My article on the right-wing monopolization of the memory politics of 1956, and on how the left can reclaim and incorporate the democratic socialist legacy of the revolution, was published on the Transform website on 29 October 2026.
The Forgotten Workers’ Revolution of 1956
Sparked on 23 October 1956, the workers’ councils were among the most remarkable institutions of the Hungarian Revolution. Yet their democratic socialist legacy was suppressed under state socialism, marginalised after 1989, and eventually overshadowed by a nationalist and anti-communist interpretation of 1956. This democratic socialist legacy may offer a neglected resource for a European Left in crisis.
The Forgotten Dimension of 1956
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 occupies a central place in European memories of resistance to Soviet domination. Yet one of its most remarkable features has gradually disappeared from political memory: the workers’ councils that emerged in factories and industrial centres across the country. Their historical significance is difficult to overstate. Especially after the Soviet military intervention of 4 November, workers’ councils became some of the most important institutions of social organisation, strike action and political resistance. The Central Workers’ Council of Greater Budapest went far beyond workplace representation and acted as a political negotiating partner of the newly established government of János Kádár. The councils also complicate the conventional interpretation of 1956 as simply an anti-communist national uprising. The revolution was politically heterogeneous, and there was never a single ideology shared by all workers’ councils. Nevertheless, many of their programmes combined demands for national independence and political pluralism with workers’ participation, social ownership and economic self-government. They rejected Stalinist state socialism without necessarily demanding the restoration of capitalism. In this respect, the workers’ councils represented the possibility of a democratic socialism that opposed both bureaucratic party rule and the concentration of economic power outside the control of workers themselves (Lomax 1990). The crucial question raised by the councils was therefore not simply whether socialism should survive. It was who should exercise control over social property and economic decision-making.
The Kádár regime claimed to have restored socialist order and described itself as representing workers’ power. Yet it confronted democratically elected workers’ organisations that rejected the new government’s political legitimacy. The contradiction was fundamental: a state exercising power in the name of the working class had to suppress the autonomous political organisations created by workers themselves. This helps explain why the workers’ councils could not be incorporated into the official memory of the regime. An openly capitalist or conservative opponent could easily be categorised as part of the “counter-revolution”, the term officially used for 1956 for decades. Autonomous socialist workers were much harder to accommodate within this narrative. The problem was not merely that they opposed Soviet intervention. Their existence suggested that socialism, collective ownership and workers’ power could be imagined without the ruling party.
Paradoxically, while the workers’ councils became increasingly difficult to discuss in Hungary, they had an important impact on the Western European Left. Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis interpreted the Hungarian Revolution as much more than a national revolt against Soviet domination. In Socialisme ou Barbarie, Lefort emphasised the workers’ councils as an autonomous political force combining demands for national independence and democracy with workers’ self-management. Castoriadis went further, describing 1956 explicitly as a “proletarian revolution against the bureaucracy” and arguing that the Hungarian workers had spontaneously placed workers’ management of production and the political power of workers’ councils at the centre of their programme.
A Left Without the Workers’ Councils
The democratic transition of 1989 theoretically created an opportunity to reclaim this neglected legacy. This happened only to a limited extent. It would be inaccurate to argue that no left-wing groups after 1989 attempted to preserve the workers’ council tradition. Some intellectual and political circles did so. The more important question is why it never became a constitutive part of the identity of the mainstream Hungarian Left. While the post-1989 Left could incorporate Imre Nagy, the reform communist prime minister executed after the revolution, into its historical narrative, the workers’ councils remained marginal as the traditional culture of working-class politics itself declined (Mark 2006).
There was also a deeper political-economic reason. The workers’ councils raised questions about workplace democracy, workers’ ownership and the social control of economic power precisely when Hungary’s post-socialist elites increasingly embraced privatisation and the construction of a capitalist market economy as the seemingly inevitable path of modernisation. The legacy of the councils therefore posed an uncomfortable challenge not only to the heirs of state socialism but also to the new political order emerging after 1989. What made this legacy particularly inconvenient after 1989 was that it challenged the apparent binary between bureaucratic state ownership and capitalist privatisation. Their legacy suggested that the alternative to bureaucratic state ownership did not necessarily have to be large-scale privatisation. It could also have involved different forms of social ownership, workers’ participation and economic democracy. In this sense, the workers’ council tradition became politically orphaned twice: first under the Kádár regime and then again during the transition to capitalism.
How 1956 Became a Predominantly Right-wing Memory
This does not mean that 1956 was already a right-wing political tradition in 1989. At the moment of democratic transition, several competing legacies coexisted: the reform socialism associated with Imre Nagy, the armed insurgents, the democratic opposition, national independence and the workers’ councils. Over the following decades, however, the balance gradually changed. The political significance of 1956 declined during part of the 1990s before becoming increasingly important again as a source of partisan legitimacy in the 2000s (Csipke 2011). The dominant interpretation increasingly centred on national independence and anti-communism. This interpretation was historically well founded: Soviet domination and the struggle for national sovereignty were clearly central to the revolution. The problem lies not in recognising these dimensions but in allowing them to eclipse others. As the national and anti-communist narrative became dominant, the social content of 1956 became less visible. Workers’ self-government, economic democracy and the possibility of a democratic form of socialism gradually disappeared from the mainstream political memory of the revolution.
After 2010, Viktor Orbán’s government incorporated this interpretation into a much broader state-sponsored politics of memory. The Orbán regime has increasingly presented 1956 through the language of national sovereignty, martyrdom and resistance to external imperial domination (Harms 2017). Workers can certainly appear in this narrative as heroic participants in a national uprising. What is largely absent, however, is the workers’ council as an autonomous political institution and as an expression of economic democracy. The worker as a member of the national community can easily be incorporated into a nationalist narrative. Workers organising political and economic power independently from the state present a much more difficult legacy for a strongly centralised political regime. Yet the Orbán government’s appropriation of 1956 has produced a second contradiction. If the fundamental message of the revolution is the right of a smaller nation to resist imperial domination, Hungary’s increasingly close political relationship with Vladimir Putin’s Russia becomes difficult to reconcile with this historical legacy.
Reclaiming a Democratic Socialist Legacy
The political memory of the workers’ councils can therefore be understood through four interconnected processes: suppression, orphaning, appropriation and contradiction. The Kádár regime could not fully acknowledge them because they undermined its claim to represent workers’ power. The mainstream post-1989 Left failed to make them part of its political identity, partly because of its post-communist origins and partly because of its accommodation with the capitalist transformation. The resulting vacuum helped national and anti-communist interpretations of 1956 become dominant, eventually allowing Fidesz to incorporate the revolution into its own political mythology.
But the workers’ councils remain relevant beyond historical commemoration. They raise questions that have returned to the European Left today: Can political democracy survive without economic democracy? Can collective ownership be imagined beyond the simple opposition between bureaucratic state ownership and private capital? Can national sovereignty be combined with internationalism and a consistent opposition to imperial domination? Reclaiming the workers’ councils does not require turning 1956 into a homogeneous socialist revolution. It requires something more modest, but perhaps more politically important: recognising that the Hungarian Revolution contained democratic and socialist possibilities that state socialism, post-socialist capitalism and nationalist memory politics have each, in different ways, failed to absorb.
References:
Chaulieu, Pierre [Cornelius Castoriadis] (1956–1957): ‘La révolution prolétarienne contre la bureaucratie’, Socialisme ou Barbarie, no. 20, 134–171.
Csipke, Zoltán (2011), ‘The Changing Significance of the 1956 Revolution in Post-Communist Hungary’, Europe-Asia Studies, 63(1), 99–128.
Harms, Victoria (2017), ‘A Tale of Two Revolutions: Hungary’s 1956 and the Un-doing of 1989’, East European Politics and Societies, 31(3), pp. 479–499.
Lefort, Claude (1956–1957): ‘L’insurrection hongroise’, Socialisme ou Barbarie, no. 20, 85–116.
Lomax, Bill (ed.) (1990), Hungarian Workers’ Councils in 1956, Boulder: Social Science Monographs.
Mark, James (2006), ‘Antifascism, the 1956 Revolution and the Politics of Communist Autobiographies in Hungary 1944–2000’, Europe-Asia Studies, 58(8), 1209–1240.
