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The 1956 Hungarian Political Revolution (Quote of the Week) This October marked the 60th anniversary of the attempted proletarian political revolution in the Hungarian deformed workers state. The uprising was crushed through military intervention by the Soviet Union’s Stalinist bureaucracy. The capitalist rulers have always portrayed Hungary 1956 as an anti-communist rebellion for capitalist democracy. In fact, the Hungarian Revolution was an attempt by the working class to throw off Stalinist bureaucratic rule and open the road to socialism. We reprint below an excerpt from a 1957 article by Shane Mage, who was at the time a left oppositionist in Max Shachtman’s Young Socialist League and became one of the founders of the Spartacist tendency. Mage’s piece was directed against Herbert Aptheker, a leading member of the American Communist Party, who defended the crushing of the workers uprising by the Kremlin by characterizing it as a capitalist counterrevolution. Nothing at all justifies the Western claim that the revolution was essentially a struggle for the “democratic” return of “peoples capitalism.” The Western version of the “counter-revolution” thesis, like the Stalinist one, is false because it ignores the key factor in the revolution—the working class. The Hungarian working class, even though it may have been confused about many things, did not fight for “Western-style” democracy—it fought for socialist democracy.... The workers council of the 11th District of Budapest showed this when it demanded “free elections in which only those parties may participate that recognize and have always recognized the Socialist order, based on the principle that means of production belong to society.” But the decisive refutation of the idea that Hungary was returning to “Western-style democracy” is the simple fact that the workers all over Hungary, in the heat of the revolution, created their own Workers Councils as organs of the political rule of the working class. What has this to do with capitalist “democracy”? To smash the threat of capitalist restoration, the Hungarian workers would merely have had to exert the power that already lay in their hands, to give all power to the workers councils and not, as in so many past revolutions, give up their power to a capitalist parliament. To grasp the loathsome hypocrisy and mendacity of the capitalist “friends” of the Hungarian revolution, the reader need only ask this question: What would be the attitude of these Dulleses, Mollets, and Edens if the workers of Paris, London, or Detroit were to form their own workers councils and attempt to establish a “Socialist order, based on the principle that means of production belong to society”? —Shane Mage, “‘Truth’ and Hungary—A Reply to Herbert Aptheker,” The Hungarian Revolution (1959)
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