Foreword. From St. Petersburg to Budapest
Foreword. From St. Petersburg to Budapest When Communist police, on December 13, 1956, arrested the leaders of the Budapest Central Workers' Council who had called a general strike, the wheel of...
...Both tenets continued to be presented as temporary necessity in the interest of future generations...
...In the two generations and two world wars that separate St...
...The deliberate sacrifice of labor's living standard to meet the unlimited power aims of the Party-state...
...The truest historical verdict on Lenin's experiment is now being pronounced by the workers themselves...
...In the first year of Bolshevik rule, the revolutionary Marxist Rosa Luxemburg observed that "the remedy discovered by Lenin and Trotsky, the abolition of democracy, is worse than the evil it is supposed to cure...
...Labor's struggle has taken the form of chronic absenteeism, slow-downs, sit-downs, walk-outs, general strikes and full-fledged revolution...
...Today, the Soviet leaders—in the words of the Budapest Central Workers Council—pursue "anti-people, anti-worker activities...
...Yet, Russian workers in 1905 opposed a system frankly dedicated to the preservation of political absolutism and class distinctions...
...In the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, as in the Russian Revolution of 1905, workers fought for individual freedom, representative government, free trade unions and a voice in factory management...
...Petersburg to Budapest When Communist police, on December 13, 1956, arrested the leaders of the Budapest Central Workers' Council who had called a general strike, the wheel of history had come full circle...
...The fostering of privileged castes with a vested interest in the survival of the system...
...Monopolistic management of production, distribution and consumption without public control—either through responsible political institutions or through the independent exercise of economic bargaining power by workers and peasants...
...Ironically, that party—the Bolsheviks, who later named themselves Communists—had itself emerged from the Russian revolutionary underground...
...Even the role Soviet policy played in the rise and spread of Hitlerism did not completely eradicate belief in the Party's two basic tenets: (1) that workers required the tutelage of a dictatorial "vanguard" trained to execute the will of history...
...Petersburg Council of Workers' Deputies in 1905...
...Fifty-one years earlier, on December 16, 1905, the police of Tsar Nicholas II arrested the leaders of the St...
...and (2) that the essence of a socialist economy was state accumulation of capital goods, irrespective of consumer needs or human costs...
...In 1917, the Party's capture of workers' and soldiers' councils had enabled its founder, Lenin, to take power...
...Bolsheviks had, in fact, participated in the St...
...Today, the gap between the living standard of labor in the USSR and the living standards of labor in democratic countries is twice and three times as great as it was before Communist rule began...
...In both revolutions, students, writers, soldiers and peasants joined the workers in the fight for liberty...
...Exploitation of workers by the speed-up, the job freeze, industrial conscription, and the threat of forced labor...
...The Hungarian workers of 1956, on the other hand, fought against the rule of a party which called itself "the vanguard of the working class" and claimed it was building "socialism...
...And nearly forty years of toil by workers and peasants have produced—as the mobile incarnation of Soviet industrial progress—the T.54 tank for the dispersal of workers' demonstrations...
...For many years, the Communists' self-proclaimed identification with labor tended to obscure that fact...
...It has erupted in factories from the Skoda Works in Pilsen to the Kaganovich Bail-Bearing Plant in Moscow...
...Petersburg 1905 and Budapest 1956, Lenin and his successors made the Communist party the antithesis of the workers' movement from which it had originally sprung...
...Petersburg Council of Workers' Deputies, which a general strike that October had created...
...Today, labor in the Soviet orbit is making clear what Karl Kautsky, Lenin's great Social Democratic adversary, understood years ago: "Not the collapse of the dictatorship in Russia but its further continuance in power constitutes the gravest menace to the struggle of the modern working class for liberation...
...These include: -Suppression of political democracy, civil rights, and free workers' and peasants' unions...
Vol. 39 • December 1956 • No. 62
