“This Market Economy Ruined Us All”
“This Market Economy Ruined Us All”
Workers and Worker Consciousness in Contemporary Hungary
The article seeks to bring class back in the Eastern European academic and social discourse. It introduces two oral history projects in Hungary conducted with blue-collar workers in 2002-2004 and workers of the service sector in 2010. Hungarian workers expressed strong doubts about the change of regimes and the newly established democracy that many did not feel to be theirs. Th ese doubts, however, failed to translate into a criticism of capitalism. Instead, workers spoke of a special, Hungarian model of capitalism, where the government acts as a mediator between the interests of multinational and domestic companies and between the interests of the workers and capitalists. The results help us to explain the ambiguous evaluation of the Kádár-regime. Th e vision of greater social and material equality is confused with a longing for a strong state, order and an autocratic government. The loss of credit of the newly established democracies renders the regime essentially vulnerable similarly to the “workers’ state”, which was not defended by the workers.