Hungary and Neo-Stalinism

“The Ghost of Stalin,” by Jean-Paul Sartre, 1956-1957

This book is a long, dense essay on the Hungarian revolt in 1956, written as it was happening.  Sartre, located as he was in France with its large Communist Party and on the European continent close to events, developed a nuanced view of the rebellion in Budapest.  He took neither a simplistic 'Trotskyist' position or a rigid Stalinist position, but something that was based on the facts of the various stages of the rebellion. He at all times calls himself a Marxist and comes out against the intervention by Zhukov’s Soviet tanks. Essentially, the rebellion first moved from a progressive ‘national communist’ phase that could have been solved by the promotion of Nagy and other CP co-thinkers, and the recognition of certain democratic and national needs.  But then it devolved into a right-wing nationalist and anti-communist phase, principally because of a reaction to the two Soviet Army interventions.  To Sartre, the dating of events is absolutely critical.  On October 23, 1956 the Soviet army first entered Budapest.  On November 4, 1956 it entered again.  Sartre contends that the armed response was a huge error.

After this, Hungary became the 'happiest barracks'

Most defenders of the hard-line in the Hungarian bureaucracy – Gero and Rakosi, even Kadar – saw the intervention as necessary to save the Hungarian worker’s state – principally the socialized property in industry and agriculture.  Sartre points out that most self-identified Trotskyists at the time did not distinguish between the pro-socialist and the pro-capitalist elements of the rebellion.  As such, they had a completely positive view of all events.  The problem with that line is that not everyone in Hungary wanted pro-socialist ‘workers councils.’ 

The Small-holders Party based on rural elements wanted to regain small landholdings.  Sartre thinks this would have been an acceptable temporary compromise to make, a sort of rural NEP, as forced collectivization had not worked.  

But there were according to Sartre, as even exist now, nationalist and fascist forces that wanted a complete break with socialism and a desire to rejoin western Europe.  Victor Orban, the present right-wing nationalist president of Hungary, is a product of those forces.  He first came to prominence in the collapse of the Hungarian workers state in 1989 – the ultimate coda to 1956.  The ‘shift to the right’ in 1956 came out in response to the Soviet Army actions and the failure of the Hungarian CP to fashion a democratic compromise.  Sartre points out that when workers are complaining of poverty, hunger and overwork, it is best not to look away...

U.S. propaganda had hinted that ‘aid’ of some kind would come if there was a rebellion, and many Hungarians resented the fact that this was a lie.  Sartre found no evidence of any material or military support by the West, as falsely claimed by ‘L’Humanite,’ the French CP paper.

To background the Hungarian situation, Sartre has a long section explaining the genesis and development of Russian Stalinism as a product of the rural backwardness and isolation of the USSR.  He in a way justifies it.  He does not see the bureaucracy as a new class and shows how the Stalinists instead created their own technocratic gravediggers after WWII.  Sartre calls Stalinism a ‘relic.’  Sartre shows how the Russian principles of bureaucracy, ‘socialism in one country,’ forced collectivization and heavy industrialization were imposed on the central European ‘people’s democracies’ by Soviet planners, and this was a huge mistake.  These were societies which, except for Yugoslavia, did not have organic workers revolutions, and where socialization and expropriation were imported by the Red Army. 

For example, Tito tried to get Stalin to agree to a ‘common market’ for Yugoslavia, Albania, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, but Stalin turned it down.   This common market would have allowed the various states to trade for products instead of following a duplicative industrialization. Instead individual state autarky was the USSR’s response to the West’s lucrative ‘Marshall Plan.’  Sartre points out that the relationship with the USSR was never one of being an ‘economic colony’ but it was one of political oppression.  Hostility by the USSR to ‘national communists’ was the result, which helped lead to the ultimately disastrous reactions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, in Berlin, in Pozan.

Oddly Sartre, in spite of his being a long-time ‘fellow-traveler’ of the French CP, comes out in this situation for various points in the 4^th International’s transitional program – workers democracy, the independence of the trade unions, a united front from below with the Socialist Party workers, the usefulness of allowing tendencies in the French CP.  Even understanding the bureaucracy not to be a class is consistent with the 4th International. He ultimately calls Khrushchev’s intervention ‘neo-Stalinism” (the ghost of Stalin…) and in response calls for de-Stalinizing the French CP.

In hindsight, the 1956 insurrection led to a long period of ‘goulash communism’ in Hungary, which was less politically and culturally restrictive, allowed more travel and included more consumer goods for the working classes than the harsher conditions in East Germany for instance.  This was its real and positive effect, as the bureaucracy realized they could not be as repressive.  Sartre points out that the Hungarian intervention and massacre was an immediate disaster for the Soviet Union on international, political terms.  The suppression by the USSR’s army undermined Communist claims to represent the working class and also its claims for ‘peace.’  As the Russian Czar found out in 1905 in Russia, massacring your own population has long-term consequences.  

British capitalism at the same time in October 1956 was ordering military action, via Israel, against Egypt's decision to take over the Suez Canal from Britain. Nasser was the leader of Egypt at the time.  But since capitalist war-making is so common, no one thinks capitalism is criminal and disqualified as a system, no matter how many times they invade, bomb or make war.  In Hungary and the Suez, we see an imperialist double-standard in the reactions to each.

Presently in the remaining workers’ states, such as China and Cuba, there will be both progressive and reactionary impulses to break the stranglehold of the political bureaucracies, both by proletarians and by capitalist or pro-capitalist elements.  And there will be responses that only exacerbate the problem or responses that will solve it.  Marxists must be able to tell one from another in order to move forward.

Prior posts on present-day Hungary, below.  Use blog search box, upper left.

And I got it at the library!

Red Frog

January 28, 2018