symbolic elements of everyday culture - MTA Szociológiai ...

1. WHAT KIND OF SOCIALISM IS „KÁDÁRISM” PART OF?
THESES ABOUT „KADARISM”
In order to understand the peculiar Hungarian state socialism known as „Kadárism”, it is obviously necessary
start from the common features of East European state socialist systems (which, by the way, have
been treated in Eszmélet on several occasions).
One of the specific features of these state socialist systems is the inclination of 20th century labour
movements to excessively exaggerate the importance of (a) politics and (b) economy. This is not typical
of labour movements only but there is no doubt that these movements implanted into their
theory and practice primarily the following two elements of Marxist ideology, the new paradigm of
social thinking: the economic determination of social processes and the capturing, by revolution, of
political power. This means, at the same time, that they neglected, or more precisely, they distorted
according to the requirements of this economic and political determinism, important elements of
Marxist social theory, such as the new concept of social conditions and the relationship between the
subject and object. This lacking, the attempt to create a new society was doomed to failure. Mere
capturing of power and adaptation to select economic requi rements will not generate a new
society if social conditions (for example, the basic productive condition) remain essentially unchanged
and the active subject(s) of society do not follow the logic of the new social paradigm.
These shortcomings were reiterated many times over the past decades. The fight against „inherited feudal or
bourgeois routines”, „ideological, moral, etc. backwardness”, the struggle to repress these phenomena
will constantly on the agenda. This, however, was based upon the concept of economy (and politics)
being some kind of a basis and if there are changes in the basis, social conditions and conscience will also
change as the „superstructure”. This concept has nothing to do with Marx’s „Marxism”; on the contrary, it is
the exact opposite thereof. Lenin raised the problem of 'teaching the teachers”, which means that in non-
socialist societies people acting under the guidance of a conscience other than socialist can by no means
create a socialist society. Nevertheless, they tried, and this is a tragic failure of Leninism, driven by the
supposition that the new political and economic conditions were eventually create somehow the new social
conditions „of a higher order” and will ultimately create a new man. Stalin topped this by the lie that the new
man „had already been created”. What actually had been created was nothing more than the mirror of reality:
a society which essentially remained within the universal system and economic laws of capitalism (carrying
over pre-capitalist social conditions), maintaining bourgeois desires and pre-capitalist emotions. It existed not
as a „basis” but accidentally, as an experiment in political power and economic control attempting to eliminate
the impacts of capitalism. As social conditions and conscience are just as determining, and indeed are
inseparable from economy or policy, they are mutually parts of one another. So, naturally, this political power
and this economy could not be „new”. The fact that some of the members of the Bolshevik guard wound up by
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