Revolutions

REVOLUTION

The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives The Hungarian Revolution 1956 The Iranian Revolution 1978-79 1867-2000: A people’s history of Mexico

Compiled by Kapil Arambam http://kapilarambam.blogspot.com

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The Hungarian Revolution: 1956 This is an anonymous account of the events of the near revolution of 1956, containing interesting information from interviews with participants. Details are included from Columbia University Research Project interviews with participants which are a nice complement to the information in our other Hungary '56 articles.

a change of leadership and a change of policy. Matyas Rakosi, who styled himself "Stalin's Hungarian disciple" but was more popularly referred to as 'arsehole' by Hungarian workers, was required to make way for Imre Nagy, who had managed not to be involved in the purges and generalised terror of the late 'forties. His 'new course' outlined in late June 1953 was designed to ease the load on the workers and peasants, produce higher living standards, end the internment camps and turn the economy away from heavy industry. Because he was opposed by the hard-line Stalinists around Rakosi and Brno Cero, Nagy is presented by some as popular and liberal. In fact he was much like the rest. After Stalin's death, he talked of him as the "great leader of all humanity"; the whole Stalinist era was a period of "trial and error". In late 1954 Nagy felt able to say "We have created a new country and a happy and free life for the people"; meanwhile Rakosi and Gero argued that workers' living standards were too high.

Before October... "It's all a load of shit, that's what it is!"[1] This accurate description of Hungarian socialism in the early 'fifties came from a worker in prison, overheard by a Communist intellectual locked up during a purge. This rare contact with a worker, and even rarer contact with what workers thought of the 'workers' state' helped this particular intellectual to lose his "faith in Marxism". As the saying went about prisons in Hungary, "We are a three-class society - those who have been there, those who axe there, and those who are heading there." The large number of workers in prison, either for political offences or for theft, showed up the system: even Imre Nagy, the watered-down Stalinist entrusted by Moscow in 1953 to liberalise Hungary (that is, to hold the workers in check) had to admit by December 1955 that "the most alarming fact is that the majority of those convicted are industrial workers". [2]

Although Nagy may have felt that the removal of some of Stalinism's worst features constituted a 'free life', his 'liberalism' was met by even more absenteeism, indiscipline and slacking by workers. A typical Nagy speech from that period shows why. "The production results of the third quarter show that, if the labour drive to mark these elections is carried out with the same enthusiasm and vigour as the revolutionary shift that was worked in honour of the Great Socialist October Revolution, and if management and workers can get the same improvement in worker discipline - in which there are still grave deficiencies - as in production, then MAVAG will be able to take its place amongst the ranks of the elite plants."[5] No amount of apologetics can cover up the straightforward capitalist content of such a speech.

Theft was a necessity for workers to compensate for socialist living standards. These had dropped by 17-20% in the years 1949-53 as a result of an idiotic 'Five-Year Plan' devoted to heavy industry and steelworks in a largely agricultural country with no iron ore or coking coal. 3 Similarly, the imposition of co-operatives on unwilling peasants led to a fall in their meagre incomes, and 1952 saw the worst ever yields in Hungarian agriculture. Official statistics revealed that while 15% of the population was above the 'minimum' standard of living, 30% were on it and 55% below. A day's pay for a state farm worker wouldn't buy a kilo of bread; in 15% of working-class families not everyone had a blanket; one in every five workers had no winter coat.[4]

Workers' cynicism spread outside the workplace: in 1954 there were three days of rioting after the World Cup final defeat by West Germany in the belief that the game had been thrown for hard currency. Games of any kind against Russia were rarely without trouble. The MDP sent intellectuals and writers out into the country at large during 1953 to explain Nagy's 'new course': for most it was a first sight of the miserable conditions of the peasants and workers. They soon found out that the 'toiling masses' had little time for the Literary Gazette or for 'building socialism'. A young Communist commented "The workers hated the regime to such an extent that by 1953 they were ready to destroy it and everything that went with it."

In these conditions, thieving from the state and 'beating the system' were the things to do to survive. No moral stigma attached to them at all, rather, everyone was at it to relieve their poverty. Pilfering and spontaneous sabotage went together with high labour turnover (often as local managements got rid of 'troublemakers'), waste in factories, futile planning and falsified output figures to meet ridiculous production targets. Workers had to do unpaid overtime to 'celebrate' anniversaries that the Party of Hungarian Workers (MDP) designated as great occasions. Home businesses thrived on materials taken from work; copper was stolen from shipyards; a buyer at a Budapest hospital complained "Nowadays even nailing it down is no guarantee against theft". In the state stores, staff would cheat customers and sell short weight, except to relatives and friends. Butter was rarely seen in shops as it was pre-packed and weighed, it offered no scope for fiddling, and so wasn't ordered much by shops.

Workers expressed this themselves: "The workers did not believe in anything the communists promised them, because the communists had cheated their promises so often." A worker from the Red Star Tractor factory: "Under Communism, we should have a share in governing Hungary, but instead we're the poorest people in the country. We're just regarded as factory fodder." Another worker: "The Communists nationalised all the factories and similar enterprises, proclaiming the slogan, 'the factory is yours - you work for yourself.' Exactly the opposite of this was true."

Workers and peasants went beyond theft, absenteeism and what the MDP leadership liked to call 'laziness' and 'wage-swindling'. The third banner in the official procession on May Day 1953 proclaimed "Glory to the immortal Stalin, star which guides us towards freedom, socialism and peace". Seven weeks later the workers of East Berlin rioted for their vision of freedom and were quickly put down by Russian tanks. 20,000 workers went on strike at the Rakosi iron and steel works in Budapest's Csepel district against low pay, production norms and food shortages. There were wildcat strikes in Diosgyor, and mass peasant demonstrations in the countryside. To avoid further outbreaks, Russia ordered

Among the students the peasants' and workers' sons were most prepared to speak their minds. They were more insolent than the middle-class ones. They were also less likely to engage in abstract ideological discussions but stuck to concrete issues - like food shortages. Disillusion and anti-communism were widespread amongst Hungarian youth. "We spoke less about political 2

subjects, but if we did, we were cursing the Russians, that was most of the time what it amounted to." "We were the first generation that was not scared. After all we had nothing to lose and we also had the feeling that we couldn't bear this for an entire life."

below. A meeting at the Polytechnic in Budapest resolved to march on the 2Jrd in support of sixteen demands. These included support for the Polish struggle for freedom; the removal of Soviet troops; the election of MDP officials; a new government under Imre Nagy; a general election; "the complete reorganisation of Hungary's economic life under the direction of specialists"; the right to strike; the "complete revision of the norms in effect in industry and an immediate and radical adjustment of salaries in accordance with the just requirements of workers and intellectuals"; and a free press and radio.[7]

Discontent and workers' opposition thus existed long before 1956. However, the American assessment in December 1953 by an army attaché was that "There are no organised resistance groups in Hungary; the population does not now, nor will they in the future, have the capacity to resist actively the present regime;". With a similar attitude, the Russian leader Khrushchev thought that if he'd had ten Hungarian writers shot at the right moment, nothing would have happened. A week before the revolt a reader's letter to the Literary Gazette complained about the uselessness of the intellectuals' debates: "The working class is, and will remain, politically passive for good, and uninterested in such hair-splitting...and without them what good can we do?"[6] However, a Yugoslavian political analyst was more perceptive, commenting nine days before the uprising, "People refuse to live in the old way, nor can the leadership govern in the old way. Conditions have been created for an uprising." The AVH ('Allamvedelmi Hatosag', State Security Force) sensed trouble toot they and the Russian troops garrisoned in Hungary were put on alert five days before October 23rd.

This mixed bag of demands could not even have begun to be met by the regime - therein lay its explosive potential. Yet underlying the demands was the all-too-common illusion that what had been mismanaged by 'bad' leaders could be rectified by 'good' leaders elected to replace them. The element of naivety was compounded by the way the students asked workers for support but not for them to strike; they wanted a silent march only. The Interior Ministry banned the march, which made more people resolve to go. The ban was lifted after the march went ahead anyway. Although the march started silently as the students wished, it became more militant as workers off the morning shift joined in after 4 o'clock. The early slogans of support for the Poles were overtaken by shouts for freedom and "Russians go home.'" Someone cut the communist symbol out of a national flag and the flag of the revolution made its first appearance - red, white and green with a hole in the middle. More people left work to join a demonstration that they weren't forced to take part in; soldiers were sympathetic and joined in too.

Much has been made of the dissatisfaction of Communist writers and intellectuals and their supposed leading role in the revolution. The intellectuals' program was only a criticism of Stalinism. Their 'Petofi Circle' debating club wanted orderly reform and a change in the leadership (because the Stalinists Rakosi and Gero had returned to power replacing Nagy, now out of public life altogether). The Petofi Circle did not encourage the revolt: it considered that precipitate actions could lead to a catastrophe. They were seen by workers as Communists and supporters of the regime. Nagy became a focus for this kind of 'opposition', which favoured working through MDP channels, and was certainly against demonstrations. Most of these people came out against the uprising: two such journalists thought that the crowds behaved "like idiots" on October 23rd. One writer though, Gyula Hay, was honest enough to see who was stirring up that: "I am perfectly willing to accept that it was not I who awoke the spirit of freedom in youth: on the contrary, it was youth who pushed me towards it." Workers started to take an interest in what the writers were getting up to in mid-September 1956, when a meeting of the Writers' Union saw the Stalinists defeated in elections. A Literary Gazette account of that meeting sold 70,000 copies in half an hour. Such a rebuff to the authorities was bound to be of interest now.

By dusk there were 200,000 people (about one-sixth of the whole population of Budapest) in Parliament Square. The authorities turned off the lights, whereupon newspapers and government leaflets were set alight. The crowd demanded that Imre Nagy speak to them, but by the time he turned up the mood had gone beyond listening calmly to speeches. Appalled by the sight of so many people and by the flags with holes, Nagy made the mistake of starting with the word 'Comrades!' This was greeted with boos and shouts of "We're no longer comrades!" The people had already rejected the whole HDP, not just the Stalinists, and the 'oppositionists' were too moderate. The disappointment with Nagy turned into positive talk of a strike, and a crowd of youths marched to the Radio building. At 8 o 'clock there was an official broadcast by Erno Gero in which he said: "We condemn those who seek to instil in our youth the poison of chauvinism and to take advantage of the democratic liberties that our state guarantees to the workers to organise a nationalist demonstration."[8] This did nothing to calm the situation. The crowd outside the Radio demanded access, with microphones in the street "so that the people can express their opinions." A delegation was taken in by the AVH to the Radio boss, Mrs Benke: she checked their ID cards and found they were workers from the long machinery plant and an arms factory. Similarly, Kopacsi, the Budapest police chief, questioned some youths picked up on the demonstration and discovered they were factory workers, some with Party cards.

The occasion of the reburial of a rehabilitated Communist, Laszlo Rajk, a victim of an earlier purge, was used by workers to demonstrate en masse. Some 200,000 attended in the rain on October 6th: an observer commented "perhaps if it had not rained, there would have been a revolution that day," There had been no difference between Rajk and Rakosi politically, personal rivalry resulting in Rajk's trial and execution as a 'Titoist fascist'. The workers' 'support' for Rajk's rehabilitation was purely symbolic: on the other side of the coin, a top Communist said that "if Rajk could have seen this mob he would have turned machine guns on to them." The same day 2-300 students inarched away after the burial using the slogan, "We won't stop halfway, Stalinism must be destroyed" Despite shouting this, the students weren't stopped by the police, who assumed that any kind of demonstration must be an official one.

When the delegation failed to reappear, the Radio building was attacked and defended: at about 9 o'clock the first shots were fired with many dead and wounded. The crowd had got weapons from sympathetic police and soldiers before the AVH's first shots, and as the news spread, workers from the arsenals brought more. The revolution had now started in earnest. An observer felt that "it was at Stalin's statue that the workers of Budapest appeared on the scene." When the crowd had trouble getting it down, two workers fetched oxy-acetylene

October 23rd

gear to cut it down. The boots remained on the plinth, with a road sign saying 'Bead End' stuck on them. Hungarian troops were greeted as friends and allies by the crowds; workers were arriving from Csepel in lorries with ammunition. Arms factories were raided and the telephone exchange taken.

It was the students who were responsible for the event that sparked off the inevitable. On October 16th students in Szeged had broken away from the official organisation and set up a new association. They sent delegates countrywide to encourage similar breaks. By the 22nd there were similar groups in most of the universities and large schools. News had reached Budapest of events in Poland, where the Soviet army had encircled Warsaw as the Polish Communist Party changed its leadership under pressure from

The authorities called on the sappers in a nearby barracks, and told them that fascists had risen against the government. The sappers were met by workers who told them the truth. More sappers arrived to defend the HDF's 3

Central Committee HQ. When they saw, for the first time, the luxury of the accommodation there, and realised that the crowds were ordinary Hungarians, they went back to their barracks, changed out of uniform and elected a revolutionary council. By midnight 'spectators' were leaving the scene and the armed workers of Csepel and Ujpest were taking their place. The battle for the Radio building went on all night: it was finally taken at nine in the morning.

The intervention by the Soviet troops now gave the revolt a national character. The attitude of sympathetic neutrality that the Hungarian army had taken in the first few hours was now replaced by and large by one of active support for the rebellion. Soviet tanks were being immobilised by the fighting youth, who, though poorly armed, were using the partisan techniques drummed into them at school in praise of the Soviet resistance to the German armies in World War Two. This was a rare case of Hungarians eager to learn from Russian example. Anti-tank tactics included loosening the cobblestones, then soaping the road, or pouring oil over it. Liquid soap was used in Moricz Zsiground Square. In Szena Square bales of silk taken from a Party shop were spread out and covered with oil so the Soviet tanks couldn't move on this and became sitting targets for petrol bombs. Youngsters would run up and smear jam over the driver's window; some rebels blew themselves up knowingly getting close enough to a tank to destroy it.

The mass, revolutionary character of the Hungarian uprising "was established within hours. "The Hungarian uprising was the personal experience of millions of men and women, and therefore of no one in particular, just like the Paris Commune or other mass revolts."[9] The casualty lists in the hospitals showed that it was young workers in particular who did most of the fighting. A doctor commented: "There was any number of youngsters amongst the fighters who knew nothing about the Petofi Circle or who for that matter hadn't even heard of it, to whom Gomulka's name was equally unknown, and who replied to the question as to why they had risked their lives in the fighting with such answers as, 'Well, is it really worth living for 600 forints a month?" A student noticed the same thing: "It is touching that it was the hooligans of Ferencvaros who created ethics out of nothing during the revolution."

A thirteen year old girl was seen taking on a 75 ton tank with three bottle bombs. A Viennese reporter at the Kilian Barracks met another 13 year old who had defended a street crossing alone with a machine-gun for three days and nights. "The Russians found themselves faced by hordes of death-defying youngsters: students, apprentices and even schoolchildren who did not care whether they lived or died." A Swiss reporter, seeing children fighting and dying, wrote: "If ever the time comes to commemorate the heroes in Hungary, they mustn't forget to raise a monument to the Unknown Hungarian Child." A chemical engineer saw some children with empty bottles. He told them to use nitro-glycerine rather than petrol, so they all went to their school laboratory where he helped them to synthesise enough nitro-glycerine to make a hundred bottle bombs. Then he went home and left them to it. Twelve year olds learnt how to handle guns: older men instructed rebels in the use of grenades and how to attack tanks.

The participants knew why they were fighting: "We wanted freedom and not a good comfortable life. Even though we might lack bread and other necessities of life, we wanted freedom. We, the young people, were particularly hampered because we were brought up amidst lies. We continually had to lie." The character of the uprising was distinctive in that it had a clear direction without a 'leadership'. The United Nations Committee investigating it was told by a Hungarian professor of philosophy, "It was unique in history that the Hungarian revolution had no leaders. It was not organised; it was not centrally directed. The will for freedom was the moving force in every action." The same point is well made by two fighters: "There was no organisation whatsoever, consequently there was no discipline either, but there was astonishingly good teamwork." "Some people got together, fought, went home, then others came and continued the fight."

An air force officer typed out copies of guerrilla tactics. Many of the carefully selected and supposedly politically indoctrinated officer corps went over to the rebels. Officers of the Petofi and Zrinyi Military Academies, the future elite, fought the Russians. After the rebellion the army was reorganised with many officers and cadets got rid of. The police were generally sympathetic. Only the AVH fought alongside the Russians. The AVH (referred to by workers as 'the Blues' or 'the AVOs', the name they had before 1949) had some 35,000 men and women, the latter being reputedly the worse torturers. Their minimum pay was over three times that of a worker, plus bonuses. They had their own subsidised stores and a holiday village by Lake Balaton. Many Hungarians had experienced 'esengofraz', namely 'bell-fever', a midnight call by the AVH. Now it was the turn of the AVOs to be hunted. "The security forces were capable of terrorisation in times of peace, or of firing on an unarmed crowd, but impotent in the face of a people's uprising."[10]

The first tasks of the rebels involved seizing the telephone exchanges, requisitioning lorries, attacking garages, barracks and arsenals, getting arms and ammunition above all else. Then barricades and molotov cocktails were made to face the Soviet tanks that entered Budapest shortly after four in the morning of the 24th. Russian troops had moved into action before the Hungarian authorities, in emergency meetings all night, called for their 'fraternal' assistance. Some 'barricades were made of paving stones ripped up by hand by women and children. The rebels took up positions in narrow streets and passages. Those in the Corvin Passage made their stand by a convenient petrol pump. As dawn broke, workers in Calvin Square confronted five tanks without running away. Public support was immediate, with armed rebels having no trouble getting food and shelter. Soldiers, when not taking part in the fighting themselves, handed arms over to the rebels.

The AVH was abolished on the afternoon of October 29th, to be resurrected after the Russian invasion. Since the 21st, two days before the uprising, the AVH had been destroying its files. Neither of these things saved individual AVOs from lynchings: such killings were generally carried out in a purposeful and sombre manner. Without any doubt, the AVH killed many more people over the years than the crowds managed to kill of them. Despite this and the AVH's continued brutality during the revolution, most insurgents condemned the lynchings. In the work of creating a new society, such imitations of the old were unwelcome. However, no one was sorry for the dead AVOs: as a Hungarian told a Polish reporter "Believe me, we are not sadists, but we cannot bring ourselves to regret those kind of people."[11] In the streets bodies of AVOs lay or hung with the money found in their pockets either stuffed in their mouths or pinned to their chests. Even in poverty, no self-respecting Hungarian would touch it. After the rebellion was crushed, the Hungarian authorities themselves put the total number of security force members killed as 234 - a remarkably low figure in the circumstances.

Thirteen days in Budapest... First reactions to events were starting to come out. The Stalinists called the revolt "a fascist counter-revolutionary action." The 'moderate' Communists wanted Nagy, but both wanted order restored, by Russian troops if necessary. The writers' role was over already, their demands surpassed. The students too were having second thoughts about what they had sparked off. Very few people went to work on the 24th. At 4.30 am an official announcement banned all demonstrations and referred to "fascist and reactionary elements". Just after 8 o'clock, Nagy was declared Prime Minister: fifteen hours earlier the appointment might have had some effect but from now on the authorities ' moves were way behind the developing events. Half an hour later Nagy showed what 'liberal', 'moderate' Communism was about: he declared martial law with the death penalty for carrying arras, and his government called in the Soviet troops. After this, his program was of little interest to the rebels.

The crowds got on with removing symbols of the old regime: red stars were torn down. At the offices of Szabad Nep, the MDP newspaper, journalists 4

threw down leaflets of support for the revolt out of the windows: people tore them up and burnt them without reading them -after all their years of lying, no one was going to believe them now. The Party bookshop and the Soviet 'Horizont' bookshop were ransacked and the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin piled up and set alight. A general strike spread over the country, a move which left the MDP embarrassed. So often it had praised the strikes of Western workers, now Hungarian workers were doing the same - but this time against them. Fighting was fierce in Parliament Square and at the Party HQ after AVH units fired on largely unarmed crowds. Black flags made their first appearances to mourn fallen rebels. Radio Budapest, still in the hands of the authorities, threatened: "If the destructions and assassinations continue, the football match between Hungary and Sweden, scheduled for Sunday, will have to be cancelled."[12] This radio station was now only listened to for laughs, as its statements bore no relation to observable reality. The fighting groups continued to form throughout the city. The armed group holding Szena Square held open democratic meetings to discuss strategy and tactics.

Budapest. This act was to cost him a life sentence in 1958. As the fighting continued, with most damage occurring in the working-class suburbs of Budapest and the industrial towns, the country's farmers worked to provide food for the rebels, and lorries with bread, flour and vegetables streamed into the towns. Bakers worked throughout the rebellion and strike to ensure that rebels and strikers were fed. Despite hunger and poverty there was an absence of looting in the city. Shops with broken windows had their goods left intact. After the radio and the Soviet press talked of looting, signs were put up on such shops saying, "This is how we loot." Another popular slogan dated back to the Korean War when the Federation of Working Youth collected metal for the North Korean war effort: "Scrap Metals Ensure Peace!" now made a more appropriate reappearance on burnt-out Soviet tanks. Some North Korean students (and some Polish ones) returned the favour by joining the rebels. The collapse of the MDP and the unity of industrial workers, peasants and white-collar workers left the Government powerless by the 27th. Real power was moving towards the revolutionary workers' councils. It was these councils that called the strike, and the workers obeyed this call because it came in effect from themselves. Similarly, the call for a return to work was accepted when the councils made it. The Communists had said that workers were the ruling class, now, through the councils, the workers were putting it into practice. As the workers' councils spread from factory to factory and district to district the

On the 25th the Government urged a return to work in its radio broadcasts. This call was ignored, but as it implied an end to the curfew (which had also been widely ignored anyway) many thousands more took to the streets to find out what was going on and to discuss events: going to work was the last thing on most people's minds, Nagy's reshuffles of his ministers, his 'concessions' and announcements were increasingly irrelevant and always too slow and too late to satisfy the rebels. The people in the streets didn't give a damn that Georgy Lukacs, a darling of leftist academics, was now in the cabinet. On the 26th Lukacs said in a radio broadcast that "what we want is a socialist culture worthy of the Hungarian people's great and ancient achievements", while all around people were dismantling all the 'socialist culture' they could find.

National Trade Union Council, realising that it was being made redundant, tried to pre-empt developments by advocating workers' councils, but with its own old hacks on the platform. Workers still turned up to such meetings, but elected from among themselves, rejecting the trade union officials. MDP members were then urged to infiltrate the genuine councils. A paper called 'Igazsag' ('Truth') was started, which kept in touch with the councils. Delegations from the councils besieged Nagy's government with endless demands. Two recurrent demands were for Hungarian neutrality and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact.

The writers were giving up quickly. Gabor Tanesos said no progress (whatever it was he had in mind) could be made "while the guns are roaring." As early as the 25th, Gyula Hay stated "We must immediately revert to peaceful methods; fighting must stop immediately. Even peaceful demonstrations should not now be undertaken."[13] While the intellectuals were way behind the workers, lacking their basic intransigence, not all were so craven. On the 29th some told Nagy to arm the workers. He shrank back from such a suggestion, replying that "At present that is quite impossible. A lot of the workers are unreliable." At times it seemed that Nagy had lost touch with the reality of what was happening's in a speech he referred to the "historic, durable, and ineffaceable" results of twelve years of Communist rule! The KDP's plight now was of no consequence - the rebels had rejected it. On the basis of their own direct experience, Bulgarians were exposing the sham of the 'socialist states'.

Among Hungary's Warsaw Pact allies, the Czech, East German and Romanian Communist Parties were particularly virulent in their condemnations of the 'counter-revolution'. This was motivated by the fear that their own working classes might choose to settle accounts with them. Russia itself, while getting more troops into Hungary ready for the second assault on the workers, chose to make an official declaration on relations between socialist states. Its highsounding phrases were of course meaningless, but it also contained an 'analysis' of events in order to justify the approaching' repression. Russia's view was that "the workers of Hungary have, after achieving great progress on the basis of the people's democratic order, justifiably raised the questions of the need for eliminating the serious inadequacies of the economic system, of the need for further improving the material well-being of the people, and of the need for furthering the battle against bureaucratic excesses in the state apparatus. However, the forces of reaction and of counter-revolution have quickly joined in this just and progressive movement of the workers, with the aim of using the discontent of the workers to undermine the foundations of the people's democratic system in Hungary and to restore to power the landlords and the capitalists."[14] For sheer drivel this was hard to beat: the workers and peasants were fighting to eliminate the economic system itself and destroy the state apparatus; the only 'counter-revolutionary force' involved was the Soviet Union itself and its Hungarian supporters in the MDP.

The call for the Russians to leave was an expression of this. The fighting between the rebels and the Russians did not however have the bitterness that the clashes with the AVH had. No Soviet soldiers were lynched, none of their corpses were mutilated, and on the other side there was no vindictiveness shown towards the rebels by the Russians. The Red Army soldiers were not keen to be shot at, nor were they eager to shoot at a population they had been peaceably stationed amongst for some time. There were some desertions, particularly among members of the Soviet Union's national minorities. One example was an Armenian major who went over to the rebels on the 24th and distributed leaflets to Soviet troops urging them not to fire. Some rebels too disliked fighting the Russians. One fighter commented "I found myself shooting at bewildered Ukrainian peasant boys who had as much reason to hate what we fought as we had... It was an embittering shock to find that one

The rebels were quite emphatically not for the restoration of capitalism, nor were

can't confront the real enemy even in a revolution. "

the political parties, which were re-emerging. The Smallholders Party leader Bela Kovacs was clear: "No one, I believe, wants to re-establish the world of the aristocrats, .the bankers and the capitalists. That world is definitely gone." Likewise National Peasants Party leader Ferenc Farkas: "We shall retain the gains and conquests of socialism..." Even Catholic Party leader Endre Varga saw no point in trying to turn back the clock - "We demand-the maintenance of the social victories which have been realised since 1945..."[15] People were worried that the reappearance of these old parties would undermine the unity

While the rebels struggled to confront and defeat the real enemy, victims of the old regime were being set free. On the 26th the police building in Csepel was stormed and its prisoners released. Thousands were let out of forced labour camps and some 17,000 from the country's prisons. The most common crime was petty theft. Police chief Kopacsi allowed all political prisoners and those fighters held from the first day or so's fighting out of the City Police HQ in 5

of the revolution, but the hatred of the one-party system was such as to tolerate them: demands for parties to be allowed was not though an expression of any great enthusiasm for them. Despite the MDP's record in power, no worker wanted private capitalists back: they wanted their supposed collective property to become theirs in fact. No peasant wanted the private landlords back - but they wanted the co-operatives to be voluntary rather than forced. As the Party collapsed, members burnt their cards. One member stuck his to a wall with a message next to it - "A testimony to my stupidity. Let this be a lesson to you." The MDP reorganised itself as the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSzMP).

the local AVH. Between 60 and 90 were shot in the massacre. Upon this, the local police joined the rebels and the Revolutionary Council in Gyor sent an army detachment. The AVH surrendered, and their officers were lynched in revenge by a large crowd. Here as elsewhere essential services were kept ticking over; miners produced just enough coal to keep the power going. Peasants joined the rebellion as the MDP crumbled and the AVH retreated in the face of popular opposition. Farmers worked to feed the rebels. In town after town, radio stations were taken over, Party buildings burnt down, AVOs sought out and killed, informers attacked. The Borsod district was the largest industrial area in Hungary, and its main town, Miskolc, the largest industrial town outside Budapest. On October 24th a workers' council met at the Dimavag iron foundry. The next day the foundry workers marched into town with a list of demands, removing red stars and the like wherever they were seen. They were joined by other workers and a mass meeting created a workers' council for all the factories of Greater Miskolc. A general strike was declared. On the 26th a crowd besieged the local police Hi trying to get the release of political prisoners. The AVH fired at the crowd. Some police gave their weapons to the workers, and miners turned up with dynamite to get their revenge. Six or seven AVOs were lynched in the ensuing battle. The Workers' Council said "Stalinist provocateurs have felt the just punishment of the people." The next evening the Council calmly announced that it had "taken power in all the Borsod region".

Of the twenty or more new papers that appeared within days of the uprising none were right wing. One that tried to publish found the compositors refusing to touch it. The papers were usually four pages or a single sheet, either printed or stenciled. 'Igazsag' proved the most popular, as it was closest to the workers' councils. Walls were covered with copies of the papers and other notices. Accounts of MDP leaders' lifestyles made popular reading. There was very little nationalism, and no anti-Semitism. Soviet armoured cars distributed the Party paper, but people tore the bundles to bits without any regard for the contents. As the Russian troops dug in round Budapest, boxes were left in the streets to collect for widows and orphans. No one needed to guard these boxes full of money. A notice next to one said "The purity of our revolution permits us to use this method of collection." The mayor of the capital, Jozsef Kovago, said the city was "pervaded with such sacred feelings that even the thieves abandoned their trade." On the wreck of a Russian tank someone scrawled the words 'Soviet culture'. A girl fighter in the Corvin Passage spoke for thousands: "Now I'm making history instead of studying it."

In Salgotarjan in Nograd county all work stopped on 25th October. On the 27th steelworkers marched through the town, taking down red stars, releasing political prisoners and destroying the Soviet war memorial. A 'National Council' was set up for the district. In Pecs, even the AVH at the uranium mines sided with the revolution. The Workers' Council there farmed a military council which immediately made plans to face another Soviet attack, which was not long in coming.

....and in the country Hungarians were not just making history in Budapest. In the country districts and industrial towns, workers and peasants were quick to follow up the events in the capital. On the 23rd October itself in Debrecen, red stars were already being taken off buildings and local trams. In Szeged, crowds tore down Soviet emblems. In Miskolc, some Russians were attacked and an army staff car thrown in the river. The police were disarmed in Cegled when some 5,000 joined the uprising. The removal of Soviet troops from Hungarian soil was demanded by oil workers in Lovasz, miners from Balinka and auto repair workers in Szombathely. Everywhere workers were finding their voices and taking action.

The Workers' Councils The first workers' council to be set up in Budapest was at the United Lamp factory. This council representing ten thousand workers got going on October 24th, within hours of the revolution starting. It appealed to workers to "show that we can manage things better than our former blind and domineering bosses." 16 Within a day, workers' councils were set up in the towns of Miskolc, Gyor, Debrecen and Sztalinvaros: incredibly, the Dimavag Workers' Council mentioned above was actually set up on the 22ndi In Budapest, councils appeared at the Beloiannis electrical equipment factory, the Gamma optical works, the Canz electric, wagon and machine works, the Lang and Danuvia machine-tool factories, the Matyas Rakosi iron and steel works and elsewhere. On the 26th the KDP graciously announced that it "approved" the new workers' councils, but it was hoping to keep them isolated as separate 'factory councils'. However the councils were already assuming a united political and economic role. The general strike was a political act in support of the armed uprising. The councils kept their power at the local level, yet exerted a collective pressure on the government. For the next few days there were constant delegations from the councils to government ministers.

In Gyor on the 24th a small demonstration of factory workers ripped red stars off the factories and destroyed a Soviet war memorial. They broke down the prison gates and released political prisoners. They found a list of the prisoners' occupations - drivers, workers, waiters and mechanics. The AVH turned up and fired at the crowds, killing four and wounding more. The next day the local police and army garrison joined the revolution, forcing the surrender, of the AVH. The local Soviet commander withdrew his troops saying that the rising "against the oppressive leaders is justified". On the 26th a general strike got under way, and by the next day a Workers' Council and a 'National Revolutionary Council' had 'been set up ('National' referring to the local county, not the whole of Hungary), composed in the main of workers with some MDP members. These councils were in constant session. They were both insurrectionary and self-governing. The local radio was in rebel hands, and on the 28th it called for an end to the Warsaw Pact and demanded that Imre Nagy negotiate with the Budapest workers. Thirty thousand miners struck for these demands. A

The Miskolc Workers' Council wrote to Nagyj "Bear President, the Workers' Council yesterday assumed power in all the domain of the Borsod department." The councils in the districts unhesitatingly seized power straightaway; in Budapest, only as the armed rebels appeared to win. The councils in Miskolc,

network of local workers' councils developed, linking the railway works with the miners of Tatabanya and Balinka. Personnel chiefs were dismissed and new plant managers elected by workforces. The national Revolutionary Council successfully repulsed efforts by a handful of reactionaries to exploit the situation.

Gyor, Pecs and Skolnok had control of radio stations which allowed them to co-ordinate with each other and with Budapest. As the fighting eased off, the workers' councils began to group themselves into district workers' councils. On the 29th delegates from the Ujpest councils met at the United Lamp factory; similar meetings occurred in the 9th district of Budapest and Angyalfold. On the 30th October, nineteen factories in Csepel set up the Central Workers' Council of Csepel. Only one day later, these moves to centralise and strengthen the movement resulted in a Parliament of Workers' Councils for

In nearby Magyarovar, everybody was talking politics as the news came through from Budapest. A peaceful unarmed demonstration was fired on by 6

the whole of Budapest.

The Military Defeat of the Revolution

This historic meeting drew up a statement of the duties and rights of the workers' councils with nine points, here in full:

The Russian attack began on November 4ths 150,000 men and over 2,000 tanks were used. The political parties as well as all the various 'leaders' disappeared in the face of it. The working class stood firm and took the lead. An immediate spontaneous general strike started, and the fiercest resistance to the Soviet troops came in working-class areas. Janos Kadar was the new Hungarian puppet the Russians used to 'invite' them in. His 'Revolutionary Worker-Peasant Government1 composed of a handful of Communists rested simply on Russian armed might. Soviet troops and tanks made straight for the industrial centers and working-class districts to crush the revolution, Throughout Hungary, peasants and workers tried to explain the truth to the invaders. Pecs radio broadcast messages to Russian troops, many of whom had no idea where they were, that "the Hungarian people have only taken the power into their own hands". As even the Communist Radio Rajk proclaimed "The place of every Hungarian communist today is on the barricades", Kadar's first move was to set up a new secret police force. The workers' councils rejected Kadar and his fake government without hesitation. When Dunapentele was surrounded by Soviet troops on the 7th, the Workers' Council there met the surrender ultimatum with the statement: "Dunapentele is the foremost socialist town in Hungary. Its inhabitants are workers, and power is in their hands. The houses have all been built by the workers themselves. The workers will defend the town from 'fascist excesses' but also from Soviet troops!"

1. The factory belongs to the workers. The latter should pay to the state a levy calculated on the basis of the output and a portion of the profits. 2. The supreme controlling body of the factory is the Workers' Council democratically elected by the workers. 3. . The Workers ' Council elects its own executive committee composed of 3-9 members, which acts as the executive body of the Workers' Council, carrying out the decisions and tasks laid down by it. 4. The director is employed "by the factory. The director and the highest employees axe to be elected 'by the Workers' Council. This election will take place after a public general meeting called "by the executive committee. 5. The director is responsible to the Workers' Council in every matter which concerns the factory. 6. The Workers' Council itself reserves all rights to: a. approve and ratify all projects concerning the enterprise; b. decide basic wage levels and the methods by which these are to be assessed; c. decide on all matters concerning foreign contracts; d. decide on the conduct of all operations involving credit. 7. In the same way, the Workers' Council resolves any conflicts concerning the hiring and firing of all workers employed in the enterprise. 8. The Workers' Council has the right to examine the balance sheets and to decide on the use to which the profits are to be put. 9. The Workers' Council handles all social questions in the enterprise."[17]

In Budapest the heaviest concentration of Soviet amour was in Csepel and Kobanya. In the centre of the city fitting went on till the 6th, when the rebels' ammunition ran out. Some suburbs held out until the 8th; Ujpest and Kobanya till the 9th and 10th, leaving Red Csepel to fall on the 11th when the Russians could move all their troops to attack it. These last districts saw by far the fiercest fighting. Some 80-90% of the Hungarian wounded were young workers. Kadar's own reports confirmed that most damage occurred in the workingclass areas. On the 7th, rebels raised the red flag to commemorate the Russian Revolution, while the heirs of that revolution killed Hungarian workers. The AVOs re-emerged, looking for revenge for their recent humiliations. Government proclamations started to appear on walls. Passers-by defaced them, or pasted over them, or just ripped them down. In Csepel the workers joked grimly "The 40,000 aristocrats and fascists of Csepel are on strike." Trenches were dug in front of the workers' flats. Csepel workers for those seven days slept eight hours, fought for eight hours and spent the other eight hours working in the factories producing arms and ammunition. The Csepel armored car made its appearance - a three-wheel mechanised wheelbarrow with a machine-gun in the bucket propped up with sandbags. Against this, the Red Army used heavy artillery and bombers. Le Figaro, a French paper, commented, "The Red Array now occupies Budapest. It is red with the blood of the workers."

This statement was an attempt by a workers' movement within days of an uprising, before the success of the revolution was in any way assured, to take power away from the bureaucrats. It was an attempt to establish workers' control, and to an extent, workers' management, in the workplace. It wasn't concerned with abstractions but with a day-to-day reality; it represented a starting-point for the workers' councils As the workers had generally taken their factories and workplaces over already, the meeting's resolution that the factories etc belonged to the workers recognised a fait accompli. All the councils were both anti-capitalist and anti-Stalinist. Borsod District Workers' Council said that it "resolutely condemns the organisation of political parties."[18] The tendency to unify continued into early November. The workers' councils in Miskolc set up a municipal one for the town, then a departmental one for the whole district. On November 2nd, the president of the Miskolc councils, Jozseff Kiss, called for a 'National Revolutionary Council' based on the workers' councils. The developing implicit trend was towards the idea of "all power to the councils", and its realisation, but this was not clearly stated: the second Russian attack cut short such developments, Imre Nagy and his ministers saw nothing of significance in the councils; similarly, the various political parties that had sprung up looked to their own activity as a solution to Hungary's problems. Workers' self-management was a notion beyond them.

Outside the capital, Dunapentele lasted till the 9th led by its Workers' Council. In Pecs, the Workers' Council decided not to defend the town. Instead a plan was carried out for guerrilla warfare in the nearby hills: this went on in a major way for ten days, and some miners and soldiers carried on fighting the Russians for several weeks, in Miskolc there was a brief resistance to the Soviet attack, followed by a declaration of a general strike of all non-essential workers. The Borsod Workers' Council offered to take 20,000 armed workers to Budapest so that Nagy (now sheltering in the Yugoslav embassy) could prove to the Russians that their fears of a 'capitalist restoration' were groundless. Later on, when the Budapest police chief, Kopacsi, who came from the Miskolc area, was tried and sentenced to death, the Borsod Workers' Council repeated this offer

On November 3rd the Csepel and Ujpest district councils called for the strike to end, with a disciplined return to work on the 5th. This was intended to strengthen the Nagy government's negotiating hand with the Russians. On November 1st there had been a declaration of neutrality and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact - this accession to one of the major demands of the revolution gave Nagy a temporary popularity. However, withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact was unlikely to be tolerated by the Russians. On November 3rd Pravda reported in Moscow that "militant communists had been massacred and murdered"; on the day of the invasion it referred to "bestial atrocities" committed by the rebels, and the Chinese Communist Party paper urged - "Bar the road to reaction in Hungary" (by which they meant - "stop this example to Chinese workers").

to Kadar, who promptly reprieved Kopacsi. In Salgotarjan in Nograd county, workers supported their local 'Rational Workers' Council' after the Soviet invasion. Until the 16th the workers held the town hall, the local press and radio, and local army units were on the revolution's side. On that day the Russian troops took over, setting up a 'Revolutionary Worker-Peasant Committee' in opposition to the Workers' Council. On December 1st, the Russians arrested the leaders of the National Workers' Council, but real power still lay in the hands of the workers: they marched to the police HQ and secured the release of their 7

fellow-workers. There followed a solid two-day strike in the area. A few days later when further arrests of district Workers' Council members took place, thousands of demonstrators were confronted by tanks, and the AVH fired on unarmed crowds.

to the CWC1. It was the councils, not Kadar's government, that was arranging' all food and medical supplies. On November 18th, a plan was developed for a truly national council, a 'parliament of Workers' Councils'. This was to have 156 members, delegates from district workers' councils in Budapest and the counties, and from the largest factories. This body would elect a thirty-strong presidium, which would co-opt up to 20 representatives from other groups such as the army, intellectuals, political parties, and the police. An appeal went out for delegates to attend a. conference on the 21st to discuss this. "The principal task of this national conference was to create a power under the direction of the workers, and in opposition to the government." On the 19th work restarted as a sign of discipline and support by the workers for the CWC1. Delegates to the conference came from Budapest, Gyor, Pecs, Tatabanya, and Ozd and there were others from peasant organisations. A vital link had been established between the CWC1 and the provincial councils. The various miners' delegates were very much against the return to work: "You can work if you want, but we shall provide neither coal nor electricity, we shall flood all the mines!" But those in favour pointed out that the strike was hitting everybody indiscriminately, and a return to work would keep the workers united in their workplaces.

Workers' Councils lead the Resistance The military defeat of the Hungarian workers and peasants thus took just over a week. The struggle now moved into a. new phase. The workers may have been beaten by an overwhelming armed force from outside, but they still had control over productions as long as they could keep that, "workers' power" was a reality and Kadar's government would rest on repression alone. The workers' councils reorganised in the wake of the invasion, setting up district workers' councils with an overtly political role. The Csepel Workers' Council sent delegations to Kadar and the Soviet army commander. The common demand of the councils was that the workers were to run the factories, ensuring that power stayed with them. On November 12th moves were made towards establishing a Central Workers' Council for the whole of Greater Budapest, and on the 14th the founding meeting was held at the United Lamp factory. A young Hungarian intellectual, Miklos Erasso, has claimed the credit for the idea of a Central Workers' Council (CWC1), but he himself relates how he was put in his place at the meeting: "The elderly social democratic chairman asked: 'What factory are you from?' 'None', I said. 'What right have you to be here?' I said that I had actually organised the meeting. The chairman replied: 'This is

A rumour spread through Budapest that the CWC1 had been arrested: the workers immediately resumed their strike. Although the workers in Csepel joined in, the Csepel Workers' Council condemned the new strike. Before

untrue. This meeting is an historical inevitability!"[19] The CWCl was indeed the inevitable result of the councils' attempts to unite. Krasso's 'idea' coincided with the direction of the workers' movement.

a commission from the CWC1 could investigate this difference, the Csepel workers had promptly elected a brand new council that was in line with their wishes and actions, supporting the strike and the CWC1. Workers were arguing through the different options facing them now: active resistance, passive resistance or flight. The first could not be maintained, although in fact there was never a Hungarian surrender, and a quarter of a million Hungarians chose the latter and fled the country to the west. Thousands were deported to Russia, particularly younger workers, in an act of indiscriminate terror. Railway workers did what they could to prevent these, for instance by removing railway track. Some ambushes were carried out against trains and deportees released. Most deportees were allowed back during 1957.

The delegates who came together were in the main toolmakers, turners, steelworkers and engineers. The following day a more widely based meeting was held. Some of the delegates wanted to create a National Workers' Council for the whole of Hungary then and there; while many agreed, it was pointed out that they only had a mandate to form a CWC1 for Greater Budapest. The workers' councils were determined to be truly democratic. "For the Hungarian workers and their delegates the most important thing about the councils was precisely their democratic nature. There was a very close relationship between the delegates and the entire working-class: the delegates were elected for the sole purpose of carrying out the workers' wishes, and it is noteworthy that workers often recalled delegates who diverged from their mandate. They didn't like delegates who were too 'independent'."[20] At the meeting, Sandor Racz, elected president, stated "We have no need of the government! We are and shall remain the leaders here in Hungary!" Unfortunately, the majority were inclined to compromise in the face of armed might, and to negotiate with Kadar's fake government. A return to work, backed also by the Csepel Workers' Council, was planned in order to show that the strike was conscious and organised. Many workers were very angry at this, and accusations of sell-outs abounded.

As passive resistance became the course followed by most Hungarians, a sullen hatred developed towards the Russians and their puppet government. When, later on, the Russian leader Khrushchev came to Hungary, supposed mass meetings of support on the radio had to be boosted by canned applause. A succession of sarcastic posters appeared on walls: "Take care! Ten million counter-revolutionaries are roaming the country. Hundreds of thousands of landowners, capitalists, generals and bishops are at large, from the aristocratic quarters to the factory areas of Csepel and Kispest. Because of this gang's murderous activities only six workers are left in the entire country. These latter have set up a government in Skolnok." "Lost: the confidence of the people. Honest finder is asked to return it to Janos Kadar, prime minister of Hungary, address: 10,000 Soviet Tanks Street." "Wanted! Premier for Hungary. Qualifications - no sincere convictions; no backbone; ability to read and write not essential, but must be able to sign documents drawn up by others." "Proletarians of the World Unite: but not in groups of three or more." A popular joke did the rounds: "D'you know where we went wrong in October? We interfered in our own internal affairs."

As real power lay with the councils, Kadar's government had to destroy them and reinstall authoritarian relationships in the factories. For two months the struggle continued, Points 9 and 11 of Kadar's 'Workers and Peasants Revolutionary Program' were for "workers' management of the factories" and "democratic election of the workers' councils". Kadar's counter-revolution had to hide behind fine phrases. But there was no way Kadar could agree to the workers' demands: "collective ownership of the factories, which were to be in the hands of the workers' councils, which were to act as the only directors of the enterprises; a widening of the councils' powers in the economic, social

As part of the policy of passive resistance, a silent demonstration took place on November 23rd: from 2 o'clock till J in the afternoon, no one went out on

and cultural fields; the organisation of a militia-type police force, subject to the councils; and on the political plane, a multi-socialist-party system."[21] The CWC1 negotiated directly with the Soviet army commander, Grebennik, giving him a list of missing workers' council members every day, whereupon the Russians released them from prison. The Soviets for their part showed that they knew power lay with the councils, not Kadar. At first, Grebennik treated workers' council delegations as fascists and imperialist agents; in due course though a Soviet colonel and interpreter were made permanent representatives

the streets of Budapest. This sort of action showed what Hungarians thought of Kadar, and was impossible for his new security force to suppress. He appealed to the workers' councils to help establish order and get production restarted. As if in reply, the CWC1 stated on November 27th "We reaffirm that we have received our mission from the working class... and we shall work with all our might for the strengthening of the workers' power." The only press that the councils had was a duplicated 'Information Bulletin' which was passed from hand to hand or read out loud at meetings. The councils allowed no party 8

organisations in the factories: MSzMP and pro-government trade union officials were banned and physically prevented from entering.

The workers of Hungary proved once again that freedom comes from below, not from any leadership ('revolutionary' or otherwise) above acting on their behalf. To destroy the communist bureaucracy they adopted forma of organisation that were democratic, anti-bureaucratic and included the whole working-class these councils were also constructive. The workers were able to destroy the old and start building the new within days if not hours. They rejected the official concepts of socialism and created their own, workers' self-management and direct democracy, a logical development from previous workers' struggles for a new society.

December saw Kadar's government slowly wrest power away from the workers' councils in the battle for the factories. From below came a relentless pressure for anti-Kadar action. On December 4th there was the 'March of Mothers', a silent procession of 30,000 women in black with national and black flags. In support, all houses had lighted candles in their windows at midnight, despite the government taking all the candles it could out of the shops. The next day a decree dissolved the Revolutionary Committees that had sprung up alongside the workers' councils in the districts, for instance in Gyor, and 200 workers' council members were arrested. The offensive continued on the 6th with the arrest of the Workers' Councils in the Ganz and MAVAG factories. At the same time the CWC1 was discussing plans for a National Workers' Council and a provisional workers' parliament with representatives from all the workers' councils. On the 8th, 80 miners were killed in Salgotarjan by Soviet troops. The next day Kadar dissolved the CWC1, arresting most of its members. The others carried on and declared a 48-hour strike in response to the dissolution and the shooting of the miners. One delegate declared "Let the lights go out, let there be no gas, let there be nothing!"

The Workers' Councils were never in any way separate from the workingclass. They never betrayed it, and dissolved themselves rather than be recuperated by the authorities they returned to the class from whence they came. The Hungarian working-class and their councils reorganised society, ran production, kept their order and united the rest of the population behind them. They were only defeated by a massive military force and the passivity of the international working-class. Given the chance to develop freely along the lines they started out on, the potential of the councils was the creation of a free human society at last. The program of the Hungarian Revolution still remains for the working-class to carry out.

So it was for a 100% solid two-day strike. Two of the CWC1 leaders who escaped arrest, Sandor Racz and Sander Bali, were protected for two days by workers at the Beloiannis factory, who refused to hand them over despite the fact that Soviet tanks were ringing the factory. On the 11th, Kadar 'invited' them to negotiations: as soon as they left the factory they were arrested. The strike continued. Even the party paper 'Nepszabadsag' was forced to say of it that "the like of which has never before been seen in the history of the Hungarian workers' movement." On the 13th as the strike finished, the Csepel iron and steel workers sat in demanding the release of Racz and Bali; other factories followed suit. Soviet troops were then moved into the major factories to force the workers to work at gunpoint.

More information Bill Lomax: Hungary 1956, Allison & Busby 1976. Tibor Meray: Thirteen Days that shook the Kremlin, Thames &, Hudson 1958. Miklos Molnar: Budapest 1956, George Allen & Unwin 1971. Bill Lomax (ed)i Eyewitness in Hungary, Spokesman 1980. Andy Anderson: Hungary '56, Solidarity (London) 19^4. Books on Hungary 1956 are under code 943.905 in public libraries.

Footnotes 1. Bill Lomax: The Working Class in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 in 'Critique' No 12, Autumn 1979/WInter 1980, Pp 27-54 (referred to as Critique from now on). The quote is taken from one of the interviews of the Columbia University Research Project on Hungary.

The Revolution Defeated

The interviews are widely used in many of the books on the revolution: all unattributed quotes from now on come from them. To list them all would be tedious and take too much

The strike was the workers' last card. Zadar's "Revolutionary Workers' and Peasants' Government" had defeated the workers and peasants. Internment was introduced, and the death penalty set for striking or inciting to strike. A few days after this announcement, the Csepel Iron and Steel Workers Council resigned with- the words "we are returning our mandate into the hands of the workers". As other councils did the same, Kadar complained of "provocative self-dissolutions"! The CWC1's final message was that "sabotage and passive resistance are the order of the day". Kadar, backed by a new AVE and the Soviet army, had seized the means of production back from the workers and attacked every workers' organisation. Naturally, he had a theoretical justification for this. In Kay 1957 he told the National Assembly: "In the recent past, we have encountered the phenomenon that certain categories of workers acted against their own interests and, in this case, the duty of the leaders is to represent the interests of the masses and not to implement mechanically their incorrect ideas. If the wish of the masses does not coincide with progress, then one must lead the masses in another direction."

space' 2. quoted in Critique p33. 3. Molnar, pp19-29. 4. Critique, p33. 5. Imre Nagy in a speech to MAVAG locomotive plant workers printed November 14th, 1954. p3 Szabad Nep [Hungarian Communists' main daily newspaper] "Production results of the third quarter show that, if the labour drive to mark these elections is carried out with the enthusiasm and vigour as the revolutionary shift that was worked in honour of the Great Socialist October Revolution, and if management and workers can get the same improvement in worker discipline - in which there are still grave deficiencies then MAVAG will be able to take its place amongst the ranks of the elite plants." 6. quoted in Perenc Feher & Agnes Heller: Hungary 1956 Revisited, George Allen & Unwin 1983. 7. Molnar, pp108-9, Meray pp6,7-8. 8. Meray, p85. 9. Molnar, p127. 10. Molnar, p144.

Two thousand Hungarians were executed for what the ruling classes everywhere will always call 'incorrect ideas'. Continuing resistance to Kadar's government can be gauged from the scale of the repression: the curfew was not lifted until Kay 1957; summary justice was not brought to an end till November 1957} during 1957 and 1958, executions occurred virtually every day; two years after the revolution, there were some 40,000 political prisoners; in 1959, nine members of the Ujpest Workers' Council were executed. It was not till January 19^0 that death sentences were officially ended for 'offences' during the revolution (although one insurgent, Laszlo Hickelburg, was executed in 1961). The last internment camps were closed in June 1960, but several hundred rebels were not released from prison till the late 'sixties and early 'seventies.

11. Eyewitness, p125. 12. Meray, p102. 13. Lomax, p138. 14. Meray, P147. 15. Meray, p173-5. 16. quoted in Critique, p36. 17. quoted in Lomax, p140. 18. Molnar, p179. 19. Eyewitness, p163. 20. Eyewitness, p176. 21. Eyewitness, p169-70.

9

The Iranian revolution 1978-79 A history and analysis of the revolution in which socialists aligned themselves with Islamists to overthrow the West-backed Shah. Following the success of the revolution, the Islamists instituted a theocratic dictatorship and wiped out the workers’ movement and the left. Religious fundamentalism, whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu or other deserves to be closely examined because it has increasingly become a player on the world stage in recent years. On the one hand, many media commentators and pro-war agitators were not slow to characterise the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Sudan, Chechnya, Palestine/Israel and Afghanistan as “crusades” against the Muslim populations or “jihads” against Christian or Jewish people. On the other hand, many religious working class people who have borne the brunt of these wars - especially when driven by US imperialism as in Afghanistan - have succumbed to the false belief that they are being protected by their domestic theocratic (religious state) regimes. The debate around the supposed “revolutionary” nature of some religious fundamentalist regimes is similar in many ways to the debate on the “liberatory” nature of national liberation movements.

were traditionally strong supporters of the regime. In August 1977, 50,000 poor slum-dwellers successfully resisted their forced removal by police, then in December, police massacred 40 religious protestors and the resentment boiled over into open anger. Strikes and sabotage were on the rise while wages dropped due to an economic downturn. The shah imposed martial law and on “Black Friday”, September 8, 1978, troops gunned down thousands of protestors. In response, infuriated workers launched a strike-wave that spread across the country like wildfire. Oil workers struck for 33 days straight, bringing the economy to a dead halt, despite fruitless attempts to send troops into the oilfields. On December 11, 2 million protestors marched in the capital, Tehran, demanding the ousting of the shah, an end to American imperialism and the arming of the people. Soldiers began to desert. On January 16, 1979, the shah fled to Egypt. In mid-February, there was an insurrection, with air force cadets joining with guerrilla forces - the leftist Organisation of Iranian Peoples’ Fedai Guerrillas, or Fedayeen, and the nationalist Mujahedeen - in over-running the military academy, army bases, the parliament, factories, armouries and the TV station. The Pahlavi regime collapsed and Khomeini, who had returned from exile, cobbled together a multi-party provisional government, but the people wanted more.

Although the relationship between anarchist revolutionary workers and religious (or nationalist) workers fighting for a better life is complex, given the current war on the Afghan people, an examination of a genuine workers’ revolution in a majority Muslim country is probably the most effective way to clarify our position. So we will look at what happened during the Iranian Revolution of 1978-1979. Iran is an important test case firstly because until the revolution, Iran was one of three key pro-Western strongholds in the Middle East necessary for suppressing local worker demands and keeping oil production cheap (the others being Israel and Saudi Arabia). Secondly, because the revolution - or more correctly, the Muslim clerical counter-revolution that destroyed it - was to the Arab, Kurdish and Persian world what the Russian Revolution was to the European world and has provided the “model revolution” debated amongst anti-imperialist and revolutionary Muslim workers ever since. Iran developed great strategic importance for the imperialist powers (especially Britain and Russia, then later the USA) following the discovery of massive reserves of oil there in 1908.

Women’s organisations flourished, peasants started seizing the land and in some places, established communal cultivation councils, strikes were rampant and workers seized control of their workplaces, arranging raw materials, sourcing and sales themselves, even setting prices in the oil industry. A system of grassroots soviets - called “shoras” in Iranian and based on the old factory council idea - sprang up in fields, factories, neighbourhoods, educational institutions and the armed forces. Armed neighbourhood committees - called “komitehs” - based on the old Muslim scholar networks - patrolled residential areas, arrested collaborators, ran people’s courts and prisons, and organised demonstrations. It was a true workers’ revolution with secular revolutionaries and Muslim workers overthrowing the capitalist state side by side. A May Day march in Tehran drew 1.5 million demonstrators.

The Iranian oil industry concentrated more workers together than any other industry in the Middle East, with 31,500 working in oil production by 1940 but most of the profits went to Britain. The following year, Russia and Britain invaded Iran and installed a puppet ruler (shah), but worker militancy was on the rise. The Communist Party of Iran had collapsed in the 1920s, but new leftist and nationalist forces came into being and organised industrially: the communist-inspired Masses organisation and the National Front. A crackdown by the British-backed shah’s forces in the late 1940s drove the movement underground.

The former headquarters of the secret police-controlled official trade union federation was occupied by the unemployed and renamed the Workers’ House. The new workerist federation, that replaced the old state one, the AllIran Workers’ Union, declared that its aim was an Iran “free of class oppression” and called for shoras to be “formed by the workers of each factory for their own political and economic needs”. But the religious fundamentalist clerics lead by Khomeini were terrified of the power of the working class and haunted by the spectre of the imminent collapse of Iranian capitalism. If it collapsed, they could not reconstitute themselves as the ruling elite in place of the shah and there would be no profits for them to steal from the workers. Three days after the insurrection, the provisional government ordered workers back to work, but the strike, shora and komiteh movements just spread.

But despite the intensive activities of the secret police, militant cells of workers - and, operating in parallel, religious fundamentalist scholars allied to the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini - re-emerged to agitate for change, especially during the 1963 revolt, and starting again in the early 1970s. Increasingly, the extravagance of the shah’s Pahlavi dynasty provoked resentment in all parts of Iranian society, even among the middle classes which 10

A month later, the government declared the shoras to be “counter-revolutionary”, claiming that their minority bourgeois regime was “the genuine Islamic Revolution”. Still the shoras spread, so the regime introduced a law aimed at undermining worker self-management by banning shora involvement in management affairs - while at the same time trying to force class collaboration by insisting that management must be allowed to participate in the shoras. The shora movement peaked in July but then the government offensive, combined with the inexperience of the left, began to take its toll. The National Front, Masses, Fedayeen and both the leftist and Muslim wings of the Mujahedeen all backed the provisional government, mistakenly believing that an Iranian clerical-dominated bourgeoisie was better than the imperialist-backed Pahlavi dynasty. Khomeini founded the fundamentalist Iranian Republican Party (IRP) to squeeze opposition parties out of the provisional government and at the same time established the Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran), a political police force to marginalise the secular left within the komitehs, which it wanted to mobilise as a supporter bloc. The Pasdaran were soon forcibly liquidating shoras, purging komitehs and repressing ethnic Kurdish separatists and women’s organisations, while the Party of God (Hezbollah) was created as a strikebreaking force of thugs. The IRP also created a public works project to divert the energies of the most militant shoras - replacing them with fundamentalist shoras and Islamic Societies - and to rebuild the exploitative capitalist economy (all the while spouting populist and anti-capitalist slogans in the manner of all fascist dictatorships). The true workers’ revolution was destroyed and for the Iranian working class, whether secular or Muslim, a long night of living under a new autocratic regime had begun. The fundamentalist clerical regime had not set them free: it had only produced new forms of capitalist exploitation and police state repression. The lesson of Iran is a basic anarchist one: workers can never trust groups, religious or not, who chant the right revolutionary slogans but whose real aim is class rule.

11

1867-2000: A people’s history of Mexico A working class history of Mexico from the Diaz administration of 1876, through the Revolution of 1910 to the beginning of the 21st century. The Revolution was the period which saw the Mexican state begin its transformation from an oligarchicallandowners’ government to the one-party corporatist model which survived for so long The Mexican Revolution is crucial to understanding the peculiar social base from which the Mexican state is constructed, with its formal recuperation of worker and peasant organisations, and its need to regularly embark upon sprees of revolutionary rhetoric. The latifundias

Zapatista movement (named after one of its leaders, the anarchist Emiliano Zapata) was the highpoint of these years. The campesinos of Morelos and Puebla constructed not only a revolutionary army; they also produced, in the Ayala Plan, a coherent political programme that asserted their needs against those of capital. The Ayala Plan spelled out in detail the Zapatista programme of land redistribution: broadly, expropriation of private land for public utility, dispossessed individuals and communities, with a guarantee of protection for small landholdings. The Plan was both a codification of what was already happening and a fillip to further land takeovers. Landlords, Mexican and foreign, were fleeing in their thousands.

The Porfiria to, the administration of Porfirio Diaz, ruled Mexico from 1876 to 1910. Its social base was the latifundistas, the large landowners, and it was their class interests that were transmitted through the government. The rapid industrialisation that Mexico was undergoing at the turn of the twentieth century was confined to tiny areas of the country, and the industrial bourgeoisie as a class were too weak to make much political headway in the Porfiriato. The large estates originated from the fallout of the Reform War, which had ended in 1867. The victorious Liberal wing of the ruling class intended to create a limited system of small landholdings that would be constructed mainly from confiscated Church property and the expropriated communal land of Indians. But almost as soon as these smallholdings came into existence they were aggressively acquired by a new breed of landowner (the latifundista), the smallholder generally being unable to exist solely on his land. These smallholders became either poorly-paid seasonal day-labourers or debt-peons, little more than slaves. In the southern and central areas of Mexico, the latifundistas further expanded their property by violently evicting peasants (campesinos) from their ejidos (communal production units).

With the landowners chased out of Morelos, the Zapatistas attempted to place limits on the future possibility of small capitalist accumulation. The end of the Morelos Commune The Zapatistas committed a key error, however, which was to lead to the smashing of their stronghold, the Morelos Commune, by the reconstituted power of the state. While the revolutionary campesino was everywhere, they were unable as a class to move beyond their localist perspective. The Ayala Plan was the most sophisticated attempt to intervene on a national level - yet it talked about the land and nothing else. They completely ignored the urban working class.

Faced with widespread resistance, the landowners organised the paramilitary Guardias Blancas (White Guards). The fact that these brutal armed groups have been a constant part of rural life ever since indicates that the peasants have never admitted defeat in the land war, and the landowners know it.

The revolutionary peasants who in December 1914 occupied Mexico City were undoubtedly one of the highest expressions of class struggle in the world at that time. The workers of Europe were drowning in their own blood in World War I and the Russian Revolution was still three years away. By contrast, the whole of Mexico was at the peasants’ feet. The national power of the capitalist class was smashed and its survivors had retreated to the eastern port of Veracruz. However, refusing a political solution from within themselves, and trusting that military strength alone would prevail, they inadvertently left the door open to a weak but reconstituting state power.

The latifundias, which were usually centred on a lavish, European-style hacienda and mainly grew sugar, coffee, cotton and India rubber to be exported abroad. As well as serving the needs of the internal market, these were the sources of wealth for the landowning classes. And if the international trade cycle contracted, the latifundia could easily withdraw into limited, or even subsistence, production. On many haciendas the landowners paid their workers in produce, or forced them to purchase from an employer’s shop. Via this payment in kind campesinos usually ended up in debt, and as a result of this dependency, the campesino became a peon, tied forever to the hacienda. Debts were also passed on from father to son, but if a campesino attempted to escape, the Guardias Blancas would follow. Anarchist guerrilla leader Emiliano Zapata Revolutionary - Emiliano Zapata

The working class Individually, many miners, railwaymen and textile workers joined the revolutionary peasant Northern Division, which had entered into a de facto alliance with the Zapatista Southern Liberation Army. As a class, however, and despite a huge strike wave in 1906, they remained quiet until 1915.

Zapatismo and the Ayala Plan

The peasant armies which had occupied Mexico City had failed to inspire working class support, or indeed relate to them in any way. As a result, in exchange for union concessions from the revolutionary capitalist class, the reformist federation of unions, the Casa del Obrera Mundial (COM) agreed to form ‘Red Battalions’ to fight the Northern Division and the Zapatistas.

By 1911, revolt was breaking out in the north and centre of Mexico, triggered by the corruption of the Porfiriato and the violence of the landowners. In the countryside, the peasant uprising took the form of land seizures. The 12

Although this decision did not go unopposed - the electricians’ union refused to abide by the pact - the Red Battalions fought alongside what were known as the Constitutionalist armies throughout 1915. Yet only a year later the working class was paying the price for this complicity. The new bourgeoisie, having beaten off the threat from the peasants, no longer needed the unions. COM headquarters was stormed by troops and unionists across the country arrested. The following year, 1916, the first general strike in Mexican history was crushed. Despite this, however, the power of the organised working class remained formidable.

1936 CGOCM was renamed the CTM (Confederation of Mexican Workers) and recognised as the official national labour movement. The highpoint of the radical social democratic project came in 1938, with Cardenas’ nationalisation of the largely US-owned oil industry. Cardenas manipulated the enthusiasm for this measure to generate a spirit of ‘national unity’, which he then used to crush the insurgent workers’ movement. It was not only the cities the radical party-state had to attend to in order to prevent social revolution breaking out. The countryside had ignited and sustained the Revolution, and could do so again. Cardenas’ solution was a massive redistribution of land the like of which social democracy in Mexico has not been compelled to repeat. Naturally only the worst land was parcelled out - the property and interests of the hacendados left intact. While the Cardenas reforms appeared impressive, for the vast majority their small patch was unsustainable and seasonal wage-labour unavoidable. The ultimate result of the land reforms was marginalisation for the many, a new network of small competitive farming for some, and the consolidation of the lumbering latifundias.

The 1917 Constitution Just like the Revolution, the 1917 Constitution is a vital touchstone in Mexican life, a document that came into existence as a result of prolonged struggle, and is still held in high regard today by many sections of the working class and peasantry. The capitalist class clearly intended the new set of state rules to be a signal that the years of chaos and civil war were over and a new cycle of accumulation could begin. Knowing the erosion of the gains of the Revolution would only be tolerated to a degree by the peasants and the working class, the new bourgeoisie institutionalised itself as the revolutionary party-state, marginalising competing currents within its own class by mobilising popular opinion. It is the evolution of this party-state, in the form of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI), that accounts for the lack of parliamentary democracy in Mexico, and explains the concentration of power in the hands of one man, the President. Despite many knocks this specific formation of the bourgeoisie survived - just - the twentieth century.

In fact Cardenas had mobilised the working class in part to discipline those recalcitrant sections of the capitalist class who needed to be saved from themselves. After 1940 the bourgeoisie as a whole accepted the necessity of state intervention. Even more crucially, any revolutionary movement from below could be mediated through the now-reliable CTM or the new CNC (National Campesino Confederation). As part of the party-state, these organisations could deliver certain concessions, defuse worker and peasant anger through nationalist channels and turn a blind eye to repression if it was needed. The state had solved the crisis it had been mired in since the fall of the Porfiriato, and it has followed the same model until very recently: one party guaranteeing social democracy - peace between the officially-recognised antagonistic classes. Unlike the West, it has not needed the shield of formal bourgeois democracy to do so.

In the advanced capitalist countries, the illusion of alternatives through democracy is at the centre of the reproduction and expansion of the capitalist mode of production. Democracy mediates between competing interests within the ruling class, while at the same time countering tendencies towards corruption in the relation between state and capital. In Mexico, there is a hole where this mediation might exist - a hole that is instead plugged by the extraordinary way in which workers’ and peasants’ organisations have been formally co-opted by the state.

The economy after 1940 Mexico had always relied on America for heavy industrial investment, and while US capital may not consciously have wanted to keep Mexico underdeveloped, it saw it generally as fit only for natural resource and labour-power exploitation.

Radical social democracy to the rescue Mexico did, though, industrialise rapidly after 1940. Investment in infrastructure was the province of the state. Petroleum, rail and communications sectors were all under state control, and the state generally carried out economic development which the private sector thought too risky. The resources of the state were augmented by huge foreign investment. Mexico has always been a natural first stop for America’s foreign-bound surplus value; now it flooded over the border as a result of the post-war boom.

It was not until 1931 that labour’s representatives were fully incorporated into the state. This acceptance of the working class as the working class, as a potentially antagonistic class who must be brought into the fold to neutralise their revolutionary impulses, is the basis of the social democracy the Mexican bourgeoisie utilised for decades. With its proximity to, and integration with, US capital, Mexico was profoundly affected by the Wall Street Crash. By 1934 the bourgeoisie had comprehensively failed to restore stable class relations for the accumulation of capital. Exacerbated by the Depression and the militant response of both the peasantry and the proletariat, revolutionary change from below was once more on the agenda.

By the 1960s, Mexico had been enjoying its economic ‘miracle’ for some time. GDP had risen on average 6-7% annually. Profit flowed into state coffers, paying for an unofficial welfare state of sorts. However social inequality was reaching new extremes. By 1969 the proportion of national income going to the poorest half of the population was only 15%. In rural areas, as agricultural mechanisation increased and productive land was concentrated, the number of un- or underemployed was going up. Some, seeking to refuse proletarianisation, moved away from the agricultural heartlands and attempted to chip out a living from barely cultivable land. Many moved to the cities to join the reserve army of unemployed and effectively kept factory and workshop wages down; some became rural migrant workers and others crossed the border into the US.[1]

Most individual Mexican capitalists recognised the objectively higher level of class struggle. The nightmare of 1914 haunted them more than ever and so they implemented a radical solution. The resultant radicalised form of social democracy came via Lazaro Cardenas, President from 1934-40. His first and most important task was to sign a pact with the new CGOCM (Confederation of Workers and Peasants). By 1935 half of all Mexico’s organised workers were in CGOCM and strikes were going through the roof. Cardenas immediately recognised the right to strike, poured money into CGOCM patronage and shifted the sympathy of the state’s labour relations boards away from the employer and towards the unions. In

In the towns and cities even the organised industrial proletariat suffered from low wages. Their union organisation militated for higher wages, yet this was offset by the absolute corruption of the charros (union bureaucrats), who would often swipe their members’ dues. More than anything being in a strong union meant a guarantee of a job, a buttress against unemployment. 13

However, for the ‘pillars of society’, those sections of the population incorporated into the party-state, the costs of the reproduction of labour were paid, after a fashion - by the ‘PRI welfare state’. It is difficult to quantify, but the far-reaching web of the PRI guaranteed an existence for those sections of society it needed to perpetuate itself. Whether it be official (wage rises) or unofficial (backhanders, protection or the elimination of a rival), it all had to be paid for. The corruption of the PRI welfare state has certainly retarded the efficiency of Mexican industry, prompting many members of the bourgeoisie to defect to the PAN (National Action Party), the pro-business Catholic party set up in the 1930s to oppose the Cardenist reforms.

economies. The recession gave the Mexican bosses less scope for conceding the aboveinflation wage rises that had headed off trouble in the past. As a result the negotiating position of the charros was considerably weakened. With the ideals - and repression - of the student movement fresh, the working class, particularly from 1973, began a series of strikes, go-slows and demonstrations. Just like 1959, their demands were over wages and the removal of corrupt union leaders. The movement organised new unions outside the CTM and formed currents of resistance within it. The fact that the workers had often to physically fight the charros and their goons, who sometimes used the tools of disappearance and assassination, meant that the CTM could easily and visibly be identified as the enemy. While few workers seem to have used this as an opportunity from which to develop criticism of wage-labour there can be no doubt that the mid ‘70s strike movement increased both the self-confidence of the Mexican working class, and the sense of their being a distinct class in opposition to the capitalists.

The 1959 movements 1958-59 saw a sustained offensive by the proletariat over both wage levels and the control of union charros.[2] It is difficult to know to what extent working class activity was self-organised or led by left-wing political parties. The Communist Party was certainly influential but the fact that it was banned from 1946 to 1977 meant that following them led to an immediate challenge to the law of the land. The 1959 movements led frequently to violent confrontation with the state.

The movement reached its height in 1976. The radical electricians’ union, who had brought together new unions, urban squatter groups, and peasant organisations to form the ‘National Front of Labour, Peasant and Popular Insurgency’, now called a national strike. The administration responded by sending the army to occupy every electrical installation in Mexico. This was only the most visible of the many acts of repression which pushed the new labour militancy into defeat.

Capital also reacted to 1959. Wary of the working class’s proven power over the railways, much investment now shifted into air freight and automobile production to begin a new round of accumulation - and struggle. Mexico’s ‘68 By the late ‘60s the inability of the PRI to reform and democratise itself was apparent to many sections of society, and was a major contributing factor to the student revolt of 1968. These students were determined to rejuvenate the egalitarianism of the 1917 Constitution. The movement, in its concentrated phase of July - October became radicalised through its many violent confrontations with the state. Their numbers were swollen by pissed-off workers angry at the cost of the imminent Olympic Games. Ten days before the Games were due to open, around five hundred students were killed and 2,500 wounded in the Tlatelolco massacre. The army attack, which has been marked every year since by demonstrations, finally blew the lid off the PRI’s claims to revolutionary legitimacy. It also damaged the party-state in more concrete ways: traditionally unconcerned about using clubs and bullets against workers and peasants, the PRI now found itself shooting down privileged students - its natural constituency for reproducing itself.

The state also responded with massive social spending. Foreign investment, however, was flooding out of Mexico. Moreover, state expenditure on unproductive industries staffed by rebellious workers was never going to solve the crisis of accumulation. Then an unexpected and propitious discovery gave the bosses room to manoeuvre - oil. Oil boom - and bust As a result of the oil boom, the economy was growing at around 8% by the end of the 1970s. Not only had the discovery of new petroleum deposits pulled Mexico out of the recession that had begun in 1973, the growth and subsequent wage rises had served to head off the snowballing class struggle. The oil still in the ground off the Yucatan peninsula and in Chiapas was used as collateral for huge loans from abroad. Western banks, stuffed with surplus petrodollars as a result of the OPEC oil price hike eagerly lent out these vast sums to Mexico and many other ‘Third World’ nations. The loans were used to cover both the trade and the budget deficits.

Many students, though, were brought back ‘within budget’ after a time in prison. Those who had moved beyond a criticism of the PRI to a wider criticism of capitalism were forced out of Mexico City to towns and cities that carried less personal risk. For those being actively pursued by the state, this meant disappearing into Mexico’s vast hinterlands. There is a direct lineage from the Tlateloloco massacre to the many guerrilla groups that appeared in the rural margins in the early 1970s. Tainted by the militarist ideology of Che Guevara or Mao, these were all smashed with the help of the CIA by 1975.

The bosses assumed the price of oil would continue to rise, as it had done since 1973: the extent of their loans was predicated on future oil revenue. However, the price of oil dropped sharply after 1979. Coupled with rising interest rates that pushed the external debt ever higher, Mexico in 1982 was unable to keep to its scheduled repayments. By then, the nation owed $92.4 billion, the third largest international debt after the US and Brazil. In August of that year, Mexico triggered the international debt crisis by declaring a moratorium on its repayments. In so doing it brought the international banking system to the edge of collapse. Western banks were soon refusing loans of any kind to the whole of Latin America which was consequently plunged into a decade-long recession.

The early 1970s - economic crisis And there was a new problem. The economic boom stemming from the industrialisation process and the PRI employment protection racket, which had partly offset the traditional role of the reserve army of unemployed, meant the nationalised industries were severely overmanned and inefficient, and run by an entrenched working class accustomed to relatively high wages.

In a desperate attempt to stem the haemorrhaging of capital, the then-President Lopez Portillo in almost his final act nationalised the banks. In so doing he followed firmly in the tradition of PRI economic nationalists who blame foreign, and especially US, capital of bleeding their country dry. In fact the bank nationalisation was the last time the economic nationalist card was be played with any real content.

They say that when America sneezes, Mexico catches a cold. Now mired in its own economic crisis, America in the early 1970s was taking Mexico down with it. As capital increasingly freed itself from national boundaries, transforming itself into highly mobile finance capital, investment flooded away from the industrial heartlands of both North America and Mexico to the Pacific Rim

14

The Lost Decade

The Tequila Effect and beyond

1982-1992 is sometimes called the ‘Lost Decade’ in Mexico. The story is a familiar one: having to go to the IMF for money to keep the economy afloat, the PRI found themselves obliged to roll the state back from the arena of capital. This meant bringing the budget deficit under control, removing state subsidies to industry and agriculture, and lowering wages in order to stem the runaway inflation which had been fuelled by the oil mirage. State enterprises were privatised by the fistful, usually offloaded at below market value to PRI cronies. And 1986 saw Mexico finally joining GATT (the World Trade Organisation’s Free Trade Agreement) after years of protectionism: many companies went bankrupt as a result.

With cheap American commodities just over the border, Mexico is adept at sucking in goods from abroad, leading to periodic crises in the balance of payments which have usually been solved by devaluing the peso. The peso was overvalued in 1994 - but everyone assumed the PRI had sufficient foreign currency reserves to protect it. In fact these reserves had fallen from $33bn in February to only $2.5bn in December, money which had been used to cover the yawning balance of payments deficit. Such a dramatic erosion also shows just how quickly the relatively protected Mexican market was opened up by NAFTA. On the 20th of December, the new Zedillo administration announced a one-off devaluation of 15%. Panicked foreign investors scrambled to get out of both pesos and Mexico. The PRI used the last of its foreign currency reserves to bolster the peso, but two days later it was forced to float the currency on the markets, where it dropped 40% against the dollar.

In December 1987 the Economic Solidarity Pact was signed by representatives of government, union leaders and business. Restraint in wage demands and price controls on consumer goods was agreed. The Pact was nothing less than an attempt to preserve the social fabric so that restructuring could go ahead unfettered, though a new workers’ offensive could have wrecked it.

With the dollar such an important factor in Mexico - companies and the government generally having their loans denominated in dollars - the devaluation now meant the debt burden in the economy had risen massively. International debt default seemed once again to be on the cards. And what was being called the Tequila Effect could spread - for Latin America, only recently recovered from the years of international finance isolation that had resulted from the 1982 default, this would be nothing short of catastrophic. Despite the isolationists in Washington, a $50bn rescue package was put together by the US and IMF, specifically to service short-term debt. In March 1995 the PRI announced an austerity programme that included a 10% cut in government spending, increased VAT, fuel and electricity price rises and imposed credit restraints.

Unfortunately the terrain of struggle had changed. While the struggle for autonomy in the 1970s had ended at the time of the oil boom, capital was now in a much less expansive position. If the crisis of accumulation was to be solved restructuring was essential. The offensive anti-charro struggles of the working class now became purely defensive and economic. As plants were closed or privatised, workers made redundant or had their wages lowered, the struggle oriented itself around sectional bread-and-butter issues, which engendered fragmentation. Better-paid CTM workers were still relatively protected, and the 1970s generation of charros were consequently in a much more credible position to mediate struggle. And if the situation became desperate, there was always the allure of the US border for the desperate proletarian.

Meanwhile, with interest rates soaring at 120%, many businesses and mortgageowners were unable to keep up their repayments, despite a new government subsidy for the better-off. Seven banks collapsed and needed rescuing by the government. The true cost of this bailout only became apparent in 1999 - $93bn, nearly 20% of GDP! This debt, which is accruing 18% yearly interest, and which the PRI hid from public accounts could cause the Mexican capitalist class trouble yet again.

Two moments from the 1980s indicate, however, that overt class antagonism had not vanished from the Mexican landscape. The first is to be found in the weeks following the devastation caused by the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. With the government paralysed, the residents of Mexico City’s barrios formed themselves, initially, into rescue and medical teams, and shortly thereafter into community groups. These groups both rebuilt houses and prevented the incursions of landlords, many of whom wished to use the earthquake as an excuse to evict their tenants and rebuild the neighbourhoods with luxury housing at luxury prices. From these autonomous working class formations came a network of self-help groups.[3]

The response of the working class to this austerity package was determined by the depth of the recession that followed. Unlike 1987, the CTM refused to sign an economic pact with the government and business. Consequently there was no official policy of wage restraint during this crucial time. But the refusal to endorse austerity was hardly in response to a militant working class movement within the CTM tent. Rather it was because, their social base undermined by privatisation, the CTM now found itself in much stiffer competition with independent unions and was compelled to posture a little more credibly. Neither, however, were the independent unions arenas of militant anti-austerity. Shocked by the scale of the 1995 recession - one million out of work, another four million working less than fifteen hours a week - the working class was unable to move beyond the fragmentation wrought by the economy and which the trade union form accepts. Furthermore, the PRI’s targeted anti-poverty programme PRONASOL, which had come into being as a result of the 1988 election shock, offset some of the very worst effects of the recession. Within the peasantry, however, there was stiffer resistance to the new neoliberalism, particularly in Chiapas where the new Zapatista Army of National Liberation, EZLN, burst onto the scene on January 1st, 1994 – the day of the introduction of NAFTA. Today the Zapatistas remain in control of an autonomous region containing about 300,000 people.

A more dissipated, but nevertheless important, response to the austerity programme was the Presidential election of 1988. Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, a renegade PRI politician, stood against the PRI - and ‘won’. Soon afterwards he formed the PRD, now the ‘official’ left opposition in Mexico. The PRD is very much old school PRI: for state intervention, increased welfare, a measure of land redistribution, against GATT and NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement). Prior to 1988, the PRI had only to manage electoral fraud on a gubernatorial level. The Cardenas challenge was so unexpected and so overwhelming that the party-state panicked and fixed the results in the crudest possible manner. Mexico City was immediately alive with anti-PRI demonstrations. The TV screens showing the polling percentages had simply gone blank for hours, and mountains of votes marked for Cardenas were found piled on the Distrito Federal’s rubbish tips or floating down Mexico’s waterways. Elections in Mexico are a world away from elections in the West. PRIistas are usually present in gangs around the ballot boxes, and refusal to vote the right way could mean losing a job, having your child barred from school or simply being given a beaten. Thus a refusal to vote PRI is not taken lightly, and is much more likely to occur after discussions and agreement with friends and neighbours. This need to come together collectively immediately and paradoxically raises the possibility of a world beyond “democracy”.

The recession has vigorously restructured sectors of the Mexican economy. The competitive edge that the devaluation gave to Mexican exports has been sustained. Oil, once such a key export, now accounts for only 10% of the country’s export base. It is this export-led recovery that the capitalist class see as the fruit of the restructuring that has been taking place since the late 1980s, and which superficially appears to be as a result of NAFTA. For the working 15

2. The best account of this we can find in English is in Chapter 20 of Mexico, Biography of Power by Enrique Krauze (Harper Collins, 1998). 3. A good example is neighbourhood of Tepito, as described in ‘The Uses of an Earthquake’ by Harry Cleaver, again in Midnight Notes, 9. 4. A good example of the way in which privatisation policies have undermined the PRI’s social base is on the railways. Since the selling off of the rail network and subsequent redundancies and pay cuts, the PRI-controlled railworkers’ union has lost more than 70% of its members. As a result the Charros have found their funds slashed and their influence eroded.

class, real wages have still not reached their pre-devaluation levels. More wage cuts and job insecurity is on the way as the privatisation bandwagon judders on and the old social contract is further destroyed. The swift economic recovery from 1995 showed how successfully the PRI had reinvented itself as a party of neoliberal economics. They did not attempted to spend their way out of trouble, as they have done in the past. Instead they inflicted the harshest of free market medicines on the population. By stealing their policies, the PRI seemingly marginalised the PAN. Two related contradictions now beset the PRI however. The first was that with the opening up of Mexico to trade liberalisation, and the subsequent deluge of American commodities, the PRI could no longer bang the ideological drum of economic nationalism with any coherence. This may not have been a problem: the Mexican bourgeoisie have decades of practice at appearing to be masters of their own fate while having huge sections of their economy subordinated to the interests of American capital. The second contradiction was more serious. By so dramatically reducing the size of the state sector, the party-state inevitably curtailed its own ability to dispense patronage and do favours.[4] The question for the PRI became: how successful could it be at maintaining its traditional network of influence and power, a network born out of a corrupt and state-led economy, in the face of the new competitiveness the free market demanded. 2000: Mexico and the fall of the PRI After seventy-one years the PRI has lost the Presidency and with it national power in Mexico. Despite getting up to all their old tricks in the run-up to the July 2nd poll - the Michoacan governor was caught plotting to divert state funds into election bribes, and in the state of Quintana Roo the PRI were even giving away free washing-machines - and despite the fact that the much heralded independent Federal Electoral Institute was controlled by the party-state, Vicente Fox, the leader of the PAN received 43% of the vote. The shock came in the PRI conceding defeat so swiftly. This time around, they lacked the political stomach for arranging the vast fraud needed to switch defeat to victory. Victorious - the PAN’s Vicente Fox Why did the PRI lose? The simple answer is corruption. After so many years of institutionalised venality the electorate finally found a sturdy enough opposition bandwagon upon which to jump. On a broader level, it is now apparent just how far the PRI’s traditional networks of power were undermined by the economic restructuring - and particularly the privatisations - of the 1980s and 90s. Their irony is that, having propelled Mexico out of its old economic protectionism, they themselves have not survived the transition. Just as the Porfiriato was compelled eventually to assault its own social base in the years before the Revolution, so the PRI through its economic reforms has attacked its social base - the peasants and the working class.

This article was edited by libcom from an extract of the A Commune in Chiapas? In Aufheben #9 which contains much more information about the EZLN. We have attempted to shorten and simplify the article somewhat and apologise for any resultant distortions. For the interested reader we recommend reading the full version here

Footnotes

1. Until 1964 the bracero programme allowed Mexicans to enter the US for seasonal agriculture work. Once there they were invariably treated as slaves and unwittingly kept the American worker’s wages down. The border has long served as a safety valve for the discontent of Mexico’s workers and peasants, a valve that both US and Mexican bourgeoisies are more than happy to keep open, whatever their rhetoric. 16