Hungary 1956: a workers' revolution against the bureaucracy

Ernest Mandel, introduced by Peter Weyns · Auditorium De Valk, Leuven · 4 November 1976

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On 4 November 1976, twenty years after Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian revolution, the Leuven branch of the Revolutionary Workers' League (RAL), the Belgian section of the Fourth International, held a public meeting in the De Valk auditorium. About 150 people came, most of them students. The speaker was Ernest Mandel. A cassette recording made at the time by Herman Michiel survives; the questions and answers that followed were not recorded, and the chairman's introduction is cut off at the start. What follows is a translation of the whole recording, in the five parts into which it was digitised: Peter Weyns's introduction and the four parts of Mandel's talk. The titles of the parts are ours.

Part one (introduction by Peter Weyns): Yes to socialism, no to the Stalinist bureaucracy

[The recording begins mid-sentence.] … the Polish workers' struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy was the signal for the Hungarian workers' uprising. That was the beginning of what we call the Hungarian revolution. And we use the word revolution deliberately, because a great many myths surround what happened in Hungary in '56. A myth is a distortion of the facts, and it is usually spread by people who have an interest in distorting them. So the Soviet Union, China and the other bureaucratised, degenerated workers' states have an interest in portraying the Hungarian revolution as counter-revolutionary, because they fear popular uprisings of that kind. And the European bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie in general, has an interest in portraying it as fascist, counter-revolutionary and anti-communist, for reasons that I think are obvious. What we want to do here tonight is to puncture these myths, and to show from the facts that the real character of the Hungarian revolution was essentially anti-capitalist and anti-Stalinist, whatever others may claim.

Our second aim tonight is to use the events in Hungary to show what kind of socialism we actually want. We believe that the Hungarian revolution, and the way it organised itself through workers' councils, is further proof that a viable alternative, a viable socialist alternative, to Stalinism and the bureaucracy is possible. That is the socialism we want.

That democratic council socialism is what the RAL and the SJW, the Socialist Young Guard, are working for. The positions of the Fourth International on it can be read in the pamphlet on sale here. As for practice, I think the RAL and the SJW have shown well enough that we mean what we say about democratic council socialism. In last year's campaign against the preamble and the Programme Law, it was the SJW that was the real driving force here at the university, pressing for the democratic organisation and democratic structure of the whole campaign. And of course we want to go further with that. So I want to use this short introduction to appeal once again to everyone interested in working with the SJW and the RAL. It is important that people find out where the RAL stands and where the SJW stands, that they get in touch with the activists in their faculties, and that they come to the meetings. I can announce the next one: the central SJW meeting takes place every Monday at eight o'clock at the Sociale Raad.

One more thing. Tonight's meeting is held together with the RAL, but its real organiser is the Léon Lesoil Foundation. The foundation has set up a whole cycle of meetings, a basic course and a series of public meetings, on Marxism and on Marxism and a number of current problems. For those who don't yet know the programme, there are plenty of posters here: take one with you afterwards, or drop in at the premises if you would like to help prepare it.

Finally, the shape of the evening. We have been asked to finish at eleven. After this short introduction comrade Mandel will give his talk, which will last about three-quarters of an hour. Then there will be a slide show of ten or fifteen minutes on the events in Hungary in '56, and then questions. I suggest we limit the first round to six or so; more can come later, but six to start with. Then there will be a short break, after which the comrade will answer the questions and further questions can be put. We will close at eleven.

It only remains for me to give the floor to the comrade. Perhaps I may repeat the motto, the plain motto under which this evening is held: Yes to socialism! No to the Stalinist bureaucracy!

Part two (Mandel, I): Why Hungary rose

Well, comrades. About the facts, at least in their most general form, there is little dispute. Twenty years ago, the overwhelming majority of the wage- and salary-earners of Hungary rose against the existing political order. After the intervention of the Soviet army, the Russian army, that uprising took the form of a confrontation between the Hungarian working class and the Russian army. For about three weeks, three or four weeks, there was a general strike in Hungary. There was no production, no transport; for days on end there was no running water, no gas, no electricity, no trams. The Russian troops in their barracks and camps got no bread, no water and no supplies. The Russian commanders were forced to negotiate with the representatives of the democratically elected workers' councils. A colonel of the Soviet army, with an interpreter, sat in the Central Workers' Council of Budapest and took part in all its deliberations. He had no choice, because there was absolutely no way of restoring normal economic relations, of getting production going again, except by negotiating with the producers. And the producers said: "You can negotiate with us only by negotiating with our representatives, and our freely elected representatives are the members of this workers' council."

Why this mighty workers' struggle, one of the most united and best organised the twentieth century has seen, did not win in the end, I shall come to briefly at the end of this talk. But that it was a workers' struggle of this kind stands apart from all the other factors. The dispute, the argument, is about those other factors. It hardly touches the facts themselves; in reality nobody contests them. That such a broad workers' struggle took place there, with the support of every other working layer of the population, with the support of the peasants, of the intellectuals and of the urban petty bourgeoisie, gives the Hungarian revolution, or the Hungarian popular uprising, call it what you will, a very sharply defined character.

So the first question we have to ask is: how was it possible? How was it possible, despite the Yalta agreement, which divided Europe into two spheres of influence, the Western and the Russian? Despite the fact (people now talk of peaceful coexistence and of the two superpowers) that the American superpower did not fire a single shot to help the so-called counter-revolutionary rising in Hungary, and strictly respected the division of Europe into two spheres of influence in 1956? Despite the fact that the Hungarian people felt deeply isolated from the rest of the world, tragically isolated, facing an all-powerful great power, the Soviet Union, with the strongest army in Europe? How did the uprising happen all the same?

I believe we can point to five reasons for it, five central reasons.

The first, and by far the most important reason for the uprising, for the revolution, is that in Hungary we were dealing with a political regime in which power was exercised by a small group of bureaucrats and functionaries, by one faction of the Hungarian communist movement, the Rákosi–Gerő faction. That faction was totally isolated from the working class and from the working population. And I must add that it was totally isolated from the mass of communists too. It ruled only by force, by terror, by the secret police, by imprisoning, if not torturing, its political opponents. That isolation had reached such proportions that it had become intolerable for the mass of communist activists, and even for a growing part of the communist functionaries.

You could say that the dictatorial rule of a privileged bureaucracy exists in the other countries of Eastern Europe as well, and in the Soviet Union, and that this in itself is no reason for a revolution; or at least that it does not explain why a revolution breaks out at a particular moment. That is true. The contradiction lies here: a dictatorship of a very small group of officials, isolated from the working class and from the rest of the population, is possible, and can survive in the long run, only while the working class is passive. Only while the working class is depoliticised, takes no part in politics, does not concern itself with politics, and neither wishes nor tries to influence the management of the economy, of the household of society and of the state. So we can say that what made that regime untenable in 1956 was a growing political awakening and a growing political activity among one layer after another: first the intellectuals, the students and the youth, then the working class, in the months and days before 23 October 1956. The main cause of the revolution, then, was the irreconcilable contradiction between an isolated bureaucratic dictatorship, exercised by a small faction at the head of the Hungarian Communist Party, and the growing awareness and political activity of ever broader layers of the working population: young people, students and intellectuals first, and the workers.

The second reason, which is bound up with the first without being quite the same, lies in what happened after the great turn made by the Russian state and party leadership in 1955. That was when Khrushchev came to Belgrade and admitted openly that Stalin and the leadership of the international Stalinist movement had been wrong to denounce the Yugoslav communists as traitors, fascists or spies, to expel them from the Cominform, and to try from outside to depose a party and state leadership recognised by the great majority of Yugoslav communists. From that moment, and still more after the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956, a fierce factional struggle was under way in every East European communist party between different groups and currents of the Stalinist movement. Simplifying a great deal, and it is a simplification, we can reduce it to a struggle between the liberals, the faction that favoured a certain democratisation of the regime, and the conservatives, the die-hard Stalinist faction, which in Hungary was represented by Rákosi and Gerő.

The symbol of the liberal faction in the Hungarian party leadership was the former prime minister Imre Nagy, and quite against his own intentions, for he was not an energetic or dynamic man at all. He had been removed from office and expelled from the party by thoroughly bureaucratic means. As a result, and I repeat that it was without his wishing it and certainly without any initiative of his, he had become a symbol in the eyes of broad layers of communist activists, above all worker and peasant activists, of what we might call mild resistance, mild opposition, to die-hard Stalinism.

And the call "Take Imre Nagy back into the party, into the party leadership, into the Central Committee and into the government" grew louder and louder inside the Hungarian Communist Party from the end of '55 and the beginning of '56, and above all after the Twentieth Congress. More and more activists and cadres said: "The Twentieth Congress has shown that Nagy was right, and that we were right all along when we opposed the most brutal and most despicable forms of terror, as they were practised under Rákosi and Gerő."

Internationally, this went together with similar battles then being fought in the Polish Communist Party and the Czechoslovak Communist Party. In the Polish party, throughout 1956, there was a very fierce factional struggle within the leadership and among the cadres. The symbol of the liberal wing of the bureaucracy in Poland was Gomułka himself, the same kind of figure as Nagy, though more energetic than Nagy, and also less reliable, I would add, seen from the working-class point of view.

To bring Gomułka back into the party leadership, a very strong workers' movement developed in Poland: big strikes, factory occupations, the formation of workers' councils too, and an enormous demonstration of nearly half a million people in Warsaw. The Russians threatened at the time to intervene militarily to prevent it. Khrushchev appeared in person at a session of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party to stop Gomułka being brought back.

The Chinese, and I will come back to this in my conclusion, because it is so contradictory, the Chinese fiercely defended the liberal communist Gomułka against the Stalinists in Poland. They threatened, publicly, that in the event of a military intervention in Poland they would openly take the side of the Poles. That probably played a part. Not the decisive part, but a part, in making possible what we might call Gomułka's seizure of power, if you want to put it that way.

It is interesting, by the way, that at the decisive session of the Polish Central Committee, which also took place on 23 October, at the very moment the Hungarian revolution began, Gomułka, who had by then been re-elected first secretary, used exactly the same arguments as Nagy in his report. The minutes of that session were later published in half a million copies in the theoretical journal of the Polish Communist Party and sold out in a few days. On what questions? He denounced the terror, the abuse of administrative methods, the arrest and torture of political opponents, the suppression of the workers' rights in the enterprises, the refusal to recognise the right to strike. Gomułka's report has a whole chapter on the need to recognise the right to strike, a right which, incidentally, is now officially recognised in the latest revision of the Chinese constitution too, even for a socialist country.

All those same points are in Nagy's platform, the platform for which Nagy fought inside the Hungarian Communist Party throughout '56, and around which a more or less organised faction began to form, with its own meetings. The most famous, or notorious, were the meetings of intellectuals in the Petőfi Circle in Budapest. But that was only a small part of it. In a sense the meetings of students at the university were more important, and so were the meetings of youth organisations, meetings in the factories, meetings in the trade unions. For a movement like this, as later in Czechoslovakia in '68, once it gets under way, runs in parallel through all the important working layers of the population. Once people start to become politically active and tongues are loosened, everyone says what is in their heart. And it is always the same, or the same kind of, aspirations, wishes and demands as the ones I have just listed.

The third reason for the uprising is something peculiar to Hungary. It played no part, or only a minor part, in Poland, because such ugly things had fortunately not happened in Poland, and still less in Czechoslovakia, although in Czechoslovakia there would have been reason enough for the same stimulus. That was the enormous indignation, not only in communist circles, above all among the older communists and cadres, but among broad layers of the population, at the state and party leadership's foot-dragging over drawing every conclusion from the rehabilitation of the communist victims of Stalinism itself.

As you probably know, the general secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party in the underground had led the resistance against the Nazis and the Hungarian fascists. He had a large following, because he had not spent twenty or fifteen years abroad like Rákosi and come back to Hungary behind the Russian occupation; he had stayed in the country and led the struggle against the fascists there, at very great risk to his life, of course. He was the most popular figure among the Hungarian communists, and he had also played the leading part (this is not as attractive as you might like, but it is an objective fact) in the communists' very bureaucratic conquest of power in '47 and '48. László Rajk was condemned as a traitor, a fascist, a Titoist, a nationalist, a chauvinist and I don't know what other stupid charges, sentenced to death and executed during the notorious trials of 1949–51. In Czechoslovakia the same thing happened to the general secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Slánský. In Bulgaria the same thing happened to the secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Kostov.

We will not spend too much time on why those purges took place in that scandalous and inhuman way; it is not the subject of this talk. We can probably reduce it mainly to one factor. Stalin and the Stalinist faction wanted to draw a line in blood between those who blindly obeyed every Russian order and those Stalinist leaders in Eastern Europe who, because of their relative popularity and relative base among communist activists, might one day be tempted to follow the example of Tito and of Mao Zedong, that is to say, to pursue an independent communist policy in their own country. So every temptation to take an independent road had to be smashed, by presenting all the candidate Titos and Maos in those countries as traitors, fascists, Trotskyists, Titoists, counter-revolutionaries and criminals.

Well, after Tito's rehabilitation in 1955 it was obviously no longer possible to go on calling those old communist activists traitors, because the main charge against them had been that they were Tito's agents. If Tito is a fascist, fine, then an agent of Tito is a fascist too. But if Tito is no longer a fascist but a good communist… You may remember Khrushchev's famous, or notorious, statement when he stepped off the plane at Belgrade airport: "Dearly beloved comrade Tito, dearly beloved Yugoslav comrades, we ask your forgiveness from the bottom of our hearts for the wrong we did you under the pressure of the provocateur Beria." Beria was of course made the scapegoat for all of it. After such sensational public statements, printed by the whole East European press, it was obviously no longer possible to go on presenting the pseudo-Titoists (for Rajk was never really a Titoist, any more than Slánský or Kostov were), the people who had been declared Titoist agents, as criminals, fascists and traitors. So there was what we might call a semi-official, partial rehabilitation of those old communist leaders.

Much the same happened in the Soviet Union after the Twentieth Congress. It is admitted that the trials were all lies, that the charges against the old Russian communists were false. But nobody dares rehabilitate them openly, for fear of the consequences. And such rehabilitations can indeed have tremendous consequences; they can set off a real chain reaction. For there were a great many accomplices in those arrests and convictions, and many, many of the people who were accomplices kept very important positions afterwards. Khrushchev himself was one of the people chiefly responsible for the repression, on a small scale, in the Ukraine. He was not a big boss then, only a little boss. But the little bosses, in their regions, towns and villages, also had thousands of innocent people convicted and deported. And naturally they shrank from having all their victims fully rehabilitated.

So the same happened in Hungary. But there, because of Rajk's great popularity, and because his widow, Júlia Rajk, was present (a good communist activist, who incidentally still lives in Budapest today) and campaigned very actively to have her husband's honour restored, a great popular movement got under way, and it was one of the detonators of the uprising. A few weeks before the uprising, the first great mass movement in Budapest was a demonstration of more than two hundred thousand people, who followed Rajk's widow, walking alone at their head, through the streets of the Hungarian capital to Rajk's second funeral. This time the official funeral was not the funeral of a criminal, but that of a communist resistance fighter, a noble communist activist.

And the fourth reason for the uprising is, if you like, the sum of national frictions, economic and political. The national, or nationalist (we may safely call it that), element in the uprising is very large. The Hungarians, the Hungarian people, feel oppressed by a great foreign power, the Soviet Union. They feel exploited by a foreign power. There is an element of exaggeration in this, and there is also, absolutely and undoubtedly, an element of truth.

Part three (Mandel, II): What kind of revolution?

Many comrades, above all the Maoists, believe that the economic exploitation of the countries of Eastern Europe began only when capitalism was mysteriously restored there in 1956. In reality there have been elements of economic exploitation since the first day of the Russian occupation, since 1944–45.

And if we look at it closely, we have to admit that the exploitation was much worse under Stalin, much worse in the first years of the occupation, than it was later. I will give just one fact among many. Under Stalin, in Hungary as in the other areas occupied by the Russian army, economic institutions were set up which (it seems almost unbelievable today) openly called themselves Soviet joint-stock companies: Soviet companies, companies owned by the Soviet Union, which exploited labour power on foreign soil and shipped raw materials and finished products to the Soviet Union. In other words, they behaved as foreign capital behaves abroad. Those companies lasted until '53, until after Stalin's death. And when they were wound up and handed back to the Hungarian people, as they were handed back to the people of East Germany, of Austria and of the other countries then occupied by the Russian army, it was not because Stalin's successors were better men than Stalin. It was because resistance to those forms of exploitation had grown so great that it led to a first explosion, the East German workers' uprising of 1953.

It was after that workers' uprising, and this is one of its positive results, that the Soviet government was forced to dissolve the Soviet joint-stock companies in Eastern Europe and in general to loosen its grip on the economies of those countries. I don't say it gave up its grip entirely, but it loosened it; the grip still exists today, milder than before, than under Stalin, but still with a great many negative and unpleasant features. On top of that, the political leadership of the Hungarian Communist Party and of the Hungarian government was felt by the overwhelming majority of the population to be the governors of a foreign power: not the elected representatives of the Hungarian working class, but the direct representatives of the Russians, of foreign rulers and oppressors.

And there is no doubt that Hungarian national feeling, like Polish national feeling, is historically anti-Russian, for well-known historical reasons. The great bourgeois-democratic revolution in Hungary, the revolution of 1848, was crushed by the Russians, by the Russian tsars. The tsars sent troops to Hungary to restore the rule of the Austrian emperors, which the Hungarian revolution had overthrown. And the Russia of the tsars was identified in Hungary, as in Poland, with counter-revolution, oppression and tyranny.

That is not the case in Czechoslovakia, for example. It is not the case in Bulgaria, or in Yugoslavia, where there is a different historical tradition: the tradition of Pan-Slavism as an idea, of Russian support for the liberation struggles of the small Slav nationalities. There, historically, there is no anti-Russian feeling at all. Even under the bourgeois and reactionary governments before and after the First World War, there was a certain sympathy there for any Russian government, whichever it was, because of that historical tradition. So it is a fact that right-wing currents in Hungary after 1945 were able to bring nationalist elements into any political movement, thanks to the anti-Russian tradition that prevailed there.

That is a fact. But it is also a fact that the particular form of political regime the Stalinist faction imposed there made it extraordinarily easy for them, and above all the first intervention did. I would say there was a turning point. Before 23 October, for very obvious reasons, all the opposition forces, even the anti-communist ones, were very cautious, and avoided any formula that might be seen from the Russian point of view as hostile or dubious. It is interesting that even the Hungarian Social Democrats, while they were still underground on the eve of 23 October, did not dare openly to question Hungary's membership of the Warsaw Pact. That was not out of deep conviction: they were certainly no supporters of the Warsaw Pact. It was because they did not want to give the Russians a pretext for intervening; that goes without saying.

They took a similar attitude, if we may draw a parallel, to that of the Italian and French communists today, who say: "Yes, if we become ministers we will not leave NATO. Because if we said that we would break the treaties our states have signed, our becoming ministers would immediately set off a major international crisis, and we do not want to give the Americans a pretext for unleashing such a crisis." Whether that is right or wrong in the case of the Italian and French communists I don't want to discuss. I only want to point to the parallel.

So before 23 October, despite the great hostility among the population to what was called Russian exploitation and the Russian foreigners, nobody questioned Hungary's membership of the Warsaw Pact. It was not discussed in a single political programme in Hungary. But after the first military intervention, when the Russians sent tanks against the Hungarian workers and students and opened fire (we should not exaggerate it either: there was no enormous bloodbath on 23 October, but the military did intervene), things changed. The bloodbath was set off by the ÁVO, the secret police of the Hungarian Stalinists, who fired on an unarmed crowd outside Radio Budapest and so unleashed the popular fury. They played a real role as provocateurs, probably consciously. After those first military clashes, anti-Russian feeling and Hungarian nationalism shot up enormously, and in the weeks that followed the national element in the uprising was undoubtedly very important.

We must have no illusions. The same was true in Czechoslovakia in '68, and the same will be true everywhere in Eastern Europe. It is inevitable. Where the military power of a great power, the Soviet Union, appears as the thing that decides the political regime in each of those countries, there is of course a silent resistance to that unacceptable and undemocratic political situation. And as soon as political feelings can be expressed, they will bring with them, among other things, very sharp anti-Russian feelings. Whether that is positive or negative depends on one's attitude to the Soviet Union, to the Soviet government; but it is a consequence. It is not a cause. It is a consequence of forms of rule that are unacceptable from a socialist point of view, from the point of view of workers' democracy, of council democracy, of socialist democracy. If you suppress the national feelings and national aspirations of many great peoples, sooner or later you will pay a heavy price for it. The Russians paid that price in Hungary in '56 and in Czechoslovakia in '68, and they will often pay a heavy price for it in future. That is inevitable. Whether one regrets it or not, it is a fact.

So now we can ask: what was this uprising? What was this revolution? What is a revolution? A revolution, says Lenin, is a change in the forms of rule which takes place when those on top, those who govern, can no longer go on governing as before, and when those below, those who are normally governed, will no longer let themselves be governed as before. In that sense, if you take the two factors together, you can truly say: this was a revolution.

There is not the slightest doubt that the Rákosi–Gerő faction could no longer govern in Hungary after 23 October 1956. It literally burst apart. We must draw some conclusions from that, by the way, and I will come back in a moment to the nature, the scale, the duration and the relative ease of a political revolution against a ruling bureaucracy in a bureaucratised workers' state. Once the working class moves on a mass scale, the bureaucracy can no longer govern, precisely because it is not a class, precisely because it has no independent role in society, in the process of production, in the normal course of things, because it rules only by usurping the power of the workers. Once those workers move, the bureaucracy can no longer govern. It is literally unable to get a single order carried out.

And that is what happened in Hungary after 23 October. There was not a ministry, not a town hall, not a provincial administration to be found where the old directors, the old rulers, the old bureaucrats of before 23 October could still achieve anything; I won't even say achieve anything, they did not even try. The whole administration burst like a soap bubble. It vanished. It was no longer there. This was so much the case that there were ministries and administrations (and when I say ministries you must of course think of a workers' state, where whole sectors of the economy are also run by ministries, so that they are not only organs of government but economic bodies, economic administrations such as trusts and trading organisations), whole administrations in which, for two weeks, nobody above a certain rank even came to the office. They knew they no longer had any say there, and some of them were probably afraid. Not of repression, I don't say, for workers are generally very generous, often too generous, when they hold power; but at least of getting a few slaps and hearing a few home truths from the people of the towns.

It is interesting, striking and a confirmation of the revolutionary Marxist theory of the nature of the proletariat, in capitalist society as in the society of transition between capitalism and socialism, that once the Hungarian working class as a whole was in motion, workers' councils were elected spontaneously almost everywhere. It is astonishing to see how spontaneously that happened, and how much alike: I don't say identical, for when things happen spontaneously there are always differences, but how closely the programme of demands of those workers' councils, and what we might call their programme of institutions, their statutes, resembled one another all over Hungary.

It is interesting to note, and this too is a great lesson for us, because it confirms what we have been saying about the West European and Central European working class for the past fifty years, that the immediate occasion for electing those workers' councils was the struggle. The workers' councils were elected to make the general strike against the Russian intervention of 23 October effective. That was the immediate motive. "We are organising a general strike. The general strike damn well has to be effective. We want to organise it; we don't want it to slip out of our hands. So we elect workers' councils, as strike committees." That is literally the same origin as that of the Russian soviets of 1905 and of February–March 1917: strike committees, the direct representatives of workers on strike and in struggle.

But very quickly, because the administration of the state had burst apart all over the country (and here the analogy is with 1917, or with Germany in 1918, not with 1905, for in 1905 the tsarist administration had not burst apart), because of the bursting, the disappearance, the disintegration of the Stalinist state apparatus, those workers' councils were forced, besides their functions as organisers of the general strike, to do positive things as well. To organise food supplies for the population. To make sure that when the electricity was cut off from industry and from the barracks, it was not cut off from the ordinary civilian population: that the workers themselves got electricity at home, and water, which was cut off, I repeat, from the barracks and the other installations used by the occupier. A whole series of positive tasks had to be handled by the councils. So they began, if you like, and in embryonic form, to carry out the functions of a state, as every council organisation has done in the history of workers' struggle since the Paris Commune.

So we say: this is a revolution. Those on top can no longer govern. Those below no longer want to be governed in the traditional way; they are trying to get a different form of government. And now one question remains: what kind of revolution is it?

Historical materialism teaches us that different revolutions are possible in the history of society. There are social revolutions, there are social counter-revolutions, and there are political revolutions. What is a social revolution? A social revolution is the transfer of power from a reactionary social class to a progressive one. What is a social counter-revolution? It is the return of power from a progressive social class to a reactionary one. And what is a political revolution? A political revolution is the transfer of political power within one and the same class, from one fraction of that class to another, without any change in the fundamental relations of production, without any change in the socio-economic system.

Is that possible, a political revolution without any change in the socio-economic system? Of course. History has known many. I will cite just two, the two classic examples Karl Marx himself gives, though there are many others: the French revolutions of 1830 and of 1848. In both cases we are dealing with a revolution, obviously. In the first case a dynasty is overthrown; in the second the monarchy is replaced by the republic. Are we dealing with a social revolution? No. To call it a social revolution, you would have to suppose that the nobility had been in power before and was overthrown by the bourgeoisie. We know that the nobility was overthrown by the bourgeoisie in 1789. The bourgeois revolution took place in France in 1789, and since 1789 France has been a capitalist country. Power there lies in the hands of the bourgeoisie, not of the feudal class; feudalism has been eliminated as the ruling social class since 1789. If, since 1789, the relations of production, the socio-economic structure, the mode of production, have been capitalist, then obviously there can be no question of a social revolution in either 1830 or 1848. You cannot carry out a bourgeois social revolution against the bourgeoisie. When the same social class stays in power, you obviously do not have a social revolution. What France had in 1830 and 1848 was a political revolution: that is to say, a different fraction of the same ruling class came to power.

Marx described this in his political writings on nineteenth-century France. He says that the part of the bourgeoisie that came to power in 1830 was the bankers. The bankers are not a social class; they are a section of a social class. The social class is the capitalist class, and the bankers are a section of it. And in the political revolution of 1848 another section of the bourgeois class came to power, the manufacturers, the industrialists. So two political revolutions, within one and the same socio-economic system and on the basis of the same relations of production, brought successive fractions of one and the same class, the bourgeoisie, to power.

And we say that a political revolution in the history of the transitional society between capitalism and socialism is something of the same kind. It does not restore capitalism. It does not bring the bourgeoisie back to power. It does not restore private property. It does not restore the exploitation of wage labour by capital. So it does not restore the power of a counter-revolutionary ruling class. What it changes is the fraction of the wage- and salary-earners, of the wage-workers, that exercises power. The bureaucracy is a fraction of the wage- and salary-earners. They are people who draw a wage: a big wage, much more than ordinary workers, with many more privileges, but privileges in the form of wages and salaries, not in the form of private property. So it is, if you like, a parasitic fraction within the wage- and salary-earners.

It is a parasitic cancer, says Trotsky, on the body of the working class, but on that body, not on the body of some other class. The political revolution removes that cancer. It puts power in the hands of the mass of the working class. So it is a political revolution, a change of political regime, but without overthrowing the socio-economic structure.

Part four (Mandel, III): The slanderers' contradictions, and the limits of spontaneity

Hungary under the power of the workers' councils was not a capitalist country. It was not a country where the factories were handed back to the capitalists, or where the land shared out among the peasants after '45 was handed back to the nobility or the Church. It kept the same socio-economic structure. But the common property was no longer managed by a small privileged bureaucracy. It was managed by democratically elected workers. That is a typical example of a political revolution.

To conclude, we must now ask ourselves two questions. First, how can we explain that there are still people, both inside the official Communist parties and inside the Maoist groups, who cast doubt on the fairly clear character of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and go on slandering it? For we can call it nothing else. Second, why was the revolution defeated? Why, despite the tremendous scale and the tremendous unanimity of the struggle, the unity of the Hungarian workers' struggle, did they not succeed in winning, or in holding on to their victory, in establishing the power of the workers' councils for good? Why, after six weeks, seven, eight, nine weeks, were the councils broken up and repressed, and many of their leaders shot, hanged, thrown into prison or forced into exile?

The first question: why is the real character of that political revolution still called into question? For the official Communist parties it was clear enough for a long time, because their general line was to identify the interests of the world revolution and of the international proletariat with the interests of the Soviet government. Since this was a rising against a regime supported by the Soviet government, it was a counter-revolutionary rising. You don't have to look any further than that. It is a pure syllogism. Socialism equals the Soviet government. Resistance to the Soviet government equals resistance to socialism, and therefore to the revolution. For a classical Stalinist of our Belgian Communist Party, or the French or Italian, the universe, the spiritual, mental, psychological and intellectual universe, was simple. A bit simplistic, but still, it was simple and homogeneous, and in '56 it fitted together like a box.

In '76 it gets harder. Our friends in the Belgian Communist Party have visibly dropped the idea that anyone who opposes any decision of the Russian state leadership is against socialism and therefore against the revolution. Today they too have opposed some decisions of the Russian state leadership. They condemn, for example, the Russian intervention in Czechoslovakia in '68. Are they anti-communists too, then? Have they too become accomplices of Western imperialism because they opposed it? Well, they find themselves in a contradiction. They now have to start treating the events in Hungary not with those general, simplistic syllogisms but by examining them more carefully, in detail. And they run into difficulties.

It is hard to prove that a united working class (I repeat, a united working class), which carried through a total general strike for weeks on end, is counter-revolutionary, and that the workers' councils it elected, democratically elected, elected in the factories, elected at factory meetings, were instruments of international imperialism. The contradiction goes deeper still. If we look at the documents, we see that Kádár himself, who to this day is the leader of the Hungarian Communist Party and the Hungarian government, recognised those councils, recognised that they were the real representatives of the Hungarian workers. In several of his government statements he said that he wanted to keep the councils as economic bodies managing the enterprises, and would build them into the new Hungarian constitution. And as I have already said, the Russian military commanders themselves recognised the councils. So how is it possible that twenty years later comrades in the Belgian, French or Italian Communist Party can tell us that those freely elected workers' councils were instruments of imperialism, instruments of some counter-revolution or other, when they were the representatives of the Hungarian working class recognised by Kádár and the Russians themselves?

The subtler apologists for the Russian counter-revolution and for Kádár's counter-revolution in Hungary say: "Well, it may be true that the workers' councils were the real representatives of the Hungarian workers, but the Hungarian workers were confused. They were politically confused. Because of the mistakes made by Rákosi and Gerő they were no longer willing to follow the communists. So there was a danger that the councils would come under the influence of left Social Democrats, Trotskyists, right Social Democrats, petty-bourgeois parties, counter-revolutionary parties. And in the long run that could have led to a counter-revolution."

Well, the answer to that was given not only by the Fourth International; it was given even by the Yugoslav communist Tito. It is hard to deny that he is a communist, and a communist who knows something about conquering power. He is, at least, the only communist in Europe who, at the head of a communist party, conquered power in his own country and by his own strength after the Second World War. And Tito said in November 1956: "What the Russians and Kádár's faction in Hungary did not dare to do was to apply the great tactical rule of Leninism from the Russian Revolution: all power to the councils. Had the Hungarian communists dared to issue the slogan 'All power to the councils', their political influence in the Hungarian working class would have risen enormously, and they would at least have had the chance of gradually winning back their lost political prestige." And he added: "One could always have intervened later, six months later, a year later, two years later, once that political experience had been gone through. They did not want to let that political experience take place." He does not say why, but to me it is clear. It is because the Russian bureaucracy is afraid of workers' councils, afraid of workers' democracy, afraid of council democracy, afraid of the working class itself exercising power.

For our Maoist friends the contradiction is greater still. Their difficulty in explaining the events in Hungary in social, Marxist, class terms is even greater. They face the following puzzle. Capitalism exists in Russia. Capitalism was restored by Khrushchev, if I am not mistaken at the Twentieth Congress of the Russian Communist Party, in February '56. The counter-revolutionary Khrushchev, representative of social-imperialism and social-fascism, intervenes in Hungary against the Hungarian workers. The counter-revolution intervenes against the counter-revolution. Odd. Can we make logical sense of that? Did Khrushchev perhaps intervene in Hungary to defend the dictatorship of the proletariat? But why would Khrushchev, who overthrew the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, defend the dictatorship of the proletariat in Hungary? That is a strange business.

Khrushchev represents the social-imperialism that has turned the other East European countries into colonies. A rising in the colonies, even a rising of the bourgeoisie, is a progressive rising. So perhaps in Hungary we are dealing with a progressive rising of the national bourgeoisie? No, we are told, we are dealing with a counter-revolution. A counter-revolution against social-imperialism. That is an extraordinarily strange business, and you can hardly make head or tail of it. And this counter-revolution against social-imperialism is carried out by millions of workers, organised in their workplaces, in workers' councils that take over the factories, take the factories into their hands, take power into their hands, take up arms. To do what? To give those factories back to capitalism? Where have you ever seen a working class do that? Take over the factories, take over the management of the factories, with the sole aim of handing them back to the class enemy?

The class enemy was not even there any more: the bourgeoisie was physically absent. The Hungarian bourgeois were in America and West Germany. They were not in Hungary. They had cleared out, and from their own point of view rightly, because there was nothing left there for them. And what the Hungarian workers wanted to do with those enterprises you can read in their statements. For they all published a programme. They all published a series of programmatic points, of demands, and many examples are given in pamphlets and other writings. You can go through all the statements, declarations, programmes and lists of demands of the workers' councils, and you will not find a single one that does not say, literally (for these workers were class-conscious workers, and sensible enough to understand what kind of slander would be used against them internationally), you will not find a single statement by a workers' council that does not literally say: we are against the restoration of private property. We are against handing our enterprises back to their former capitalist owners. We are against handing the land back to the former landowners. We are for the management of the nationalised, socialised factories by the workers themselves.

And I ask our Maoist friends: is that the programme of the bourgeois counter-revolution? A programme that says: against the restoration of capitalism, against the restoration of capitalist private property, for the management of the enterprises by the workers themselves: is that a capitalist programme? Is it a counter-revolutionary programme? Is it a fascist programme? Or is it the normal programme of a workers' revolution?

So you have a double contradiction. The social-fascist Khrushchev as the representative of the dictatorship of the proletariat; and the social-fascist, social-imperialist, restorer of capitalism Khrushchev as the representative of the dictatorship of the proletariat against the proletariat, against the Hungarian workers. For he does not intervene against the bourgeoisie. He does not intervene against American or West German armies. He intervenes against Hungarian workers' councils, against Hungarian workers who have occupied the factories and organised the general strike with extraordinary effectiveness. As I said, you can make neither head nor tail of it; there is no Mao to fit it.¹ It is self-contradictory.

And the only reason (for there is no other) why our Maoist friends do not dare to say that Khrushchev's Russian intervention in Hungary was just as counter-revolutionary, just as scandalous, just as oppressive and exploitative as the Russian intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968, is that, as it happens, Mao Zedong approved of the intervention at the time. And since by definition Mao Zedong can never be wrong, and since by definition one may never say anything other than what Mao Zedong says, our Maoist friends are not allowed to admit that what happened in Hungary was the same as what happened in Czechoslovakia.

There is absolutely no difference. If there is a difference, it is in the Hungarians' favour. For in Czechoslovakia there were not as many workers' councils, there was no general strike, there was not such a clear, one hundred per cent clear attitude on the part of the working class as there was in Hungary. In Czechoslovakia there was a little more confusion; only a little, mind you, the difference is not very great, but a little more confusion. In Hungary things were clearer: in the self-organisation of the working class, in the general strike, in the workers' struggle, and in the plainly national suppression of a popular rising and a workers' revolution by a great foreign superpower. But since that superpower was not criticised by Mao at the time, our Maoist friends are still standing there today with their mouths full of porridge, unable to say a word.

Why did the cause not win? Here we can draw an extraordinarily important conclusion about the limits of workers' spontaneity. We believe that revolutionary Marxism, that Leninism, means recognising the necessary spontaneity of the workers, the necessary autonomy of the working class, the tremendous rise of spontaneous workers' struggle in pre-revolutionary and revolutionary periods. Lenin himself, in 1905 as in 1917, wrote more profound, more appreciative and more enthusiastic words about spontaneous mass movements of this kind than anyone else in the history of the workers' movement, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg included. The difference between spontaneists and Leninists, between spontaneists and revolutionary Marxists, does not lie in the Leninists and revolutionary Marxists underestimating the spontaneous mass movement, failing to recognise it, condemning it, breaking it up, crushing it. No: it lies only in their recognising the limits of that movement. In recognising that the spontaneous mass movement is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a victorious revolution.

A necessary condition, because without a spontaneous mass movement you will not set millions and millions of people in motion, and you will not be able to realise the ABC truth of Marxism that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself. Not the work of the party, not the work of the party leadership, not the work of the party chairman, but the work of the working class itself. But spontaneity alone is not enough. And after Spain, the Spain of July, August, September, October and November 1936, Hungary is the second-best example of the limits of that spontaneity.

Spontaneously, workers are capable of carrying through a victorious general strike. Yes. Spontaneously, they are capable of occupying factories. Yes. Spontaneously, they are capable of running workers' councils. Yes. But spontaneously they are not capable of working out a political project, a political programme, a political plan for the conquest of political power that would allow them to stop all their enemies, all those who want to prevent, obstruct or crush the exercise of that political power, from carrying out what we may call their scandalous calculations and scandalous plans.

Part five (Mandel, IV): Why the councils lost: all power to the councils

Spontaneously you cannot carry out an intricate, complicated, very, very complex strategy for the conquest of political power, for the centralisation of the political power of the working class. For that a political leadership, a political vanguard, a revolutionary party is absolutely necessary.

And there was no such revolutionary party in Hungary in '56. So what we saw was a repetition, I say it again, of what we saw in the Spanish revolution of '36: workers' councils that know what they have to do at the level of each enterprise. The first step forward they know; workers can normally reach it with their common sense, their class instinct and their elementary class consciousness. First organise the strike, then occupy the enterprise, then get production going again under their own management. I don't say that is easy, but you don't need to be a learned person or have great experience of revolutionary organisation to do it. But once you have to take the second, third, fourth step… How are the councils now to centralise among themselves? What are they to do in that centralisation? Whom are they to negotiate with? Whom are they to eliminate? How are they to arm themselves? How are they to try to work out a project for the conquest of political power? There they come up against insurmountable difficulties, when there is no conscious political vanguard, no conscious revolutionary party.

And we saw that. The most the Hungarian workers were able to achieve spontaneously (and even that was no longer wholly spontaneous, for a small core of revolutionary vanguard activists had begun to form inside the workers' councils)… It was one of those activists who made the proposal to set up a central workers' council: Miklós Krassó. He is now in Western Europe, he lives in England, you can talk to him and ask him about his experiences, and he can tell you all about it in detail. And that proposal was accepted practically at once by all the workers' councils of Budapest. That was the most that could be achieved: four or five hundred of the biggest enterprises, large and small, in Greater Budapest formed a central workers' council of delegates elected in each of them.

But what exactly that workers' council was to do: there doubt began. Some inside the council said: just go on organising the strike, the general strike. And that obviously led into a dead end. You cannot strike for months without a concrete project. You cannot bring the economic life, the production of a modern country, to a standstill for months without proposing what you want to put in place of the existing political government. Others said: negotiate with the Russians, so that they push Kádár aside and recognise the Nagy government again, or recognise us as the representatives of the Hungarian working class and the Hungarian people. Others again said: "No, negotiate with Kádár, so that Kádár recognises us as the representatives of the Hungarian working class and builds us into the new Hungarian constitution and the new way of running the administration in Hungary." A fourth group said: negotiate with the Russians and with Kádár, and come to an agreement with whichever gives us most; if it's the Russians, fine, if it's Kádár, fine. A fifth said: negotiate with nobody, because if you negotiate you will be cheated; and so on, and so on.

And once there was no longer any political line in it, no strategic conception; once they did not know what they really wanted to do, or could do, with the tremendous power they potentially had; and once there was practically nobody (for that is a fact: no group at all, not even the small revolutionary core that was forming there) working out the precise project of trying to put not only the management of the enterprises but the whole state administration into the hands of a council government, a soviet government, then it was only a question of time. Kádár and the Russians would see that power begin to dwindle through disintegration, through wearing down, through exhaustion. More and more groups of workers, after five, six, seven weeks on strike, began to grow tired of striking on without a political aim, without a clear political project.

And Kádár's tactic was very clear and very clever, and in the end it succeeded. It consisted in making every concession on paper, every concession, even on radio and television, on one condition: stop the general strike. It is a trick he learned from the capitalists and the bourgeois governments; they know it well too. As long as the strike lasts, as long as the power of the workers is there, promise whatever you like. But once the strike is over, once that power is gone, you can take back two-thirds, three-quarters, nine-tenths of all your promises, because there is no longer any power to enforce them. And so you can read in the newspapers of the time, the official newspapers of Hungary, the official press of the Hungarian Stalinists, and in the radio and television reports, Kádár saying: recognition of the councils? Yes. Safe conduct for all members of the workers' councils? Yes, nobody will be locked up, nobody will be prosecuted. Yes. Councils written into the constitution? Yes. The right to strike? Yes. Everything: yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. On one condition only: get production going again. Get the trains running again. Get the buses and trams running again. Get the water supply working again. Get the power stations working again, and then we will carry out all the things we promise you.

And once the workers' councils, disoriented for want of concrete political aims and of revolutionary leadership, began to make concessions over the return to work, all those promises were taken back. Then the first workers' councils, the members of the first workers' councils, were locked up, shot, hanged, or had to flee so as not to be shot and hanged. Then there was no more talk of recognising the councils, no more talk of writing the right to strike into the constitution. Then all of it was taken back, and a counter-revolution triumphed, a bureaucratic counter-revolution against the working class.

The conclusion we can draw is that there is no other way of achieving the direct rule of the working class than institutionalised workers' power in workers' councils, with revolutionary political parties, with a revolutionary political vanguard, which wins the majority of those councils to the revolutionary Marxist line inside the councils: not by administrative means, not by repression, not by oppression, not by violating the democratic rights and freedoms of the working people, but by persuasion, by the possibility of political persuasion, by the strength of its correct political line and its correct political programme.

Every other model of a so-called socialist state or a so-called socialist country (we say, of a society in transition between capitalism and socialism under the dictatorship of the proletariat) will degenerate into a bureaucratic regime, a regime in which the working class does not exercise power directly. We shall have occasion in the coming weeks and months (and we have really had it already in the last few months, but some people are slower than others to draw conclusions), in the coming weeks, months and years, to see in practice that Mao's model was an illusion, as we have always said. That mass mobilisations alone are not enough to prevent bureaucracy. That cultural revolutions alone are not enough to prevent the bureaucratic concentration of power. We are now seeing it very clearly, and we shall not have long to wait before everything in China comes to look very, very like what happened under Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev: in the economy, in society, in politics, in culture, in collaboration with the West, in imitating the Western pattern of development, in importing technology, organisation and business management according to the patterns taught in Western universities.

You will see: within six months, a year, two years, three years, you will get the management schools that the Maoist press now talks so much about in Russia. Those same management schools you are going to get in China. All the economic preparations for them have already been made. That is the essence of the change in the political leadership that has taken place in China in the last few weeks: that the same administration and pattern of development are being introduced there. And then you will have to draw your conclusion.

Mao meant well. The Red Guards meant well. The revolutionary rebels meant well. The revolutionary masses and the Maoists in the West meant well. But you cannot break the power of the bureaucracy in the field of culture, in the field of ideology, in the field of the superstructure, if you do not break its institutions. And its institutions are its monopoly of management in the state and the economy, in the state and in the enterprises. There is only one way to break the power of the bureaucracy: all power in the hands of democratically elected councils of workers, peasants and soldiers. All power in the hands of a democratically elected national and international congress of workers', peasants' and soldiers' councils, on the model of State and Revolution, on the model of the October Revolution, on the model of the programmatic documents of the Communist International.

Translator's note

Source. Translated from the Dutch, from Notta transcripts of the five MP3 files Herman Michiel digitised from his 1976 cassette (published on the Marxists Internet Archive, December 2006). Doubtful words were checked against two Whisper transcripts (small and large-v3) of the same audio. The recording runs about 85 minutes; the question-and-answer session was not recorded. The introduction is cut off at the start, and the opening words in square brackets are supplied.

Editing. Edited lightly for print: fillers, false starts and repetitions removed, and the speaker's self-corrections silently applied (he says "leader of the Russian government" of Kádár and corrects himself to "Hungarian"). Paragraphing and the part titles are editorial. The asides, jokes, rhetorical questions and the direct address to the audience are kept. Nothing was inaudible once the doubtful passages had been re-heard; one sentence about the "people of the towns" in part three is still slightly uncertain. Mandel's date of 23 October for the plenum of the Polish Central Committee is a slip: the Eighth Plenum that elected Gomułka first secretary sat on 19–21 October 1956. It is left as spoken.

Corrections to the spoken text. - Cominform: the Yugoslav communists were expelled from the Cominform (1948), not Comecon. The Notta transcript has "Comecon"; the Whisper transcript hears "Kominform", which is also historically right. - Júlia Rajk: Rajk's widow is named "Elsa" in both transcripts. Her name was Júlia Rajk (née Földi). She was still living in Budapest in 1976 and died in 1981. The reburial of László Rajk took place on 6 October 1956. - Léon Lesoil Foundation: the transcripts garble the organiser's name ("Lion de Grol", "Rion de Zwal"), which is close to the Flemish pronunciation of Léon Lesoil. The Fondation Léon Lesoil was the educational foundation of the RAL/LRT, named for the Belgian Trotskyist Léon Lesoil (1892–1942). - SJW: the Socialist Young Guard (Socialistische Jonge Wacht), the RAL's youth organisation. All three transcripts hear "SCW" (in Flemish the letter J is said "zjee"); SJW has been confirmed. - Miklós Krassó: transcribed "Nicholas Krasso". Krassó (1930–86) was an activist in Budapest in 1956 who emigrated to Britain and wrote for New Left Review as Nicolas Krasso; Mandel's reply to his critique of Trotsky's Marxism appeared there in 1968.

Names. Hungarian names are given in their Hungarian spelling (Rákosi, Gerő, Kádár, Rajk, Petőfi, Krassó) and Russian names in their usual English form (Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Beria), following the archive's Dutch-to-English guide, project-docs/nl-to-en.md.

Context. The "preamble and the Programme Law" in Weyns's introduction refer to the 1975–76 Belgian student campaign at Leuven; the details have not been checked. "The change in the political leadership in China in the last few weeks" is the arrest of the Gang of Four on 6 October 1976, a month after Mao's death. Mandel announces five reasons for the uprising but numbers only four. The fifth may be the effect of the first Soviet intervention on 23 October, which he discusses in his second part without giving it a number, or it may have fallen into the gap where the cassette was turned over.