the workers’ councils of 1956 – by tamas krausz

A lecture by Tamas Krausz, a communist based in Budapest, about the 1956 Hungarian revolution, its workers’ councils and forms of workers’ self-management

1. Prehistory[1]

The history of the workers’ councils of 1956 cannot be understood without the history of the Hungarian working class. The intellectual-political and socio-cultural development of the Hungarian working class has been shaped by diverse and complex historical processes in the interwar period. The counter-revolutionary system of Horthy destroyed and criminalized the 1918-1919 revolutionary tradition of the workers’ councils of the Hungarian working class, it banned the communist party and it declared in the name of the sanctity of private property that communal property – which was defined as the essence of socialism from Marx and Lenin till Zsigmond Kunfi, Justus and Lukács – was a sinful idea.