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The Communist Party dictatorships in Hungary and East Germany
sought to win over the “masses” with promises of providing for
ever-increasing levels of consumption. This policy—successful at
the outset—in the long-term proved to be detrimental for the
regimes because it shifted working class political consciousness to
the right while it effectively excluded leftist alternatives from
the public sphere. This book argues that this policy can provide
the key to understanding of the collapse of the regimes. It
examines the case studies of two large factories, Carl Zeiss Jena
(East Germany) and Rába in Győr (Hungary), and demonstrates how
the study of the formation of the relationship between the
workers’ state and the industrial working class can offer
illuminating insights into the important issue of the legitimacy
(and its eventual loss) of Communist regimes.
The Communist Party dictatorships in Hungary and East Germany
sought to win over the "masses" with promises of providing for
ever-increasing levels of consumption. This policy-successful at
the outset-in the long-term proved to be detrimental for the
regimes because it shifted working class political consciousness to
the right while it effectively excluded leftist alternatives from
the public sphere. This book argues that this policy can provide
the key to understanding of the collapse of the regimes. It
examines the case studies of two large factories, Carl Zeiss Jena
(East Germany) and Raba in Gyor (Hungary), and demonstrates how the
study of the formation of the relationship between the workers'
state and the industrial working class can offer illuminating
insights into the important issue of the legitimacy (and its
eventual loss) of Communist regimes.
This volume brings together a diverse set of scholars to address
the long theoretical, conceptual and political debate on the
interpretation of “actually existing” socialism in the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe. While the major paradigms –
totalitarianism, neo-totalitarianism, revisionism,
post-revisionism, modernization, and the world-system analysis –
are well known in the Western (English-language) literature, the
concept of state socialism, which has strong theoretical roots in
Hungary (going back to the works of György Lukács and István
Mészáros) received less international attention. This book
contributes to a productive discussion about viable
alternatives to capitalism by introducing and theoretically
elaborating on the concept and practice of state socialism,
highlighting the historical significance of Hungary’s experiment
with the “new economic mechanism” of 1968. It generates a
common point of reference for various generations of anti-systemic
thinkers, scholars, and activists to move beyond Cold War
simplifications and ideological divides, and contributes to the
discussion about anti-capitalist alternatives, which are relevant
today for the global left. The chapter “Dance
Around a ‘Sacred Cow’: Women’s Night Work and the Gender
Politics of the Mass Worker in State-Socialist Hungary and
Internationally” is available open access under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International
License via link.springer.com.
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