The author points out the endogenous ineffectiveness of capitalism that is regarded by mean stream authors as anomalies but from a community viewpoint the "effectiveness" of capitalism gets a different angle. Let's the ball from the dots!
The article is only available in Hungarian.
The first part of the study reviews the Hungarian state socialism's literature on commuters and gives a picture on the way how the official discourse addressed commuting workers. It is important to be noted that urban workers often envied families having income both from industry and agriculture and this split was reinforced by propaganda. Nevertheless a large group of long-time commuters came from the poorest, for whom moving into the cities and taking non-skilled industrial jobs could mean certain positive social mobility. In the second half of the study the author analyses documentaries how they present in the 70s and 80s the poverty and lack of protection of commuters travelling on "black trains" as a social question.
The article is only available in Hungarian.
The article, starting from the debates surrounding the new Hungarian Health Insurance Reform Act (ultimately aiming at the privatisation of the health service) attempts to analyse the destruction of social welfare systems in East Central Europe. While politically endorsing the rearguard fight trying to save the remnants of the welfare state, the author is sceptical concerning their future in the post-Fordist era. The article makes a sharp distinction between the egalitarian, statist (nationalising) and redistributive model on the one hand and the normative concept of ‘socialism' on the other.
The article is only available in Hungarian.
The renowned Sovietologist and labour historian examines the question how the Soviet labour history writing developed in the West, what were the major paradigms of historiography and what direction the research tends now. He concludes that the "golden age" of workers in historiography has ended too; while earlier they were depicted (and celebrated) as heroes of the revolution but the trendy catchword now is "people's impulsiveness"; they are in the end victims of their "own" revolt against oppression. Nonetheless of this pessimistic picture of historiography the author – at the end of his study – describes certain promising research fields which can offer (also) new perspectives to labour history writing.
The current issue of Eszmélet is likely of interest to all of our readers, because it focuses on the fate of workers in East Europe, especially in Hungary, the former Soviet Union and Poland. Many contributions are made to understand the problem why after the working class after the system change was unable to resist the social degradation by capitalist expropriation. The ‘social integration' of the working class was determined by state suppression for decades, almost making impossible to acquire working class consciousness, because this consciousness remained the monopoly of the ‘socialist' state/party. Two articles conduct lessons from the demolition of ‘welfare achievements' – the background of the fate of the working class after the system change – and the ineffectiveness of capitalist use of human, material and natural resources, the parasite character of this system. Within this framework the problem of Roma people gained a particular role, of which ‘anthropological' aspects also addressed.