Thread by @Itmechr3

1. Today is the anniversary of the start of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the great workers uprising against Stalinism and for workers control. As one member of a workers council put it: "The time when the bosses decided our fait is over".

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2. The death of Stalin in 1953 kicked of a wave of uprisings against the horrors of the Stalinist bureaucratic apparatus stretching from Soviet prison camps to East Germany to Czechoslovakia. These revolts were bathed in blood and annihilated.

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3. But they forced the Stalinist apparatus, which had by this point butchered so many compliance they had lost their fear of the working class, into a defensive, reformist posture. In 1956 Kruschev admitted (some) of the errors of Stalin.

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4. The calculation was that revealing the bankruptcy of Stalin's cult of personality could re-establish trust in the Party. The result was precisely the opposite. In June, workers on Poznan, Poland, went on strike chanting Freedom and Bread!

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5. The revolt spread across the city and Polish troops once again massacred the striking workers. Order prevailed, as Luxembourg has once declared, in Warsaw. But that order was built on sand. And 4 months later the revolution rose up again.

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6. A demonstration in support of the Polish workers led by an organization formed by the Young Communists was permitted by the government on October 23. But neither the Young Communists nor the government was prepared for what happened next.

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7. 100,000 people marched in Budapest, eventually gathering in front of a radio station demanding to be able to broadcast their grievances. A delegation entered the station (controlled by the hated Hungarian secret police) but did not reappear.

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8. The crowd, demanding to know the fate of their comrades, surged forward. The secret police opened fire onto the crowd. The crowd, undeterred, overran the police and attempted to fight their way into the radio building.

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9. Meanwhile all across Budapest news of the fighting was spreading. The night shift of workers in munitions factories carried weapons out to the protesters, who by 1am had occupied most of the city's public squares.

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10. In the early morning on Wednesday the 24th, the government declared martial law and attempted to clear the streets. Instead, the workers of Hungary formed workers councils and alongside the revolutionary students declared a general strike.

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11. The strike and the councils spread across the country like wildfire. Russian tanks rolled into Budapest, apparently oblivious the irony and horror of Soviet tanks firing on workers soviets, but workers fought them with small arms and molotovs.

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12. Through desperate struggles on the barricades the Soviet tanks were eventually pushed from the city and the revolutionary workers everywhere seized control of production and began coordinating between their new revolutionary workers councils.

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13. They had, in essence, formed a united workers council socialist republic. This is, ironically, what the USSR claimed to be. But the Leninist hatred for workers democracy and self-management, etched in blood at Kronstadt, defined the USSR.

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14. And so the Soviets would find themselves once again massacring the workers councils that formed their namesake. But what were these workers councils so feared by the Soviets and the bourgeoisie alike?

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15. They were not precisely the revolutionary syndicates that had seized control of the factories in Spain in 1936. The Hungarian councils would retain and elect management positions and a president while setting wage rates internally.

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16. Still, as Grace Lee Boggs, C. L. R. James, and Cornelius Castoriadis pointed out in Facing Reality, their control over production was remarkable and it gave them enormous political and social power.

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libcom.org/library/facing…

17. These councils operated in a kind of bizarre dance with their own demands, which included free elections to a parliament and the maintenance of a central government. But we'll never know how that contradiction would have resolved itself.

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18. On November 4th 15 Russian armored division stormed into Hungary, attacking every major city and drowning the revolution in blood. Hungarian workers fought on for a week in ferocious, desperate, battles against utterly superior weapons.

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19. Still, though defeated in the streets, the workers councils fought on through economic means. The strikes and slowdowns continued for months after. But eventually the overwhelming force of police destroyed the councils as a political force.

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20. And thus died the Hungarian Revolution. Stalinists both then and now have continued to insist, the actual evidence notwithstanding, that the revolution was nothing more than a "fascist counter-revolution".

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21. This "analysis" of course is a joke, we need only remark that workers councils seizing control of the means of production and running them democratically would be perhaps the strangest fascist counter-revolution in history.

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22. Kadar himself revealed the true nature of the Stalinist regime, its anti-democratic nature justified through a infantilizing paternalism: "the regime is aware that the people do not always know what is good for them. It is therefore the duty

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23. of the leadership to act, not according to the will of the people, but according to what the leadership knows to be in the best interests of the people". This of course is much close to fascism than any of the drivel trotted out by dutiful

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24. Stalinist apologists. And across the world people agreed. The Hungarian revolution became the specter haunting Stalinism. People left their official communist parties in droves. In Shanghai striking workers chanted "Here another Hungary".

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25. Still, a deluded rear guard of Stalinist apologists clung to the lie that tanks crushing Hungarian soviets was socialism. In Great Britain these revelers in the butchery of the working class became known as tankies.

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26. Today, with Stalinism consigned to the dustbin of history, these reactionaries have only the lies of past atrocities to celebrate. Our task is to bury them with the weight of history.

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libcom.org/library/Hungar…

27. Let their ideology finally go the way of their empire and let us build the world the Hungarians fought for. Let us build one beyond what they even dared dream. Let us bury our dead and arrive at our content.

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libcom.org/history/articl…