Central European Papers 2018, 6(1):115-138 | DOI: 10.25142/cep.2018.006

Working-class protests against the economic reforms of the 1960s in the GDR and Hungary

Eszter BARTHA

Faculty of Humanities, Eötvös Loránd University

The article seeks to interrogate the question of how workers in the GDR and Hungary responded to the economic reforms of the 1960s, when the Communist leadership in both countries sought to implement a policy, which would lead to higher levels of consumption and consumer satisfaction. I chose two factory case studies to answer this question: the case of Carl Zeiss Jena in the GDR and the Hungarian Rába in Győr.

The most important common characteristic of the two case studies is that the period of economic reform spoilt the established political consensus and even within the party there was a search for alternatives. As part of this political struggle, the party widened the social dialogue with the working class. Concerning the nature and content of working-class criticism of the economic reform, I single out three main similarities. Firstly, the working class widely responded to the dialogue that the party initiated: in the reform era workers accepted the party as a conversation partner and a respected political actor. It is important to stress that workers voiced remarkably open and harsh criticisms of the economic reform, which was implemented by the party in both countries, at public forums. This clearly shows that in the reform era the government took the social ‘feedback’ into consideration and the party took a sincere interest in the social dialogue with the working class.

The second common characteristic is the fact that workers addressed not only the social consequences of the economic reform that they held to be harmful for the working class (increasing inequalities between managerial and working-class wages) but also the existing contradictions of the socialist system. This criticism was, however, an essentially left-wing criticism of actually existing socialism; the purpose of the critics was the reform of a socialist system and not the restoration of capitalism. As I document in the article, workers in both countries criticized unjust managerial privileges and increasing social and material inequalities, which we can hardly interpret as longing for a capitalist regime, which produces not less but more inequalities. The documented working-class criticisms rather lead us to conclude that in this era workers were open to a democratic reform of socialism.

Thirdly, I list the most important common elements of the working-class criticism of the reform in the two countries. In both cases anti-reformist attitudes were manifest in working-class communities. East German workers protested against the economic incentives, which decreased average working-class wages; at the same time they also complained that other social strata (intellectuals, managers, self-employed) lived better under socialism than the working class. The Hungarian workers even more vehemently opposed the reform, which in their eyes benefited only the managers and the ‘peasants’. Apart from this criticism, however, workers in both countries spoke of the formality of enterprise democracy and the actual powerlessness of the working class in the state-owned factories. The statement that ‘at these meetings officials and the state leaders speak only, workers never make any comments’ indicates that the East German workers were as much critical of the missing working-class control of the factories as the Hungarians.

Keywords: economic reforms, 1960s, GDR, Hungary, factory case studies, actually existing socialism, welfare dictatorship, working-class criticism

Published: August 30, 2019  Show citation