On October 27th 1956, Peter Fryer, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and correspondent for its paper the Weekly Worker, arrived in Hungary. This was four days into an uprising of workers calling for worker controlled socialism. Factories had been taken over nationally by workers councils, in a demonstration of workers self-organisation that was unprecedented at the time, and the first strike on its scale in an Eastern-bloc country. On the 4th of November, Russian T54 tanks rolled into Budapest to suppress the uprising. Street fighting continued until the 10th November, although the workers councils held out for two months.
Fryer returned to the UK horrified by the Soviet repression he had seen, but his attempt to write about it for the Daily Worker was suppressed - the editors were sticking to the official USSR line that the entire uprising was a fascist counter-revolutionary plot and refused to publish anything contradicting that narrative. When Fryer wrote up his experiences anyway, he was expelled from the CPGB. Hungary 1956 split Communist parties across the world; many who had supported the USSR up until this point became disillusioned and split or left individually, while those who stayed loyal to the USSR earned the epithet ‘tankies’.
Are we so sure it was really a Socialist uprising, given they were supported by the American reactionary media and government? I’m suspicious of any group the USA calls “Freedom Fighters.”
After 1956, the USSR was to invade Czechoslovakia in 1968, then Afghanistan in 1979.
I think people get tangled up by two primary factors here:
They correctly identify that the origins of the uprising were heterogeneous and they don’t consider the way that the movement was co-opted by fascists and reactionaries because, essentially, they aren’t approaching this very rapid political development from a dialectical perspective. (And they accuse tankies of uncritically accepting anything that comes draped in a red flag yet they’ll see some progressive or arguably revolutionary forces and just assume that the entire uprising is therefore inherently good.)
The naive, dogmatic adherence to a sort-of “It is right to rebel” line. Westerners seem to have a single-pointed focus on the act of rising up as the embodiment of revolution. While this isn’t entirely untrue, just because people are rising up doesn’t mean that therefore the revolution is on their side. (Building up to a revolutionary moment and setting about the long, arduous task of socialist construction are just as important to the revolution as the moment when the revolution proper kicks off.)
It’s easy to side with the rebels in any given situation, especially when they are positioned as being anti-[whatever bad stuff that exists in the moment]. It takes hard work to figure out what a group of people are fighting for and to assess how they’re going about it and the broader implications of this.
Someone once did a writeup on here about this saying it was a fascist counter-revolution
Are we so sure it was really a Socialist uprising, given they were supported by the American reactionary media and government? I’m suspicious of any group the USA calls “Freedom Fighters.”
Lol, Afghanistan. Look into operation cyclone.
Good post
Honestly how is it so hard to realize it was a fascist revolution, its very easy once you engage with the primary sources
I think people get tangled up by two primary factors here:
They correctly identify that the origins of the uprising were heterogeneous and they don’t consider the way that the movement was co-opted by fascists and reactionaries because, essentially, they aren’t approaching this very rapid political development from a dialectical perspective. (And they accuse tankies of uncritically accepting anything that comes draped in a red flag yet they’ll see some progressive or arguably revolutionary forces and just assume that the entire uprising is therefore inherently good.)
The naive, dogmatic adherence to a sort-of “It is right to rebel” line. Westerners seem to have a single-pointed focus on the act of rising up as the embodiment of revolution. While this isn’t entirely untrue, just because people are rising up doesn’t mean that therefore the revolution is on their side. (Building up to a revolutionary moment and setting about the long, arduous task of socialist construction are just as important to the revolution as the moment when the revolution proper kicks off.)
It’s easy to side with the rebels in any given situation, especially when they are positioned as being anti-[whatever bad stuff that exists in the moment]. It takes hard work to figure out what a group of people are fighting for and to assess how they’re going about it and the broader implications of this.
This impulse is kinda Sex Pistols politics imo.