Hungarian mini-purge

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The conference of the which took place last week was a slightly more dignified affair than the Polish CP conference a month earlier.

At least the Prime Minister turned up-which was more than could be said for his Polish counterpart.

But, like the Polish party congress, the Hungarian one echoed with evidence of the failure of the bureaucracy's economic plans and the resulting economic hardships which face the masses.

And, like the Polish congress, the Hungarian one ended in the classic Stalinist response to political problemsa purge.

After criticisms from Party Secretary Janos Kadar (installed in power by Soviet tanks during the workers' uprising of 1956), the Prime Minister Gyoergy Lazar, was obliged to make a remarkably self-critical speech about the economy.

He admitted that the objectives of the present S-year on economic growth, prodi ctivity and real wages. had not been fulfilled.

Energy crisis

Like his capitalist counterparts he tried to draw a veil over the real causes of these failures by blaming it all on the "energy crisis".

And his proposed solutions to the problem sounded very similar as well-"to make profitable or eliminate loss-making production" to increase productivity and reinforce discipline in the factories, to "regroup" the workforce (meaning create redundancies), to end "egalitarianism" in salaries and increase differentials as an "incentive"

"We must get rid," Kadar said in hiş preliminary report to the Congress, "of this false conception of socialism: security and absolute egalitarianism cannot be priority imperatives".

Kadar's novel conception of a "socialism" which involves the end of job security and the pursuit. . of profit is spuriously attributed to Lenin, who "always said we had to reach the same level of efficiency of the capitalist countries".

The Hungarian bureaucracy's "taking account of just criticism" and the "very open exposure to public opinion of the problems and difficulties" was all much more beautifully stage managed than it had been in Warsaw.

After Lazar's speech, Kadar congratulated him on all the self-criticism. • Then came the elections to the leadership. A few heads rolled -just to show that the wasn"t quite perfect.

But even those demoted stayed on the Central Committee, so despite their mistakes they won't lose all their privileges.

This whole procedure parallels recent developments in a series of the deformed workers states in recent months-in Poland, in Cuba and in Vietnam.

It reflects widespread and growing opposition among workers in the Stalinist-ruled states to economic hardship and austerity and to bureaucratic privilege.

The bureaucracies are forced to recognise this through harmless but widely publicised purges of a section of the leadership along with a great orgy of "self-criticism"

But this is a purely demagogic exercise.

Because when the "self-criticism" is examined it in fact turns out to be criticism of something or someone elsepartly of the economic problems imported from the capitalist countries, but most of all criticism of the working class for being unproductive and undisciplined.

"Self" criticism therefore is an expression of the enmity which exists between the working class and the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy that feeds off and shackles the nationalised property relations in the deformed workers states. words coupled with a refusal to organise any concerted militant action against it.

While the CP is refusing to organise strike action, farmworkers in some parts of the Alentejo have both taken strike action and organised demonstrations outside the usual framework of the CP and the unions which it dominates.

This important movement, however, remains in a rather spontaneous form and has not developed a consistent leadership.

This means that arch-opportunist "left" General Otelo de Carvalho was able to take advantage of the vacuum of leadership to make demagogic calls for the arming of the workers and for a mass march on Lisbon.

The frustration of the working class is now appearing not only in the Alentejo but in the rest of the country and other sectors of the economy as well.

Iwo weeks ago railway workers staged a two-day strike in support of a wage claim-and they have made threats of further strikes.

Other workers in the public sector, especially transport and the state-owned newspapers, are pressing similar claims against a government which is extremely