskyist leadership, the workers would inevitably accept the restoration of Capitalism. In 1989, the WWP applied the same stance toward the Tiananmen events in China, denouncing this incipient proletarian political revolution as counter-revolutionary and acting as abject apologists for the Stalinist misrulers.
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POLISH SOLIDARNOSC AND THE LESSONS OF HUNGARY ...
[[Please see the Glossary entry for Solidarnosc. It is very revealing.]]
The central documents by Shane Mage in the factional struggle against the right-wing ISL/YSL majority, were reprinted in the 1959 pamphlet The Hungarian Revolution, published by a forerunner of the YSA. Mage insisted that whether the collapse of Stalinist rule led to a workers' government, or to Capitalist restoration, would be determined by the political consciousness and leadership of the working class; specifically the ability of the workers' movement to overcome and combat parliamentarist illusions and nationalist prejudices. This would be true even where there existed proletarian organs of dual power, as was the case in Hungary in 1956.
The heart of Mage's argument was that "pure democracy" in East Europe (such as a sovereign parliament based on free elections) would likely lead to the victory of pro-Western, petty-bourgeois forces (such as the Hungarian Smallholders) who would, in short order, restore Capitalist rule. Mage further pointed out, that such counter-revolutionary parties need not call for, nor effect, the immediate denationalization of statified industry. Rather they would subordinate the nationalized economy to the interests of the domestic petty bourgeoisie and international capital.
In this, Mage was following Trotsky, who wrote in his November 1937 "Not a Workers' and Not a Bourgeois State?" (Writings 1937-38):
"Should a bourgeois counter-revolution succeed in the USSR, the new government for a lengthy period would have to base itself upon the nationalized economy. But, what does such a type of temporary conflict between the economy and the state mean? It means a Revolution, or a Counter-revolution. The victory of one class over another signifies that it will reconstruct the economy in the interests of the victors."
[[This is a frank statement of the consequences. The Russian Economy was, and usually is, a mess to begin with. Which naturally has most Russians theorizing on how to repair it. From this Tumult of Economic Woes, came the Economic Theories of Communism and Socialism.]]
Mage insisted that such a counter-revolution was not what had occurred in Hungary in October-November 1956. The effective organs of power were the workers' councils, which expressed an, albeit confused, Socialist consciousness.
The material in Mage's pamphlet was a central element in our tendency's [[group's]] understanding of the struggle for proletarian political revolution, and our fight against the forces of "democratic" Capitalist Counter-revolution, in the East European deformed workers' states and the former Soviet Union.
[[Here is a brief explanation of the Polish Revolution, which ousted the Stalinists after the Hungarian Revolution, and how they were different.]]
In Poland in 1980, striking workers lined up behind an opposition dominated by reactionary ultranationalists, Catholic clerics and pro-capitalist social democrats. In 1981, we published a pamphlet, Solidarnos´c´: Polish Company Union for CIA and Bankers, with excerpts from Mage's documents under the title "'Pure Democracy' or Political Revolution in East Europe."
Wielding the upper hand in the Solidarnosc "union" was a constellation of counter-revolutionary forces [[Capitalist]], the likes of which had been a distinctly subordinate element in Hungary in 1956. At its first national congress in September 1981, Solidarnosc consolidated on a program of Capitalist restoration. Behind its call for "free elections" to the Sejm (parliament) stood the program of Capitalist restoration, under the guise of parliamentary government.
In contrast to Hungary 1956, Solidarnosc was able to mobilize significant sections of the working class against the bureaucracy under the banner of right-wing reaction, symbolized by the Polish eagle and the Catholic cross. This was a direct consequence of the political bankruptcy of Stalinism. In Poland in 1956, 1970 and again in 1976, proletarian upheavals were headed off as the bureaucracy each time put forward a new leader who promised a new and better deal. At the same time, the Polish Stalinists strengthened the Catholic church in various ways, including by perpetuating a landowning peasantry. Having been disillusioned three times with "national-liberal" Stalinism, by the late 1970s the Polish working class was susceptible to being organized by clerical-nationalists who answered to the imperialists and the Vatican.
Solidarnosc's counter-revolutionary bid for power was checked in December 1981 by General Jaruzelski's coup, which was strongly backed by Moscow. Virtually the entire non-Stalinist left backed Solidarnosc, from the French Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire and other components of the pseudo-Trotskyist United Secretariat to the U.S. International Socialist Organization, then affiliated with the British Socialist Workers Party of the late Tony Cliff.
[[This is saying that the Polish Group 'Solidarnosc' was a right-wing Capitalist organization, supported by the entire left-wing Anti-Stalinist list of organizations in Poland. When at the same time, we have been educated that the Stalinists were really right-wing Capitalists in disguise, and were in league with the American Capitalists.]]
[[Do you get the impression that someone was playing both ends against the middle, in Poland?]]
How such "leftists" distort reality in the service of their counter-revolutionary line on Poland, can be seen in an article on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in 'Socialism Today' (November 2006), which is published by the Socialist Party (England and Wales), section of the Committee for a Workers' International.
The article compares the Hungarian workers, who were committed to the defense of Socialism as they saw it, to Solidarnosc -- writing of the latter that:
"Some of its leaders retained a strong allegiance to the ideas of Socialism.
" Solidarnosc's "allegiances" (including those of social democrats like Jacek Kuron who formed part of its leadership) can be gleaned from the fact that this was the only "union" beloved by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher!
"In sharp contrast to the Stalinophobic fake left, we fulfilled our class duty ...
[[This openly admits that this was a 'Class Struggle' and therefore 'Class Warfare'. This bunch did not like Solidarnosc.]]
... to unconditionally defend the Polish deformed workers' state against Capitalist restoration.
Emphasizing in Workers Vanguard No. 289 (25 September 1981):
"Solidarity's counter-revolutionary course must be stopped! If the Kremlin Stalinists, in their necessarily brutal, stupid way, intervene militarily to stop it, we will support this. And, we take responsibility in advance for this; whatever the idiocies and atrocities they will commit, we do not flinch from defending the crushing of Solidarity's Counter-revolution."
[[Solidarnosc is known in the west as 'Solidarity'.]]
In 1989, the Polish Stalinists abdicated governmental power in favor of Solidarnosc, which had won a landslide electoral victory that June. Thus Solidarnosc formed the first of the Capitalist-restorationist regimes in East Europe.
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THE DEAD END OF STALINISM ...
In Hungary, following the suppression of the 1956 Revolution, the Kremlin installed in power the liberal Stalinist János Kádár, who had been imprisoned and tortured under Rakosi. After an initial period of repression, Kádár set out to gain popular acceptance, or at least tolerance, for his regime by redirecting investment so as to rapidly raise consumption levels, a policy dubbed "Goulash Communism."
Kádár's New Economic Mechanism anticipated the "Market Socialism" that would later characterize Deng Xiaoping's China and Mikhail Gorbachev's Russia. The Hungarian, Yugoslav, Polish and Czech governments borrowed heavily from Western banks, essentially mortgaging these countries to the imperialists. This set the stage for IMF-dictated austerity programs that took a knife to the living standards of the working people.
In the 1980s, petty-bourgeois "democrats" and nationalists became politically ascendant throughout most of East Europe, with the signal exception of East Germany. For its part, in 1989-90 the Moscow bureaucracy under Mikhail Gorbachev let it be known that it would abandon the East European Stalinist regimes to their fate. This followed Gorbachev's treacherous withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, which abandoned the Afghan peoples to the mercies of CIA-backed mujahedin cutthroats, right on the border of the Soviet Union. Thus the fate of the East European and Soviet workers' states was put in the balance: EITHER proletarian political revolutions to defend and extend the gains embodied in the collectivized economies, OR Capitalist Counter-revolution, with its promise of all-sided social devastation.
The first sign of political revolution in this period, occurred not in East Europe but in China, where events resembled the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in key ways. In May-June 1989, protest initiated by students in Beijing's Tiananmen Square gained widespread support among the workers, who were angered by the sharply rising economic inequalities, rampant corruption and inflation encouraged by Deng's "socialist market economy."
Under Deng over the previous decade, agriculture had been decollectivized and centralized economic planning had been weakened. The "iron rice bowl" of guaranteed lifetime employment and social benefits for workers was becoming rusted out.
Groups of young workers, some of them carrying posters with Mao Zedong's picture, joined the huge demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, which spread throughout the country. As we wrote at the time, "It was the beginnings of a working-class revolt against Deng's program of 'building Socialism with Capitalist methods' which gave the protests their mass and potentially revolutionary nature" ("Defend Chinese Workers!" WV No. 480, 23 June 1989).
Initially, both rank-and-file soldiers, and some senior military commanders, refused to carry out orders to suppress the protests. Deng was finally able to find military units willing to carry out a massacre, which was directed primarily at working-class neighborhoods in Beijing, rather than at the student protesters. As in Hungary in 1956, the key factor in China in 1989 was the absence of a Revolutionary Leadership, such as that provided by Lenin and Trotsky's Bolshevik Party, which led the 1917 Russian Revolution.
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[[This is the final and advertisement part of this work.]]
THE ICL, AND THE FIGHT AGAINST CAPITALIST COUNTER-REVOLUTION ...
The events in China reverberated throughout East Europe, particularly in the German Democratic Republic (DDR) of East Germany. In autumn 1989, the DDR's Stalinist regime collapsed, most graphically expressed by the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9. East Germany at that time was engulfed in a developing political revolution. The impulses of the workers were directed not toward Capitalist reunification with imperialist West Germany, but toward building what they considered a decent Socialist society on the foundations of the DDR's nationalized economy. Meanwhile, as part of his conciliation of imperialism, Gorbachev pledged not to use the tens of thousands of Soviet troops stationed in East Germany to intervene militarily. All these factors created an exceptional opportunity to consummate a proletarian political revolution.
The International Communist League undertook the biggest sustained mobilization in our tendency's [[group's]] history; drawing upon the personnel and other resources of all sections to intervene in Germany. We unconditionally opposed the Capitalist reunification of Germany. We fought for political revolution in the East, and Socialist Revolution in the West - for a Red Germany of workers' councils in a Socialist Europe.
To emphasize the need for internationalism, as opposed to narrow DDR nationalism, we published greetings in Russian to Soviet soldiers, linking the fight in the DDR to the struggle to defend the homeland of the October Revolution against imperialism and domestic counter-revolution. We also issued internationalist greetings in their languages to Cuban, Mozambican, Vietnamese and Polish workers in East Germany.
The impact of our program was seen in January 1990, when 250,000 turned out in a demonstration initiated by our German comrades and joined by the DDR's ruling party, the SED (Socialist Unity Party), to protest the fascist desecration of a Soviet war memorial in Berlin's Treptow Park. At Treptow, for the first time since Trotsky and his followers were expelled from the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, Trotskyists were able to address masses of workers under Stalinist rule.
The spectre of organized proletarian resistance to Capitalist reunification, alarmed West Germany's imperialist rulers, led by the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl, and their front men of the Social Democratic Party, and they accelerated the drive for Capitalist Counter-revolution. The Stalinists in the Kremlin, and in the DDR, gave the green light for reunification.
Uniquely, our comrades of the newly founded Spartakist Workers Party ran unambiguously against Capitalist restoration in the March 1990 East German elections. However, under the impact of the bourgeois offensive, the vanguard layers of the working class increasingly despaired, particularly as the disintegrating Stalinists of the SED (which renamed itself the Party for Democratic Socialism), blatantly supported Capitalist anschluss (annexation).
The March elections were an overwhelming vote for Capitalist reunification, with the vast majority voting for either Christian Democratic, or Social Democratic-based coalitions. This marked the victory of Capitalist Counter-revolution in East Germany.
It was the ICL alone which fought to the last against the drive for Capitalist reunification, led by the imperialists and their Trojan Horse -- the German Social Democratic Party. From the beginning, we were in a political struggle with the abdicating Stalinist regime, and its program of capitulation and counter-revolution. While we were calling for a government of workers and soldiers councils, the Stalinists were consciously acting to prevent a workers' insurrection. That included demobilizing army units that had formed soldiers councils, in part as a result of our propaganda.
The ICL also fought to the end in defense of the Soviet workers' state. When Boris Yeltsin made his power grab in Moscow in August 1991, we put out a call titled "Soviet Workers: Defeat Yeltsin-Bush Counter-revolution!" This was the first statement widely distributed throughout the Soviet Union opposing Yeltsin's bid for power. It advanced a program for political revolution against Capitalist restoration, for genuine workers' soviets as organs of a new proletarian political power. But the Soviet working class, atomized and bereft of any anti-capitalist leadership, lacking any coherent and consistent Socialist class consciousness, skeptical about the possibility of class struggle in the Capitalist countries, did not rally in resistance against the encroaching Capitalist Counter-revolution -- which succeeded in destroying the Soviet workers' state in 1991-92.
[[Of course, none of this was even hinted at by the SQLD Medias, which blacked out any and all news that was not approved by the Political Establishments in America.]]
The victory of Capitalist Counter-revolution was a profound, historic defeat for the World's working class, and oppressed masses. Widespread poverty, disease and malnutrition quickly became rampant in East Europe, and the former Soviet Union.
With the USSR no longer providing a countervailing force, the U.S. imperialists have felt that they have a free hand to ride roughshod over whomever they please. The restoration of Capitalist rule, particularly in the former Soviet Union, has also resulted in a massive, although uneven, retrogression in proletarian class consciousness internationally. The working class has been pounded by the bourgeois rulers' "Death of Communism" ideological campaign, and its attendant historical lies. In Hungary, the first order of business of the Capitalist-restorationist parties, that dominated the parliament elected in 1990, was to declare October 23 (the anniversary of the 1956 Revolution), a national holiday celebrating "multi-party democracy" and "the independence of the motherland."
[[That is a typical SQLD-like propaganda technique; to reverse the Truth, and declare the Reversal as the Reality. We see such lies constantly in our fight to prevent the Genocide of Our Species.]]
[[This should illustrate to all Humans where the tactics and techniques of the Homosexual/Democrats come from.]]
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[[Here comes the ICL Pitch.]]
The International Communist League is dedicated to the fight for new October Revolutions, crucially including in the U.S. and other imperialist centers, to sweep away the rotten Capitalist-Imperialist system, and usher in an egalitarian Socialist World order.
Key to this perspective today, is the unconditional military defense of China, the largest and most powerful of the remaining deformed workers' states, as well as of Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba against imperialism and domestic counter-revolution. Another key aspect, is the urgent need is to win militants to the revolutionary program of Trotskyism; which is the fight to reforge the Fourth International as the World Party of Socialist Revolution. It is thus, that we honor the Hungarian workers' political revolution of 1956.
[[End of Account.]]
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If you are starting to feel sympathetic for the Socialists or Communists – do not waste your time – they are all dead.
The pantyhose-wearing transvestite trash that pretend to be Socialists and Communists here in America, today – namely the Homosexual/Democrats – are less than the dung of the Real Socialists and Real Communists that lived during the days portrayed in these accounts.
The twisted Imitation Socialists and Imitation Communists of today, would Queer their own Grandmothers if they thought it would get them Political Power and Riches and Adulation from their Voter/Follower Slaves.
One has to wonder, if those imitation things actually think Heinrich 'Himmler' Reid is an asset to their efforts? Or, just another Queer Capitalist.
Answer: Well - it IS just another Queer Capitalist.
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GLOSSARY OF TERMS:
Using excerpts from Wikipedia:
Please take particular attention to Solidarnosc -- and its fate.
*Bourgeois -- In the rhetoric of some Communist parties, "bourgeois" is sometimes used as a pejorative, and those who are perceived to collaborate with the bourgeoisie are called its lackeys. Socialists, especially Marxists, have multiple uses for the term: the original meaning, the social class of capitalists, and the pejorative. Something or someone described as bourgeois means that something or someone is superficial, pedestrian, banal and concerned with only the material.
In the Western World, between the late 18th century and the present day, the bourgeoisie is a social class characterized by their ownership of capital and their related culture. A member of the bourgeoisie is a bourgeois or capitalist (plural: bourgeois; capitalists). Marxism defines the bourgeoisie as the social class that owns the means of production in a capitalist society. Marxists view the bourgeoisie as emerging from the wealthy urban classes in pre- and early capitalist societies.
*Bureaucrat -- A bureaucrat is a member of a bureaucracy and can comprise the administration of any organization of any size, though the term usually connotes someone within an institution of a government or corporation. Bureaucrat jobs were often "desk jobs" (the French for "desk" being bureau, though bureau can also be translated as "office") ...
inflexible official: an official who applies rules rigidly.
*'bureaucratic collectivism' -- As in state capitalism, a bureaucratic collectivist state owns the means of production, while the surplus ("profit") is distributed among an elite party bureaucracy, rather than among the workers. Also, most importantly, it is the bureaucracy—not the workers or the people in general—who controls the economy and the state. Thus, the system is not truly capitalist, but it is not socialist either. In Marxist theory, it is a new form of class society which exploits workers through new mechanisms. Most who hold this view believe that bureaucratic collectivism does not represent progress beyond capitalism—that is, that it is no closer to being a workers' state than a capitalist state would be, and is considerably less efficient.
*Chauvenism -- Chauvinism, in its original and primary meaning, is an exaggerated, bellicose patriotism and a belief in national superiority and glory. By extension it has come to include an extreme and unreasoning partisanship on behalf of any group to which one belongs, especially when the partisanship includes malice and hatred towards rival groups.
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In classic Feminism Dementia, it is used as a Hate Word against males who does not obey the insane demands of the Anti-Human Mental Illness that has possessed the brains of Feminists. An Anti-Male Hate and Propaganda Word.
*CIS -- Commonwealth of Independent States -- ... is a regional organization whose participating countries are former soviet republics, formed during the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The CIS is comparable to a very loose association of states and in no way comparable to a federation, confederation, or supra-national organisation such as the old European Community. It is more comparable to the Commonwealth of Nations. Although the CIS has few supranational powers, it is more than a purely symbolic organization, possessing coordinating powers in the realm of trade, finance, lawmaking, and security. It has also promoted cooperation on democratization and cross-border crime prevention. As a regional organization, CIS participates in UN peacekeeping forces. Some of the members of the CIS have established the Eurasian Economic Community with the aim of creating a full-fledged common market.
*Comecon Bloc -- The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, 1949–1991, was an economic organization comprising the countries of the Eastern Bloc along with a number of communist states elsewhere in the world. The Comecon was the Eastern Bloc's reply to the formation of the Organization for European Economic Co-operation in western Europe.
Collectively, the members of the Comecon did not display the necessary prerequsites for economic integration: their level of industrialization was low and uneven, with a single dominant member (the Soviet Union) producing 70% of the community national product.
In the late 1980s there were ten full members: the Soviet Union, six East European countries, and three extraregional members. Geography, therefore, no longer united Comecon members. Wide variations in economic size and level of economic development also tended to generate divergent interests among the member countries. All these factors combined to give rise to significant differences in the member states' expectations about the benefits to be derived from membership in Comecon. Unity was provided instead by political and ideological factors. All Comecon members were "united by a commonality of fundamental class interests and the ideology of Marxism-Leninism" and had common approaches to economic ownership (state versus private) and management (plan versus market).
*'comprador' -- is a term used to describe native managers of European business houses in East Asia.
The term comprador, a Portuguese word that means buyer, derives from the Latin comparare, which means to procure. The original usage of the word in East Asia meant a native servant in European households in Guangzhou in southern China or the neighboring Portuguese colony at Macao who went to market to barer their employers' wares. The term then evolved to mean the native contract suppliers who worked for foreign companies in East Asia or the native managers of firms in East Asia.
A native agent of a foreign enterprise. A 'comprador agent'.
*CP -- Communist Party
*'crossing the rubicon' -- (going beyond the 'point of no return') -- Crossing the Rubicon is a metaphor for deliberately proceeding past a point of no return. The phrase originates with Julius Caesar's invasion of Ancient Rome (January 10, 49 BC), when he led his army across the Rubicon River in violation of law, thus making conflict inevitable. Therefore the term "the Rubicon" is used as a synonym to the "point of no return".
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During WW II Allied Armies crossed the Rubicon again, going north, in the opposite direction of Caesar's crossing.
*Expropriation -- two possible meanings.
Nationalization, also spelled nationalisation, is the process of taking an industry or assets into the public ownership of a national government or state. Nationalization usually refers to private assets, but may also mean assets owned by lower levels of government, such as municipalities, being transferred to the public sector to be operated by or owned by the state.
Confiscation, from the Latin confiscatio 'joining to the fiscus, i.e. transfer to the treasury' is a legal seizure without compensation by a government or other public authority. The word is also used, popularly, of spoliation under legal forms, or of any seizure of property without adequate compensation.
See Eminent Domain.
*February Revolution -- The February Revolution of 1917 was the first of two revolutions in Russia in 1917. Centered around the then capital Petrograd (modern day St. Petersburg) in March (late February in the Julian calendar). Its immediate result was the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, the collapse of Imperial Russia and the end of the Romanov dynasty. Tsarism was replaced by a Russian Provisional Government under Prince Georgy Lvov, an alliance between liberals and socialists who wanted to instigate political reform, creating a democratically-elected executive and constituent assembly. Socialists also formed the Petrograd Soviet, and the two ruled together in a system known as Dual Power.
This revolution appeared to break out spontaneously, without any real leadership or formal planning. Russia had been suffering from a number of economic and social problems, which were compounded by the impact of the First World War. Bread rioters and industrial strikers were joined on the streets by disaffected elements of the city's garrison. As more and more troops deserted, and with loyal troops trapped at the Front, the city moved into a state of anarchy, prompting a revolution the Tsarist regime did not survive.
The February Revolution was followed in the same year by the October Revolution, bringing Bolshevik rule and a change in Russia's social structure, and paving the way for the USSR. The two revolutions constituted a change in the composition of the country: the first overthrew the Tsar, and the second instituted a new form of government.
*'greenfield site' -- Areas beyond the city where development can take place unfettered by earlier building and where low-density, high-amenity buildings can be constructed.
*GST - Goods and Services Tax -- same as VAT.
*Ideologues -- An adherent of an ideology, esp. one who is uncompromising and dogmatic. An impractical idealist. An often blindly partisan advocate or adherent of a particular ideology.
*Intellectuals – something that does not exist here in American Politics.
*Internationale -- (song) -- The Internationale became the anthem of international socialism, and gained particular notoriety under the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1944, when it was that communist state's de facto national anthem. Its original French refrain is translated: "This is the final struggle / Let us group together and tomorrow / The Internationale / Will be the human race."
*lumpen -- (rags) -- Lumpenproletariat (a German word literally meaning "rag proletariat") is a term first defined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The German Ideology (1845).
Marx refers to the lumpenproletariat as the "refuse of all classes", including "swindlers, confidence tricksters, brothel-keepers, rag-and-bone merchants, beggers, and other flotsam of society".
Marx rhetorically describes the lumpenproletariat as a "class fraction" that constituted the political power base for Louis Bonaparte of France in 1848. In this sense, Marx argued that Bonaparte was able to place himself above the two main classes, the proletariat and bourgeoisie, by resorting to the 'lumpenproletariat' as an apparently independent base of power, while in fact advancing the material interests of the 'finance aristocracy'. For rhetorical purposes, Marx identifies Louis Napoleon himself as being like a member of the lumpenproletariat, insofar as being a member of the finance aristocracy, he has no direct interest in productive enterprises.
Lumpenbourgeoisie is a term most often attributed to Andre Gunder Frank in 1972 to describe a type of a middle class and upper class (merchants, lawyers, industrialists, etc.); one that has little collective self-awareness or economic base and who supports the colonial masters.
The term Lumpenbourgeoisie was already used in Austria by about 1926. The author was an Austrian social democratic journalist and he used the term in at least one article in a Viennese periodical. Another example of the use of the term was given by Czech philosopher Karel Kosik in 1997. In his article, "Lumpenbourgeoisie and the higher spiritual truth" he defines Lumpenbourgeoisie as "a militant, openly anti-democratic enclave within a functioning, however half-hearted and thus helpless democracy".
*Marseillaise -- is the national anthem of France. The name of the song originally was Chant de guerre pour l'Armée du Rhin ("War Song for the Army of the Rhine"). It was written and composed by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle in 1792 and adopted in 1795 as the nation's first anthem. It is also the first example of the "European march" anthemic style. Since being adopted as France's national anthem, the evocative lyrics and instantly recognisable tune of La Marseillaise have led to its use as a revolutionary anthem as well as to the inspiration of many pieces of classical music and popular culture.
Rouget de Lisle wrote the song 'Chant de guerre pour l'Armée du Rhin' in Strasbourg on 25 April 1792. The melody soon became the rallying call to the French Revolution and was adopted as La Marseillaise after the melody was first sung on the streets by volunteers (federes in French) from Marseille. These federes were making their entryway into Paris on 30 July 1792 after a young volunteer from Montpellier called Francois Mireur had sung it at a patriotic gathering in Marseille, and the troops adopted it as the marching song of the National Guard of Marseille. The song's lyrics reflect the invasion of France by foreign armies (from Prussia and Austria) underway when it was written; Strasbourg itself was attacked just a few days later. The invading forces were repulsed from France following their defeat in the Battle of Valmy.
*Moribund -- adjective -- dying, coming to an end, having little or no vital force left. Stagnant, on the verge of becoming obsolete.
*New Technocrats -- An adherent or a proponent of technocracy. A technical expert, especially one in a managerial or administrative position. An expert who is a member of a highly skilled elite group. A group or class of persons enjoying superior intellectual or social or economic status. A person with special knowledge or ability who performs skillfully. A person active in party politics.
*October Revolution -- also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution, Red October, or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917. It took place with an armed insurrection in Petrograd traditionally dated to 25 October 1917 Old Style Julian Calendar (O.S.), which corresponds with 7 November 1917 New Style (N.S.). Gregorian Calendar.
It followed and capitalized on the February Revolution of the same year. The October Revolution in Petrograd overthrew the Russian Provisional Government and gave the power to the local soviets dominated by Bolsheviks. As the revolution was not universally recognized outside of Petrograd there followed the struggles of the Russian Civil War (1917–1922) and the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922.
*OECD -- The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is an international economic organization of 34 countries founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade. It defines itself as a forum of countries committed to democracy and the market economy, providing a platform to compare policy experiences, seeking answers to common problems, identifying good practices, and co-ordinating domestic and international policies of its members.
The Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), was formed in 1948 to administer American and Canadian aid in the framework of the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. It started its operations on 16 April 1948. Since 1949, it has been headquartered in the Chateau de la Muette in Paris, France. After the Marshall Plan ended, the OEEC focused on economic questions.
Following the 1957 Rome Treaties to launch the European Economic Community, the Convention on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was drawn up to reform the OEEC. The Convention was signed in December 1960 and the OECD officially superseded the OEEC in September 1961. It consisted of the European founder countries of the OEEC plus the United States and Canada, with Japan joining three years later. During the next 12 years Finland, Australia, and New Zealand also joined the organisation. Yugoslavia had observer status in the organisation starting with the establishment of the OECD until its dissolution.
In 1989, after the political changes in Central and Eastern Europe, the OECD started to assist these countries to prepare market economy reforms. In 1990, the Centre for Co-operation with European Economies in Transition (now succeeded by the Centre for Cooperation with Non-Members) was established, and in 1991, the Programme "Partners in Transition" was launched for the cooperation with Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. This programme also included a membership option for these countries. As a result of this, in 1994–2000 Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia as well as Mexico and the Republic of Korea became members of the organisation.
The OECD has been criticised by several civil society groups and developing countries. The main criticism has been the narrowness of the OECD because of its limited membership to a select few rich nations. In 1997–1998, the draft Multilateral Agreement on Investment was heavily criticized by several non-governmental organisations and developing countries. Many critics argued that the agreement would threaten protection of human rights, labor and environmental standards, and the least developed countries. A particular concern was that the MAI would result in a 'race to the bottom' among countries willing to lower their labor and environmental standards to attract foreign investment. Also the OECD's actions against harmful tax practices has raised criticism. The primary objection is the sanctity of tax policy as a matter of sovereign entitlement.
*Poznan -- The Poznań 1956 protests, also known as Poznań 1956 uprising or Poznań June, were the first of several massive protests of the Polish people against the communist government of the People's Republic of Poland. Demonstrations by workers demanding better conditions began on June 28, 1956, at Poznan's Cegielski Factories and were met with violent repression. A crowd of approximately 100,000 gathered in the city center near the UB secret police building. 400 tanks and 10,000 soldiers of Ludowe Wojsko Polskie and the Internal Security Corps, under Polish-Soviet general Stanislav Poplavsky were ordered to suppress the demonstration, and during the pacification fired at the protesting civilians.
The death toll was placed between 57 and 78 people, including a 13-year-old boy, Romek Strzalkowski. Hundreds of people sustained injuries. Nonetheless the Poznań protests were an important milestone on the way to the installation of a less Soviet-controlled government in Poland in October.
Many historians consider the Poznań 1956 protests to be an important milestone in modern history of Poland, and one of the events that precipitated the fall of communism in Poland. Nonetheless it should be noted that the protests of 1956 were not motivated by anti-communist ideology; the workers' demands were mostly of economic nature, centering around better work conditions rather than any political objectives. The workers sang "The Internationale" and their banners read "We demand bread." It was the government's consistent failure to fulfil the first demand which eventually led to the demands for political change, but even during the history of Solidarity few demanded wide political reforms.
*Proletarian -- (of the Proletariat) -- The proletarii according to the Constitution of the Roman Republic were men without property. The proletarii were also called capite censi because they were "persons registered not as to their property which was below the lowest census for military service, but simply as to their existence as living individuals, primarily as heads (caput) of a family." In the early days of the Roman Empire, the Comitia Centuriata was an people's assembly composed of centuriae (nominally, groups of about 100 men) who were classified according to the value of each one's property. The top infantry class assembled with full arms and armor; the next two classes brought arms and armor, but less and lesser; the fourth class only spears; the fifth slings. In voting, the calvary and top infantry class were enough to decide an issue; as voting started at the top, an issue might be decided before the lower classes voted. Excluded were the proletarii, those who did not qualify for any of these five classes because "they had not even the minimum property required for the lowest class. Their sole possession was their children, proles; hence the name. The proletarii were the poorest stratum of the population.
In Marxist theory, the proletariat is the class of a capitalist society that does not have ownership of the means of production and whose only means of subsistence is to sell their labour power for a wage or salary. Proletarians are wage-workers, while some refer to those who receive salaries as the salariat. For Marx, however, wage labour may involve getting a salary rather than a wage per se. Marxism sees the proletariat and bourgeoisie (capitalist class) as occupying conflicting positions, since workers automatically wish their wages to be as high as possible, while owners and their proxies wish for wages (costs) to be as low as possible.
*Second International -- The Second International (1889–1916) was an organization of socialist and labour parties formed in Paris on July 14, 1889. At the Paris meeting delegations from 20 countries participated. It continued the work of the dissolved First International, though excluding the still-powerful anarcho-syndicalist movement and unions, and was in existence until 1916.
Among the Second International's famous actions were its (1889) declaration of May 1 as International Workers' Day and its (1910) declaration of March 8 as International Workers' Day. It initiated the international campaign for the 8-hour working day.
*Small Holders -- Founded in 1908, the original party won an overwhelming majority in the first elections after the Second World War, resulting in its leader, Zoltan Tildy, becoming prime minister. The Smallholders-dominated parliament established a republic in 1946 with Tildy as president. He was succeeded as prime minister by Ferenc Nagy. However, the Soviet occupation of the country, and the Hungarian Communist Party's "salami tactic" to break up opponent parties, and widespread election fraud in 1947 led to a communist government.
In 1947 the Communist Party carried out a coup d’état against the rule of the Smallholders’ Party. Though not all democratic institutions were abolished, the Communists firmly held power. The prominent smallholders politicians were either arrested or forced to leave the country. Lajos Dinnyes of the Smallholders remained prime minister after the 1947 elections, but his government was controlled by the communists. Two years later the party was absorbed into a People’s Independent Front, led by the communist ungarian Working People's Party. After the latter prevailed in that year's elections, a communist people's republic was established. The Smallholders party was dissolved.
*Solidarnosc -- (Solidarity) -- is a Polish trade union federation founded in September 1980 at the Gdansk Shipyard, and originally led by Lech Walesa. Solidarity was the first non-communist party-controlled trade union in a Warsaw Pact country. In the 1980s it constituted a broad anti-bureaucratic social movement. The government attempted to destroy the union during the period of martial law in the early 1980s with several years of political repression, but in the end it was forced to start negotiating with the union.
Solidarity was founded in Gdańsk in September 1980 at the Lenin Shipyards, where Lech Walesa and others formed a broad anti-Soviet social movement ranging from people associated with the Catholic Church to members of the anti-Soviet Left. Solidarity advocated non-violence in its members' activities. In September 1981 Solidarity's first national congress elected Lech Walesa as a president and adopted a republican program, the "Self-governing Republic".
The Round Table Talks between the government and the Solidarity-led opposition led to semi-free elections in 1989. By the end of August, a Solidarity-led coalition government was formed and in December 1990 Walesa was elected President of Poland, and Tadeusz Mazowiecki was elected Prime Minister.
Since 1989 Solidarity has become a more traditional trade union, and had relatively little impact on the political scene of Poland in the early 1990s. A political arm founded in 1996 as Solidarity Electoral Action (AWS) won the parlimentary election in 1997, but lost the following 2001 election. Currently, as a political party Solidarity has little influence on modern Polish politics.
[[In the days of Lech Walesa, Solidarity was Big News around the world! The medias trumpeted Solidarity as the New Hope of the East. Of course, what they did not say, was that it was their chance to jump in and do some creative lying and double-dealing in Poland. Now, the very same political forces that Solidarity helped to eliminate Communism -- have eliminated Solidarity.]]
[[There are many Jackals waiting in the wings to get their chance at the fresh meat -- and replace Human Resistance by whatever trickery and deceptions and backstabbings they can get away with -- as soon as Human Resistance does the Heavy Lifting for them, and is no longer needed. We have already seen this with the 'Twin Jackals' of Demo-Iowa, Doug Gross and 'Il Duce Branstad'.]]
*Syndicalism -- Syndicalism is a type of economic system proposed as a replacement for capitalism and state socialism which uses federations of collectivised trade unions or industrial unions. It is a form of economic corporatism that advocates interest aggregation of multiple non-competitive categorised units to negotiate and manage an economy.
For adherents, labor unions are the potential means of both overcoming economic aristocracy and running society fairly in the interest of the majority, through union democracy. Industry in a syndicalist system would be run through co-operative confederations and mutual aid. Local syndicates would communicate with other syndicates through the Bourse du Travail (labor exchange) which would manage and transfer commodities.
Syndicalism is also used to refer to the tactic of bringing about this social arrangement, typically expounded by anarcho-synicalism and De Leonism, in which a general strike begins and workers seize their means of production and organise in a federation of trade unionism.
*Third International -- The Communist International (abbreviated as Comintern, also known as the Third International) was an international communist organization founded in Moscow in March 1919. The International intended to fight "by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the State."
While the fissures (in the Second International) had been evident for decades, World War I was to prove the issue that finally separated the revolutionary and reformist wings of the workers' movement. The socialist movement had been historically antimilitarist and internationalist, and was therefore opposed to being used as "cannon fodder" for the "bourgeois" governments at war. This especially since the Triple Alliance (1882) comprised two empires, while the Triple Entente gathered the French Third Republic and the United Kingdom of Great Britian and Ireland into an alliance with the Russian Empire. (In disgust) -- the Communist Manifesto had stated that "the working class has no country" and exclaimed "Proletarians of all countries, unite!" Massive majorities voted in favor of resolutions for the Second International to call upon the international working class to resist war if it was declared.
Nevertheless, within hours of the declaration of war, almost all the socialist parties of the combatant states announced their support for their own countries. The only exceptions were the socialist parties of the Balkans, Russia, and tiny minorities in other countries. To Lenin's surprise, even the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) voted in favor of war credits.
Discredited by its passivity towards world events, the Second International dissolved in the middle of the war in 1916. In 1917, Lenin published the April Theses, which openly supported a "revolutionary defeatism". The Bolsheviks pronounced themselves in favor of the defeat of Russia, which would permit them to move directly to the stage of a revolutionary insurrection.
The victory of the Russian Communist Party in the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 truly shook the world. An alternative path to power to parlimentary politics was demonstrated in broad stokes. With much of Europe on the verge of economic and political collapse in the aftermath of the carnage of the Great War, revolutionary sentiments bubbled forth from a hundred hidden streams. The Russian Bolsheviks, headed by Vladimir Lenein, firmly believed that unless socialist revolution swept Europe, they would be crushed by the military might of world capitalism, just as the Paris Commune had been crushed by force of arms in 1871. To this end, the organization of a new International, to foment revolution in Europe and around the world, became to the Bolsheviks an iron necessity.
The Comintern was founded in these conditions at a congress held in Moscow March 2–6, 1919, against the backdrop of the Russian Civil War.
*Trotsky --
was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist.
Leon Trotsky was one of the leaders of the Russian October Revolution, second only to Vladimir Lenin. During the early days of the Soviet Union, he served first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army, and People's Commissar of War. He was a major figure in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War. He was also among the first members of the Politburo.
After leading a failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s, and the increasing role of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was successively removed from power, expelled from the Communist Party, deported from the Soviet Union and assassinated on Stalin's orders. An early advocate of Red Army intervention against European fascism, Trotsky also opposed Stalin's peace agreements with Adolph Hitler in the 1930s.
As the head of the Fourth International, Trotsky continued in exile to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, and was eventually assassinated in Mexico, by Ramon Mercader, a Soviet agent. Trotsky's ideas form the basis of Trotskyism, a major school of Marxist thought that is opposed to the theories of Stalinism. He was one of the few Soviet political figures who was never rehabilitated by the government of Mikhail Gorbachev.
*value, Law of -- Excess demand can raise the exchange-values of products traded, and excess supply can lower them; but if supply and demand are relatively balanced, the question arises of what regulates the settled exchange-ratios (or average price-levels) of products traded in that case, and this is what the law of value is intended to explain. According to the law of value, the trading ratios of different types of products reflect a real cost structure of production, and this cost structure ultimately reduces to the socially average amounts of human labor-time currently required to produce different goods and services.
Simply put, if product A takes 100 hours of human work to produce in total, and product B takes 5 hours to produce, the normal trading-ratio of A and B will gravitate to a rate of around 1:20 (one of A is worth 20 of B), because A is worth much more than B. The trading ratio will never be 20:1, 1:5, 1:100, or 500:1 (unless there was an exceptional shortage or oversupply of these products, or unequal exchange took place). For that reason, most market trade is regular and largely predictable, rather than chaotic and arbitrary; norms of what products are worth relative to each other are mostly clearly known and established, even if people lack an exact knowledge of prices.
According to Marx, the knowledge that the law of value existed, expressed in one form or another, was very ancient. People knew very well that there was a definite relationship between time worked and the value of products traded; in itself that was not a very difficult insight to grasp. The economic effects of the availability or lack of labour were rather self-evident in practical life. Nevertheless, different thinkers in history failed to conceptualize it with any adequacy. In part, Marx believed that the reason was that unrestricted trade of almost everything (including all kinds of labour) purely according to their exchange-value, was a comparatively recent phenomenon in human history. In pre-capitalist societies, there were far more restrictions on trade, the scope of trade was much less, and trade was influenced much more strongly by local custom, religion and cultural tradition. It was therefore difficult for philosophers to reach the theoretical conclusion, that only human work effort is the real substance of economic value; it seemed to contradict all kinds of other influences at work.
*VAT -- A value added tax (VAT) is a form of consumtion tax. From the perspective of the buyer, it is a tax on the purchase price. From that of the seller, it is a tax only on the "value added" to a product, material or service, from an accounting view, by his stage of its manufacture or distribution. The buyer remits to the government the difference between these two amounts, and retains the rest for themselves to offset the taxes he had previously paid on the inputs.
The "value added" to a product by a business is the sale price charged to its customer, minus the cost of materials and other taxable inputs. A VAT is like a sales tax in that ultimately only the end consumer is taxed.
It differs from the sales tax in that, with the latter, the tax is collected and remitted to the government only once, at the point of purchase by the end consumer. With the VAT, collections, remittances to the government, and credits for taxes already paid occur each time a business in the supply chain purchases products from another business.
Value added tax (VAT) avoids the cascade effect of sales tax by taxing only the value added at each stage of production. For this reason, throughout the world, VAT has been gaining favour over traditional sales taxes. In principle, VAT applies to all provisions of goods and services. VAT is assessed and collected on the value of goods or services that have been provided every time there is a transaction (sale/purchase). The seller charges VAT to the buyer, and the seller pays this VAT to the government. If, however, the purchaser is not an end user, but the goods or services purchased are costs to its business, the tax it has paid for such purchases can be deducted from the tax it charges to its customers. The government only receives the difference; in other words, it is paid tax on the gross margin of each transaction, by each participant in the sales chain.
In many developing countries such as India, sales tax/VAT are key revenue sources as high unemployment and low per capita income render other income sources inadequate. However, there is strong opposition to this by many sub-national governments as it leads to an overall reduction in the revenue they collect as well as a loss of some autonomy.
*Visegrad countries -- The Visegrád Group, also called the Visegrád Four or V4, was an alliance of four Central European states – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia – for the purposes of cooperation and furthering their European integration. It is also sometimes referred to as the Visegrád Triangle, since it was the alliance of three states at the beginning – the term is not valid now, but appears sometimes even after all the years since the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993.
The Czech Republic and Slovakia became members after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993. All four members of the Visegrád Group became part of the European Union on May 1, 2004.
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For the modern Hungarian Capitalist viewpoint about the events of the 1956 Revolution, I am providing the following websites.
This is a set of five lessons from -- The Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, in Budapest.
http://www.rev.hu/history_of_56/ora1/INDEX.HTM
http://www.rev.hu/history_of_56/ora2/INDEX.HTM
http://www.rev.hu/history_of_56/ora3/INDEX.HTM
http://www.rev.hu/history_of_56/ora4/INDEX.HTM
http://www.rev.hu/history_of_56/ora5/INDEX.HTM
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And, here are some websites of interest about the entire scenario.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956
http://www.filolog.com/crosscultureHistory1956.html
http://faroutliers.blogspot.com/2005/04/chinas-role-in-suppressing-hungarian.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_1_18/ai_82013555/
http://www.mywiseowl.com/articles/1956_Hungarian_Revolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky#Assassination
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB76/
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I once knew some young men, who knew nothing about what I know; but thought they already knew everything that they had to know about everything; and therefore were all-knowing.
In conversation one day, I mentioned the film 'Doctor Zhivago'.
They all said -- "What? Hah hah hah!"
I said again -- "Doctor Zhivago."
They said -- "What the (bleep) is 'Doctor Zhivago'?"
I said -- you do not know what 'Doctor Zhivago' is?
They laughed somemore.
Then I said in a loud voice -- "DOCTOR ZHIVAGO !"
They stopped laughing, and looked at me with blank faces.
They are probably dead by now.
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Markel Peters
http://www.voices-of-iowa.blogspot.com
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Well – if you have been waiting for someone (other than me) to explain what struggles like ours are all about – here it is!
The problem is – you might be one of those people who always fell to sleep in the History Class, in your High School. You might still be someone who falls to sleep during History Lessons.
I never could figure that out, personally. How anyone could fall to sleep, while they were being told the History of their Species, was always puzzling and seemingly impossible to me.
On the other hand, what those people thought was stimulating and exciting – I found to be almost non-existent – except in their heads. That is when I first learned about 'brainwashing'.
To make things worse, these days the Bastards and Bitches of the NEA lie about everything. Nothing but lies and SQLD propaganda leaves their mouths. They deliberately support the Bastardization and Bitchifying of Real Human History, by engendering and distributing textbooks that twist and distort and outright lie about what really happened in Human History.
So, any of their victims who do not fall asleep during the 'Revisionist' History Classes, get their heads filled with warped and demented lies – instead of the Real History.
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I will not pull any punches here. For some of you, reading this could be the most History you have ever read, and the most difficult. Even though it really happened, and it holds MASSIVE RELATIVITY to your own lives.
We will see. If you cannot get through this, and fall asleep, I suggest you stay that way. At least, you won't be in the way – when History happens again.
There are no guarantees – that you will awaken again.
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The first part of this, is an engaging explanation of the Political Events of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, from the Socialist viewpoint. Real Socialism, not that claptrap fakery of the Homosexual/Democrats.
The second part, seems to be all about Finances and Businesses – but it is really about 'Why'. Why the first part happened at all. I would like to bring the second part to the attention of all Real Women. They need to read, and reread, that work until they understand it all. This is important. With the Democrat/Homosexuals trying to take over as many industries as they can, using any excuse that they can concoct, the lessons here about Government versus Private Industry relationships, and 'cause-and-effect', are very worthwhile to know. In that section it is not Socialism, Communism, and Capitalism that matter. Instead, it is Private Economics versus Government Economics. Use this as a starting point for such learning.
The third part is basically an advertisement. It is an explanation of why a 'tendency', or 'grouping', failed at most of its attempts to carry out Revolutions. It ends up with a dedication to continue the workers' struggle for Freedom, and so forth. However, having read the first two parts, the third part reaffirms a lot of what they said, and fills in some details.
All of it, is about Economic Revolutions.
Here in America, and wherever we fight the Satanic and Queer Lying-Dead, it is not an Economic Revolution which we need. Our need is much more dire and traumatic. We are fighting the Extinction of our Species, by Replacement -- Genocide by Replacement.
What we need is a Revolution Level Event, to erase the terrible threat of Genocide from our doorsteps, our minds, and our futures.
Most of all, to protect our children from the SQLD.
By learning how past Revolutions happened, and worked, and should have worked between Political and Economic Systems that are so different from your own; and to learn how people over there describe their own plights, and hopes, and turmoils; and how they go about solving their own problems – YOU can better understand your own problems, and learn how to deal with them more clearly and efficiently.
Study Them.
Know Yourself.
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At this time it is most appropriate to study this Reality, especially in light of the complete fakery that is going on today in American Politics. Recently, someone who is supposed to be a Communist (or a sympathizer) has shot a group of people in Arizona.
As the Japanese say -- "We at least have the decency to shoot ourselves. In America, when someone is totally disgraced or despondent, they climb on top of a roof, and shoot everyone else!"
The SQLD and their Democrat/Homosexual swine already hate the State Politicians in Arizona anyway, and they are always looking for any way to denounce and discredit the creatures that they perceive as Political Rivals ...
So ...the Homosexual/Democrats are blaming this latest 'Public Target Range' (American Style) on Arizona Politicians, and that Lying Backstabber-Bitch Sarah Palin. We have already denounced and thrown that bitch out of the Human Species for supporting the Gross Puppet of DemoIowa -- 'Il Duce Branstad'.
It is a lying scumbag politician. Which is exactly why it is being attacked and blamed for this latest American TV Event.
It IS a lying scumbag politician -- and that is why it is perceived as a danger, and a threat, by the lying scumbag politicians of the SQLD.
For all of us -- the entire TV Event is nothing more than the ugly sight of slavering and biting dogs in a dogfight -- mad dogs fighting mad dogs.
Anyone who would see Sarah Palin as a threat -- must be a rabid dog and murderer -- that views Palin as a rival rabid dog and murderer.
Thus, they are fighting over what?
Answer: The Grand Deluxe Dog Kennel.
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What most of my readers do not understand, is that the creatures which commit all of these endless lies and defamations and social atrocities (each time there is an opportunity such as a TV Event to utilize), exist to do so. They are not like Human Beings. They do not have Human Lives. They do not have Human Loves, and Human Thoughts and Human Hopes for a better future.
They are Propaganda Dogs. Nothing more. Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.
They are technically called 'Politicists, and Lobbyists, and Managers.'
But, at no time in History have they been anything better than dogcrap on a hot sidewalk, on a stinking summer's day.
Socialist, Communist, Capitalist, (whatever) -- they are all the same.
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I have been forced to correct the punctuation of the original works of this message. When I write something for the Species it is edited about six times, before I release it. That is because the flow and comprehension is so important in my writings – which are admittedly complicated to read sometimes.
These works below, appear to be either transcriptions by someone other than the original writers, or were only edited once, or both. Their meanings are clear, but the punctuation is not up to Species Standards. I have tried to clean up the punctuation as much as possible, with the aim of making these works more readable.
Only once, have I had to make an omission here. It was a sentence that had no meaning; either because the writer thought he put all of the words in there that he intended to, and did not (which is a danger in all writing), or it was garbled during transcription. I took it out because it was utterly meaningless. By that I say, it had no sense due to being incomplete. Usually, if a word or two are missed somehow, you can tell what they had to be, because enough of the sentence still remains to declare its intention. The sentence which I removed was too incomplete for even that kind of repair.
These works use 'English' english, and to keep with the original intent I have not allowed my spell checker to change that into 'American' english.
I have included at the end of this, a Glossary for those of you, who have no idea of what the heck these people are talking about.
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This is about the Real Stuff. Not the fake and phony Candy-Ass substitutes that the Homosexual/Democrats are today. This is about Real Socialism versus Real Communism, both of which fear Real Capitalism.
It is obviously written by Real Socialists and Real Communists, and has a tint of their bias throughout. However, I can tell that a major effort was made to just state the facts, as they were seen from their position. There is some mockery of their opponents herein, but not too much – and nothing even close to what I usually do against the Democrat/Homosexuals (et all). And of course, no indication that Capitalism is anything other than 'The Unthinkable Disaster'.
The writers of these works made an effort to be objective enough, so as to make this worthy of historical consideration. Not being Historians themselves, they wanted these writings to merit historical approval, and a place in written history. They have succeeded.
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From our own experiences with fighting the SQLD, and the Cowardly Moderates, these words come to life with meanings and relevancy.
Add to that -- the fact that many of the hopes and aspirations, and greeds and betrayals, and promises and backstabbings that occurred during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; reflect directly in the events of our own situation today, under the Tyranny of the Satanic and Queer Lying-Dead of DemoTopia -- and these accounts become worth their weight in literary gold. Especially, the first one by Dave Hughes.
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Also, with all of the talk these days about the Homosexual/Democrats trying to make America into a Socialist country, when in Reality they cannot even make themselves into any semblance of Humans (not even for propaganda purposes), it is appropriate to take a look at just what the Hell a Real Socialist is, and how they think.
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As I have indicated, the people who wrote these accounts were not literary experts like Dostoevsky – otherwise these treatises would be 600 pages long and as strenuous as an 'Iron Man Contest' - but they are written with obvious sincerity.
There are words used in these texts, that are spelled the same as some of the words on this Continent; such as 'Democrat'. That is where the similarities end, however.
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Putting it very generally .. the History of Human Civilization ... that stuff the NEA does not want you to know about ... was basically a sequence of Economic Arrangements ... sometimes in competition ... usually in succession, often violent succession.
One such Economic Arrangement was called the Tsarist Empire of Russia. It was the result of many Good Things now gone bad, and many Bad People taking advantage of the Bad Things.
Ivan (the Terrible), and Peter (the Great) were both Tsars and were largely responsible for the creation of a 'Modern Russia'; but by the turn of the Twentieth Century the Russia they had created would have disgusted both of them. Neither would have tolerated it.
The Economic Arrangement in Russia, at that time, was unsuitable to many of the working inhabitants of the country.
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Excerpted from Wikipedia --
Long-term causes:
Despite its occurrence at the height of World War I, the roots of the February Revolution traced much further back in time. Chief among these was Imperial Russia's failure, throughout the 19th and early 20th century, to modernize its archaic social, economic and political structures whilst maintaining the stability of ubiquitous devotion to an autocratic monarch. As historian Richard Pipes writes, "the incompatibility of capitalism and autocracy struck all who gave thought to the matter".
Among the key problems facing Russia in the decades before the February Revolution were, therefore: an inefficient, autocratic political structure, complicating attempts at reform; an overwhelmingly rural population (83% were peasants in 1897); economic and technological backwardness relative to Western European powers such as Britain and France; an outdated and disorganized army; a corrupt bureaucracy.
From these conditions sprang considerable agitation among the small working and professional classes. This tension had erupted into general revolt with the 1905 Revolution, and did so again under the strain of total war in 1917.
Short-term causes:
The revolution was provoked not only by Russian military failures during the First World War, but also by public dissatisfaction with the way the country was being run on the Home Front by Tsarina Alexandra Fyodorovna of Hesse and Tsar Nicholas's ministers, and the economic challenges Russia faced fighting a Total War.
In August 1914, all classes supported and virtually all political deputies voted in favour of the war (despite calls from "defeatists", including Lenin of the Bolshevik party, that it was not a war worth fighting). The declaration of war was accompanied by a wave of jingoism and flag-waving, which served to effect a temporary moratorium on internal strife. After a few initial victories, such as in Galicia in 1915 and with the Brusilov offensive in 1916, the Tsar's armies were confronted with a number of very serious defeats. Nearly six million casualties had been accrued by January 1917. Mutinies sprang up more often (most due to simple war weariness), morale was at its lowest, and the (newly called up) officers and commanders were at times very incompetent. Like all of the major armies, Russia's armed forces suffered from inadequate supply. The pre-revolution desertion rate ran at around 34,000 a month. Meanwhile, the wartime alliance of industry, Duma and Stavka (Military High Command) started to work outside of the Tsar's control.
In an attempt to boost morale and to repair his own reputation for being weak, Nicholas announced in the summer of 1915 that he would become the new Commander-in-Chief of the army, in defiance of almost universal advice to the contrary. The result was disastrous on three grounds: firstly, it associated the monarchy with the unpopular war; secondly, Nicholas proved a poor leader of men on the front line, often irritating his own commanders with his interference; and thirdly, whilst at the front, he was unavailable to govern.
On the home front, a famine was looming and commodities were becoming scarce due to problems with the overstretched railroad network. Meanwhile, refugees from German-occupied Russia came in their millions. The Russian economy, which had just seen one of the highest growth rates in Europe, was blocked from the continent's markets by the war. Though industry did not collapse, it was put under considerable strain and when inflation soared, wages could not keep up.
*****
To combat these conditions of repression, and the inhumanities that came with them, a set of ideas (which later developed into the Communism we know about) was unleashed, later to branch out into World Socialism. Both of which went sour, fast. Nonetheless, they have both had ENORMOUS effects upon the lives of every living Human Being, and will continue to do so.
Considering that such TREMENDOUS ramifications have resulted from the creation of Communism and World Socialism, it is an act of Insanity, or the result of terrible oppression, not to be familiar with the Who, What, Where, When and Why of it all.
Yes, a lot of it was unpleasant.
It still is unpleasant.
So, learn about it – and make it more pleasant – because it can hold no surprises for you.
The October Revolution in Russia during 1917, was the spark that set off the next Economic Succession there. Otherwise known as the Bolshevik Revolution, it wiped out the Capitalistic Arrangement of Tsarist Russia, and pitched the country into a battle of Revolutionaries versus Counter-revolutionaries (who wanted the Old Days and the Old Ways and the Old Profits back).
In the Western World, Joseph Stalin is sometimes mentioned as the Communist Leader of the Twentieth Century, and Mikhail Gorbachev is mentioned as the man who dissolved the Soviet (Communist) Empire – at the insistence of Ronald Reagan – but beyond that, the events of Russia and Eastern Europe from the year 1900 to today are almost totally unknown in the Western Countries.
That is the result of a deliberate news blackout by the Satanic Medias here in America, that do not want any Humans here to learn any of the lessons that the Humans over there learned – most grievously.
That is bad news. Really bad news.
It is because of that news blackout, that the discussion of any Two of the opposing Economic Theories and Arrangements, in a country which is controlled by the Third Arrangement, is always considered alien and detrimental to the point of Treason.
This naturally causes animosities and hatreds between the Three, and between any people who consciously study any one of them, or likes One more than the other Two.
Economic Theories and Arrangements tend to put people into an Inhuman Place, from which thoughts and perceptions of 'other people', as enemies, inject themselves insidiously into their unsuspecting minds. Of course, some people go to that place, just to become somebody's enemy.
-----
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, as with most Revolutions, was all about Economic Thought. It was about people who somehow equate Economic Models and Economic Theories into Social Structures; that is, their own expectations of Society; what they think their Society (and International Society) should be.
Such people strive to have too much power, so their theories will become the laws of Society too much, so the friction and competition between the Theories will grate and grind too much, so the people who have to live their 'day-to-day' lives stuck inside societies, which are controlled by those Theories too much – die too much.
Such Theorists, think that Economics should be the foundation of Society. They realize that people are important too, but they get too much entranced into, and entrenched into, the idea that Society is the battlefield for the Struggle of Economic Theories and Methodologies. In the process, the Humanity gets Crushed To Death!
World War I, was just such a battlefield over which the Struggle between Economic Ideas and Intentions was fought. World War II was the same thing, only intensified and amplified. Don't forget that the Bolshevik Revolution, and the creation of the Soviet Empire, happened in that same time period.
Economic Ideas and Theories have always been causes and excuses for Wars.
*************************
This STUDY of a struggle between Socialists and Communists (which the Capitalists won) is being presented for its instructive values only.
This is not an endorsement for any of those Economic Systems.
So, all of the Communist and Socialist and Capitalist Propagandists can let the air out of their brains again. They aren't going anywhere with this lesson.
*************************
*************************
THE HUNGARIAN Revolution OF 1956:
My own notations are enclosed in brackets – [[ ]]
By Dave Hughes, a founding member of 'Workers Power', who died in 1991. [[A complete revolutionary activist, in England, who is the best writer in the group; and as is the case with all of them, against any notion or idea of the acceptance of Capitalist Economics.]]
--------------------
[[Beginning of Account]]
In October and November of 1956, the workers and students of Hungary took up arms against two successive waves of Soviet military intervention. They toppled a hated Stalinist government. They created workers' and revolutionary councils that became the real power in every factory and mine, and most localities. Only after at least 20,000 had been killed, and after the aerial bombardment of its major proletarian strongholds, was the Hungarian Revolution eventually drowned in blood.
[[Students? They had Students? How come they get to have Students – and we only get Demo/Homo Slaves with 'NEA' stamped on their brains?]]
The Hungarian uprising of 1956, contained the potential for the revolutionary destruction of Stalinism, both within Hungary and beyond its borders. It opened the prospect of destroying the political rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy, and replacing it with the direct political rule of the revolutionary proletariat.
Despite the ceaseless torrent of lies and slanders poured forth by international Stalinism, the Hungarian workers were neither agents of the restoration of Capitalism, nor the dupes of such agents. They were in their overwhelming majority determined to achieve two things. They wished to defend the socialised and planned economy against the restoration of the Capitalists and landlords, and they were determined to destroy the filthy tyranny that denied the proletariat the slightest democracy; subjecting it to a caste of highly privileged and upstart bureaucrats.
The tragedy of the Hungarian Revolution was that the workers were unable to create, in the time available, a leadership and a programme of action that could establish a government; and the armed forces necessary to defend Hungary's political revolution; and to extend it to the rest of Eastern Europe and the USSR. That the potential for this existed is clear from every serious study or eyewitness account of the events of 1956.
[[Did you get the lesson in that paragraph?]]
The falsity of the Stalinists' slanders breaks out of the vast majority of workers' statements in this period: [[stands out in contrast from]] ....
"Soviet soldiers! We the workers from the railroad factory in Gyor inform you that in our democratic state, workers are the guardians of the Socialist achievements. That means with all their might, they are speaking out against returning factories and banks to the Capitalists. At the same time we are against any Rakosite - Stalinist restoration." (Quoted in M.J. Lasky (ed) The Hungarian Revolution p 211)
The death of Stalin, in March 1953, served to destabilise the whole political system he had ruled over in the USSR, and in the 'People's Democracies' of Eastern Europe. In the highest ranks of the Kremlin there was a murderous struggle for power which, although eventually won by Khruschev, extended over several years. Berea, Khruschev, Malenkov and their rival cliques, took their battle for power onto the terrain of international politics.
[[Lesson – no one Human Leader should ever become so irreplaceable to our Species, that the loss of that Leader would paralyze or disable or scramble the Species itself.]]
As part of this factional struggle, Khruschev was obliged to denounce 'the crimes of Stalin'. In fact, he carefully restricted himself to revealing the dictator's crimes against the bureaucracy itself. The political opponents of Stalin, against whom the mass terror was unleashed - were not rehabilitated. In a laughable standing on its head of the personality cult, the slaughter and imprisonment of hundreds of thousands [[actually millions]] was passed off as the result of the evil genius or paranoia of one man. Promises were made to relax the police terror regime, to open the labour camps [[release political prisoners]], and improve living standards.
A ferment of revolt seethed through the whole Stalinist system. In the slave labour mines of Vorkuta there was a strike in the summer of 1953. In June 1951, strikes spread from East Berlin to all the major industrial centres of East Germany. The general strike was put down by Soviet troops. There were major strikes in Pilzen in Czechoslovakia, and at the giant Matyas Rakosi iron and steel plant in Csepel - the industrial centre of Budapest.
Stalin's death, the gang warfare in the Kremlin, and proletarian resistance provoked a political crisis in the ranks of Hungarian Stalinism. Since 1948, the 'Hungarian Stalin' (Matyas Rakosi) had set a course to industrialise Hungary, at break-neck speed, along the lines pioneered by the USSR in the 1930s. Workers living standards were driven down. The peasantry were driven at gunpoint into collective farms. Political repression was probably more severe then anywhere else in Eastern Europe; with the apparatus of repression being in the hands of an extremely privileged uniformed security force - the AVH. Rankers in the AVH received at least three times the average industrial wage; officers received twelve times that wage. In addition the newly established Hungarian People's Democracy was obliged to pay massive reparations to the USSR for the war that the Horthy regime had waged alongside Hitler. In 1948, 25.4% of Hungarian national expenditure went to reparations. That figure dropped to 10% in 1949.
Little wonder then, that the Rakosi regime was amongst the most hated by its own people in Eastern Europe. Fully aware of this and fearful of the consequences, the Kremlin and Malenkov in particular - moved to improve the image of the regime in 1953.
Rakosi had to stay as Party Secretary, but there was to be a new Prime Minister in the person of Imre Nagy, who was given the green light to inaugurate a 'New Course' in Hungary.
-----
NAGY'S NEW COURSE ...
Given his role in 1956 and his popularity with large sections of workers, and with oppositional intellectuals in the party, it is necessary to characterise Nagy's politics. By training, Nagy was an old Stalinist. He had spent 15 years of his life as a Comintern functionary in the USSR. On Stalin's death, he delivered the standard eulogy to Stalin as 'the great leader of humanity'.
However, within the spectrum of Stalinist politics Nagy was also decidedly a Rightist. His 'New Course' was aimed at achieving a slower pace of transition, along the lines of Russia's New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s. He attacked the politics of the Rakosi era for having more in common with the programme of the Left Opposition than with the actions of Stalin during the NEP. He was an ardent devotee of the Popular Front alliance that the Hungarian CP had maintained with peasant, social democratic and outright reactionary parties from 1944 to 1948. To that end he attempted to breathe life into the corpse of the still existent People's Patriotic Front, attempting to turn it into a mass organisation. Nagy talked openly of Hungary as having its own national road to Socialism and mused in 1955 on:
"the possibility of neutralizing Hungary on the Austrian pattern."
Nagy stands in the tradition of Hungarian and Rightist strands within Stalinism. More recently the model for his policy was Tito. However during his time in power, writers and journalists were less restricted by censorship, real wages were increased, peasants were freed to leave collective farms and the grossest trappings of Rakosi's dictatorship were scrapped.
If this alone was not sufficient to give Nagy a degree of popularity, his ousting from power by a resurgent Rakosi in January 1955, and his subsequent expulsion from the Central Committee and Party; served to provide him with the mantle of the courageous foe of the 'workers and intellectuals' of number one enemy, Matyas Rakosi.
[[This meaning is unclear. Is Nagy the courageous foe of the 'workers and intellectuals' of Matyas Rakosi? Or, is Nagy the courageous foe of Matyas Rakosi, to the 'workers and intellectuals'?]]
This explains why throughout 1955 and 1956 most oppositional currents in Hungary looked initially to Imre Nagy for political leadership.
Despite his best intentions, Rakosi found that he was not able to turn the clock back to the political norms of his old regime. In May 1955, Khruschev traveled to Yugoslavia to embrace and rehabilitate Tito. This immediately opened once again the cases of those thousand who had perished as the 'Tito-ite Fascists' in the various 'People's Democracies'.
In Hungary, it reopened the case of Lazlo Rajk, a prominent party leader who was shot after 'confessing' that he was an imperialist agent. The grisly story behind this was that Rajk had bravely resisted repeated torture; refusing to confess, until none other than Janos Kadar [[enter the evil villain, stage left]] (now Thatcher's favourite 'communist') went to see him, and pleaded with him to confess to save hundreds of other lives and offered him a deal - secret exile in the USSR. The confession having been, made the Stalinist gangsters kept their word as only they know how to!
[[backstabbing number one, in this account]]
In February 1956 however, the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) heard the most detailed denunciations of Stalin that Khruschev had delivered. Of necessity this fortified all opponents of the various 'Little Stalins', who had ruled in Eastern Europe. Opposition to Rakosi continued within the lower ranks of the Party. In 1956, members of the Communist Party's Youth Organisation (DISZ) reactivated a discussion circle established in 1954, under the name of the Hungarian national democratic poet of 1840 - Petofi.
The leaders of the Petofi circle included pre-war and war-time CP members, as well as young party intellectuals such a Balazs Nagy, who was deputy secretary of its provisional bureau. (In exile Balazs Nagy was later to become better know in Trotskyist circles as Michel Varga.)
[[The changing of names, depending upon situations and intentions, was not uncommon during the reign of the Soviet Empire.]]
In June 1956, the Petofi circle held a series of meetings attended by thousands, which heard Julia Rajk demand the full and wholehearted rehabilitation of her husband, and which endorsed a programme primarily demanding the freedom of the Press, and the return to power of Nagy. Rakosi ordered the Petofi circle to be closed, and seems to have been prepared for a new wave of arrests.
[[They had a Press? That's cool. All we have are newsrags.]]
-----
WORKERS ON THE MOVE ...
The workers of the People's Democracies were to prevent him. The indignation of the Hungarian proletariat was about to boil over. In June and July, there were a series of strikes in Csepel and Greater Budapest. Workers were reported to be expressing their hatred of privileged bureaucrats, by openly spitting at their limousines in the street. On the 28th July in Poland, the workers of Poznan struck, demonstrated, and were brutally fired on by the internal security forces that killed 54 and wounded at least 300. In the aftermath, the oppositional Stalinist Gomulka rode to power promising reforms and a break with the methods of the past.
Both incensed and terrified, Rakosi fulminated against the meetings of the Petofi circle as being "Hungary's Poznan", but he was unable to stop them. Neither were his Kremlin patrons convinced that he was any longer able to hold the line for the bureaucracy. In July, the Soviet leader Mikoyan visited Budapest and engineered the resignation of Rakosi, but foolishly installed as his replacement one of Rakosi's most trusted clique members, Frno Gero.
Squeezed between the restive workers, and the Kremlin's desire for a less harsh face for Hungarian Stalinism, and the Nagyite intellectual opposition; the Hungarian bureaucracy began to crack under the strain. Sharp criticism of Party policy and demands for change became increasingly vocal in the Party cells, in the working class districts.
The Party Press became increasingly open - and within its own terms - critical. On 6 October, over 200,000 people attended the public reburial of Rajk in Budapest. Students with red flags and national banners first raised a slogan that was to be heard much more frequently in the weeks ahead:
"We won't stop halfway, Stalinism must be destroyed."
Destabilisation and disorientation in the Stalinist ranks first opened the road for the student youth to organise. In mid-October, student youth in Szeged demanded the right to form their own organisation, independent of party control. They also struck against the compulsory learning of the Russian language. The students of Budapest's Technological University followed suit by calling a demonstration for 23 October in solidarity with Poland, where Gomulka was now firmly in power and had faced down Kremlin pressure.
The 23 October demonstration was the spark that lit the Hungarian Revolution. The authorities were not strong enough to ban it. Instead, they asked the Party members of the Petofi circle to lead the demonstration. The Stalinist, Antal Apro, begged wartime CP militant Tancss to assist him: "You must lead the demonstrators . . . and save the situation." (Ralazs Nagy: quoted in The Truth About The Nagy Affair 1959)
[[backstabbing number two]]
At this time the Petofi circle, composed as it was of critical Stalinists, was indeed very anxious to avoid any serious confrontation with the regime. As Balazs Nagy put it later:
"At this time, and subsequently also, the Petofi circle curbed rather than encouraged the movement, considering that the hastening of events could lead to a catastrophe."
The demonstration had an extraordinary flavour. Its members sang the Marseillaise, the Kossuth national song and the Internationale. Participants from the Party school marched with enormous portraits of Lenin and Marx. [[Not Stalin]]
The major slogans of the day were for "Nagy to power, Rakosi to the Danube" and for Soviet troops to go home.
As they became more emboldened, demonstrators pulled down red stars from the top of public buildings and ripped out the People's Democracy emblems from the centre of the Hungarian national flag. Eventually, welding workers hauled down a giant statue of Stalin and dragged it round the city behind a dustcart, eventually leaving its head outside the national theatre inscribed with the internationally understood W.C. As workers left factory shifts and joined the demonstration its ranks spread throughout the city. Troops joined the crowds and, in many cases, distributed arms.
On day one, of the Hungarian Revolution the demonstrators wrapped themselves in national colours. This was denounced over the radio by Party Chief Gero, as the demonstrators took the streets of Budapest. Gero declared on the radio:
"We condemn those who wish to spread the poison of chauvinism among our youth, and have used the democratic freedom assured to the working people by the state, to organise a demonstration of a nationalist character." (Quoted in M Molnar: Budapest1956)
[[The poison of chauvanism (as used here) is patriotism to a single Country -- which Gero condemns -- because everyone is supposed to have loyalty to the Communist State -- which includes all places controlled by Communism. This is like Arizona telling 'Wash This Death City' to "Go To Hell", and being called Chauvanists in return.]]
The Gero regime attempted a policy of using the carrot and stick. On the one hand, it called for Soviet troops to restore order in Budapest and declared martial law. On the other, it called on Nagy to head the government. It thereby hoped Nagy would be able to head off the mass movement. And indeed, he dutifully attempted to do just that, by supporting martial law, calling for order and promising, in reply, a return to his 1953 policies. Meanwhile, groups of workers were already doing battle with Soviet tanks on the streets of Budapest.
Throughout the length and breadth of Hungary, the workers replied to the Soviet intervention with strike action. By 26 October, virtually all work had stopped. Moreover, these first days saw the formation of workers' councils in every factory and mine, and also the link up of those councils into regional revolutionary committees in major industrial centres, such as Gyor and Miskolc.
-----
THE FIRST SHOTS ...
In its turn, Gero's attack served to render the crowds more angry and increase their resolve to hear their demands and arguments broadcast by the radio station. The first serious fighting took place at the radio station, where AVH guards opened fire on demonstrators, who returned fire from arms provided by fraternising Hungarian troops.
In general, the political horizons of the increasingly proletarian demonstration were fixed on the return to power of Imre Nagy. He had refused an invitation to attend the demonstration, and only belatedly agreed to address the thousands who had marched to Parliament Square calling for him to take power. His initial speech to the crowd showed just how alien his bureaucratic outlook was from that of the students and workers:
"It is by negotiation in the bosom of the Party, and by the discussion of problems, that we will travel the road that leads toward the settlement of our conflicts. We want to safeguard constitutional order and discipline. The government will not delay in arriving at its decisions." (Quoted in I Merray: 13 Days That Shook The Kremlin)
[[Lesson - that is typical 'Moderate Pabulum'. Unfortunately, Moderates are such dim-witted and short-sighted cowards, that they actually think (and can only think) that the near and close options of surrender and compromise will get them liked by enough people, that they will be permitted to stay in power and pretend to know what they are doing.]]
Yet one such speech was not sufficient to disabuse the masses of their illusions in Nagy.
-----
As stated before .. when faced with a massive demonstration, active fraternisation between workers and soldiers, and armed clashes with the AVH, the Gero regime attempted a policy of using the carrot and stick. On the one hand, it called for Soviet troops to restore order in Budapest, and declared martial law. On the other, it called on Nagy to head the government. It thereby hoped Nagy would be able to head off the mass movement. And indeed, he dutifully attempted to do just that; by supporting martial law, calling for order, and promising in reply, a return to his 1953 policies.
[[backstabbing number three]]
Meanwhile groups of workers were already doing battle with Soviet tanks on the streets of Budapest.
Throughout the length and breadth of Hungary, the workers replied to the Soviet intervention with strike action. By 20 October, virtually all work had stopped. Moreover, these first days saw the formation of workers' councils in every factory and mine, and also the link up of the foremost councils into regional revolutionary committees, in major industrial centres such as Gyor and Miskolc.
The impact of the upheaval on the bureaucracy, the security forces and the ranks of the Communist Party was immediate. In general, the officers of the hated AVH attempted to defend themselves and their barracks from the insurgents with the utmost brutality. Most dramatically, at Moson Magyarovar, the AVH let loose a hail of machine gun bullets at an unarmed and peaceful demonstration, killing around one hundred.
For the British CP's Daily Worker correspondent Peter Fryer, it was a shattering experience to see the dead and the mourners on his arrival across the Austrian frontier:
"After eleven years of 'People's Democracy' it had come to this: that the security police was so remote from the people, so alien to them, so vicious and so brutal that it turned its weapons on a defenceless crowd, and murdered the people who were supposed to be masters of their own country." (P Fryer: Hungarian Tragedy)
Little wonder then, that insurgent workers showed the least mercy for the AVH officers, and in most towns had to fight a bloody battle with them. In Miskolc, for example, the AVH attacked a proletarian crowd on 26 October. The local police handed their weapons to insurgent miners who finished off the AVH chief and the officers. In many cases the workers made a strict distinction between the AVH officers and the younger rank and filers, who were shown more mercy.
In many instances, the more hated Party officials in the localities simply disappeared or hid. However, Party members also played a leading role in the uprising itself at every level.
[[backstabbing number four]]
In the factories and mines, CP workers were active in initiating workers' councils. The leading figure in the Budapest Workers' Council Movement – Sandor Bali - had been a Party member since 1945. In proletarian Miskolc and the surrounding Borsod county, CP militants played a leading role in organising the workers' councils and in framing their demands. By 27 October, the Trade Union Council called on all workers to elect councils that would take over the tasks of management.
In addition, there were several instances of individual members from the highest ranks of the bureaucracy, going directly and actively over to the side of those who were doing battle with the Soviet troops.
Pal Maleter is the best known example. An army major and CP member since 1945, Maleter proudly sported a Soviet military decoration he received in 1944. On 24 October, he was ordered to capture the Kilian barracks, which was holding out against Soviet tanks. He described the events on Radio Budapest:
"When I got there, I discovered that the fighters for freedom were not bandits, but loyal children of the Hungarian people. I therefore informed the Ministry of Defence that I was joining the insurgents."
Yet Maleter always insisted that his struggle was for Socialism. He told foreign correspondents:
"If we get rid of the Russians don't think we're going back to the old days. And, if there's people who do want to go back, we'll see."
Reassuringly clutching his revolver he added:
"We don't mean to go back to Capitalism. We want Socialism in Hungary."
[[almost backstabbing number five – except he was up front about it. A grateful Stalinist Party, had him hanged after the Revolution.]]
While the proletarian base of the party, and certain elements of its apparatus went over to the insurrection, its leading circles sought desperately to diffuse the crisis and restabilise bureaucratic rule. In late October, as workers' councils mushroomed and the security forces melted away, this was a task they attempted to do behind Soviet tanks. However, the Nagy government was to find it impossible to restore an order to its liking, so long as it was shielded by Soviet troops. And, in turn those very Soviet troops were proving unreliable in this task.
-----
FRATERNISATION WITH SOVIET TROOPS ...
Initially the Soviet troops believed, to some extent, that they were being sent in to fight Fascists. This meant that fraternisation by workers and students was capable of having a devastating effect on Soviet troop morale. A worker recounted to Time magazine a typical instance of fraternisation:
"Our people were not afraid of the Russians, and talked to them. Some of the Russians thought they were in East Germany, and that they would soon meet American 'fascists' who had invaded the country. Other troops thought they were in the Suez Canal zone."
[[The Soviet Regime, like the Homo/Demos, used massive amounts of brainwashing and constant political programming upon everyone within its empire. If you were inside the empire you could not eat, drink, or breath without being inundated by Communists slogans and Communist ideological statements, which you were supposed to accept as gospel. Your life, was not your life -- it belonged to the State.
Just like our lives, are not supposed to be our lives -- they are supposed to belong to the SQLD.]]
The workers proceeded to explain who they really were, at which point the Soviet troops began to fraternize, with their captain throwing down his hat and affirming that the Kremlin leaders:
"Bulganin and Khruschev would rape their own mothers." (Quoted By Lasky: p 103)
Gyor and Miskolc radios - in the hands of their revolutionary committees - broadcast messages of solidarity to the Soviet troops. Miskolc declared:
"Our people did not revolt against you, but for the achievement of legal demands. Our interests are identical. We and you, are all fighting together for a better Socialist life." (ibid p116)
In Gyor, the Soviet commander even went on the air to declare:
"We will not interfere with your national political affairs... I think that the rising of the Hungarian people against the oppressive leaders is just." (ibid p112)
The authorities had to act to prevent the spread of fraternisation. On the 25 October, Soviet tanks accompanied a jubilant crowd to a demonstration in Parliament Square. That demonstration was fired on from the surrounding rooftops; Soviet tanks returned the fire. When the firing stopped, according to Bill Lomax, over 100 were killed including Soviet troops. Either the AVH or crack Soviet security units had taken this action to stop the drift towards fraternisation. In fact, fighting between the two sides became far more severe as a result of the slaughter - which both Hungarian workers and Soviet soldiers saw as the others' responsibility.
The wave of fraternisation showed that the political revolution - whilst necessarily raising certain legitimate national grievances - held the potential for becoming international, and indeed internationalist, by spreading to the Soviet Armed Forces. The bloody outcome of the Hungarian Revolution, underlines just how vital that internationalism is; if the political revolution is not to be crushed in national isolation. [[read that again]]
Despite this enormous potential, the actual politics of the workers' movement in the last days of October were those of sceptical Nagyism. The complete inadequacy of these politics was to be tragically revealed. In most areas the workers' councils busied themselves with local or factory problems, involved in maintaining the general strike, and gave different forms of critical support to Nagy. The leaders of the councils saw them as potential organs of management in the plants. They saw their committees as potential alternative local government, but blindly ceded central political power to Nagy.
This was well expressed recently by a Budapest Workers Council Militant, in Sandor Racz, who explained that it wasn't until moves were made against Nagy (by Kadar) that council activists began to think about national politics, or governmental power, as a question that concerned them directly:
"Up till then we hadn't intervened in politics, because we trusted Imre Nagy. We saw him as the political guarantee of the revolution." (Interview from Beszelo No 7: In Labour Focus Summer 1984)
This meant that while the councils pressed demands on Nagy - most importantly for Soviet withdrawal, a new government, the right to strike, and an amnesty (the 4 point programme of Miskolc in the first days of the revolution) -- and while the councils maintained the strike action until they thought they had wrung serious concessions from Nagy -- they remained hidebound by a variety of syndicalism that saw the factories as the property of the workers, and the government as the property of the national politicians. Thus a decisive struggle for workers' power -- at a time when Soviet troops were in many instances unwilling to fight, and when the Nagy government was very weak indeed -- was excluded from the agenda. There was in fact an acute crisis of leadership in the Hungarian Revolution. [[read that again]]
How did Nagy use the political initiative that the workers' movement ceded to him? Initially the authority of his government barely ran beyond the ministry buildings in Budapest. Cast in his Stalinist mould, there was no question of him conceiving of the workers' councils as an alternative base of power.
The history of Stalinism, shows it to be resolutely opposed to all manifestations of a healthy workers' democracy; so much so that it will always ally itself with reactionary and bourgeois forces, in order to subvert and destroy the potential organs of a healthy workers' state.
[[Just exactly like the Moderates, who will do anything they can in the future to disable and derail the Human Species.]]
The form that alliance took in Hungary during and after the war (in common with other People's Democracies) was a coalition with bourgeois parties, within which the Stalinists would keep a hold on the organs of security and repression. Nagy's means of defusing the political revolutionary crisis was to attempt to piece such a coalition together once again.
[[backstabbing number five]]
-----
NAGY'S COALITION GOVERNMENT ...
On 27 October, Nagy announced the formation of a new coalition government, including representatives of the historic Smallholders' Party and the National Peasants' Party. Two points must be underlined about this move. Firstly, those parties barely existed except as motley collections of ex-party leaders. Secondly, if we look at the demands being voiced in Miskolc and Gyor, while it was the case that some ex-Social Democrats were joining in the fray; calls for a coalition government or for parliamentary type elections were rarely posed in the initial documents of struggle. It was, in fact, those around Nagy who reached for the old parties and the trappings of a coalition with the ex-leaders of the bourgeois parties. This was a trusted tactic for deflecting the working class, from the fight for its own political power. [[democrat tactics]]
In turn, as the old parties were reconstituted from the top downwards, and as horse trading for office recommenced, so the call for genuine free elections was increasingly raised from within the workers' councils. After all, the Stalinists had maintained the charade of Parliamentarism, without the substance of a multiplicity of competing parties. Stalinism, could never pose the political alternative to a parliament of genuine soviet power.
[[Do not miss what that means. He is talking about multiplicityy of competing parties (democraps need not apply), that results in a healthy Parlimentarism.]]
The workers' movement, posed the potential of workers' council power. Its predominant demands included the public trial of the most murderous bureaucrats of the Rakosi regime, the replacement of those responsible for faults in the planned economy, the publication and revision of foreign trade agreements; as well as wage rises and management rights for workers' councils.
Nagy and company, tried to divert this movement into the channels of a bogus popular front coalition. In that coalition, key figures of the old Stalinist apparatus - Apro, Munnich, Horvath and Kossa - were to keep their positions. And, they were to use those positions to murderous effect later.
Many of the Stalinists around Nagy were resigned to a very significant Rightist retreat, as the road out of the crisis, and a means of aborting the political revolution. The literary theorist Georg Lukacs was Minister of Popular Culture in the Nagy government. Vikor Woroszylski, a Polish CP journalist from Nowa Kultura, describes a conversation he had with Lukacs at the time. He reports Lukacs as saying:
"Communism in Hungary has been totally disgraced. . . The working class will prefer to follow the Social Democrats. In free elections the Communists will obtain five per cent of the vote, ten per cent at the most. It is possible that they won't be in government, that they will go into opposition. But, the party will continue to exist; it will save the idea; it will be an intellectual centre, and after some years or decades from now, who knows. (Quoted in Lasky: op cit p 159)
As the political organs of a healthy workers' state were making their appearance throughout Hungary, our Marxist philosopher (Lukacs) preferred saving the 'idea' of being an opposition, in a bourgeois parliament. And, what idea did he want to save? The idea that he and his bureaucratic centre could get their hands back on power one day, once the political revolution of the Hungarian workers had exhausted itself.
Playing on the political weaknesses of the spontaneous workers' movement, Nagy was able to temporarily regain some of the political initiative. On 28 October, he requested a Soviet troop withdrawal from Hungary, and an immediate cease fire. He announced the dissolution of the AVH. On 30 October, he announced the recreation of the 1945 coalition, by inviting the Social Democrats to delegate a minister; even though that party had not yet effectively re-formed itself at a national level. The Minister of the Interior was Ferenc Munnich - one time Ambassador to Moscow of Rakosi's regime. At the same time, Soviet troops left the major industrial centres of Hungary.
The troop withdrawals were negotiated by the Soviet Ambassador, one Yuri Andropov. He had good reason to pull back the troops, since they had been infected with many of the liberatory slogans of the Hungarian Revolution. At the very same time, he liaised with Khruschev to organise the entry of fresh Soviet troops into Hungary. While Nagy's new popular front coalition was holding back the workers from a decisive show down with Stalinism, the Kremlin was preparing a deadly second strike.
[[The most brainwashed, sadistic and murderous killers are always used in the very front as Intimidators, and in reserve as Crushers.]]
--------------------
IN THE PERIOD FROM 23 OCTOBER ...
From then, until the first announced withdrawal of Soviet troops, the Hungarian working class had shown enormous strengths and a capacity for revolutionary struggle. Its councils and militia controlled the major industrial centres. It's fighting spirit and its efforts at fraternisation had undermined the morale of the Soviet troops. Yet, the mobilisations of the Hungarian working class were not without their fatal weaknesses.
The councils had the potential to become organs of direct working class power. Yet, they concerned themselves with local and factory matters, and ceded central power to Imre Nagy. Also, the fraternisation never succeeded in bringing whole units of the Soviet armed forces over to the side of the insurrection. Neither, did it win Soviet soldiers to a fight to form their own soldiers' councils. The failure to achieve these things seriously weakened the vital struggle to internationalise the Hungarian political revolution, via the ranks of the Soviet army.
It is not to belittle the heroism of the Hungarian working class, to argue that its fundamental weakness was its lack of a Revolutionary Party. Only such a party could have led the challenge for workers' power.
"The forty thousand aristocrats and fascists of the Csepel works strike on!" [[obligatory socialist enthusiasm]]
In general, at this time, militants either proposed the idea of parties as being divisive, or had illusions in one or another of the 1945 governmental parties, or favoured a coalition of such parties. Against these tendencies revolutionary Marxists, fighting for political revolution, would have fought for the councils to centralise their forces; and for a government that was directly accountable to those councils.
Such a call would have mobilised serious support amongst sections of the council militants. For example, Kiss, President of the Miskolc Workers' Council, condemned the role of the newly organised political parties, and demanded on 2 November that:
"The Government shall propose the formation of a national revolutionary council, to be supported by the departmental workers' councils of Budapest and composed of democratically elected delegates. At the same time, they shall pronounce the dissolution of the National Assembly. (Quoted in Budapest 1956, M Molner)
In the vital stages of the Revolution, such voices were in a minority in the leadership of the councils. The key task was to win that minority to the fight for political revolution, and to organise them into a Revolutionary Party.
The initial stance of the councils handed Nagy, and remnants of the old parties' leaderships, all the political initiative. This was to prove fatal for the course of the Hungarian political revolution.
[[Not to mention the 20,000 yet to die.]]
In an immediate sense, the very leaders drawn into the Nagy coalition did not demand the restoration of Capitalism. On day release from his sanatorium, Small Holders leader Kovacs, declared that
"No one must dream of going back to the World of Counts, Bankers and Capitalists. That World is definitely over."
And, while he suggested that the party programmes were now outdated, he refrained from any alternative. For the Social Democrats, Anna Kethly made a similar declaration against the restoration of the old order:
"Freed from one prison, let it not allow the country to become a prison of another colour. Let it watch over the factories, the mines and the land, which must remain in the hands of the people."
The National Peasants Party, which was to rename itself the Petofi, contained many cadrised activists who had historically been prepared to work with the CP.
Yet in offering the leaders, of these partly reconstituted parties, a governmental majority Nagy was certainly creating a potential rallying point for Capitalist restoration. The Small Holders were a traditionally rightist party, based on the richer peasants. The Social Democrats used the freedom delivered to them by the political revolutionary crisis, to dispatch Kethly to Vienna to discuss matters with the leaders of the Second International. Whatever its orientation to the poorer peasants, the Petofi Party soon announced that it ...
"Believes in private property, and advocates free production and marketing" (Quoted in The Hungarian Revolution, MJ Lasky, p218).
In the medium and longer term, each of these party leaderships would have used their power to dismantle the monopoly of foreign trade and the planning mechanisms, in the direction of restoring Capitalism for Nagy, For Lukacs and company, this was a lesser evil compared with the proletarian political revolution. The trajectory of these rightist Stalinists, confirmed Trotsky's analysis of the nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The Hungarian leadership shared the characteristic Trotsky had identified in the Soviet bureaucracy - namely a tendency to fragment under pressure, with sections of it willing to:
". . . overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back into Capitalism." (The Transitional Programme)
But, many of the Stalinists who connived in the coalition project, as an expedient means of robbing the workers of political power - Kadar for example - were also to accuse the Hungarian revolutionaries of having become the tools of counter-revolution. They were to order the slaughter of thousands of Hungarian workers on this pretext.
Jubilant and thankful ideologists of Capitalism, were lucky to seize on every meagre piece of evidence, offered up by the Stalinists, to prove their own version of the story that the Hungarian Revolution was a Capitalist, pro-Western revolution.
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THE FORCES OF REACTION ...
Old Reactionaries, took advantage of the revolutionary crisis to show their faces once again. In Clyur, one Somogyvari argued for the formation of a separate government which, with him at its head, would wage a Christian crusade against the USSR. Workers, from the railway wagon works ran him out of town. There is no evidence that any real delegates ever attended his Council, but the Kadar regime was to hold him up as evidence of the mounting threat of counter-revolution.
The old fascist Arrow Cross (organization) did make some re-appearance, most notably in Gyor, which was near (connected) to exile organisations over the Austrian border. There are no substantiated accounts of the Arrow Cross playing an organised or systematic role in these events. A meeting on 1 November in Budapest, which was called to reconstitute the Arrow Cross seems to have been poorly attended and chaotic.
However ex-Arrow Cross members do seem to have played a role in the slaughter of Communist Party officials at their Budapest HQ, on 30 October; along with lumpens and criminals, they killed over 25 communists and AVH conscripts and savagely mutilated their bodies. The political revolution had as one of its tasks the brutal suppression of all such reactionary forces. The Hungarian workers were more than capable of fulfilling this task. Fascists got short shrift from the workers.
The activities and slogans of the reactionary forces, must not be confused with the seemingly nationalist slogans advanced at the earliest stages of the Revolution, by the workers. The initial slogans of the October fighting, were not consciously those of political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy. The Revolution tended to express itself in the language of destroying the symbols of Soviet sponsored power, and of national independence.
The historic gain of nationalised industry had not been the work of the workers themselves, but rather that of a regime which stamped out every manifestation of proletarian democracy. The collective farms appeared to the majority of peasants as an alien imposition. Given that the red stars and the hammers and sickles that accompanied these gains, were seen as symbols of Hungary's national oppression; it is little wonder that the early revolt often expressed itself simply in terms of removing such symbols.
It would have been impossible to eject (remove) otherwise, in a World where 'Socialism' meant both the expropriation of the old owners and the imposition of a local Stalinist variant of the oppressive Russian bureaucracy.
However, the political drift of the major workers' organisations was not in the direction of unleashing Capitalist Counter-revolution. They initially saw themselves as pressure points on Nagy. All the major councils were so content with the Nagy government, and with promises of Soviet troop withdrawal, that they called for a return to work from 5 November.
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THE STALINISTS FIGHT BACK ...
The Hungarian workers had been lulled into a sense of false confidence. By the first days of November, Soviet troops had left the major industrial centres for their barracks. Most organisations were now prepared to back Nagy's coalition government. Janos Kadar announced on 1 November that the old Hungarian Communist Party had been dissolved, and that a new Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party was to be formed, purged of the most hated Stalinists. He announced his full backing for Nagy and the Revolution:
"In a glorious uprising the people have overthrown the Rakosi regime. It has won for our country the freedom and independence without which there can be no Socialism."
Of the insurgents he declared:
"We are proud of you, for you took your proper place in the armed uprising. You were imbued with true patriotism and loyalty towards Socialism."
However, there was mounting evidence of fresh Soviet troops entering Hungary, despite explicit denials of this by Ambassador Andropov. On 1 November, the Nagy government publicly protested at the troop movements, and repeated its demand for the withdrawal of all Soviet troops. It also announced that it was renouncing the Warsaw pact, which the Soviet bureaucracy was using as their pretext for positioning their troops. It declared that, like Austria, Hungary was now 'neutral'.
These were dramatic steps for a Stalinist to take. Neutrality had been mooted by Soviet leaders, as a model for Central Europe beyond their "buffer zone". The idea did not fall from the sky, and had been accepted as a status for Austria in 1955. However, for a Communist Party led government to declare itself neutral between Imperialism and the USSR, was evidence of its rightist course; a course that was being backed by the Social Democrats.
A proletarian political revolution would, quite justifiably, break with the Warsaw Pact which is an instrument of political repression. It (Warsaw Pact) licences the Kremlin bureaucracy to trample on proletarian democracy, anywhere in its sphere of influence. But, the political revolution would commit itself from the outset to defending all of the workers' states against Imperialism. Failure to do so would always cut the ground under attempts to internationalise the political revolution. In a purely 'national' or 'neutral' guise, the proletarian uprising of a small individual state is rendered powerless to effectively neutralise the superior military might of the Soviet Armed Forces. [[read that again]]
With tragic but typical naivety, the Nagy government reached for the United Nations as the means of defending itself, asking the next General Assembly to debate 'Hungarian neutrality'. At the same time it announced itself prepared to negotiate a troop withdrawal, and nominated a commission led by Pal Maleter to carry out the preparations. At a time when the armed working class, fighting under the banner of internationalism, was the only means of defence against the USSR, Nagy chose the path of neutralism and appeals to the United Nations. [[a Moderate blunder]]
The Soviet bureaucracy had made all of its preparations for a second attack. On 2 November, key Stalinist 'supporters' of Nagy - Kadar and Munnich - slipped away in secret. On 3 November, Maleter started negotiations with his Soviet counterparts. Agreement was reached immediately, that all Soviet troops would withdraw with military honours. Only the date of departure was left to be negotiated over dinner at the Soviet HQ.
At 11:00 pm, Maleter phoned to say the negotiations were going well. After that, contact with him was broken. At dawn, on the 4 November, a fresh wave of Soviet troops went into all the major industrial centres. Kadar and Munnich announced that they had formed a 'Revolutionary Workers and Peasants Government'; and that "acting in the interest of our people, working class and country" they had:
"requested the Soviet Army Command to help our nation smash the sinister forces of reaction, and restore order and calm in the country."
[[backstabbing number six]]
Nagy took cover in the Yugoslav embassy, urging the workers not to resist this new onslaught. The much vaunted leaders of the coalition parties were nowhere to be seen. Yet, the workers replied again with a general strike and organised military resistance. The second phase of the Hungarian Revolution had begun. The workers, arms in hand, now confronted the invasion of a new wave of Soviet troops, who had not been affected by the previous efforts at fraternisation.
At the head of the bogus 'workers and peasants government', were key Stalinist figures who had remained in Nagy's government - Horvath, Munnich, Apro, Kossa and Kadar himself. In giving time to Nagy, the workers had also been giving time to their future executioners. Kadar now denounced the workers' rising as a fascist inspired counter-revolution that, with the help of fraternal troops, they were suppressing in order to save Socialist Hungary!
[[Read that again – the Communists are crushing the Socialists in order to save Socialist Hungary.]]
The clique around Kadar cut no ice with the Hungarian workers.
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THE REVOLUTION DROWNED IN BLOOD ...
Posters at the giant Csepel works replied defiantly:
"The forty thousand aristocrats and fascists of the Csepel works strike on!" and:
"The general strike is a weapon, which can only be used when the entire working class is unanimous - so don't call us Fascists." (quoted in Lasky op.cit.)
Radio Rajk announced on 5 November:
"Comrades! The place of every true Hungarian Communist today is on the barricades." [[Socialists calling themselves Communists, fighting Communists at the barricades.]]
Attacked from all sides by Soviet troops and aircraft, the Dunapentele workers' council announced:
"Dunapentele is the leading Socialist town in Hungary. In this town all the inhabitants are workers and they hold power in their hands... The population of the town is under arms. . . they will not give in, because they have erected the factories and homes of the town with their own hands . . . the workers will defend the town against fascism - but also against the Soviet troops." (Quoted in B Lomax, Hungary 1956)
The Soviet troops met the fiercest resistance in the proletarian strongholds of Hungary. It was iron and steel towns like Miskole and Dunapentele, as well as mining areas like Borsod, Pees, Dorog and Tatabanya that held out the longest. It took the Soviet Armed Forces three days to take the centre of Budapest, and it was not until 10 November that Soviet troops could be fully deployed against the capital's proletarian bastion of Csepel. Even when the Soviet troops had crushed the insurrection, a total general strike continued against the occupation and its 'workers and peasants government'.
During the initial days of the second invasion, workers' councils coordinated the defence of the factories on a local basis. It was not until after most of the fighting had subsided, that delegates assembled to form a Central Workers' Council of Greater Budapest. Its leading figure was a pre-war social democrat turned Communist Party member in 1945 - Sandor Bali.
The initial intention of Bali, and his supporters, was that the Council should be a representative negotiating force for the working class, forcing maximum concessions from the Kadar regime. The general strike was seen as the most violent means of securing such concessions. Accordingly, the Council's first meeting drew up a list of demands and sent a delegation to press those demands on Kadar.
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THE POLITICS OF THE WORKERS' COUNCILS ...
The politics of the leaders of the Hungarian workers, in this period, were highly contradictory. A political programme was adopted at the 12 November meeting. It came from the pen of Istvan Bibo a member of the peasant Petofi Party, and one time member of Nagy's cabinet. It gives a sharp insight into the pressures towards the restoration of Capitalism, that the Nagy coalition would inevitably have come under.
It called for a multi-party system, for the restoration of the Nagy government, and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary -- which, in turn, would leave the Warsaw Pact. While calling for "legislation to secure the existence of Socialism and the protection of Communists", it also called for freedom of private ownership in land. While it defended social ownership of the banks, mines and large enterprises, it argued for the remaining factories to be taken into common ownership through workers' management, workers' shareholdership, and a profit-sharing system.
As immediate demands, the Council informed Kadar that it negotiated on behalf of the workers and took upon itself the right to call strikes. It protested at the reappearance of armed AVH units and demanded the reinstatement of Nagy, an amnesty, the withdrawal of Soviet troops and free elections. The majority of the Council were for parleying with Kadar, to restore Nagy to power from his bolt hole in the Yugoslav embassy. Only a minority agreed with the view expressed at the time by the Council's President Sandor Racz:
"We do not need the cabinet. We are, and will be, the leaders of Hungary."
Kadar played for time, stringing the Council leaders along for rounds of negotiations. He informed the first Council delegation:
"We want a multi-party system in, and an honest election. . . We (Communists) might be thoroughly beaten in the elections, but if we take on an election challenge, the Communist Party may regain its strength and obtain the confidence of the working masses." (Quoted from the Party paper, Nepszabadsag 15 November, In Lasky op.cit.)
But in the meantime, in exchange for such assurances, the workers' leaders were urged by Kadar to call off the General Strike, and use any influence they had to urge Nagy to leave the Yugoslav embassy in order to negotiate.
While the Central Workers' Council was formally adopting resolutions in favour of parliamentary democratic forms, and a mixed economy; there was a vital aspect of their politics, standing in potential contradiction to these bourgeois democratic illusions that a revolutionary Trotskyist party would have sought to relate to and extend. The front line role of the workers, and their councils, convinced proletarians and non-proletarians alike that the working class was the leading force in the Hungarian Revolution.
"The general strike is a weapon which can only be used when the entire working class is unanimous - so don't call us Fascists."
In the first phase of Resistance, it was common to read declarations from the workers announcing that the factories were theirs, while the government (or 'nation') should be ruled by others. But, faced with the second invasion the workers' leaders saw themselves as representatives of the proletariat, negotiating with an alien government. In mid-November, the duplicity of Kadar and his negotiators concentrated the minds of many more militants on the question of fighting for an alternative governmental power.
In early and mid November, there was a clear situation of dual power in Hungary. No tram could run and no factory could open without the say so of the workers' councils. The Stalinists recognised this fact. Kadar regularly negotiated with council leaders. The Soviet High Command issued those same leaders with the right to carry arms, and break the curfew. The Soviet Command even sent an observing liaison officer to the Budapest Council meetings.
There were, however, three key preconditions for resolving this dual power through a victory of workers' power over the Stalinist Armed Forces. First, a party was needed to lead the fight for such a resolution to the crisis. Secondly, the councils would have to centralise their forces into a clear and open governmental alternative. Last, but by no means least, that governmental challenge would have to project itself into an international struggle, to spread the political revolution.
Despite the absence of a Revolutionary Party, the councils did, hesitatingly and belatedly, move in the direction of centralising their power and challenging the governmental power of Kadar. On 19 November, the Budapest Workers' Council called for all provincial councils to elect delegates to a Workers' Parliament, due to meet on 21 November.
It proposed the formation of a permanent Workers' Parliament, of 156 delegates from the provinces and some of the larger factories. In turn, this was to elect a 30 strong executive from its ranks and co-opt 20 individuals from the parties, the armed forces, the police and the intellectuals. It did lay down that only parties accepting Socialism could be admitted into the executive.
The Soviet High Command and Janos Kadar acted quickly to smash this challenge. On 21 November, Soviet troops ringed the stadium where the Workers' Parliament was due to meet.
In order to remove a symbol rather than a vital force, Imre Nagy and his supporters were issued with safe conduct passes from the Yugoslav embassy on the 22 November. On leaving their sanctuary they were duly arrested and immediately departed to Romania. They were later to be hanged.
[[backstabbing number seven]]
On the 25 November, the workers' council leaders were offered a conference in the Parliament building with the leading Hungarian Stalinists in the government. At the conference, the working class was attacked for being 'confused', and the council leaders for having nothing to do with the working class. 'Workers and Peasants' Minister Marrsan rounded on the delegates who defended the actions of the Hungarian workers:
"You Russians! To think you can give us a lecture! Us! You call yourselves proles! But, what have you in common with the workers?" (Quoted in Lomax op.cit.)
Thus spoke satrap, who could now afford to publicly vent his fury against the insubordination (of the working class and its delegates) towards the bureaucratic regime of which he was a well paid agent!
Such rude treatment at the hands of the Kadar government hardened the stance of the council leaders, at a time when the Government and the Soviet troops obviously had the upper hand on the streets.
The council leaders pressed ahead with their plans to create a National Workers' Parliament which was to meet until the 23 October 1957 (the anniversary of the first fighting in Budapest), when free national elections were to be held. For well on a year, the workers' council delegates were to assume national authority until elections took place.
The Budapest Council took this stance when the balance of forces was already strongly against the workers. Their plans were not to come to fruition; but a Revolutionary Party would have had to take a stance on such proposals, at whatever stage they were advanced in a political revolutionary crisis. A Revolutionary Party, would have supported the formation of a government responsible to the councils. It would have opposed the eventual ceding of power from the councils to a parliamentary body.
Given, that the workers' illusions in Parliamentary Democracy had been strengthened as a direct result of Stalinist tyranny; and that workers therefore still called for parliamentary elections; Revolutionaries would have fought for any election to be held under the direct scrutiny of the councils themselves, and with the exclusion of all parties that did not support those councils.
Should the scheduled National Assembly have met, it would have been faced with the choice of ratifying the Central Workers' Council as the source of power, or of being sent packing as soon as possible.
The best elements of the Hungarian proletariat had, unfortunately, attempted to pose a council based government far too late in the struggle. The all encompassing repression, meant that it was difficult for these self same leaders to envisage any form of Resistance in favour of their new project - beyond silent demonstrations that turned Budapest into a ghost town, or symbolic demonstrations of wreath-bearing women.
"In this town all the inhabitants are workers and they hold power in their hands."
Despite the more militant political stance of the Budapest Council leaders, the attempt to pose a form of workers' government as an alternative to the Kadar government came far too late. On 9 December, the government arrested as many council leaders as it could. The workers of the Beloiannis factory protected Bali and Racz from arrest. But, these two accepted an offer on 11 December to leave the factory in order to meet Kadar. They were arrested in the Parliament building.
[[backstabbing number eight]]
Despite a short lived renewed general strike against the arrests, the Stalinist regime of Kadar was now firmly in the saddle. It cracked down with special courts, and extended the death penalty to those who struck or even incited others to strike. In the face of such victorious and barbaric reaction, and with its principal leaders in jail, the workers' movement came to terms with its defeat. The Central Workers' Council now called for passive resistance. On 15 January 1957, it issued a final appeal to the Hungarian workers:
"Because of the terror, however, and the death penalty even for distributing leaflets, the Council exhorts the workers to spread all news concerning the underground by word of mouth. Sabotage and passive resistance are the order of the day."
[[This is why the SQLD put 'Il Duce Branstad' in power, as Puppet Governor of Demo-Iowa]]
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WAS VICTORY POSSIBLE?
Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the Hungarian Revolution had the potential to develop into a successful proletarian political revolution against bureaucratic rule. The workers' councils and workers' militia were the embryonic organs of a healthy workers' state; where bureaucratic tyranny would have been replaced by proletarian democracy; and the planned economy reorganised under the democratic management of the workers.
Under the impact of the revolt, the Stalinist bureaucratic apparatus fragmented. Major sections of the party, particularly at a rank and file level, went over to the side of the Insurgents. But, the core of the bureaucracy remained - of necessity - intransigently opposed to proletarian democracy in all its forms.
One wing, around Nagy, offered the working class the road of a popular front coalition; built from above to derail the struggle for worker's power.
[[That is identical to what the SQLD are doing with the 'Il Duce Branstad' regime in Demo-Iowa, to derail the Real Humans of Iowa.]]
The other (wing), prepared to drown the Revolution in proletarian blood. Once again, Stalinism showed its predominantly counter-revolutionary nature. The hopes of the leaders of degenerate Trotskyism at the time (Pablo and Mandel), in a "progressive" wing of the bureaucracy, were shown to be illusory. While the bureaucracy will always fragment, no wing of it can ever be a substitute for direct organs of working class power, or the Revolutionary Party.
That the Hungarian workers were defeated does not mean that all such revolts against bureaucratic rule are doomed. Neither does it mean that the working class should forsake the goal of political revolution, in search of a reformist co-existence with the bureaucracy - what Kuron calls his 'self-limiting revolution'. What it does mean is that in the absence of a Revolutionary Leadership, the spontaneous energy of the working class is not in itself sufficient to take power into the hands of the workers.
[[Bingo! That is the crux of the problem here in America! There is no Revolutionary Leadership that is sufficient to stop the SQLD vermin! The SQLD intend to have the Republican Establishment derail the Tea Party Movement, to keep it from becoming a Revolutionary Party.]]
A Revolutionary Leadership would have battled inside the often politically confused Hungarian working class, for the councils to constitute themselves as the basis of power, and ensure that the government was directly and immediately accountable to them.
[[What an unheard of, and Non-Democrat thought! Government Accountability to the People. Who are never supposed to have a Will of the People!]]
Against those who saw it as simply a national revolt, or who put their trust in the United Nations, a Revolutionary Party would have fought to internationalise the political revolution, spreading it both to the USSR, via the Soviet Army, and to the other degenerate workers' states.
[[Trotsky argued that the Soviet state had become a 'degenerated workers state' controlled by an undemocratic bureaucracy. In other words, failed.]]
Without that internationalisation, all the odds were stacked against the Hungarian workers achieving victory. The struggles of the Hungarian working class thirty years ago [[at the time of this writing]] prove both the need for, and the possibility of, the political revolutionary overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy. They show all too clearly, as well, that the working class needs an International Revolutionary Party if it is not to be crushed by the forces of Stalinist reaction.
[[This is a blueprint for ANY struggle by an oppressed people, against any bureaucracy. In America, it is the struggle of the Humans against the Establishments.]]
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POST SCRIPT ...
The collapse of the Stalinist states in 1990-92, saw the destruction of the bureaucratically centrally planned economies, and the restoration of Capitalism in all of them, barring North Korea and Cuba. This collapse had a profound effect on World politics and the state of the working class movement. No longer could workers' parties look to a really existing Socialism abroad. No longer were national liberation movements like the PLO and Vietcong, funded by the Stalinist regimes. No longer was over a third of the World's territory excluded from Capitalist exploitation. For a period during the 1990s, as Capitalism was being restored and while the working class movement was in full retreat, there was a period that could be described as a counter-revolutionary one; the forces of reaction were triumphant, the Capitalists proclaimed the end of "history." The class struggle was over and the Capitalists had won. Or, so the story went.
But, with the revival of the World economy from the mid-1990s, as globalisation injected new dynamism into World Capitalism, the working class began to recover, albeit hesitantly, falteringly with often only small steps forward.
The PR-N believe that this transition from the defeats of the 1990s towards a new revival of working class confidence and struggle still characterises the period today - hence we describe it as a transitional period. The working class has still not recovered from the defeats of the 1970s/80s, but has only begun to recover its confidence. The growth and expansion of World Capitalism is manifest, with the development of whole new powers like China and India, and the recovery of the former workers' states, as their economies have begun to function as Capitalist ones.
It is nonsense today to speak of a period of "stagnation" or even a "tendency towards stagnation" in the World economy, in fact to do so, wilfully ignores the effects of Capitalist restoration, and gives credence to those leftists who asserted that there was no fundamental difference between the centrally planned economies of the former Stalinist states, and Capitalism itself. A mistake which World Capitalism had no intention of making.
We can continue to take inspiration from the struggle of Hungarian workers against the Stalinist bureaucracy, while recognising that in general, that is yesterday's fight, with Stalinism destroyed as a material block to the class struggle.
The initial effects have been to profoundly set back the working class struggle, but ultimately, without this bulwark of counter-revolution, when Capitalism does re-enter a period of crisis, the working class movement will be able to rebuild itself far more easily and strongly than before.
[[End Of Account]]
[[As you can tell, this was written from the viewpoint of a Working Class Warrior. I will not discard that backdrop to this, because it is part of the lesson. The lesson is the realizations and requirements that must happen, if any Corrupt Bureaucracy (aka Establishments) are to be brought to Heel and Accountability to the People.]]
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[[Now for the Economics (shame) of it all.]]
[[Beginning of Account]]
Trotskyist International No. 23, January-June 1998
In 1989, the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party voted to dissolve itself and relinquish its monopoly of power. Eight years and two governments later, many of the old Stalinist bureaucrats at that conference are at the helm of state as the country reintroduces Capitalism. Keith Harvey maps out the country's tortured journey back into the hands of Imperialism.
-----
By Keith Harvey – 1998.
In 1994 Gyula Horn, leader of the Hungarian Socialist Party, became the country's Prime Minister. Over the last four years he has been a key figure in Hungary's transition to Capitalism.
Horn's career brilliantly illustrates the truth of Leon Trotsky's view of the Stalinist bureaucracy as an "agent of imperialism in the workers' state".
[[Trotsky's revelations about Stalinism got him assassinated in Mexico City, by a Stalinist agent.]]
Forty years ago, Horn was a member of Janos Kádár's security services; which engaged in a search and destroy mission against the remnants of the workers' councils and militias that were crushed by Soviet intervention into Hungary in 1956. He helped to smash the political revolution against Stalinism.
By 1989, Horn was Foreign Minister in the Stalinist government of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (HSWP). In June that year, he sanctioned the uncontrolled border crossings to Austria that led to a breach in the Iron Curtain. Before the end of 1989 the Berlin Wall was hauled down, and the west's victory in the Cold War was complete. Thus, in his own way, Gyula Horn played a key part in precipitating the end of Stalinism in Eastern Europe.
Having once preserved the Stalinist dictatorship against workers' democracy, Horn has just completed the sale of the country's prime industrial and financial assets to western multinational companies, and turned Hungary into a dependent, semi-colonial Capitalist state.
The west is pleased with Horn's work. A year ago the Financial Times recognised the "fundamental structural changes that have put Hungary at the forefront of the fast-track reforming countries of east Europe." (1)
Indeed, it claimed then that Hungary's "transformation to a market economy is all but complete." Twelve further months of privatisation, the liquidation of ailing firms, an unrivalled stock market boom and a wave of enterprise restructuring have completed the decisive phase of Hungary's transition to Capitalism: it stands with both feet on Capitalist terrain, if a little unsteadily.
[[Note the hint of jealousy that always accompanies Socialist descriptions of Capitalist successes.]]
In order to guide the working class of Eastern Europe in the changed conditions of class struggle, we must confront the implications (of the successful restoration of Capitalism) upon Marxist theory - not just in Hungary but also in Poland and the Czech Republic.
This article is the LRCI's latest contribution to that task, and uses Hungary as its reference point, because it has advanced furthest and fastest down the path of Capitalist restoration in Central Europe.
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THE DISSOLUTION OF THE SOVIET BUREAUCRACY ...
To understand the process of Capitalist restoration (2) in Eastern Europe, it is essential to take into account the history of the states involved in that transition. Capitalism was uprooted in East and Central Europe by Stalinist administrations, in the years 1945-49. (3) Bureaucratic command economies were built on the basis of:
* nationalised industries;
* a state monopoly of foreign trade;
* the abolition of profit-driven production. (4)
The concrete tasks of the restoration process today are affected by this historical point of departure. First, those who wished to restore the profit system had to re-create a class of private Capitalist owners/managers, and a proletarian class with no access to ownership of the means of production.
[[That means, no employee-owned companies, and no employee-owned resources.]]
Second, they had to transform money from the passive instrument of accounting, that it was in the bureaucratic command economy, into a measure and store of value, and hence into profit-oriented investment capital.
Third, they had to purge and restructure the bureaucratic Stalinist state machine into one that could ensure the reproduction of all these features against Resistance, both from the working class and where necessary from deficient elements of a nascent Capitalist class. [[Non-bloodsucking Capitalists, that are not mean enough.]]
After 1989, the new Hungarian regime approached these tasks with a number of advantages. As the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) remarked, Hungary "entered the transition with particularly favourable initial conditions". (5)
After securing political stability in 1957, through outright repression, Janos Kádár embarked on a series of economic reforms which encouraged, or turned a blind eye to, small scale entrepreneurial activity. This met basic consumer needs better than the old system. [[And, made the Kadar regime richer than the old system.]]
By means of what became known as "goulash Communism", the HSWP (Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party) hoped to buy the acquiescence of the population.
After the introduction of a further round of "market socialist" reforms in 1968 (the New Economic Mechanism -NEM), the major state enterprises in Hungary ceased to be simply the property of the state, and ownership was jointly vested in the central ministries and the enterprises themselves. This gave an important share of independent control to the enterprise managers. Many decisions regarding product range and use of labour fell to them, instead of to the central planners. The central state and party bureaucrats retained control over decisions on longer term investment. But, by the 1980s the resources available to them were substantially diminished and, with this, so too was the central bureaucracy's leverage over the enterprises.
Reforms in 1984 further shifted control away from the centre. After 1984, more than two-thirds of the enterprises had ownership rights concentrated in enterprise councils - where the managers had a preponderant influence. In 1988, on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the power of enterprise managers was further increased by the Companies Act. This gave local managers the right to sell their ownership rights in the factories, and led in turn to a process of "spontaneous privatisation".
Before the collapse of the HSWP's monopoly rule, and the elections of 1990, several large enterprises had already converted themselves into joint stock companies. (6)
Hence, before the final removal from power of the ruling Stalinist caste within a degenerated workers' state [[Trotsky again]] - indeed with its active encouragement - the legal framework for the transformation of state property into industrial capital had made great strides forward, even if it still lacked a genuine social and economic content. (7)
Through these measures, the enterprise and industry strata of the economic bureaucracy were preparing themselves to inherit the fruits of Capitalist restoration.
But, in 1988 the leadership of the HSWP was captured by the "new technocrats". Rising as a result of the post-1968 market reforms, these 'communist' bureaucrats had by the early 1980s, consciously abandoned any commitment to a centrally planned economy. In 1988, they forced the resignation of Kádár and opened up multi-party discussions with opposition forces inside Hungary; with a view to abandoning the HSWP's monopoly of political and military power and arriving at a "negotiated transition".
[[Lesson-A blood-soaked and murderous regime was forced to resign by 'technocrats', described as 'communist bureaucrats'.]]
While being openly pro-capitalist, they objected to the process of enrichment by the "red managers". They preferred a more controlled process of transition, which would include foreign participation, and help for the substantial layer of Hungarian small businesses to take a large slice of privatised state assets. But in 1988, the technocrats were still too weak to stop spontaneous privatisation.
In 1989, the adoption of the Transformation Act by the dying Stalinist regime further entrenched enterprise managers' rights in return for a commitment to keep the economy going during a phase of accelerated decline; (8) a measure which effectively gave up on central planning as any kind of direct economic mechanism. This was complemented by the decline, in the late 1980s, in the amount of direct budget subsidies given to the enterprises by the central ministries. By 1988, they were down to 8% of GDP - the lowest in Eastern Europe. (9) As the central state's direction and influence shrank further, spontaneous privatisation mushroomed and the number of joint stock companies increased five-fold in the last year of the Stalinist regime. (10)
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HUNGARY AS A MORIBUND WORKER'S STATE ...
As a result of the elections of 1990, Hungary became a Stalinist state with an openly pro-bourgeois government: an unprecedented and by definition transitory phenomenon which we have defined as a 'moribund workers' state'.
Henceforth, its ruling regime was actively dismantling all the remaining centralised economic mechanisms that prevented the Capitalist law of value (11) from dominating the economic life of the country.
The Hungarian Democratic Forum (HDF) government abolished the already much weakened central ministry-based planning institutions, and removed all restrictions in the way of individual firms trading internationally. This was accompanied by the "liberalisation" - i.e. removal of state control - of prices. Both measures helped to convert money from a passive instrument into an active agent in establishing the relative exchange ratio of commodities in the market. This led, in turn, to the prices of most enterprise assets (factories, stocks etc.) being marked down as they were far less valuable than in the west.
The break-up of the existing exchange relations in the Comecon Bloc precipitated a catastrophic economic slump throughout Eastern Europe. In Hungary, output collapsed by 20% in 1990-93. (12) The main task of the new government was to ensure that the costs of this crash were borne by the working class, in the form of mass unemployment. By the end of 1993, the labour force fell by an incredible 40%. The largest 150 manufacturing firms reduced their workforce by 47% between 1989 and 1993. (13)
This massively speeded up the process of transformation of labour power into a commodity. Under the Social Relations of a degenerated workers' state, despite the existence of the "wage form" of payment, labour power did not function as a commodity, as it does under Capitalism. [[Read that again. The Real Socialist viewpoint is that Work goes from being a Right (under Socialism) to being a Commodity (under Capitalism) where it is sold, bartered, traded, exchanged, devalued, surplused, and discarded.]]
( Under the Social Relations of a degenerated workers' state) --
workers were "tied" to the enterprise. It was very difficult to sack them. So there was no system of "free labour" typical of Capitalism, which guarantees a permanent reserve army of labour that can act as a pressure on the employed labour force, to depress wage levels. On the contrary, wage levels were predetermined by the plan, irrespective of the demand or supply for any specific type of labour.
But, the mass unemployment of the early 1990s "freed" the workers from the means of production, to become a truly exploited proletariat, i.e. a class with nothing to sell but their labour power. For workers, their enterprise was the main point of access (via the trade unions) to welfare payments, housing allocation and even holiday entitlement. A key task of the regime, in a moribund workers' state, was to oversee the wholesale destruction of this welfare function of the enterprises; stripping the trade unions too of their role in distributing benefits.
Instead, in a much reduced and weakened condition, benefit distribution was transferred to the state. This process also involved turning non-wage benefits, such as housing and even some food supplies, into commodities to be bought and sold in the market, in return for a part of wages received.
This too, was pioneered by the HDF government, although as with the other countries in the region, "reform" of the pension and social security system has been one of the last elements of the welfare system to be restructured; requiring as a precondition the prior solution of another problem, the overhaul of the taxation system.
This change in taxation is crucial, since it determines the volume and rate of the new state's revenues. In a degenerate workers' state, these were derived primarily from a charge on the enterprise (a turnover tax). As part of the transition process the bourgeois government, of the moribund workers' state, has to remodel taxation so that it is primarily a charge on the working class. It does this by introducing a regressive taxation system such as a sales tax (for example, VAT or GST) as well as introducing an income tax on wages.
Naturally, all of this takes a great deal of time since the social structures, culture of acceptance, and professional skills necessary to implement it have been obliterated or driven underground for 40 years. The necessary legislation on property and contract law, and a bourgeois justice system, and an internationally recognised system of accounting - all these have to be rebuilt and then enforced.
But, all of these problems pale into insignificance compared to the task of creating a class of Capitalist property owners. While the new government inherited some of the legal framework for this from the 1980s, it had to fill it with a social content, via the privatisation of state assets. This, in turn, begged a series of questions: What kind of Capitalist class should be created and how? What should be done about the pre-war claims of old bourgeois owners? What role should foreign Capitalists play? What share, if any, should the workers have in the ownership of the new firms?
There is no "rational" solution to these questions, to be drawn out of some general model of the Capitalist economy. The answers depend upon a struggle, a struggle of existing classes and castes and of nascent ones. The outcome, reflects the residue of past struggles and their results. Because of this, each country in the region has arrived at different specific solutions.
In the case of Hungary, by the time of the negotiated agreement with the opposition forces in 1989, and the parliamentary elections of 1990, the majority of the "new technocrats" in the re-named Hungarian Socialist Party (HSP) [[they took out the Workers']] - and most of the opposition parties - had agreed on the need to establish a State Property Agency (SPA). The purpose of this was to halt and, if possible, reverse the process of "spontaneous privatisation" and the resulting enrichment of the enterprise managers. In this way the state machine hoped to regain control over the restoration process.
The first two years of the HDF government (1990-92), witnessed a sharp struggle within the state machine over the direction of Capitalist restoration, focusing on the nature and powers of the new SPA. Privatisation from below did not cease. But the SPA bureaucracy, made up of figures drawn from formally different parties (united in opposition to the enrichment of enterprise managers), fought for control over the right to sell firms.
The various parties and coalitions, in and out of government, were weak. Their economic policies did not express clearly different programmes for restoration. This reflected the fact that the multiplicity of newly created parties - made up of intellectuals, former Stalinists, small entrepreneurs and enterprise managers - did not represent stable bourgeois forces, but overlapping and sometimes contradictory programmes. In this situation the possession of control within the state machine, rather than parliament, was more decisive in influencing the form of restoration policy.
The Imperialists [[Skyscraper-building Capitalists]], recognised the importance of continuity and stability in the state machine, both before and after the formal change of ruling political parties. The 1997 Transition Report contrasts the situation in Eastern Europe to the fragmentation of the federal state in the USSR after 1991:
"The political transition…did not entail the same challenge to the capacity of the central state, enabling the key state institutions to continue to function through this transition albeit under different political leadership." (14)
The privatisation law came into force in August 1992. The battle for control resulted, in the words of one observer, in the "centralisation of the entire ownership right [which is] nothing other than renationalisation." (15)
The SPA was able to appoint the top managers in the enterprises that had been formed into companies, together with the members of the management board.
The HDF government, until its demise in 1994, spent much of its time resolving these essentially political disputes about the character of privatisation, implementing the privatisation of small-scale state property (shops, small enterprises), and legitimating the many previously illegal small businesses that mushroomed during the Kádár decades.
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CONTRADICTIONS OF THE TRANSITION PROCESS ...
As in all moribund workers' states, Hungary's new rulers had to work their way through a number of real social contradictions on the road to Capitalism. Alongside unambiguously pro-capitalist measures, they also had to carry through a series of measures that worked in the opposite direction and, for a whole period, acted to protect much economic activity from the operation of the law of value.
The bulk of material production in a moribund workers' state can become value-generating surplus, only on condition that its initially unprofitable character is sustained and reproduced for some time during the process of transition. A generalised and immediate imposition of the law of value on the entire production process in these states, would have destroyed the possibility of future surplus value creation.
The limits of the law of value at this stage, can be observed in the gradual increase in the number of loss-making enterprises in Hungary in the period 1990-92, as the real worth of assets is revealed. The opening up of the internal market to international competition soon revealed the extent of loss-making firms in Hungary. One estimate suggests that, in 1992, half of all enterprises were "drifters" (i.e. barely solvent), one-quarter healthy and capable of withstanding short-term competition, and another quarter hopelessly failing. (16)
In 1992, much to the chagrin of its western advisers, the government picked out 14 big state-owned companies for debt-relief. These employed 83,000 workers, and were responsible for a quarter of all Hungary's industrial exports at the time. The government poured in $1.7 billion of aid to keep them going, while it decided which ones could be saved in the medium term.
Inter-enterprise debt (IED) mushroomed to $5.2 billion by the first quarter of 1992, as traditional supply lines between similarly afflicted enterprises were maintained. This amounts to the extended reproduction of loss-making production in the old state sector. IED was accompanied by systemic use of non-commercial bank-lending, to replace missing government subsidies and the government itself tolerated non-payment of enterprise taxes (and energy bills), to ease the financial crisis of the lame-duck firms.
The 1990-94 government also, rather uniquely among the Visegrad countries, attempted a reflationary economic policy by borrowing abroad to keep up domestic demand. As a result, although unemployment skyrocketed, wage levels of those in work rose. By the end of 1993, they stood at 130% of the 1989 level. (17) Pensions remained pegged to real wage levels and were eroded at a slower rate than elsewhere in the region.
This reflationary programme was aimed, quite unashamedly, at keeping vast swathes of the ailing smaller domestic industries (the "drifters") afloat; not surprisingly, since these firms formed the main social base of the leading party in the government, the Hungarian Democratic Forum (HDF). [[Lesson-this is what politicians, who know what their base is, do to keep that base supporting them.]]
A further notable feature of Hungary's policy, at this time, was the way in which the government used bankruptcy laws, which they introduced in 1992. Their function under Capitalism, is to remove unprofitable sectors from the circuit of capital, and to release whatever assets can be saved from the liquidated enterprise, so that they can be used productively by another firm or bank.
The spontaneous, purely economic, movement of capital is insufficient to ensure the destruction of capital; bankruptcy is a conflict between creditor and debtor. Hence, the state must adjudicate and resolve this conflict in favour of one side or the other, usually the creditor. [[a Capitalist trick]]
When implemented, early in 1992, the bankruptcy laws were the most far-reaching in the region. They required all firms, more than 90 days in arrears, to file for reorganisation or liquidation. Over 22,000 firms did so by the end of 1993. But by mid-1994, over 95% of the firms that went through the procedures were still in business, and yet only one quarter were profitable.
The major study of this experience concluded, in 1995, that "what the system lacked and still lacks, is an efficient and dependable exit process on which creditors can rely, as the final stage in debt collection." (18)
Hungary's experience shows that a government of a moribund workers' state uses the bankruptcy legislation not to enforce the untrammelled logic of the profit system, but to protect illiquid enterprises from being destroyed. [[not-liquid]]
As Marx said, no matter what laws are on the statute book "right can never be higher than the material foundation upon which it rests." Hungary possessed neither the political balance of forces, nor the technical infrastructure, to carry through Capitalist restoration in the originally intended form.
[[Socialists and Communists always have to quote Marx – it's obligatory.]]
To put it bluntly, the new laws were used by debtors to gain protection from creditors. No bankruptcy laws in a moribund workers' state allow for creditors to initiate bankruptcy. By acting in this way, the state machine acts to prevent the law of value from being imposed, objectively impeding the transition to Capitalism, despite its subjective and strategic desires.
But, we are dealing here with a contradictory process, and the bankruptcy legislation did have effects which prepared state-owned industry for privatisation. Almost two-thirds of all the enterprises that entered into the process of bankruptcy proceedings slashed their workforce by between one-quarter and one-third as a condition for survival. This undoubtedly prepared some of them for being sold off later. But, this kind of "passive restructuring" was typical of the early years of the transition, whereby any reorganisation of production takes place on the old technical foundation; by means of wage cuts and/or mass sackings, and by finding new markets, rather than by transforming the production process with new investments in plant and machinery.
Thus we see that in the form of extended IED, a government reflation package, and bankruptcy laws "of a special type", the moribund workers' state in Hungary carried through a contradictory historical task. It protected decisive sectors of the economy from the re-introduction of the law of value, in order to ensure its introduction at a more favourable moment in the process.
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THE ROLE OF BANK REFORM ...
Major problems plagued Hungary's banking sector during the first half of the 1990s. Banking reform began in the 1980s, with the creation of five state-owned commercial banks, separated off from the central bank. Their function was to provide long-term investment finance for industry.
These banks entered the transition process saddled with non-performing loans to bankrupt industries. In 1991, the government guaranteed Ft 10 billion worth of "doubtful loans". Then, in 1992, it began the process of recapitalising these banks by siphoning off these debts and pouring in new capital, to bring their reserves up to internationally acceptable levels. Without this, the banks could not act against the ailing and failing firms which they owned, or were creditors of, for fear of forcing themselves out of business if they forced the firms into liquidation. By 1997, this amounted to a Ft 334 billion injection of capital, equivalent to 8% of the 1994 GDP.
[[1 Hungarian Forint (Ft) = 0.0047 US dollars at this moment]]
This process of recapitalisation, was carried through in the form of a tax on the future profits of the Capitalist class. It represented the nationalisation of banking debts and, as such, indicated the deepening of the Capitalist character of the state machine. The state was now proving capable of raising itself above the individual interests of any one Capitalist, and undertaking measures beneficial to the Capitalist system as a whole. This was an important measure, since it enabled the process of new production to be separated off from the burden of past production.
However, all commentators agree that in the first two years of operation, the terms of the recapitalisation programme were so lax that it did not require the banks to fundamentally change the nature of their lending operations to ailing firms. This created what is known as "moral hazard", whereby banks continued to extend bad loans in the belief that, in the last instance, the government would step in and bail them out. It therefore failed, initially, to force the banks to be an instrument in the battle to restructure the social relations of production inside the enterprises. And, it failed to force the banks themselves to become commercial, profit-oriented businesses.
By mid-1994, therefore, Hungary's economy was still structurally dislocated. There was a growing profit-oriented private sector which consisted of: newly founded private enterprises in the hands of domestic owners, newly acquired outlets of foreign multinationals, and a few commercially restructured former state enterprises. In addition, there was a sizeable "grey" sector of the economy, which delivered informal goods or activities, but did not appear in official statistics. [[the 'grey market economy']]
The non-state sector was strongly represented in retail and wholesale trade, (19) personal and business services, and light industry oriented to consumer goods. Due to slow progress with privatisation, the non-capitalist state sector continued to dominate large-scale industry (e.g. steel), together with the energy and transport sectors.
Many of these enterprises not only operated at a loss, but were not even geared to the goal of profit-making. More than half of the biggest loss-makers in state ownership, as of 1992, had still not entered into bankruptcy procedures by mid-1994. Some of them retained their monopoly position, backed by state subsidies, and were therefore not forced to change under the impact of competition.
Still more enjoyed protection because it was thought that ways had been found to make them commercially viable, under state ownership in the future. This category includes four of the original 14 state-owned giants, that the government picked out in 1992. As long as the old state sector dominated the whole economy - as long as the non-capitalist laws of this sector regulated the accumulation process of the bigger part of the economy and held the other sector in dependence and subordination - Hungary remained a moribund workers' state.
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CROSSING THE DANUBE ...
The Danube - which flows through the centre of Hungary's capital, Budapest - divides the old historic city of Buda from the commercial and industrial district of Pest. The river could easily stand as a metaphor for the transition process from degenerate workers' state to Capitalism. The Hungarian economy, after several years of lingering on the Buda bank of the mighty river, has now passed over into Pest. All the key institutions of modern Hungarian Capitalism, its stock market, major banks and MNC headquarters are to be found there.
In this process, the election of the new HSP-led coalition government in May 1994 was a watershed. The restoration of Capitalism, after all, is not a blind and spontaneous economic process. The state is the forcing house of transition, and during the last three years Horn's administration has speeded up the privatisation process, especially in the big state-owned industries and above all the banks.
By a strict tightening of the bankruptcy procedures, it has ensured the liquidation of more than half of the firms that entered into the process. Those that have survived, have been sold off to foreign multinationals, where they have been restructured through the use of new technologies rather than simply through mass sackings. And, in a marked departure to the previous administration, Horn implemented a draconian austerity programme in which he "has applied his shears to social welfare and wages." (20)
The new government showed itself to be deaf to the protests of the trade unions or small domestic producers. Horn and company, have shown themselves to be genuine "comprador" agents of multinational capital. They have proven willing, and able, to enforce the general logic of Capitalist accumulation against both small-scale private Capitalists and state-owned enterprises.
The government virtually completed the privatisation process with the 1995 Privatisation Law:
In 1990, the SPA held 1,698 enterprises for privatisation.
By May 1997, state ownership had been reduced to less than 50% in 1,489 of these. Nearly 1,000 of these were completely sold off, and only in 209 companies does the state now have a share of more than 50%.
In 1996-97, key companies such as MOL (oil) and Richter (pharmaceuticals) have gone to foreign owners.
In 1998, the government aims to have shares in only 109 firms, and intends to keep 100% ownership only in the postal service and the rail industry.
But, it is not the mere change in ownership rights that is crucial in the restoration of Capitalism. The experience of privatisation in Eastern Europe and the CIS has been quite diverse. In itself, the return of state-owned industries and banks to formally private ownership does not signify the return to Capitalism, any more than state ownership in itself signifies the transition to Socialism.(21)
If ownership rights are distributed too widely, they can impede the centralisation and concentration of capital ownership needed to effect changes of behaviour among the managers of the enterprises - most of whom are products of a different social system. This problem has slowed down the restoration process in the Czech Republic, for example, until recently.
Or, if for political reasons ownership is vested in "insiders" (i.e. managers and workers), this can slow down the restructuring process by which managers are turned into agents of capital, and workers are turned into wage-slaves exploited by capital. This has been the experience in Russia. (22)
[[This is typical of how Socialists and Communists think of the relationships between Economics and Labor, in Capitalist societies. With them, everything is always about the 'exploitation of the masses'. They are convinced that their viewpoint is right, but they never offer successful alternatives.]]
Finally, ownership may come to reside in banks which are also creditors of the mass of ailing and failing enterprises. They are reluctant to impose ruthless, profit-oriented financial restructuring on these firms for fear of provoking their own collapse. (23)
Hungary adopted a different strategy, early on. As part of its long-term openness to imperialist multinational firms and banks, Hungary had borrowed heavily in the 1970s and 1980s. Consequently, it entered the transition process after 1989 saddled with a far higher level of foreign-owned debt than anywhere else in the region - a debt totalling $17.8 billion.
The idea of raising cash to pay off this debt appealed to the leading figures in government. But, only the western multinationals had the necessary money, given the weakness of a domestic Hungarian bourgeoisie. (24)
Privatising state firms into foreign ownership gained favour for a further reason; it was a way of preventing the embourgeoisement of the enterprise managers, through spontaneous privatisation.
[[ boing! ]]
The long-term ties that multinationals had formed with the Hungarian bureaucracy, before 1989, to some degree predetermined the route taken by privatisation. As the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) notes:
"More than in any other centrally planned economy, Hungarian enterprises were extensively engaged with western companies by the 1980s, and many of these original links formed the basis of subsequent sales." (25)
The Economist noted in 1995 that:
"Western business instinctively went to invest [in Hungary] when Communism fell, because it had long been the easiest place in the old Eastern Bloc to operate in. Its system was by far the most liberal. . ." (26)
Hungary's well developed ties with Imperialism, before 1989, made the new regime very suggestible to entreaties and threats, from the battery of new inter-governmental agencies thrown up to oversee the restoration of Capitalism. And just to make sure, in 1992 the World Bank forced the HDF government to abandon any attempt at an industrial policy, that sought to restructure SPA property with a view to keeping it in state ownership.
The figures for foreign direct investment (FDI) into the country, illustrate the scale of multinational capital penetration. At $1,113 per capita Hungary has attracted twice as much FDI as the Czech Republic. Between 1989-95, it attracted a total of $11.3 billion, which amounted to one third of the total FDI that went to Eastern Europe and the CIS. And, this for a country of 10 million people.
After 1992, the multinationals bought the best, and potentially most profitable parts of Hungarian industry, for knock-down prices in recessionary conditions. Alongside this, many western companies have set up in greenfield sites in Hungary to establish a regional productive base for sales to other former Stalinist countries. These include Audi, GM, Suzuki, Unilever and Pepsi.
As a result, 49% of Hungarian manufacturing is now foreign-owned, and 70% of Hungary's manufacturing exports (aimed at the bigger markets in Central Europe and the CIS), come from companies partly or wholly owned by multinationals. (27)
Most of these "have largely set up low value-added subassembly operations", according to the Economist Intelligence Unit. (28) The head of economic strategy in Hungary's industry ministry, László Csernszky, admits that these firms "import, assemble and export with hardly a link to the local economy." (29) There is, as a result, little technology transfer or demand for domestically produced inputs. In many ways, Hungary is a carbon copy of the Irish Republic, but without the huge inward funds from the EU which have helped sustain its growth.
By undertaking a bonfire sale of industrial and financial assets, in the last five years the Hungarian government has also met two other key objectives of the restoration process:
* Finding the necessary investment capital to go beyond passive restructuring (e.g. sackings, change of product line and market direction), and into active restructuring of production technologies.
* Imposing profit-oriented behaviour on the managers of the privatised firms.
As one commentator has said:
"Virtually all cases of foreign ownership have been associated with a major investment programme. Considerable change in management structure has also taken place, with senior local managers typically being supplanted by foreign managers." (30)
In a moribund workers' state, the enterprise managers typically resist pressure to impose the "logic of capital" on the production process. They resort to maximising output rather than profit; they engage in deals with other stricken enterprises to roll over debts; they make special pleas to government for funds or plead for concessions on their tax obligations. All this reflects a corporate identity that stresses the needs of the enterprise (including its workforce), and abstracts from the class divide that separates worker from boss, under fully restored Capitalism.
While Polish and Czech owners and governments have addressed this problem too -- for example, by insisting on government or Investment Fund representatives on management boards, and by training up a new generation of bourgeois-minded managers and accountants -- the Hungarians have often imposed foreign managers upon a newly purchased firm, or set up their own operations on greenfield sites.
But, the experience of foreign management has filtered through to domestically-owned enterprises as well. The hard-to-please EBRD conceded in its latest report that:
"Available evidence reveals that strategic owners of Hungarian firms are more directly involved in management, than is the case in the normal operation of a firm in an industrialised market economy. New owners have tended to exert direct influence over the running of the firm, rather than relying on the formal structures of corporate governance, such as the General Assembly or the Supervisory Board" (31)
In other words, the private owners of Hungarian industry have broken through any insider resistance to the single-minded, profit-oriented operation of the firm, and imposed the social relations of Capitalist exploitation on the working class.
[[That means – Gone Capitalist.]]
With the country's industries enjoying a sustained recovery since 1994, and exports growing at 13% a year since then, it is clear that the majority of the country's enterprises are making an operating profit. The bankruptcy process has liquidated those that can never be profitable, and restructured and/or sold those that could; dealing with their debts along the way by negotiated settlements with creditors, and absorption of debts into the budget deficit of the government by means of successive rounds of bank recapitalisation.
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ONCE AGAIN, THE BANKS ...
The final part of Hungary's transition to newly restored Capitalism, was assured by further important changes in the relationship between the banks and the state on the one hand, and the banks and industrial capital on the other.
The banks play a critical, even decisive, role in the economics of transition to Capitalism. In the "market socialist" forms of the degenerated workers' state, the banks have no independence from the state. But, by controlling the supply of investment credit to industry, they are the key agencies of central planning. The goal of the restoration process for banks is clear. Extend commercial-based investment credit to industry, and where they are owners of industrial capital, enforce profit-maximisation behaviour. But, realising this goal is fraught with difficulty.
First, they have to gain their independence from the state so that lending is not politically directed. Secondly, they have to gain freedom from their ties to any one firm or sector of industry with which they have a privileged or unique relationship, so that they can carry out their function of aggregating and recycling total social capital to wherever it is most profitable. Thirdly, they must take a lead in the process of destruction of unprofitable output in conditions where many of the firms responsible for this output are assets on the banks' balance sheets.
To complete these tasks the government has to legislate and enforce the autonomy of the banks from the state. In Russia, this took the form of a massive growth in new banks; in Poland it involved the commercialisation of state-owned banks. But in Hungary, it has primarily occurred through the foreign take-over of domestic banks.
All five of Hungary's previously state-owned commercial banks, have now been sold to foreign banks. Now, more than 50% of banking assets in Hungary are held by foreign banks. The state's share in all remaining banks must be less than 15% by the end of 1997. These banks have taken advantage of their new asset structure and autonomy, to enforce profit-maximising behaviour inside firms they own or lend to. They have done this through direct participation in the management of the enterprise, selling off shares, varying the terms of loans and petitioning for bankruptcy.
With the widespread banking reform of 1995-97, the government has done much to ensure that surplus capital is systematically directed into spheres of investment that promise the most profitable employment of capital; irrespective of its origin in any particular line of production or in any one firm. (32) The profits from individual firms are now concentrated and centralised (together with savings of the working class), into a formally autonomous financial sector. This sector is the institutional embodiment of the power of money capital, which extinguishes all traces of its specific origin in the profits squeezed from workers at the point of production.
By redeploying capital to more profitable areas of investment, by speeding the velocity of capital's circulation (i.e. by reducing the turn-over time between production of surplus value, its realisation in profits and its reinvestment) the autonomous and privatised banks ensure the formation of an average rate of profit. They do this by ensuring that capital is allowed to move unhindered between different sectors of industry, wherever the best returns can be made. Over time this tends to lead to the equalisation of profit rates between different economic sectors. Finally, an independent banking sector assists in the destruction of irredeemably unprofitable enterprises.
When the state (Hungary) excluded itself from the political direction of the financial sector, through the 1995-97 bank privatisation process, an important stage was reached in stabilising Hungary's existence as a newly restored Capitalist country. A now autonomous finance sector (including capital markets) finally entered into an independent (but at the same time fully integrated) relationship with industrial capital, providing for the bulk of its investment needs on a commercial basis. (33)
Where the state retains ownership of industry, it does so merely as one among equals, capable of applying its own laws equally to itself and the rival Capitalists in the regulation of competition.(34)
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FUTURE EVOLUTION ...
The Economist reported in June 1997 that "Hungarian companies have been through the bankruptcy wringer. Privatisation is virtually over. And, huge foreign investment flows have sucked the survivors onto a new plane of efficiency." (35)
As a reward for its "progress" Hungary was given a seat at the top table of industrial Capitalist economies-the OECD-in 1996. In March 1994, it had already applied for EU membership. The Commission opened negotiations with Hungary on the terms for membership, and is due to issue a report on progress by the end of 1998. Already, it has made it known that "Hungary can be regarded as a functioning market economy". (36)
The restoration of Capitalism in Hungary, has been achieved at a great price for Hungary's workers. Since Horn's government came to office in 1994, real wages have fallen by a third. Unemployment in the eastern part of the country is above 15%. Many more are without work, but cannot officially appear so in a country with the harshest rules on welfare entitlement in the region. Many of those who do have a job, have more than one in order to survive. Some 20% of the population lives below the official poverty level.
"Goulash Communism" has given way to Soup-Kitchen Capitalism. The meat in the dish - the prime cuts of Hungarian industry and the banks - has been devoured by foreign multinationals. But, they were served up to the IMF, the EBRD and World Bank by one-time Stalinists who now watch, like the bloodsuckers they are, as profits drain out of the country and the national debt to the foreign bankers mounts. [[increases]]
They will demand even more sacrifices from the Hungarian workers.
In an epoch of globalised Capitalism, a country like Hungary, so weak and exposed to foreign capital movements and capricious demand for exports, is a crisis waiting to happen.
The working class of Hungary must disabuse itself of the lying promises, made in 1989, of lasting prosperity and a consumer paradise. A Capitalist Hungary is and will remain, an impoverished semi-colony of the big imperialist powers.
But, there is an alternative and Hungarian workers can discover it in their own past - though not in the Stalinist dictatorship and bureaucratic planning. The parents and grandparents of today's Hungarian workers created a heroic legacy of struggle. Twice - in 1919 and in 1956 - they created a Republic of workers' councils.
To recreate such bodies as fighting organisations for the expropriation of the foreign and Hungarian exploiters, is the first step.
The second, is to create a state of workers' councils running a democratically planned economy. That, is the way to make the country's first post-war Capitalist crisis also its last one.
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CAPITALIST RESTORATION AND THE MARXIST METHOD ...
[[This is the summary for this work.]]
[[Remember, these guys have to discuss Marx. To Socialists and Communists he is the Lawgiver.]]
This article presents a concrete application of a method the LRCI has used, to analyse the process of the restoration of Capitalism, which has been under way in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989.
We started from Trotsky's analysis of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state, and considered all the Eastern European states where Stalinist bureaucracies presided over centrally planned economies - including those with an important degree of "market socialist" decentralisation like Hungary - to be qualitatively the same as the USSR.
After the overthrow, or fragmentation, of the ruling Stalinist bureaucracies, and the dissolution of the central planning apparatus, we characterised these countries as moribund workers' states (MWS).
We defined a MWS as one in which a bourgeois restorationist government had come to power, and actively undertaken the restoration of Capitalism; but where this restoration process had not yet succeeded in "crossing the Rubicon", into an economy dominated by the operation of the law of value. The institutions of command planning were dismantled in this phase, together with the removal of Stalinist control over the apparatus of state repression. In the sphere of trade and commerce, the law of value triumphed, and a Capitalist sector of production began to grow.
The countries of Central Europe and the Baltic states passed into this stage in 1989-90. In the Commonwealth of Independent States this occurred later, in 1991-92. In some Balkan countries, the MWS-process started even later -- due to the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina -- and was halted several times. In Serbia and Montenegro bourgeois-restorationist governments have not yet been established: the rump Yugoslav republic remains a degenerate workers' state in which (like China and Cuba) the Stalinist bureaucracy is taking steps towards Capitalist restoration, while retaining a monopoly of political power.
By the beginning of 1997, Capitalism had been restored in certain parts of Eastern Europe: in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and the Baltic states. There, the social system is now one which we describe as Newly Restored Capitalism (NRC).
We have identified two phases within this transitional stage. Poland and Hungary have already entered the second phase of restoration, in which they have shown themselves to possess not only a mainly profit-making industrial sector, but an independent and dominant financial sector.
The Czech Republic displays certain defects or structural weaknesses, which remain in the application of the law of value to the whole circuit of capital. The finance sector remains partially under state control, with the result that profit-maximising behaviour is circumscribed by political considerations.
While there is a high level of product markets, at this stage there are few market institutions to mediate between enterprises and between industry and finance capital. There are relatively few bankruptcies due to the lack of creditor incentives, with the result that capital is frozen in non-performing assets. Finally, residual state ownership of banks and/or investment funds prevents effective commercially based lending from taking place.
We can expect a situation in which actual production is already governed by the law of value, whereas the investment process is still distorted, as indeed it is in other Capitalist states in extreme situations. The lack of an autonomous finance sector is an important defect, that will not allow such a system to develop beyond a certain stage. It is a deformation of Capitalism, but one that is not absolutely unique in the history of Capitalism.
In Eastern Europe, after the war, the first waves of nationalisation took place before the establishment of degenerated workers' states in 1948-51. The most important banks were statified before 1948. [[State-ified. Taken over by the State.]] In many cases, the state industries were often privileged in relation to private firms, because the labour movement (and to be sure, the Soviet Armed Forces) was in a position to put enormous pressure on the governments. This means that the point of departure for the emerging degenerate workers' states was the existence of already “deformed bourgeois states”. Rewinding the film backwards is likely to produce similarly deformed bourgeois states.
[[Note the part about Soviet Armed Forces putting enormous pressure on governments. Just what will the SQLD Armed Forces do to governments? Why do you think they want a Queer Armed Forces?
Put an already worthless and gutless and ultimately corrupted herd of turds, pretending to be a government, under the heel of a hoarde of Killer Queers pretending to be an Armed Force – and what will you get?]]
Naturally, the starting point, the institutional framework and the tempo of the transition has varied enormously in all these countries. It is impossible to describe any one of them as "typical".
Nevertheless, Hungary has gone further faster than the others. It started the process earlier, met less institutional resistance from the working class along the way; and adopted forms of ownership of capital that have allowed the new bourgeoisie to impose the law of value more completely and sooner, over decisive sectors of industry and finance. As the furthest country along the road it shows the others important features of their future.
Although qualitatively Capitalist, the system of NRC is quite different in appearance from modern Capitalism in its western form. The share of state ownership in industry (often over 30%) remains higher in most restorationist states than in the most "state capitalist" countries in Europe (e.g. Austria, and Sweden where there is a still a large state sector). State responsibility for big loss-making enterprises far exceeds what is usual in the OECD countries. Labour markets remain distorted and "rigid", in important ways unpalatable to the Capitalists.
In these respects NRC combines features of Capitalism in its infancy, and in its senility. Similar degrees of state ownership can be found in the poorest third World countries, and in war-oriented or crisis-wracked Imperialist countries. NRC represents a particular combination of "modified" Capitalism - not as it emerges from pre-capitalism, but from a failed post-capitalist social transformation.
Footnotes.
1. - "Survey of Hungary" Financial Times, 16 December 1996.
2. - Here we use the term transition process to mean the series of measures enacted since 1990 under the post-Stalinist governments, during and beyond the stage of a moribund workers' state. This is to distinguish it from the broader "restoration process" which predates 1989 and of which the Stalinist bureaucracy was the chief agent.
3. - See Workers' Power and the Irish Workers Group, The Degenerated Revolution London, 1982
4. - See "Plan Versus Market", Trotskyist Bulletin No. 9, London 1996
5. - European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), Transition Report London, 1997, p91
6. - For a full discussion see E Szalai, "Political and Social Conflicts Arising from the Transformation of Property Relations in Hungary", in Journal of Transition, June 1994 pp56-77
7. - The Economist noted that even before the Stalinists ceded power Hungary's "laws [were] half-way conducive to a market economy." Survey of Hungary", 18 November 1995
8. - Average growth between 1978-87 was 1.8% but in 1989 it was -0.7%. State investment had fallen by 10% in the previous decade and inflation was 15% and rising fast.
9. - Compare this with a figure of 20% for Czechoslovakia in 1988.
10. - E Szalai op cit p59
11. - The law of value is the Marxist term for the process by which Capitalism spontaneously reflects the amount of human labour power embodied in a commodity. See K Marx, Capital Vol. 1, Harmondsworth, 1973
12. - Labour productivity too fell for the first three years of the new government.
13. - C W Gray et al, "Hungary's bankruptcy experience 1992-93" in The World Bank Economic Review Vol 10 No3 11 1996 p442
14. - Transition Report 1997, op cit, p80
15. - Quoted in E Szalai op cit p67
16. - Business Central Europe, June 1997 p13
17. - The reverse is true for the Czech Republic. Here the regime traded off relatively low levels of unemployment against a massive drop in real wages.
18. - C W Gray et al, op cit p443/44
19. - Of the 10,423 state owned shops and small firms in 1990, 9,990 were privatised by June 1994.
20. - "Survey of Hungary", The Economist, op cit.
21. - See "Russia: death agony of a workers' state", Trotskyist International 22 for a discussion.
22. - In the case of enterprise managers they too continue to operate according to other criteria than profitability at the outset, such as revenue or output maximisation; they may also be forced to concede to the interests of their co-owners (i.e.the workers).
23. - Again, this has been the experience in the Czech Republic.
24. - "Privatisation has mainly involved selling companies off to western investors for cash", Financial Times, 16 December 1996. By May 1997 privatisation had raised $5bn for the government.
25. - Transition Report 1997, op cit p91
26. - "Survey of Hungary" , op cit
27. - Foreign-owned companies accounted for 14% of GDP in 1997
28. - Business Central Europe, June 1997 p13
29. - ibid
30. - W Carlin et al, "Enterprise restructuring in the early transition", in Economics of Transition, vol 3 (4) 1995 p449
31. - Transition Report,op cit p91
32. - Hungary is still the only country in Eastern Europe or the CIS to get full marks from the EBRD for its progress on banking reform, which entails "Significant adoption of banking laws and regulations towards BIS standards; well-functioning banking competition and effective prudential supervision; significant term lending to private enterprises; substantial financial deepening." ibid, p16
33. - Hungary had the region's most rapidly developing stock market in 1996-97. Turnover quadrupled in 1996 and market capitalisation more than doubled in the first half of 1997 before the East Asian crash affected Hungary along with all markets. Most investment for industry still comes from issuing shares and foreign owners rather than domestic banks.
34. - This system of regulation has necessitated easily available, consistent and readily understood state enforced rules for effective competition. The government has introduced a regulated market in securities and equities as well as effective registers for property claims.
35. - Business Central Europe, op cit
36. - As a geopolitical counterpart to Hungary's economic trajectory, in November 1997 a referendum delivered 80% backing for Hungary's application to join NATO - i.e. to place the defence of Hungary in the hands of US and EU imperialism.
[[End of Account]]
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[[This third work is from the viewpoint on the Revolution, from the Modern Communists. Specifically, The International Communist League.
These guys have no qualms about declaring their intentions for an October Revolution in America. Which is a lot more possible, than saying that the SQLD want to have a Revolution in America. Which would be like the bubonic plague just wanting to rearrange your body a little bit - to suit it better for the plague.]]
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The 1956 Hungarian Revolution
PART ONE:
[[The original format of this one is thick and dense. I am going to spread it out, so it makes more sense. Nothing will be lost. I am not a God-Damned Censor. You will notice, as we go through this, that these works become increasingly vitriolic towards Capitalism, and anyone who is Capitalistic. That's supposed to be us. It will be interesting to see how the 'Communists' portray the Hungarian Revolution. Especially since, technically, it was carried out against them.
Having seen the 'literature' of the time, which was almost exclusively propaganda from all sides; I can say that what you are reading here is far more sane and rational than were the bursts of Crazed Advertising, and Defamations of Character, that went on during these events themselves.
This dissertation is from the 'New Communists', the Post-Stalinist Communists, the dreamers of a True Trotskyist Communism. As you may have perceived by now – Communism did not merely happen. It was carefully orchestrated and prepared – but not carefully enough – and when it took off it was more like a chaotic explosion, than an orderly march towards a mutual destiny.
Quite frankly, the History of the Communism is absolutely "Fascinating." – as Mr. Spock would say. It exists as such a dynamic and fantastic 'Operatic Presentation' of all of the Goods and Evils of Civilization, that it is hard to find a more revealing and telling demonstration of the failures and possibilities of the Human Species anywhere. It is as though the entire Epic Spectacle was staged just for us; to evaluate and criticize and ridicule.
And, with that we come to a key point in our own History. We, of today, are the Audience to all of this. We are the Readers. We are the Students. We are the Final Chapter. If we just condemn and rebuke the participants in this Awesome Drama, and we fail to learn what must be understood, from such a Tremendous Landscape of teachings, and tragedies, and temptations and traumas – then it was all for nothing.
Without our understanding, and benefiting from, the lessons learned here – it was all just a worthless Slaughterhouse of the Insane.
It is for us – to make Sanity of it all.]]
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[[Account begins]]
This past October 23, marked the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The anniversary was celebrated internationally by bourgeois politicians and ideologues, who cynically portrayed the uprising as a precursor to the counter-revolutions that restored Capitalist rule in East Europe, and the Soviet Union in 1989-1992. Four months earlier, George W. Bush visited Budapest and laid flowers in honor of "the Hungarian patriots who tore down the statue of Josef Stalin and defied an empire."
Commemorations of the uprising were held in Budapest by the government of former-Communist, now-millionaire, Ferenc Gyurcsany; as well as by anti-government protesters, including a hefty contingent of fascist skinheads.
The depiction of the 1956 events as an anti-Communist, pro-Capitalist rebellion, which has been propagated by reactionary forces for the past half-century, is an outright lie. The Hungarian Uprising was an attempt by the working class (in a country where Capitalism had been overthrown, but political power was in the hands of a Stalinist bureaucracy), to throw off bureaucratic rule and open the road to Socialism. Workers seized the factories and mines and set up elected workers' councils (called Soviets), which were embryonic organs of proletarian political power. For weeks the workers fought courageously - by means of strikes, demonstrations and armed struggle - before this political revolution was suppressed.
The cynical misappropriation, by Capitalist spokesmen, of the uprising was skewered in a 1957 document by Shane Mage, a founder of our political tendency [[group]]:
"What a cruel, cynical joke of history this seems to be! The Hungarian Revolution is hailed lyrically by the rulers of the 'West'; the worst enemies of Socialism and of the Russian Revolution. The (same) men who surrounded the infant Soviet Republic with a 'cordon sanitaire' of steel and fire; who hailed Hitler and Mussolini as bulwarks against Bolshevism; who stood by with smiling 'neutrality' while Franco murdered freedom in Spain; whose hands are still stained by the crimes of Algeria, Suez, and Guatemala. The 'Free' World gleefully hands its poisoned bouquets to the freedom fighters of Hungary."
From "The Meaning of Two Revolutions" (reprinted in the 1959 Young Socialist Forum pamphlet, The Hungarian Revolution)
Bourgeois ideologues, [[eager to claim evidence for their assertions]] focus on isolated expressions of anti-Communism; such as some lumpen gangs calling themselves "freedom fighters", or arch-reactionary Cardinal József Mindszenty addressing the insurgents by radio. (Following the suppression of the revolt, Mindszenty spent the next 15 years holed up in the U.S. Embassy in Budapest.)
[[Which is better than being in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for fifteen years. Or, having to watch Maggots' TV for fifteen years.]]
This [[the Capitalist propaganda]], is a fundamental distortion; one that was also disseminated by Stalinist spokesmen to justify the brutal repression of the workers. As we stated in "Political Revolution in Hungary, Ten Years After" ((Spartacist [English language edition] No. 8, November-December 1966)), the slander that the Hungarian masses embraced fascists and monarchist reactionaries:
"was demolished, not only by the actions of the revolutionaries (including the violent suppression of what anti-Semitic and White Guard threats actually existed) - but also by the workers' militantly Communist aspirations and their unambiguous hatred for Capitalism."
The Hungarian working class was overwhelmingly committed to Socialism, and opposed to a return to Capitalism. In all of the workers' councils, and other proletarian bodies that arose in 1956, Communist Party members were elected to positions of leadership.
Ferenc Töke, a vice-president of the Central Workers' Council of Greater Budapest, later recalled:
"No reactionary tendency manifested itself throughout the entire strike. There was never, at any moment, a question of the former owners eventually returning" (Jean-Jacques Marie and Balazs Nagy [eds.], Pologne-Hongrie 1956 [1966]).
The Central Workers' Council of Budapest declared in a 27 November 1956 appeal to workers' councils throughout the country:
"Faithful to this mission, we defend, even at the cost of our lives, our factories and our fatherland against any attempt to restore Capitalism."
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution, was in fact a powerful confirmation of the Trotskyist understanding of the nature of the deformed and 'degenerated workers' states'. [[the classic Trotsky term]]
In the Soviet Union and East Europe before the restoration of Capitalism - as in China, North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam today - Capitalist rule was overthrown as a result of Social Revolutions. But, political power was/is monopolized by a conservative, anti-working-class bureaucracy.
The Hungarian Revolution, decisively demonstrated that the Stalinist regime represents a 'caste' [[as in 'specialized elite']] which parasitically rested upon the collectivized economy. They were not a new type of social class. Unlike the Capitalist ruling class, which in the face of Revolution inevitably unites around a program of counter-revolution, the Stalinist bureaucracy in Hungary shattered, with large sections going over to the side of the workers.
[[Note the part about the Capitalist Ruling Class (aka Establishments) uniting around a program of counter-revolution. Which is exactly why the so-called Homosexuals are infesting both the Democrats and the Republicans. The Revolution, is against them and their SQLD Masters.]]
These events caused a profound crisis in the Communist parties internationally. In Italy, the Communist Party lost some 200,000 of its members. The French Communist Party, already facing discontent over its support to the Socialist-led government (as it pursued the Algerian War), saw its share of the electorate plunge. In Britain, the Communist Party lost a third of its membership.
More than 200 CP members and ex-members, including a number of talented intellectuals, were won over by the British Trotskyist group, led by Gerry Healy. These former CPers included Brian Pearce, Cliff Slaughter, Tom Kemp and Peter Fryer, the correspondent in Hungary for the Communist Party's Daily Worker; whose first-hand observations of the events were recounted in his 1956 book, Hungarian Tragedy (see article, page 9).
With the formation of workers' soviets [[workers' groups]], Hungary entered into a period of incipient dual power; in which local workers' councils, defended by the armed masses, confronted what remained of the Stalinist repressive apparatus, which was backed by Soviet troops. Mage noted:
"The first and decisive thing about the Hungarian Revolution is that it was a workers' revolution, and the leading role of the workers was institutionally formulated by the establishment of workers' councils. Except for the Russian Army, there was in Hungary not the shadow of a social force capable of preventing the assumption of state power by the workers' councils. Thus the objective conditions for the formation of a Soviet Republic, in the event of revolutionary victory of course, were entirely favorable."
[[That is, Soviet Republic. Not, Soviet Union.]]
"The actual level of consciousness of the Hungarian workers, however, was not at the level indicated by the objective possibilities of the Revolution. In this, the Hungarian workers were like the Russian proletariat after the February Revolution. The general demand was not for all power to the workers' councils, but for 'free elections' to a sovereign parliament."
"It would, however, be a disastrous mistake to take the level of consciousness, corresponding to the struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy, as the permanent and ultimate political program of the Hungarian proletariat. The Hungarian workers wanted 'free elections', but they also wanted to preserve their own councils and extend their powers. They wanted to move forward to Socialism, not backward to Capitalism."
From "The YSL Right Wing and the Crisis of World Stalinism,"
The Hungarian Revolution; excerpted as "Pure Democracy or Political Revolution in East Europe". That was in the Spartacist pamphlet, Solidarnosc: Polish Company Union for CIA and Bankers (1981)The Birth of the Hungarian Deformed Workers State.
To understand the 1956 Hungarian Revolution requires examining the Russian Revolution of 1917 - the only successful Revolution as yet carried out by the working class - as well as its later degeneration under the Stalinist bureaucracy.
In the October Revolution of 1917, the proletariat, led by Lenin's Bolshevik Party, took state power, basing its rule on the soviets [[groups]] of workers, soldiers and peasants deputies.
[[Hence the term – 'Soviet Union' – or 'Union of Groups'.]]
The young workers' state nationalized the land, and went on to expropriate Capitalist property. The Bolsheviks understood their Revolution as the first step of the World Socialist Revolution, and founded the Third (Communist) International in 1919.
However, the immaturity and indecisiveness of Revolutionary Leadership outside Russia led to a failure to realize opportunities for proletarian Revolution. For example, a proletarian Revolution was defeated in Germany in 1918-19, and short-lived soviet republics were crushed in Bavaria and Hungary in 1919. The decisive defeat was the failure of the German Communist Party to consummate a Socialist Revolution in 1923.
The economically backward soviet workers' state (suffering under the devastation wrought by World War I and compounded by the bloody 1918-20 Civil War against imperialist-backed counter-revolution), was left isolated in the face of imperialist encirclement and a general stabilization of the World Capitalist order. Together with the decimation of the most conscious layer of the proletariat during the Civil War [[the most educated]], these factors set the stage for a political counter-revolution.
While the social foundations of the workers' state remained intact -- above all the expropriation of the Capitalist class and the establishment of a collectivized economy -- by 1924 political power was transferred from the hands of the proletariat, and its revolutionary vanguard, into the hands of a conservative bureaucratic caste headed by Stalin. From that point on, the people who ruled the USSR (the way the USSR was ruled), and the purposes for which the USSR was ruled, all changed.
Under the false dogma of "Socialism in one country," proclaimed by Stalin in December 1924, the bureaucracy accommodated the imperialist order. Correspondingly, the Comintern became transformed over time into an instrument of the bureaucracy's search for "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism. With the elaboration of the "Popular Front" line at the Comintern's Seventh (and last) Congress in 1935, the Stalinists explicitly and officially embraced the program of class collaboration with the "democratic" imperialist bourgeoisies.
Leading the fight against the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party, Leon Trotsky's 'Left Opposition' upheld the revolutionary-internationalist program of the October Revolution. In 1938, Trotsky and his co-thinkers founded the Fourth International.
Central to its program was the unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers' state against imperialism and Capitalist Counter-revolution, and the call for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy, and to restore working-class political power. Such a political revolution would be premised on defense of the socialized property forms. This is in contrast to social revolutions or counter-revolutions, which overturn existing property relations and place a different class in power.
[[The whole thing sounds like a constant ongoing battle over 'Property Rights', but it is far more complicated and sinister than that.]]
The Trotskyist analysis of Stalinism is key to understanding the creation and subsequent development of the bureaucratically deformed workers' states of East Europe.
[[This statement tells it all. The Real Socialists (Trotsky Communists) consider any Workers' State that is not run by the Workers, but is instead run by Bureaucrats, as 'Deformed' and doomed to a return to Capitalism, because all Bureaucrats are greedy and vicious scum.]]
In the closing months of World War II, in Hungary as throughout much of East Europe, large sections of society welcomed the Soviet Red Army as liberators from the nightmare of Nazi occupation, and supported the ensuing destruction of the old bourgeois order. Class-conscious workers hated the right-wing dictatorship of Admiral Miklós Horthy, who ruled Hungary during the interwar period and much of World War II. Impoverished agrarian laborers settled huge scores with the landlords in this land of feudal-derived estates.
Initially, the remnants of the bourgeoisies of Soviet-occupied East Europe, which had been discredited and shattered by the war, were not expropriated, either politically or economically. In Hungary, elections in 1945 gave a majority, in what was then a largely peasant country, to the bourgeois-clericalist Smallholders Party, which was allowed to form a coalition government with the social democrats and Stalinists. But, as elsewhere in East Europe, it was the Red Army that held the real power.
[[It was a huge mistake to include the Stalinists. Just as today, in America, it is a huge mistake to include the Homosexual/Democrats in anything!]]
Under the growing pressure of the anti-Soviet Cold War, the Stalinists in 1947-48 proceeded to expropriate the bourgeoisie in Hungary and elsewhere in East Europe, jettisoning their bourgeois coalition partners, nationalizing industry and establishing deformed workers' states, that is, societies qualitatively similar to the Soviet Union under the Stalinist bureaucracy.
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PRELUDE TO POLITICAL REVOLUTION ...
The 1945-48 period of the so-called "People's Independence Front" government had a significant effect on the attitudes of the Hungarian working masses. Many would later view that period favorably in comparison to the harsh Stalinist police state that came afterward; although virtually no one wanted a return of the Capitalists and large landowners. The 1945-48 interregnum also created certain left-right tensions among the Stalinists themselves. An incipient left opposition, impatient with the slow pace of social transformation, crystallized around Minister of the Interior Laszlo Rajk, a hero in the eyes of many for having fought in the Spanish Civil War, and for having been a leader of the Communist underground under the Horthy dictatorship.
At Moscow's behest, the Hungarian regime adopted a one-sided economic policy concentrated on heavy industry. This served to drive down living standards, further fueling proletarian discontent.
The fact that with the exception of Tito's Yugoslavia, the East European Stalinist regimes were imposed from without [[and not from within]] meant that they had shallower roots than in the Soviet Union. This rendered the social order in the East European deformed workers' states relatively volatile and unstable.
[[Certainly like America is unstable today, because a pack of perverts over in 'Wash This Death City', think they can force all of us to be as queer and demented as they are.]]
Facing social discontent, the East European bureaucracies began to split into Moscow loyalists, and national-liberal Stalinists more attuned to popular moods. In 1949 Tito's Yugoslavia broke from the Kremlin. With its "workers' self-management," Titoism presented itself as a more democratic and authentic form of Socialism than Stalin's Russia. Among East European Communist oppositionists, there was a tendency to idealize the Yugoslav "road to Socialism" on the one hand, and Western bourgeois democracy on the other. Fearing further splits, Stalin went into a murderous frenzy, seeking to eliminate any potential Titos elsewhere. The Polish party leader Wladyslaw Gomulka was imprisoned and placed under house arrest. Rajk in Hungary and Rudolf Slánský in Czechoslovakia were subjected to show trials, and then executed.
Following Stalin's death in March 1953, the Kremlin bureaucracy and its counterparts in East Europe embarked on a policy that has been referred to as "de-Stalinization." Moves in the direction of liberalization throughout East Europe had the effect of simultaneously opening up possibilities for mass struggle, while reinforcing illusions that, under the pressure of the masses, the Stalinist bureaucracy could carry out self-reform and become an instrument for building Socialism.
On 17 June 1953, the first incipient proletarian political revolution in the deformed workers' states broke out in East Germany. Both the Stalinist regimes, and West Germany's Capitalist rulers, portrayed the uprising as pro-Western. But, this was a lie.
Workers from the East German Hennigsdorf steel works marched through West Berlin and back to the East demanding a metal workers' government. June 17 powerfully demonstrated the potential for a slogan, later adopted by the international Spartacist tendency (now the International Communist League). A tendency for the revolutionary reunification of Germany through political revolution in the East and Socialist Revolution in the West. (For more on the 1953 events, see "The East German Workers Uprising of 17 June 1953," WV No. 332, 17 June 1983.)
[[So what was the slogan?]]
The post-1953 crisis of "de-Stalinization" had a particular impact on Hungary. Of all the Stalinist regimes in East Europe, that of Matyas Rakosi was unquestionably the bloodiest. More Communists were killed under Rakosi than under Horthy. Rakosi's widely despised political police, the AVH (a multitude of highly paid thugs), constituted fully 1 percent of the entire population of Budapest.
In 1953, to head off the pressures building up in Hungary, the Soviet leadership forced Rakosi to step down as prime minister. He was replaced by Imre Nagy, who had a reputation as a liberal Communist. Nagy proclaimed a "New Course" that included easing the pace of industrialization, lessening pressures on the peasantry and relaxing police terror.
However, Rakosi, fearing the vengeance of his political opponents, hung onto power and by 1955 managed to oust Nagy. Thus, between 1953 and 1956 the Hungarian Stalinist regime was torn by a severe polarization between the Rakosi clique, and the mass of Communist Party members who supported Nagy.
One sign of the ferment in the Communist Party was the emergence of the Petofi Circle, a grouping of dissident intellectuals and others that provided a forum for public debate, and became a hub of opposition to the Rakosi hardliners.
In February 1956, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev gave a "secret" speech to the Soviet Communist Party's 20th Congress, in which he acknowledged a number of Stalin's crimes. Four months later, locomotive workers in Poland demonstrating for higher wages and lower prices attacked the city hall, radio station and prison in Poznan. Security forces fired on them, killing over 50 workers. Poland entered into an incipient proletarian political revolution, which was headed off at the last minute by Gomulka's restoration to power. Subsequently, Khrushchev and his Kremlin colleagues did not move against Gomulka, in large part because in factories throughout the country workers' councils organized Resistance to any attempt to overturn the "Polish October."
Gomulka granted sweeping concessions, such as wage increases. But once the crisis was defused, he disbanded the workers' councils that had helped bring him to power.
Meanwhile in Hungary, 200,000 people turned out in early October for a ceremony marking the regime's "rehabilitation" of Laszlo Rajk. The mass turnout foreshadowed the revolutionary explosion later that month.
[[Literally, in those days in that regime, as in the future plans of the Democrat/Homosexual regime here, to be 'rehabilitated' into a Good Communist (or a Good Queer) meant execution and a 'Rehabilitation Funeral'.]]
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THE HUNGARIAN OCTOBER ...
The Hungarian Revolution, whose events were broadcast on radio and television internationally, was one of the best-documented revolutions ever. It began on October 23 with a largely student demonstration solidarizing with the victory of Gomulka in Poland, and calling for the reinstatement of Nagy as head of the Hungarian government. The Rakosi regime denounced the protest as a counter-revolutionary mobilization, and when the unarmed demonstrators marched to the radio station to protest, the AVH goons fired on them.
Hungary then exploded in a near-universal general strike, combined with military resistance to the regime. While the initial agitation was student-based, once the fighting started the core of the insurgency in Budapest and the other main centers was the workers' councils and workers' militias.
Writing about the emergence of the workers' soviets [[groups]], Peter Fryer observed in Hungarian Tragedy:
[[I have re-punctuated this one, but it is still somewhat garbled because when Ideologists write for their own kind, they assume that all kinds of shorthand and mutual idioms can be used.]]
*"In their spontaneous origin, in their composition, in their sense of responsibility, in their efficient organisation of food supplies and of civil order;
* in the restraint they exercised over the wilder elements among the youth, in the wisdom with which so many of them handled the problem of Soviet troops;
* and, not least, in their striking resemblance (at so many points) to the soviets or councils of workers', peasants' and soldiers' deputies which sprang up in Russia in the 1905 Revolution and again in February 1917;
*these committees, a network of which now extended over the whole of Hungary, were remarkably uniform. They were at once organs of insurrection (the coming together of delegates elected by factories and universities, mines and Army units) and organs of popular self-government, which the armed people trusted.
*As such they enjoyed tremendous authority, and it is no exaggeration to say that until the Soviet attack of November 4 the real power in the country lay in their hands."
Even a 1957 "Report of the Special Committee on the Problem of Hungary" by the United Nations, whose role is to provide a fig leaf for imperialist depredation, noted that the emergence of workers' councils "represented the first practical step to restore order, and to reorganize the Hungarian economy on a Socialist basis; but without rigid Party control or the apparatus of terror."
The Hungarian Army immediately ceased to be an effective force. Some sections went over to the insurgents; many soldiers turned their weapons over to the workers' militias. Militarily, the turning point of the Revolution was the attempt by the Soviet Army to capture the Kilian barracks, the main stronghold of the Hungarian Army within Budapest. The commander of the barracks, Colonel Pal Maleter, a veteran Communist, went over to the Revolution and led the forces that repulsed the Soviet attack.
Following the subsequent Soviet withdrawal from Budapest, the embryo of an effective revolutionary authority was seen in the newly established National Guard under Maleter's command, although its authority remained largely limited to the capital. In many press interviews, Maleter insisted that he was a good Communist and would remain so. Maleter's comments in one such interview are recounted in Hungary 1956 (1976) by Bill Lomax:
“If we get rid of the Russians don't think we're going back to the old days. And, if there's people who do want to go back, we'll see!” To emphasize the last remark, he reached for his revolver holster and repeated, “We don't mean to go back to Capitalism. We want Socialism in Hungary.”
Despite attempts to portray the uprising as dominated by anti-Russian nationalism, what stands out is the degree to which the insurgents attempted to fraternize with the Soviet soldiers, and the degree to which they were successful. The workers' and students' Council of Miskolc published leaflets in Russian for the Red Army soldiers declaring: "Our interests are identical. We and you are all fighting together for a better Socialist life." On October 28, the Hungarian trade-union newspaper Népszava called for the right of asylum for Soviet soldiers who sided with the workers (François Manuel, La Revolution Hongroise des Conseils Ouvriers [1976]).
There were innumerable cases in which Soviet soldiers refused to fight or sided with the insurgents. In his autobiographical work 'In the Name of the Working Class' (1986), Sandor Kopacsi, the Budapest police chief who went over to the insurgents, described a scene that occurred on October 25 when Soviet tanks encountered a crowd of demonstrators:
"A boy, undoubtedly a student, the scene took place just below us - pushed his way through the crowd to the first tank and passed something through the loophole.
"It wasn't a grenade but a sheet of paper. It was followed by others.
"These sheets, many of which my men would later collect, were tracts in Russian, composed by students in the faculty of oriental languages. They reminded the Soviet soldiers of the wishes of the Hungarian nation, and of the unfortunate role of policemen in which they had been cast. The tracts started with a citation from Marx: [[of course]] 'A people that oppresses another cannot itself be free.'
"We counted the minutes. Nothing happened.
"Then the top of the turret of the lead tank opened a little, and the commander, with his leather cap and the gold epaulettes, emerged slowly into the view of the apparently unarmed crowd. Then he flung the turret open and perched himself upon the top of his tank….
"The crowd erupted in a frantic ovation. In this jubilant atmosphere, the commander's cap was thrown into the middle of the crowd. In exchange, someone plunked a Hungarian Army kepi on his head. The crowd sang 'Kossuth's Song', and then the Hungarian national anthem. And, at the top of their voices, they cried: 'Long live the Soviet Army!'"
Moments later, Kopacsi received a report from one of his police officers: "The AVO [AVH] is firing from every roof. Now the Soviet tanks are firing on the AVO! They're defending the crowd."
Though the Stalinist apparatus had disintegrated, a short-lived government was cobbled together under Nagy. On October 28, the Nagy government announced an agreement that Soviet troops would immediately leave Budapest. Indeed, one of the reasons that the Kremlin pulled troops out of Budapest was fear of the effect of fraternization with the insurgent Hungarian masses. But, the Kremlin quickly reneged on the agreement. And on November 1, Nagy protested to Soviet Ambassador Yuri Andropov (who would become head of the Soviet Union in the early 1980s) against the entry of new Soviet troops into Hungary without his government's assent.
The new troops were not only lied to about what was happening; they were lied to about where they were being sent. A leader of the insurgents in a village in eastern Hungary recalled his encounter with the troops (Melvin J. Lasky, ed., The Hungarian Revolution [1957]):
"Some of the Russians thought they were in East Germany, and that they would soon meet American 'fascists' who had invaded the country. Other troops thought they were in the Suez Canal zone." (The Suez Canal had just been nationalized by Nasser's Egypt, which was then attacked by British, French and Israeli forces.)
At dawn on November 4, Soviet troops attacked Budapest. Despite stiff resistance, the insurrection was soon crushed. Nevertheless, the general strike continued well into December-the longest nationwide general strike in history. In this way, the proletarian centrality of the uprising was even more evident in its aftermath than during the anarchic period of the Revolution itself.
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THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HUNGARY 1956
During his brief tenure, Nagy moved steadily to the right. He brought into his government bourgeois politicians from the "People's Independence Front" period. Nagy also declared Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, and appealed to the United Nations to defend Hungarian neutrality. The logic of Nagy's policies, had they succeeded in running their course, was to strangle the Revolution and enormously strengthen the forces of Capitalist Counter-revolution. However, Nagy, who spent his greatest efforts trying to get the workers to lay down their arms, utterly lacked control over events. While the revolutionary workers had their fair share of political confusion, their representative organs were in practice counterposed not only to the old hardline Stalinist butchers like Rakosi, but to the Nagy regime as well.
In the industrial city of Miskolc, one of the main centers of the Revolution, the workers' council sent a delegation to Nagy demanding that a new government be formed based on the existing workers' councils, not through elections to a new parliament. The Budapest Parliament of Workers Councils adopted, as its first programmatic principles, that "the factory belongs to the workers" and that "the supreme controlling body of the factory is the Workers' Council" (see Lomax, Hungary 1956). While that statement did not express the Marxist program for central economic planning combined with genuine soviet democracy, it was nevertheless incompatible with a Capitalist order and bourgeois parliamentarism.
[[This gets down to a core difference between Real Socialism and Capitalism. Namely, where is the economic planning and control done? Centrally, by the Workers, with no Bureaucrats in sight -- or Decentralized and by the Bureaucrats, with the Workers as Commodities?]]
On the available evidence, the Hungarian workers looked toward an idealized version of Titoist Yugoslavia. Tito, however, along with Mao Zedong, supported the crushing of the 1956 Revolution. Tito and Mao were quite aware of the ramifications for their own bureaucratic regimes if the Hungarian workers succeeded in taking and securing political power. Nagy had taken refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy in Budapest on November 4. But, despite an agreement for safe passage out, Nagy was arrested by Soviet forces later that month. He was eventually handed over to the Hungarian Stalinist regime under János Kádár, which executed Nagy as well as Maleter and other leaders of the Revolution in 1958.
The repression directed at the workers, however, was relatively mild. The Kádár government announced in early November that it "will not tolerate the persecution of workers on any pretext, for having taken part in recent events." But Kádár was not in control of events, and Soviet troops conducted searches for those suspected of having participated in the uprising. For the most part, the Kádár regime attempted to piece off the population by raising consumption levels under a policy that came to be known as "Goulash Communism."
[[Lesson-both the SQLD and the 'Moderates' will try this tactic of enticing different parts and pieces of the Human Species to defect, and join them as 'elite' and 'prized' allies.]]
[[To be hanged later -- per schedule.]]
What was lacking above all in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, was a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party rooted in the working class. Such a party would have had the task of winning the workers to a program of transforming the soviets [[groups]] from being organs of insurrection, to becoming the sole basis for political power in the workers' state.
It would have fought to extend the struggle for political revolution to neighboring East European countries and crucially to the Soviet Union, linking these efforts with the fight for Socialist Revolution in the Capitalist countries. This would have required politically combatting the views of Maleter, Kopacsi and others whose outlook at the time remained within the framework of Stalinist nationalism and "peaceful coexistence" with the imperialist World order.
[[Thus -- to the Real Socialist who belong to the Real Communist Party, and can never explain clearly which one they really are -- any of the leaders of the Hungarian Revolution who did not completely seek a break from Stalinist Communism (which was just Capitalism in disguise) -- would have to be shot anyway.]]
[[Well -- its better than being in the Goulash!]]
Had even a small Trotskyist propaganda group been able to intervene in this situation, it could have rapidly won an initial base among the tens of thousands of workers and radical intellectuals who saw themselves as authentic Communists. These lessons have profound significance for the remaining deformed workers' states, in particular China, which experienced an incipient political revolution in May-June 1989 and, more recently, a massive growth in defensive struggles by both workers and peasants.
[[This paragraph could have been taken right out of the ACLU Manual on how to queer all governments, and eliminate the Human Species. A copy of which I still have.]]
What Leon Trotsky foresaw, in outlining the course that a political revolution would take in the Soviet degenerated workers' states, was amply confirmed by the 1956 events in Hungary:
"When the proletariat springs into action, the Stalinist apparatus will remain suspended in midair. Should it still attempt to resist, it will then be necessary to apply against it not the measures of civil war but rather the measures of a police character….
"A real civil war could develop, not between the Stalinist bureaucracy and the resurgent proletariat, but between the proletariat and the active forces of the counter-revolution…. The victory of the revolutionary camp, in any case, is conceivable only under the leadership of a proletarian party, which would naturally be raised to power by victory over the counter-revolution."
-"The Class Nature of the Soviet State" (October 1933)
[[I am sure that any 'Collared and Leashed' Capitalist Intellectual will smear and defame Trotsky across the board, but Trotsky knew his Turf and his Intellectual Territory. What he predicted and explained about his Mental Ground was usually proven correct, with pools of spilled blood.]]
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PART TWO:
As we noted last issue, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution had an enormous impact on the left internationally. It touched off a deep crisis in many Stalinist parties, and had a major impact on Trotskyist organizations.
In the U.S., the Hungarian events led to the consolidation of a left opposition in Max Shachtman's Independent Socialist League (ISL) and its youth group, the Young Socialist League (YSL). The Shachtman tendency had broken from Trotskyism in 1940, refusing to defend the Soviet Union in World War II, and developing the position that Stalin's Russia was a new exploitative form of class society, "bureaucratic collectivism." Following their break with Trotskyism, the Shachtmanites pursued an uneven 18-year-long course to full-blown social democracy, culminating in their liquidation into Norman Thomas' Socialist Party in 1958.
In response to the prevailing pressures of the anti-Soviet Cold War, Shachtman's group, which became the ISL in 1949, moved to the right throughout the 1950s. Though still claiming to be orthodox Leninists, the Shachtmanites' program in 1956 for Hungary (for a sovereign parliament based on free elections), amounted to a call for a Capitalist Counter-revolution in the guise of "democracy."
Had this program been carried out in largely peasant Hungary, it might well have given an electoral majority to the bourgeois-clericalist Smallholders Party. This openly counter-revolutionary line was an important step in the Shachtmanites' liquidation into official American social democracy. A few years later, Shachtman himself supported President John F. Kennedy's Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
[[In the world of Communism, that was a really bad thing to do.]]
A left opposition led by Tim Wohlforth, Shane Mage and James Robertson resisted the ISL/YSL's capitulation to social democracy. In the course of this effort, these Left Shachtmanites recognized that the events of the Hungarian Revolution affirmed Trotsky's position, that the Stalinist bureaucracy was a parasitic caste -- as against Shachtman's "new class" theory (see "The Bankruptcy of 'New Class' Theories-Tony Cliff and Max Shachtman: Pro-Imperialist Accomplices of Counter-revolution," Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 55, Autumn 1999).
Having transcended Left Shachtmanism, these youth [[the YSL?]] fused with the then Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1958. An important section of the founding cadres of the SWP youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), they found themselves again in a rapidly rightward-moving party. Robertson and Mage (the latter of whom subsequently abandoned Marxism) were among those comrades who emerged as the SWP's left opposition, forming the Revolutionary Tendency (RT).
[[Yes -- it was a game of Musical Chairs. A kind of sorting out process, that was the result of so many conflicting Opinions. Apparently, none of them had any Hard Truth to benefit from.
Providing you Humans with Hard Truth, is what I am all about -- so such wastes of time and confusion do not happen to you.]]
[[This part is about what happened internally to the world of the Socialists and Communists in America and Poland, as the result of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. It is of interest, if you care about how things break apart and develope into other things.
If this does not interest you, please proceed to the heading called 'The Dead End Of Stalinism'.]]
[[You are not supposed to be reading this anyway. The creatures on the Satan Tube, that want to own your brains, will not like it.]]
Beginning in December 1963, Robertson, Mage and other RTers were bureaucratically expelled from the SWP. This grouping was the embryo of what became the Spartacist League, which was founded in 1966. (Wohlforth, acting as a tool for Gerry Healy, head of the Socialist Labour League in Britain, provoked an unprincipled split in the RT in 1962; and went on to serve as Healy's toady, as head of the Workers League.
Wohlforth more recently emerged as an abject apologist for U.S. Imperialism, calling in 1993 for American intervention in Bosnia under the headline "Give War a Chance" [In These Times, 26 July 1993].)
Another consequence of the impact of the Hungarian Revolution, on the left in the U.S., was the formation of a pro-Stalinist faction, led by Sam Marcy, in the SWP. The Marcy group, forerunners of the Workers World Party (WWP), provided a sophisticated apology for the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. Unlike Stalinist hacks, such as the Communist Party's Herbert Aptheker, whose book 'The Truth About Hungary' portrayed the beginning of the Revolution as the work of counter-revolutionaries organized by Washington -- the Marcyites did not attempt to prove that the revolt was some deep-laid imperialist plot.
The main Marcyite document, V. Grey's "The Class Character of the Hungarian Uprising" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 18, No. 1, January 1957), begins:
"On October 23 the students and workers of Budapest demonstrated for a liberalization of the totalitarian Stalinist regime. Contrary to their own desires, the demonstration was swiftly converted into a full-scale, nation-wide counter-revolution throughout Hungary".
If the workers and intellectuals in the decisive battleground of the uprising were against a counter-revolution, then how did such a "conversion" come about? Grey argued that the workers, lacking a Revolutionary Party, had no understanding of the need to defend the gains of the deformed workers' state:
"The only consciousness was for 'freedom'. But, freedom from what? Freedom to do what? Their first duty was to keep the proletarian dictatorship. Apparently, nobody understood this."
The Marcyites' position boils down to the idea that, in the absence of a pre-existing Trotskyist leadership, the workers would inevitably accept the restoration of Capitalism. In 1989, the WWP applied the same stance toward the Tiananmen events in China, denouncing this incipient proletarian political revolution as counter-revolutionary and acting as abject apologists for the Stalinist misrulers.
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POLISH SOLIDARNOSC AND THE LESSONS OF HUNGARY ...
[[Please see the Glossary entry for Solidarnosc. It is very revealing.]]
The central documents by Shane Mage in the factional struggle against the right-wing ISL/YSL majority, were reprinted in the 1959 pamphlet The Hungarian Revolution, published by a forerunner of the YSA. Mage insisted that whether the collapse of Stalinist rule led to a workers' government, or to Capitalist restoration, would be determined by the political consciousness and leadership of the working class; specifically the ability of the workers' movement to overcome and combat parliamentarist illusions and nationalist prejudices. This would be true even where there existed proletarian organs of dual power, as was the case in Hungary in 1956.
The heart of Mage's argument was that "pure democracy" in East Europe (such as a sovereign parliament based on free elections) would likely lead to the victory of pro-Western, petty-bourgeois forces (such as the Hungarian Smallholders) who would, in short order, restore Capitalist rule. Mage further pointed out, that such counter-revolutionary parties need not call for, nor effect, the immediate denationalization of statified industry. Rather they would subordinate the nationalized economy to the interests of the domestic petty bourgeoisie and international capital.
In this, Mage was following Trotsky, who wrote in his November 1937 "Not a Workers' and Not a Bourgeois State?" (Writings 1937-38):
"Should a bourgeois counter-revolution succeed in the USSR, the new government for a lengthy period would have to base itself upon the nationalized economy. But, what does such a type of temporary conflict between the economy and the state mean? It means a Revolution, or a Counter-revolution. The victory of one class over another signifies that it will reconstruct the economy in the interests of the victors."
[[This is a frank statement of the consequences. The Russian Economy was, and usually is, a mess to begin with. Which naturally has most Russians theorizing on how to repair it. From this Tumult of Economic Woes, came the Economic Theories of Communism and Socialism.]]
Mage insisted that such a counter-revolution was not what had occurred in Hungary in October-November 1956. The effective organs of power were the workers' councils, which expressed an, albeit confused, Socialist consciousness.
The material in Mage's pamphlet was a central element in our tendency's [[group's]] understanding of the struggle for proletarian political revolution, and our fight against the forces of "democratic" Capitalist Counter-revolution, in the East European deformed workers' states and the former Soviet Union.
[[Here is a brief explanation of the Polish Revolution, which ousted the Stalinists after the Hungarian Revolution, and how they were different.]]
In Poland in 1980, striking workers lined up behind an opposition dominated by reactionary ultranationalists, Catholic clerics and pro-capitalist social democrats. In 1981, we published a pamphlet, Solidarnos´c´: Polish Company Union for CIA and Bankers, with excerpts from Mage's documents under the title "'Pure Democracy' or Political Revolution in East Europe."
Wielding the upper hand in the Solidarnosc "union" was a constellation of counter-revolutionary forces [[Capitalist]], the likes of which had been a distinctly subordinate element in Hungary in 1956. At its first national congress in September 1981, Solidarnosc consolidated on a program of Capitalist restoration. Behind its call for "free elections" to the Sejm (parliament) stood the program of Capitalist restoration, under the guise of parliamentary government.
In contrast to Hungary 1956, Solidarnosc was able to mobilize significant sections of the working class against the bureaucracy under the banner of right-wing reaction, symbolized by the Polish eagle and the Catholic cross. This was a direct consequence of the political bankruptcy of Stalinism. In Poland in 1956, 1970 and again in 1976, proletarian upheavals were headed off as the bureaucracy each time put forward a new leader who promised a new and better deal. At the same time, the Polish Stalinists strengthened the Catholic church in various ways, including by perpetuating a landowning peasantry. Having been disillusioned three times with "national-liberal" Stalinism, by the late 1970s the Polish working class was susceptible to being organized by clerical-nationalists who answered to the imperialists and the Vatican.
Solidarnosc's counter-revolutionary bid for power was checked in December 1981 by General Jaruzelski's coup, which was strongly backed by Moscow. Virtually the entire non-Stalinist left backed Solidarnosc, from the French Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire and other components of the pseudo-Trotskyist United Secretariat to the U.S. International Socialist Organization, then affiliated with the British Socialist Workers Party of the late Tony Cliff.
[[This is saying that the Polish Group 'Solidarnosc' was a right-wing Capitalist organization, supported by the entire left-wing Anti-Stalinist list of organizations in Poland. When at the same time, we have been educated that the Stalinists were really right-wing Capitalists in disguise, and were in league with the American Capitalists.]]
[[Do you get the impression that someone was playing both ends against the middle, in Poland?]]
How such "leftists" distort reality in the service of their counter-revolutionary line on Poland, can be seen in an article on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in 'Socialism Today' (November 2006), which is published by the Socialist Party (England and Wales), section of the Committee for a Workers' International.
The article compares the Hungarian workers, who were committed to the defense of Socialism as they saw it, to Solidarnosc -- writing of the latter that:
"Some of its leaders retained a strong allegiance to the ideas of Socialism.
" Solidarnosc's "allegiances" (including those of social democrats like Jacek Kuron who formed part of its leadership) can be gleaned from the fact that this was the only "union" beloved by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher!
"In sharp contrast to the Stalinophobic fake left, we fulfilled our class duty ...
[[This openly admits that this was a 'Class Struggle' and therefore 'Class Warfare'. This bunch did not like Solidarnosc.]]
... to unconditionally defend the Polish deformed workers' state against Capitalist restoration.
Emphasizing in Workers Vanguard No. 289 (25 September 1981):
"Solidarity's counter-revolutionary course must be stopped! If the Kremlin Stalinists, in their necessarily brutal, stupid way, intervene militarily to stop it, we will support this. And, we take responsibility in advance for this; whatever the idiocies and atrocities they will commit, we do not flinch from defending the crushing of Solidarity's Counter-revolution."
[[Solidarnosc is known in the west as 'Solidarity'.]]
In 1989, the Polish Stalinists abdicated governmental power in favor of Solidarnosc, which had won a landslide electoral victory that June. Thus Solidarnosc formed the first of the Capitalist-restorationist regimes in East Europe.
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THE DEAD END OF STALINISM ...
In Hungary, following the suppression of the 1956 Revolution, the Kremlin installed in power the liberal Stalinist János Kádár, who had been imprisoned and tortured under Rakosi. After an initial period of repression, Kádár set out to gain popular acceptance, or at least tolerance, for his regime by redirecting investment so as to rapidly raise consumption levels, a policy dubbed "Goulash Communism."
Kádár's New Economic Mechanism anticipated the "Market Socialism" that would later characterize Deng Xiaoping's China and Mikhail Gorbachev's Russia. The Hungarian, Yugoslav, Polish and Czech governments borrowed heavily from Western banks, essentially mortgaging these countries to the imperialists. This set the stage for IMF-dictated austerity programs that took a knife to the living standards of the working people.
In the 1980s, petty-bourgeois "democrats" and nationalists became politically ascendant throughout most of East Europe, with the signal exception of East Germany. For its part, in 1989-90 the Moscow bureaucracy under Mikhail Gorbachev let it be known that it would abandon the East European Stalinist regimes to their fate. This followed Gorbachev's treacherous withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, which abandoned the Afghan peoples to the mercies of CIA-backed mujahedin cutthroats, right on the border of the Soviet Union. Thus the fate of the East European and Soviet workers' states was put in the balance: EITHER proletarian political revolutions to defend and extend the gains embodied in the collectivized economies, OR Capitalist Counter-revolution, with its promise of all-sided social devastation.
The first sign of political revolution in this period, occurred not in East Europe but in China, where events resembled the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in key ways. In May-June 1989, protest initiated by students in Beijing's Tiananmen Square gained widespread support among the workers, who were angered by the sharply rising economic inequalities, rampant corruption and inflation encouraged by Deng's "socialist market economy."
Under Deng over the previous decade, agriculture had been decollectivized and centralized economic planning had been weakened. The "iron rice bowl" of guaranteed lifetime employment and social benefits for workers was becoming rusted out.
Groups of young workers, some of them carrying posters with Mao Zedong's picture, joined the huge demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, which spread throughout the country. As we wrote at the time, "It was the beginnings of a working-class revolt against Deng's program of 'building Socialism with Capitalist methods' which gave the protests their mass and potentially revolutionary nature" ("Defend Chinese Workers!" WV No. 480, 23 June 1989).
Initially, both rank-and-file soldiers, and some senior military commanders, refused to carry out orders to suppress the protests. Deng was finally able to find military units willing to carry out a massacre, which was directed primarily at working-class neighborhoods in Beijing, rather than at the student protesters. As in Hungary in 1956, the key factor in China in 1989 was the absence of a Revolutionary Leadership, such as that provided by Lenin and Trotsky's Bolshevik Party, which led the 1917 Russian Revolution.
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[[This is the final and advertisement part of this work.]]
THE ICL, AND THE FIGHT AGAINST CAPITALIST COUNTER-REVOLUTION ...
The events in China reverberated throughout East Europe, particularly in the German Democratic Republic (DDR) of East Germany. In autumn 1989, the DDR's Stalinist regime collapsed, most graphically expressed by the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9. East Germany at that time was engulfed in a developing political revolution. The impulses of the workers were directed not toward Capitalist reunification with imperialist West Germany, but toward building what they considered a decent Socialist society on the foundations of the DDR's nationalized economy. Meanwhile, as part of his conciliation of imperialism, Gorbachev pledged not to use the tens of thousands of Soviet troops stationed in East Germany to intervene militarily. All these factors created an exceptional opportunity to consummate a proletarian political revolution.
The International Communist League undertook the biggest sustained mobilization in our tendency's [[group's]] history; drawing upon the personnel and other resources of all sections to intervene in Germany. We unconditionally opposed the Capitalist reunification of Germany. We fought for political revolution in the East, and Socialist Revolution in the West - for a Red Germany of workers' councils in a Socialist Europe.
To emphasize the need for internationalism, as opposed to narrow DDR nationalism, we published greetings in Russian to Soviet soldiers, linking the fight in the DDR to the struggle to defend the homeland of the October Revolution against imperialism and domestic counter-revolution. We also issued internationalist greetings in their languages to Cuban, Mozambican, Vietnamese and Polish workers in East Germany.
The impact of our program was seen in January 1990, when 250,000 turned out in a demonstration initiated by our German comrades and joined by the DDR's ruling party, the SED (Socialist Unity Party), to protest the fascist desecration of a Soviet war memorial in Berlin's Treptow Park. At Treptow, for the first time since Trotsky and his followers were expelled from the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, Trotskyists were able to address masses of workers under Stalinist rule.
The spectre of organized proletarian resistance to Capitalist reunification, alarmed West Germany's imperialist rulers, led by the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl, and their front men of the Social Democratic Party, and they accelerated the drive for Capitalist Counter-revolution. The Stalinists in the Kremlin, and in the DDR, gave the green light for reunification.
Uniquely, our comrades of the newly founded Spartakist Workers Party ran unambiguously against Capitalist restoration in the March 1990 East German elections. However, under the impact of the bourgeois offensive, the vanguard layers of the working class increasingly despaired, particularly as the disintegrating Stalinists of the SED (which renamed itself the Party for Democratic Socialism), blatantly supported Capitalist anschluss (annexation).
The March elections were an overwhelming vote for Capitalist reunification, with the vast majority voting for either Christian Democratic, or Social Democratic-based coalitions. This marked the victory of Capitalist Counter-revolution in East Germany.
It was the ICL alone which fought to the last against the drive for Capitalist reunification, led by the imperialists and their Trojan Horse -- the German Social Democratic Party. From the beginning, we were in a political struggle with the abdicating Stalinist regime, and its program of capitulation and counter-revolution. While we were calling for a government of workers and soldiers councils, the Stalinists were consciously acting to prevent a workers' insurrection. That included demobilizing army units that had formed soldiers councils, in part as a result of our propaganda.
The ICL also fought to the end in defense of the Soviet workers' state. When Boris Yeltsin made his power grab in Moscow in August 1991, we put out a call titled "Soviet Workers: Defeat Yeltsin-Bush Counter-revolution!" This was the first statement widely distributed throughout the Soviet Union opposing Yeltsin's bid for power. It advanced a program for political revolution against Capitalist restoration, for genuine workers' soviets as organs of a new proletarian political power. But the Soviet working class, atomized and bereft of any anti-capitalist leadership, lacking any coherent and consistent Socialist class consciousness, skeptical about the possibility of class struggle in the Capitalist countries, did not rally in resistance against the encroaching Capitalist Counter-revolution -- which succeeded in destroying the Soviet workers' state in 1991-92.
[[Of course, none of this was even hinted at by the SQLD Medias, which blacked out any and all news that was not approved by the Political Establishments in America.]]
The victory of Capitalist Counter-revolution was a profound, historic defeat for the World's working class, and oppressed masses. Widespread poverty, disease and malnutrition quickly became rampant in East Europe, and the former Soviet Union.
With the USSR no longer providing a countervailing force, the U.S. imperialists have felt that they have a free hand to ride roughshod over whomever they please. The restoration of Capitalist rule, particularly in the former Soviet Union, has also resulted in a massive, although uneven, retrogression in proletarian class consciousness internationally. The working class has been pounded by the bourgeois rulers' "Death of Communism" ideological campaign, and its attendant historical lies. In Hungary, the first order of business of the Capitalist-restorationist parties, that dominated the parliament elected in 1990, was to declare October 23 (the anniversary of the 1956 Revolution), a national holiday celebrating "multi-party democracy" and "the independence of the motherland."
[[That is a typical SQLD-like propaganda technique; to reverse the Truth, and declare the Reversal as the Reality. We see such lies constantly in our fight to prevent the Genocide of Our Species.]]
[[This should illustrate to all Humans where the tactics and techniques of the Homosexual/Democrats come from.]]
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[[Here comes the ICL Pitch.]]
The International Communist League is dedicated to the fight for new October Revolutions, crucially including in the U.S. and other imperialist centers, to sweep away the rotten Capitalist-Imperialist system, and usher in an egalitarian Socialist World order.
Key to this perspective today, is the unconditional military defense of China, the largest and most powerful of the remaining deformed workers' states, as well as of Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba against imperialism and domestic counter-revolution. Another key aspect, is the urgent need is to win militants to the revolutionary program of Trotskyism; which is the fight to reforge the Fourth International as the World Party of Socialist Revolution. It is thus, that we honor the Hungarian workers' political revolution of 1956.
[[End of Account.]]
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If you are starting to feel sympathetic for the Socialists or Communists – do not waste your time – they are all dead.
The pantyhose-wearing transvestite trash that pretend to be Socialists and Communists here in America, today – namely the Homosexual/Democrats – are less than the dung of the Real Socialists and Real Communists that lived during the days portrayed in these accounts.
The twisted Imitation Socialists and Imitation Communists of today, would Queer their own Grandmothers if they thought it would get them Political Power and Riches and Adulation from their Voter/Follower Slaves.
One has to wonder, if those imitation things actually think Heinrich 'Himmler' Reid is an asset to their efforts? Or, just another Queer Capitalist.
Answer: Well - it IS just another Queer Capitalist.
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GLOSSARY OF TERMS:
Using excerpts from Wikipedia:
Please take particular attention to Solidarnosc -- and its fate.
*Bourgeois -- In the rhetoric of some Communist parties, "bourgeois" is sometimes used as a pejorative, and those who are perceived to collaborate with the bourgeoisie are called its lackeys. Socialists, especially Marxists, have multiple uses for the term: the original meaning, the social class of capitalists, and the pejorative. Something or someone described as bourgeois means that something or someone is superficial, pedestrian, banal and concerned with only the material.
In the Western World, between the late 18th century and the present day, the bourgeoisie is a social class characterized by their ownership of capital and their related culture. A member of the bourgeoisie is a bourgeois or capitalist (plural: bourgeois; capitalists). Marxism defines the bourgeoisie as the social class that owns the means of production in a capitalist society. Marxists view the bourgeoisie as emerging from the wealthy urban classes in pre- and early capitalist societies.
*Bureaucrat -- A bureaucrat is a member of a bureaucracy and can comprise the administration of any organization of any size, though the term usually connotes someone within an institution of a government or corporation. Bureaucrat jobs were often "desk jobs" (the French for "desk" being bureau, though bureau can also be translated as "office") ...
inflexible official: an official who applies rules rigidly.
*'bureaucratic collectivism' -- As in state capitalism, a bureaucratic collectivist state owns the means of production, while the surplus ("profit") is distributed among an elite party bureaucracy, rather than among the workers. Also, most importantly, it is the bureaucracy—not the workers or the people in general—who controls the economy and the state. Thus, the system is not truly capitalist, but it is not socialist either. In Marxist theory, it is a new form of class society which exploits workers through new mechanisms. Most who hold this view believe that bureaucratic collectivism does not represent progress beyond capitalism—that is, that it is no closer to being a workers' state than a capitalist state would be, and is considerably less efficient.
*Chauvenism -- Chauvinism, in its original and primary meaning, is an exaggerated, bellicose patriotism and a belief in national superiority and glory. By extension it has come to include an extreme and unreasoning partisanship on behalf of any group to which one belongs, especially when the partisanship includes malice and hatred towards rival groups.
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In classic Feminism Dementia, it is used as a Hate Word against males who does not obey the insane demands of the Anti-Human Mental Illness that has possessed the brains of Feminists. An Anti-Male Hate and Propaganda Word.
*CIS -- Commonwealth of Independent States -- ... is a regional organization whose participating countries are former soviet republics, formed during the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The CIS is comparable to a very loose association of states and in no way comparable to a federation, confederation, or supra-national organisation such as the old European Community. It is more comparable to the Commonwealth of Nations. Although the CIS has few supranational powers, it is more than a purely symbolic organization, possessing coordinating powers in the realm of trade, finance, lawmaking, and security. It has also promoted cooperation on democratization and cross-border crime prevention. As a regional organization, CIS participates in UN peacekeeping forces. Some of the members of the CIS have established the Eurasian Economic Community with the aim of creating a full-fledged common market.
*Comecon Bloc -- The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, 1949–1991, was an economic organization comprising the countries of the Eastern Bloc along with a number of communist states elsewhere in the world. The Comecon was the Eastern Bloc's reply to the formation of the Organization for European Economic Co-operation in western Europe.
Collectively, the members of the Comecon did not display the necessary prerequsites for economic integration: their level of industrialization was low and uneven, with a single dominant member (the Soviet Union) producing 70% of the community national product.
In the late 1980s there were ten full members: the Soviet Union, six East European countries, and three extraregional members. Geography, therefore, no longer united Comecon members. Wide variations in economic size and level of economic development also tended to generate divergent interests among the member countries. All these factors combined to give rise to significant differences in the member states' expectations about the benefits to be derived from membership in Comecon. Unity was provided instead by political and ideological factors. All Comecon members were "united by a commonality of fundamental class interests and the ideology of Marxism-Leninism" and had common approaches to economic ownership (state versus private) and management (plan versus market).
*'comprador' -- is a term used to describe native managers of European business houses in East Asia.
The term comprador, a Portuguese word that means buyer, derives from the Latin comparare, which means to procure. The original usage of the word in East Asia meant a native servant in European households in Guangzhou in southern China or the neighboring Portuguese colony at Macao who went to market to barer their employers' wares. The term then evolved to mean the native contract suppliers who worked for foreign companies in East Asia or the native managers of firms in East Asia.
A native agent of a foreign enterprise. A 'comprador agent'.
*CP -- Communist Party
*'crossing the rubicon' -- (going beyond the 'point of no return') -- Crossing the Rubicon is a metaphor for deliberately proceeding past a point of no return. The phrase originates with Julius Caesar's invasion of Ancient Rome (January 10, 49 BC), when he led his army across the Rubicon River in violation of law, thus making conflict inevitable. Therefore the term "the Rubicon" is used as a synonym to the "point of no return".
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During WW II Allied Armies crossed the Rubicon again, going north, in the opposite direction of Caesar's crossing.
*Expropriation -- two possible meanings.
Nationalization, also spelled nationalisation, is the process of taking an industry or assets into the public ownership of a national government or state. Nationalization usually refers to private assets, but may also mean assets owned by lower levels of government, such as municipalities, being transferred to the public sector to be operated by or owned by the state.
Confiscation, from the Latin confiscatio 'joining to the fiscus, i.e. transfer to the treasury' is a legal seizure without compensation by a government or other public authority. The word is also used, popularly, of spoliation under legal forms, or of any seizure of property without adequate compensation.
See Eminent Domain.
*February Revolution -- The February Revolution of 1917 was the first of two revolutions in Russia in 1917. Centered around the then capital Petrograd (modern day St. Petersburg) in March (late February in the Julian calendar). Its immediate result was the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, the collapse of Imperial Russia and the end of the Romanov dynasty. Tsarism was replaced by a Russian Provisional Government under Prince Georgy Lvov, an alliance between liberals and socialists who wanted to instigate political reform, creating a democratically-elected executive and constituent assembly. Socialists also formed the Petrograd Soviet, and the two ruled together in a system known as Dual Power.
This revolution appeared to break out spontaneously, without any real leadership or formal planning. Russia had been suffering from a number of economic and social problems, which were compounded by the impact of the First World War. Bread rioters and industrial strikers were joined on the streets by disaffected elements of the city's garrison. As more and more troops deserted, and with loyal troops trapped at the Front, the city moved into a state of anarchy, prompting a revolution the Tsarist regime did not survive.
The February Revolution was followed in the same year by the October Revolution, bringing Bolshevik rule and a change in Russia's social structure, and paving the way for the USSR. The two revolutions constituted a change in the composition of the country: the first overthrew the Tsar, and the second instituted a new form of government.
*'greenfield site' -- Areas beyond the city where development can take place unfettered by earlier building and where low-density, high-amenity buildings can be constructed.
*GST - Goods and Services Tax -- same as VAT.
*Ideologues -- An adherent of an ideology, esp. one who is uncompromising and dogmatic. An impractical idealist. An often blindly partisan advocate or adherent of a particular ideology.
*Intellectuals – something that does not exist here in American Politics.
*Internationale -- (song) -- The Internationale became the anthem of international socialism, and gained particular notoriety under the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1944, when it was that communist state's de facto national anthem. Its original French refrain is translated: "This is the final struggle / Let us group together and tomorrow / The Internationale / Will be the human race."
*lumpen -- (rags) -- Lumpenproletariat (a German word literally meaning "rag proletariat") is a term first defined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The German Ideology (1845).
Marx refers to the lumpenproletariat as the "refuse of all classes", including "swindlers, confidence tricksters, brothel-keepers, rag-and-bone merchants, beggers, and other flotsam of society".
Marx rhetorically describes the lumpenproletariat as a "class fraction" that constituted the political power base for Louis Bonaparte of France in 1848. In this sense, Marx argued that Bonaparte was able to place himself above the two main classes, the proletariat and bourgeoisie, by resorting to the 'lumpenproletariat' as an apparently independent base of power, while in fact advancing the material interests of the 'finance aristocracy'. For rhetorical purposes, Marx identifies Louis Napoleon himself as being like a member of the lumpenproletariat, insofar as being a member of the finance aristocracy, he has no direct interest in productive enterprises.
Lumpenbourgeoisie is a term most often attributed to Andre Gunder Frank in 1972 to describe a type of a middle class and upper class (merchants, lawyers, industrialists, etc.); one that has little collective self-awareness or economic base and who supports the colonial masters.
The term Lumpenbourgeoisie was already used in Austria by about 1926. The author was an Austrian social democratic journalist and he used the term in at least one article in a Viennese periodical. Another example of the use of the term was given by Czech philosopher Karel Kosik in 1997. In his article, "Lumpenbourgeoisie and the higher spiritual truth" he defines Lumpenbourgeoisie as "a militant, openly anti-democratic enclave within a functioning, however half-hearted and thus helpless democracy".
*Marseillaise -- is the national anthem of France. The name of the song originally was Chant de guerre pour l'Armée du Rhin ("War Song for the Army of the Rhine"). It was written and composed by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle in 1792 and adopted in 1795 as the nation's first anthem. It is also the first example of the "European march" anthemic style. Since being adopted as France's national anthem, the evocative lyrics and instantly recognisable tune of La Marseillaise have led to its use as a revolutionary anthem as well as to the inspiration of many pieces of classical music and popular culture.
Rouget de Lisle wrote the song 'Chant de guerre pour l'Armée du Rhin' in Strasbourg on 25 April 1792. The melody soon became the rallying call to the French Revolution and was adopted as La Marseillaise after the melody was first sung on the streets by volunteers (federes in French) from Marseille. These federes were making their entryway into Paris on 30 July 1792 after a young volunteer from Montpellier called Francois Mireur had sung it at a patriotic gathering in Marseille, and the troops adopted it as the marching song of the National Guard of Marseille. The song's lyrics reflect the invasion of France by foreign armies (from Prussia and Austria) underway when it was written; Strasbourg itself was attacked just a few days later. The invading forces were repulsed from France following their defeat in the Battle of Valmy.
*Moribund -- adjective -- dying, coming to an end, having little or no vital force left. Stagnant, on the verge of becoming obsolete.
*New Technocrats -- An adherent or a proponent of technocracy. A technical expert, especially one in a managerial or administrative position. An expert who is a member of a highly skilled elite group. A group or class of persons enjoying superior intellectual or social or economic status. A person with special knowledge or ability who performs skillfully. A person active in party politics.
*October Revolution -- also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution, Red October, or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917. It took place with an armed insurrection in Petrograd traditionally dated to 25 October 1917 Old Style Julian Calendar (O.S.), which corresponds with 7 November 1917 New Style (N.S.). Gregorian Calendar.
It followed and capitalized on the February Revolution of the same year. The October Revolution in Petrograd overthrew the Russian Provisional Government and gave the power to the local soviets dominated by Bolsheviks. As the revolution was not universally recognized outside of Petrograd there followed the struggles of the Russian Civil War (1917–1922) and the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922.
*OECD -- The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is an international economic organization of 34 countries founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade. It defines itself as a forum of countries committed to democracy and the market economy, providing a platform to compare policy experiences, seeking answers to common problems, identifying good practices, and co-ordinating domestic and international policies of its members.
The Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), was formed in 1948 to administer American and Canadian aid in the framework of the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. It started its operations on 16 April 1948. Since 1949, it has been headquartered in the Chateau de la Muette in Paris, France. After the Marshall Plan ended, the OEEC focused on economic questions.
Following the 1957 Rome Treaties to launch the European Economic Community, the Convention on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was drawn up to reform the OEEC. The Convention was signed in December 1960 and the OECD officially superseded the OEEC in September 1961. It consisted of the European founder countries of the OEEC plus the United States and Canada, with Japan joining three years later. During the next 12 years Finland, Australia, and New Zealand also joined the organisation. Yugoslavia had observer status in the organisation starting with the establishment of the OECD until its dissolution.
In 1989, after the political changes in Central and Eastern Europe, the OECD started to assist these countries to prepare market economy reforms. In 1990, the Centre for Co-operation with European Economies in Transition (now succeeded by the Centre for Cooperation with Non-Members) was established, and in 1991, the Programme "Partners in Transition" was launched for the cooperation with Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. This programme also included a membership option for these countries. As a result of this, in 1994–2000 Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia as well as Mexico and the Republic of Korea became members of the organisation.
The OECD has been criticised by several civil society groups and developing countries. The main criticism has been the narrowness of the OECD because of its limited membership to a select few rich nations. In 1997–1998, the draft Multilateral Agreement on Investment was heavily criticized by several non-governmental organisations and developing countries. Many critics argued that the agreement would threaten protection of human rights, labor and environmental standards, and the least developed countries. A particular concern was that the MAI would result in a 'race to the bottom' among countries willing to lower their labor and environmental standards to attract foreign investment. Also the OECD's actions against harmful tax practices has raised criticism. The primary objection is the sanctity of tax policy as a matter of sovereign entitlement.
*Poznan -- The Poznań 1956 protests, also known as Poznań 1956 uprising or Poznań June, were the first of several massive protests of the Polish people against the communist government of the People's Republic of Poland. Demonstrations by workers demanding better conditions began on June 28, 1956, at Poznan's Cegielski Factories and were met with violent repression. A crowd of approximately 100,000 gathered in the city center near the UB secret police building. 400 tanks and 10,000 soldiers of Ludowe Wojsko Polskie and the Internal Security Corps, under Polish-Soviet general Stanislav Poplavsky were ordered to suppress the demonstration, and during the pacification fired at the protesting civilians.
The death toll was placed between 57 and 78 people, including a 13-year-old boy, Romek Strzalkowski. Hundreds of people sustained injuries. Nonetheless the Poznań protests were an important milestone on the way to the installation of a less Soviet-controlled government in Poland in October.
Many historians consider the Poznań 1956 protests to be an important milestone in modern history of Poland, and one of the events that precipitated the fall of communism in Poland. Nonetheless it should be noted that the protests of 1956 were not motivated by anti-communist ideology; the workers' demands were mostly of economic nature, centering around better work conditions rather than any political objectives. The workers sang "The Internationale" and their banners read "We demand bread." It was the government's consistent failure to fulfil the first demand which eventually led to the demands for political change, but even during the history of Solidarity few demanded wide political reforms.
*Proletarian -- (of the Proletariat) -- The proletarii according to the Constitution of the Roman Republic were men without property. The proletarii were also called capite censi because they were "persons registered not as to their property which was below the lowest census for military service, but simply as to their existence as living individuals, primarily as heads (caput) of a family." In the early days of the Roman Empire, the Comitia Centuriata was an people's assembly composed of centuriae (nominally, groups of about 100 men) who were classified according to the value of each one's property. The top infantry class assembled with full arms and armor; the next two classes brought arms and armor, but less and lesser; the fourth class only spears; the fifth slings. In voting, the calvary and top infantry class were enough to decide an issue; as voting started at the top, an issue might be decided before the lower classes voted. Excluded were the proletarii, those who did not qualify for any of these five classes because "they had not even the minimum property required for the lowest class. Their sole possession was their children, proles; hence the name. The proletarii were the poorest stratum of the population.
In Marxist theory, the proletariat is the class of a capitalist society that does not have ownership of the means of production and whose only means of subsistence is to sell their labour power for a wage or salary. Proletarians are wage-workers, while some refer to those who receive salaries as the salariat. For Marx, however, wage labour may involve getting a salary rather than a wage per se. Marxism sees the proletariat and bourgeoisie (capitalist class) as occupying conflicting positions, since workers automatically wish their wages to be as high as possible, while owners and their proxies wish for wages (costs) to be as low as possible.
*Second International -- The Second International (1889–1916) was an organization of socialist and labour parties formed in Paris on July 14, 1889. At the Paris meeting delegations from 20 countries participated. It continued the work of the dissolved First International, though excluding the still-powerful anarcho-syndicalist movement and unions, and was in existence until 1916.
Among the Second International's famous actions were its (1889) declaration of May 1 as International Workers' Day and its (1910) declaration of March 8 as International Workers' Day. It initiated the international campaign for the 8-hour working day.
*Small Holders -- Founded in 1908, the original party won an overwhelming majority in the first elections after the Second World War, resulting in its leader, Zoltan Tildy, becoming prime minister. The Smallholders-dominated parliament established a republic in 1946 with Tildy as president. He was succeeded as prime minister by Ferenc Nagy. However, the Soviet occupation of the country, and the Hungarian Communist Party's "salami tactic" to break up opponent parties, and widespread election fraud in 1947 led to a communist government.
In 1947 the Communist Party carried out a coup d’état against the rule of the Smallholders’ Party. Though not all democratic institutions were abolished, the Communists firmly held power. The prominent smallholders politicians were either arrested or forced to leave the country. Lajos Dinnyes of the Smallholders remained prime minister after the 1947 elections, but his government was controlled by the communists. Two years later the party was absorbed into a People’s Independent Front, led by the communist ungarian Working People's Party. After the latter prevailed in that year's elections, a communist people's republic was established. The Smallholders party was dissolved.
*Solidarnosc -- (Solidarity) -- is a Polish trade union federation founded in September 1980 at the Gdansk Shipyard, and originally led by Lech Walesa. Solidarity was the first non-communist party-controlled trade union in a Warsaw Pact country. In the 1980s it constituted a broad anti-bureaucratic social movement. The government attempted to destroy the union during the period of martial law in the early 1980s with several years of political repression, but in the end it was forced to start negotiating with the union.
Solidarity was founded in Gdańsk in September 1980 at the Lenin Shipyards, where Lech Walesa and others formed a broad anti-Soviet social movement ranging from people associated with the Catholic Church to members of the anti-Soviet Left. Solidarity advocated non-violence in its members' activities. In September 1981 Solidarity's first national congress elected Lech Walesa as a president and adopted a republican program, the "Self-governing Republic".
The Round Table Talks between the government and the Solidarity-led opposition led to semi-free elections in 1989. By the end of August, a Solidarity-led coalition government was formed and in December 1990 Walesa was elected President of Poland, and Tadeusz Mazowiecki was elected Prime Minister.
Since 1989 Solidarity has become a more traditional trade union, and had relatively little impact on the political scene of Poland in the early 1990s. A political arm founded in 1996 as Solidarity Electoral Action (AWS) won the parlimentary election in 1997, but lost the following 2001 election. Currently, as a political party Solidarity has little influence on modern Polish politics.
[[In the days of Lech Walesa, Solidarity was Big News around the world! The medias trumpeted Solidarity as the New Hope of the East. Of course, what they did not say, was that it was their chance to jump in and do some creative lying and double-dealing in Poland. Now, the very same political forces that Solidarity helped to eliminate Communism -- have eliminated Solidarity.]]
[[There are many Jackals waiting in the wings to get their chance at the fresh meat -- and replace Human Resistance by whatever trickery and deceptions and backstabbings they can get away with -- as soon as Human Resistance does the Heavy Lifting for them, and is no longer needed. We have already seen this with the 'Twin Jackals' of Demo-Iowa, Doug Gross and 'Il Duce Branstad'.]]
*Syndicalism -- Syndicalism is a type of economic system proposed as a replacement for capitalism and state socialism which uses federations of collectivised trade unions or industrial unions. It is a form of economic corporatism that advocates interest aggregation of multiple non-competitive categorised units to negotiate and manage an economy.
For adherents, labor unions are the potential means of both overcoming economic aristocracy and running society fairly in the interest of the majority, through union democracy. Industry in a syndicalist system would be run through co-operative confederations and mutual aid. Local syndicates would communicate with other syndicates through the Bourse du Travail (labor exchange) which would manage and transfer commodities.
Syndicalism is also used to refer to the tactic of bringing about this social arrangement, typically expounded by anarcho-synicalism and De Leonism, in which a general strike begins and workers seize their means of production and organise in a federation of trade unionism.
*Third International -- The Communist International (abbreviated as Comintern, also known as the Third International) was an international communist organization founded in Moscow in March 1919. The International intended to fight "by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the State."
While the fissures (in the Second International) had been evident for decades, World War I was to prove the issue that finally separated the revolutionary and reformist wings of the workers' movement. The socialist movement had been historically antimilitarist and internationalist, and was therefore opposed to being used as "cannon fodder" for the "bourgeois" governments at war. This especially since the Triple Alliance (1882) comprised two empires, while the Triple Entente gathered the French Third Republic and the United Kingdom of Great Britian and Ireland into an alliance with the Russian Empire. (In disgust) -- the Communist Manifesto had stated that "the working class has no country" and exclaimed "Proletarians of all countries, unite!" Massive majorities voted in favor of resolutions for the Second International to call upon the international working class to resist war if it was declared.
Nevertheless, within hours of the declaration of war, almost all the socialist parties of the combatant states announced their support for their own countries. The only exceptions were the socialist parties of the Balkans, Russia, and tiny minorities in other countries. To Lenin's surprise, even the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) voted in favor of war credits.
Discredited by its passivity towards world events, the Second International dissolved in the middle of the war in 1916. In 1917, Lenin published the April Theses, which openly supported a "revolutionary defeatism". The Bolsheviks pronounced themselves in favor of the defeat of Russia, which would permit them to move directly to the stage of a revolutionary insurrection.
The victory of the Russian Communist Party in the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 truly shook the world. An alternative path to power to parlimentary politics was demonstrated in broad stokes. With much of Europe on the verge of economic and political collapse in the aftermath of the carnage of the Great War, revolutionary sentiments bubbled forth from a hundred hidden streams. The Russian Bolsheviks, headed by Vladimir Lenein, firmly believed that unless socialist revolution swept Europe, they would be crushed by the military might of world capitalism, just as the Paris Commune had been crushed by force of arms in 1871. To this end, the organization of a new International, to foment revolution in Europe and around the world, became to the Bolsheviks an iron necessity.
The Comintern was founded in these conditions at a congress held in Moscow March 2–6, 1919, against the backdrop of the Russian Civil War.
*Trotsky --
was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist.
Leon Trotsky was one of the leaders of the Russian October Revolution, second only to Vladimir Lenin. During the early days of the Soviet Union, he served first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army, and People's Commissar of War. He was a major figure in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War. He was also among the first members of the Politburo.
After leading a failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s, and the increasing role of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was successively removed from power, expelled from the Communist Party, deported from the Soviet Union and assassinated on Stalin's orders. An early advocate of Red Army intervention against European fascism, Trotsky also opposed Stalin's peace agreements with Adolph Hitler in the 1930s.
As the head of the Fourth International, Trotsky continued in exile to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, and was eventually assassinated in Mexico, by Ramon Mercader, a Soviet agent. Trotsky's ideas form the basis of Trotskyism, a major school of Marxist thought that is opposed to the theories of Stalinism. He was one of the few Soviet political figures who was never rehabilitated by the government of Mikhail Gorbachev.
*value, Law of -- Excess demand can raise the exchange-values of products traded, and excess supply can lower them; but if supply and demand are relatively balanced, the question arises of what regulates the settled exchange-ratios (or average price-levels) of products traded in that case, and this is what the law of value is intended to explain. According to the law of value, the trading ratios of different types of products reflect a real cost structure of production, and this cost structure ultimately reduces to the socially average amounts of human labor-time currently required to produce different goods and services.
Simply put, if product A takes 100 hours of human work to produce in total, and product B takes 5 hours to produce, the normal trading-ratio of A and B will gravitate to a rate of around 1:20 (one of A is worth 20 of B), because A is worth much more than B. The trading ratio will never be 20:1, 1:5, 1:100, or 500:1 (unless there was an exceptional shortage or oversupply of these products, or unequal exchange took place). For that reason, most market trade is regular and largely predictable, rather than chaotic and arbitrary; norms of what products are worth relative to each other are mostly clearly known and established, even if people lack an exact knowledge of prices.
According to Marx, the knowledge that the law of value existed, expressed in one form or another, was very ancient. People knew very well that there was a definite relationship between time worked and the value of products traded; in itself that was not a very difficult insight to grasp. The economic effects of the availability or lack of labour were rather self-evident in practical life. Nevertheless, different thinkers in history failed to conceptualize it with any adequacy. In part, Marx believed that the reason was that unrestricted trade of almost everything (including all kinds of labour) purely according to their exchange-value, was a comparatively recent phenomenon in human history. In pre-capitalist societies, there were far more restrictions on trade, the scope of trade was much less, and trade was influenced much more strongly by local custom, religion and cultural tradition. It was therefore difficult for philosophers to reach the theoretical conclusion, that only human work effort is the real substance of economic value; it seemed to contradict all kinds of other influences at work.
*VAT -- A value added tax (VAT) is a form of consumtion tax. From the perspective of the buyer, it is a tax on the purchase price. From that of the seller, it is a tax only on the "value added" to a product, material or service, from an accounting view, by his stage of its manufacture or distribution. The buyer remits to the government the difference between these two amounts, and retains the rest for themselves to offset the taxes he had previously paid on the inputs.
The "value added" to a product by a business is the sale price charged to its customer, minus the cost of materials and other taxable inputs. A VAT is like a sales tax in that ultimately only the end consumer is taxed.
It differs from the sales tax in that, with the latter, the tax is collected and remitted to the government only once, at the point of purchase by the end consumer. With the VAT, collections, remittances to the government, and credits for taxes already paid occur each time a business in the supply chain purchases products from another business.
Value added tax (VAT) avoids the cascade effect of sales tax by taxing only the value added at each stage of production. For this reason, throughout the world, VAT has been gaining favour over traditional sales taxes. In principle, VAT applies to all provisions of goods and services. VAT is assessed and collected on the value of goods or services that have been provided every time there is a transaction (sale/purchase). The seller charges VAT to the buyer, and the seller pays this VAT to the government. If, however, the purchaser is not an end user, but the goods or services purchased are costs to its business, the tax it has paid for such purchases can be deducted from the tax it charges to its customers. The government only receives the difference; in other words, it is paid tax on the gross margin of each transaction, by each participant in the sales chain.
In many developing countries such as India, sales tax/VAT are key revenue sources as high unemployment and low per capita income render other income sources inadequate. However, there is strong opposition to this by many sub-national governments as it leads to an overall reduction in the revenue they collect as well as a loss of some autonomy.
*Visegrad countries -- The Visegrád Group, also called the Visegrád Four or V4, was an alliance of four Central European states – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia – for the purposes of cooperation and furthering their European integration. It is also sometimes referred to as the Visegrád Triangle, since it was the alliance of three states at the beginning – the term is not valid now, but appears sometimes even after all the years since the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993.
The Czech Republic and Slovakia became members after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993. All four members of the Visegrád Group became part of the European Union on May 1, 2004.
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For the modern Hungarian Capitalist viewpoint about the events of the 1956 Revolution, I am providing the following websites.
This is a set of five lessons from -- The Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, in Budapest.
http://www.rev.hu/history_of_56/ora1/INDEX.HTM
http://www.rev.hu/history_of_56/ora2/INDEX.HTM
http://www.rev.hu/history_of_56/ora3/INDEX.HTM
http://www.rev.hu/history_of_56/ora4/INDEX.HTM
http://www.rev.hu/history_of_56/ora5/INDEX.HTM
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And, here are some websites of interest about the entire scenario.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956
http://www.filolog.com/crosscultureHistory1956.html
http://faroutliers.blogspot.com/2005/04/chinas-role-in-suppressing-hungarian.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_1_18/ai_82013555/
http://www.mywiseowl.com/articles/1956_Hungarian_Revolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky#Assassination
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB76/
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I once knew some young men, who knew nothing about what I know; but thought they already knew everything that they had to know about everything; and therefore were all-knowing.
In conversation one day, I mentioned the film 'Doctor Zhivago'.
They all said -- "What? Hah hah hah!"
I said again -- "Doctor Zhivago."
They said -- "What the (bleep) is 'Doctor Zhivago'?"
I said -- you do not know what 'Doctor Zhivago' is?
They laughed somemore.
Then I said in a loud voice -- "DOCTOR ZHIVAGO !"
They stopped laughing, and looked at me with blank faces.
They are probably dead by now.
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Markel Peters
http://www.voices-of-iowa.blogspot.com
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Fakery and Fake Fakery
Chain of Evil -- still has not changed.
Chain of Evil -- still has not changed