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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • urgenthexagon@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlHow i feel on Lemmy
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    1 year ago

    I am quite certain that there are proportionally more communists in post-socialist countries than in Western countries. According to the results of the “Rendszerváltás 30” public opinion survey conducted in 2020 by Policy Solutions, Závecz Research, and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 52% of the Hungarian population believes that the relative standard of living was better during the Kádár era, while 31% think it was worse. (Page 24) Of course, this doesn’t mean that 52% of the respondents are communists, but the results significantly contradict this meme. Is there any source to support the claim that there is a higher proportion of communists in Western countries compared to post-socialist countries?
    I cannot speak for other countries, but here, the Kádár-era remains popular for many people even to this day, particularly among those who lived during that time.


  • A theoretical question: How do you think social democratic politics could be implemented in a peripheral or semi-peripheral country? In the core countries, it’s evident that successful social democracies are built not only on national resources but also on the exploitation of the periphery and semi-periphery, through which corporations and capitalists generate profits which are then taxed back into the country. So, what would make a social democratic world fairer than other forms of capitalism? There have been attempts to implement social democratic economies in peripheral regions, for instance, the often-mentioned Venezuela and Bolivia are much closer to the Norwegian economic model than to Cuba.
    What could a peripheral social democratic government do at all if, after winning an election, the capitalists would simply withdraw their capital from the country and/or sabotage the government, while using their media to portray every measure taken by the government in a negative light?


  • That was disrespectful, literally no one in Hungary thinks positively of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the oppression of the Habsburg Empire. It was not a coincidence that in 1918 the monarchy was overthrown by revolution and replaced with a people’s republic then with a soviet republic in 1919.


  • I am Hungarian, and it would have made more sense to bring up any other post-socialist country instead. One of the most popular historical leaders of Hungary is János Kádár, who was the one who requested help from the Soviet Union in 1956 after Imre Nagy announced that he would withdraw from the Warsaw Pact.

    Also, at the second parliamentary election after the socialist era, MSZP (one of the successor parties of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, alongside the Hungarian Workers’ Party) campaigned on the promise of democratically restoring all the “good things” (they put it this way) from socialism, which immediately won them all the parliamentary seats that could be won by one party in 1994. Of course, the MSZP did not keep any of their campaign promises and implemented more neoliberal policies with strong austerity (the infamous Bokros package). The then-prime minister, Gyula Horn, also made explicitly anti-strike statements. As a result, there was a significant chance that the still-Marxist Hungarian Workers’ Party would enter parliament in the 1998 parliamentary election. Therefore, the parliamentary parties voted to raise the electoral threshold in common agreement, so that this could not happen.

    TLDR: In Hungary, the assessment of the socialist era is not as black and white as many people think.