The author who was involved personally in the cultural policy of the Kadar-era, linking to the writings carried by our paper's previous issue, tries to pro­vide an objective analysis of that cultural policy. Proceeding from sub-era to sub-era he shows that it was characterised by successive waves. He calls attention to the asynchronity of the policy as a whole and cultural po­licy and the tensions stemming in the role of culture of having been a valve. He points out that when evaluating the period, it is impossible to think in black and white terms: the results and regressions were inseparable in the cultural performance of the age. He makes an attempt to evaluate the role played by György Aczél (and to some extent of Janos Kadar) and discus­ses those features of the age in the field of culture which led to the collapse and the preparations for the change of system ending the Kadar-era.

The authors analyse two types of the concrete and broad ranging self-go­vernment initiatives in Spain: the system of cooperatives and the "partner­ship owners". They describe the structure in which these work, the scopes of authority and especially the possibilities they provide for the workers to acquire practice in the management of affairs through these forms of parti­cipation.

The author provides a portrait of the somewhat forgotten left wing, social democratic leader, Pal Justus. Justus who was sentenced to life imprison­ment by Rákosi, criticised the then policy of the Hungarian Communist Party from the left, from a basis of principles of consistent, Marxist principles. By presenting Justus's main ideas of principle, the author warns that social de­mocracy does not only contain the social democratic right, the revision of the Marxist concepts but – in a significant trend – also the consistent re­presentation of exactly these concepts. A topical message of Justus is that social democracy is not one single ideal: the bourgeois and the so­cialist ideas of democracy represent two rival concepts.