Abstract
The article follows changes in the paradigms and institutional context of Hungarian sociology of social structure, as formed by Hungary’s double dependence on Soviet and Western cores throughout the second part of the twentieth century. It demonstrates that as a result of those changes, the concept of class has been absent from the sociology of social structure from the early 1970s on. Thinking towards a possible reconstruction of twentieth-century Hungarian social formation in a class-sensitive perspective embedded in the dynamics of the capitalist world system, we point at a typical effect of global hierarchies on the description of local social structure: the tendency to identify a “double structure” in local society. This gesture places various characteristics of local society on two different ontological levels—for example, Western versus Eastern, future versus past. We argue that in order to conceive of local social formation as part of an integrated global history, this internalized effect of global hierarchies needs to be transcended.
In the early communist years after 1949 in Hungary, sociology was a forbidden discipline. All discussion of society was expected to follow an obligatory script based on the official Stalinist view of the nature of socialist society, according to which in socialism no antagonism between social groups existed any more, and the difference between social groups decreased. When the authorities permitted the institutional reestablishment of sociology in 1963, sociologists started to criticize the Stalinist view of social structure. One strain of criticism focused on demonstrating the existence of inequality and social stratification within socialism. In the early 1970s, another stream of criticism produced a class-based view of structure and power in socialist Hungary. Censorship and repression soon put it to a halt, leaving the sociology of social structure stripped of a critical class perspective.
From the mid-1970s on, sociology took refuge behind the lines of professional, anti-ideological stratification research. Since the practice was compatible with Western academia, it had no need to rearticulate itself at the time of regime change. During Hungary’s transition to capitalism, Hungarian sociologists were happy finally to cast away the wooden language of ideological Stalinist Marxism, and engage in what they saw as proper Western social science. Because of these dynamics, the perspective of class has not been an integral part of the local sociological understanding of Hungary’s transition and postsocialist development.
In the following pages, we explore Hungarian research on social structure during state socialism and then look at the types of analyses that have emerged since the beginning of the transformation. We then offer suggestions for elements of a possible class-based analysis of the period. We argue that there is a long tradition in Hungarian sociology of what we call “doubling” that needs to be theoretically transcended. “Doubling” refers to the division of Hungary’s social structure into two different models of structuration, usually labeled Western and Eastern. This appears to be an epistemological effect of Hungary’s semi-peripheral geopolitical position, with its long-term double dependence on Soviet and Western cores. We, together with the Hungarian Working Group for Public Sociology Helyzet, of which we are part, aim to consider class relations in postsocialist Hungarian society from a global point of view. 1 We argue that social relations in Hungary need to be understood within a framework of globally interacting modes of production and their structuring effects, as is done in the broadly understood practice of world-systems analysis.
In our presentation of Hungarian sociology of social structure, we rely on Márk Áron Éber’s work on the recent history of the discipline. 2 In the formulation of our approach, regarding the application of a global perspective to a class analysis of Hungarian society, we rely on a few Hungarian sociologists who have dealt with local structure from similar perspectives, especially József Böröcz, Attila Melegh, Erzsébet Szalai, and Iván Szelényi. 3
Confronting Stalinist Doctrine
The sovietization of Hungary after 1949 rendered the academic study of society impossible. With sociology declared a “bourgeois pseudo-science” and its workshops disbanded, those writing about society were obliged to accept Stalin’s model, according to which socialist society is made up of “two classes and a stratum”—the former consisting of the industrial labor force and the peasantry in agricultural co-operatives, and the latter the intelligentsia, seen as a “stratum” separate from the class structure. Classes officially still existed, but they were declared to be “non-antagonistic”: the nationalization of property meant that class differences and social inequalities would now systematically diminish.
After Hungarian sociology was restored as an academic discipline in 1963, researchers began to challenge this normative model. The first strain of criticism, represented mainly by Zsuzsa Ferge and András Hegedüs, relied on demonstrating the existence of inequalities within socialist society. Hegedüs 4 argued that Stalin’s picture of society maintained Marx’s definition of class as based on property, and was thus no longer relevant in conditions of state property and state planning. But if classes no longer existed, Hegedüs argued, inequalities certainly did, rooted not in property but in the place occupied in the production process and the distribution of labor. In 1969, Zsuzsa Ferge, later to become the most influential figure of empirical stratification research, produced an empirical study in which she demonstrated that the distribution of social inequalities could better be explained by a stratification model based on work-type groups, than by using the Stalinist model of “two classes and a stratum.” 5
This stream of criticism replaced the ideological Stalinist notion of (friendly) classes with a notion of stratification that allowed for empirical analysis of existing social inequalities. It located contemporary social inequalities in the process of production and the different types of labor carried out by different groups. However, this replacement of “class” with “stratification” also helped to eradicate class analysis from Hungarian sociology in the long term.
In the early 1970s, another, class-based strain of criticism against the Stalinist view emerged, influenced by the revisionist Marxism popular in Eastern Europe at the time, as well as by Milovan Djilas’s “new class” theory. 6 György Konrád and Iván Szelényi, 7 as well as Tamás Kolosi, 8 sought to revive a Marxian class analysis based on relationships to production rather than to ownership. How are certain groups able to acquire the surplus value produced by society? they asked. Their answer: class differences can also be created by state redistribution.
In The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, Konrád and Szelényi argued that a new class of intellectuals was evolving in state socialist society. Bringing together the ruling party bureaucratic group (Stand) with technocratic and humanistic intellectuals, this class propagated redistribution over market allocation, and organized themselves as the desired “teleological redistributors.” According to the authors, this new class in the making was becoming the dominant class in state socialism, in conflict with the class involved in direct production. It enjoyed systematic advantages and privileges, and received a larger part of the surplus product than the workers who actually produced the surplus.
Tamás Kolosi, another young sociologist of the time, proposed that instead of looking at synchronic differences in social positions and their stratification, a real analysis of social structure should look at relationships of production and define the basic dynamics that produce the class structure of a society. 9 To lay the basis for such an analysis, he proposed to look first at the social structures of production, then at the structures of interest relations built on them, and last, at the political relations that express these interests. 10 As an employee of the sociological research institute of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, he did not venture to take this project to its logical conclusion. Had he done so, he probably would have ended with something similar to Milovan Djilas’s “new class” theory, a critique that Kolosi quoted, but with due distance.
By the mid-1970s, the class-based stream of criticism against Stalinist doctrine was muted by political force. The possibility of class analysis based on Marxian logic, rather than on Stalinist orthodoxy, was essentially annulled by a party decision. The party once again made the application of the “two classes and a stratum” model compulsory. Empirical research was expected to show decreasing differences between the two classes.
Konrad could not continue his career as a sociologist in Hungary, Szelényi was expelled from the country, and Kolosi was persuaded to refrain from his critical class analysis. Kolosi and the Institute for Social Sciences of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party adapted to political expectations, and to the doctrine of “rapprochement between the social classes.” Kolosi himself now spoke more about “stratification” than class. 11 Yielding to official pressure for empirical demonstration of “rapprochement between the classes,” Kolosi referred to Gerhard Lenski and started writing about growing status inconsistency. 12
After his forced departure from the country, Szelényi developed an international career, first in Australia, then in the United States. Regaining his Hungarian passport in 1982, well before the collapse of the regime, he embarked on new research in Hungarian villages. Encountering “socialist entrepreneurs” in rural Hungary, Szelényi hypothesized the emergence of a unique Eastern European process of socialist embourgeoisement. 13 Beyond the official state sector of production, he saw, production for profit was gaining more and more ground, especially in agriculture. Like other Hungarian sociologists at the time, 14 he set up a double model of Hungarian society: beside the official structure, a second social structure was evolving, operating according to quasi-market mechanisms instead of redistribution, and making a limited accumulation of capital possible for the peasant and worker strata. Szelényi thus believed that some marketization might reduce inequality under socialism, a theory he would be able to test soon enough.
From Socialism to Capitalism
As a reaction to party pressure, from the mid-1970s on, class-based analysis beyond (or against) the official Stalinist view was halted, and the main approach in social structure research remained that of stratification. Hungarian sociology retreated behind the lines of anti-ideological methodological and empirical professionalism, compatible with Western standards. When sociology recommenced analysis after 1990, the situation did not raise the necessity of a theoretical reconsideration in the face of Western science. In this context, class was understood as a sociologically irrelevant ideological constraint, from which sociology could finally free itself. At the time of the regime change, Hungarian sociologists understood class as a notion of ideological Stalinist Marxism, something opposed to both empirical and intellectual questioning. This perception remained dominant throughout the years of postsocialism, and hindered the birth of a class-based analysis of the transition.
Three research projects of postcommunist transition provide an important empirical base for a possible class-based reconstruction of the transformation research into the continuity of state socialist elites into the capitalist period; former elite control over privatized property; and the role of socialist-era informal networks in the formation of new political and economic structures. Yet these problematics were not embedded in an overarching analysis of how the transformation of the mode of production led to a transformation in social power relations. Many dealt with the transformation as pieces of a puzzle that had already been solved in the West. The dominant narrative of “catching up” with the West tended to erase concern with contemporary social conflicts. With few exceptions, Hungarian researchers did not connect their descriptions of restructuration processes within Hungarian society to the wider global processes that set the circumstances for inner restructuration.
Theories of the New Elite
Who constituted the new postcommunist elite? In an influential early intervention, Elemér Hankiss advanced the concept of a “grand coalition,” according to which the old elite (political and bureaucratic leaders, company managers, and big socialist entrepreneurs) had “converted” their power into new leadership positions. 15 A number of investigations refined that theory.
Szelényi and Szelényi 16 demonstrated the continuity of old elites, plus an influx of second- and third-level functionaries into new positions constituted by the decentralization of the economy. They found greater circulation among political and cultural elites, as figures of the democratic opposition entered political and institutional positions. These results were consistent with Kolosi’s theory of “the revolution of secondary executives,” implying the emergence into the limelight of a younger generation of second- and third-level socialist leaders. 17 Contradicting hopes expressed by Szelényi in his 1988 book that the socialist-era entrepreneurs would become the new economic elite, members of the socialist second economy did not enter that elite in significant numbers. József Böröcz and Ákos Róna-Tas showed that the new elite typically came from the privatized state sector, and not from the second economy. 18 Among the significant factors contributing to entry into the new elite, they pointed to company ownership in one’s family before 1948, high family education levels before 1948, one’s own professional education, a managerial position in a socialist company, and Party membership before 1989.
Based on her research into the elites of the market reform era of state socialism, Erzsébet Szalai proposed the idea that in the 1980s, a coalition was forged between the young Kádárist economic technocracy working in state institutions and the technocratic managers of late socialist-era companies. By the end of the decade, young technocrats supported economic liberalism and Kádárist company leaders became interested in privatization. Writing in 1989, Szalai warned that if such a coalition was to define the path of economic transformation, it would be to the detriment of wider social interests. 19
In 1996, in their theory of “managerial capitalism,” Szelényi with co-authors Townsley and Eyal argued that what Szalai feared is basically what happened. 20 They claimed that in postsocialist transformation, the major stakes of economic power lay not in property but in the right of disposition, exercised by companies, state banks, and the state privatization agency, together forming intricate structures of cross-possession. For the same property system, David Stark coined the term “recombinant property.” 21 In this system, liabilities and deficits become a burden borne by the state, while profitable branches went into private hands. 22
Regarding both elite reproduction and privatization, a central element of investigation has been the survival of Kádárist informal networks. Informality became a key explicatory term in the sociological literature of postsocialist transition.
Before researchers turned to informality in the early 1990s, a strong empirical literature on Kádárist informality had been produced at the Financial Research Institute within the Ministry of Finance in the 1970s and 1980s. It concluded that the effectiveness of market socialism had been hijacked by the bargaining power of large companies within state–company networks. The political consequence of the problem, they said, was a failure of interest inclusion. 23 The Ministry of Finance closed the Institute in 1987 for its criticism. Yet in a curious shift, oddly symbolic of the new era, the Institute soon started anew as a private company, selling its intimate knowledge of state-company networks to managers of state companies, as advice for their privatization plans. 24
József Böröcz 25 also spoke of informality as a general mechanism shaping the transformation. He argued that as the force of state redistributive power declined after 1989, old informal networks acted as in a vacuum, defining the new economic structure before market normativity could take hold. 26 Findings of Ágnes Czakó and Endre Sik 27 regarding agrarian cooperative leaders and Judit Bodnár on housing privatization in Budapest 28 confirmed the decisive power of pre-1989 informal networks in privatization.
By the end of the 1990s, researchers argued that the theories of managerial capitalism and recombinant property no longer applied. 29 The process of privatization had largely ended, with majority foreign ownership and the establishment of a class of local proprietors. Fractions of the political elite became indebted to groups of the economic elite through party and campaign financing. 30 In return, large entrepreneurs and companies close to political parties could expect ample reward through state contracts. In the terms of Balázs Vedres and David Stark, a new type of “political capitalism” took shape, based on two competing blocks of co-operation between private businesses and the two leading political parties. Stratification research demonstrated growing inequalities, consolidation of property, the crystallization of status, and a closure of social mobility. 31
Towards a World-Systems Analysis of Hungarian Society
With few exceptions, 32 Hungarian sociology of social structure has concentrated on the level of the nation-state, in a comparative perspective that takes Western core countries as universal models. We think Hungarian social structure can be better understood as being shaped by Hungary’s position within global economic and political power relations. From the end of the Wallersteinian “long sixteenth century” (about 1450–1650) through the middle of the twentieth century, Hungary belonged to the semiperiphery of Western-centered capitalism. Between 1949 and 1989, it found itself in a position of double dependency on the Soviet Union and the Capitalist Bloc—from 1949, dependent on a Communist Bloc permeated by and under constant pressure from global economic and military competition, and from the 1970s, directly dependent on international loans from the capitalist world. 33 After 1989, Hungary was fully re-embedded in a Western-centered capitalist world, in a dependent position. 34 These relationships set the conditions for the development of local relations of production and social structure. For a class analysis of Hungarian society, the development of elites, redistribution, informality, and inequality produced in a nation-state framework, need to be understood in light of these global broader economic and political processes.
There is, moreover, a general feature of Hungarian sociological thought that, in our view, needs to be transcended. This is the tradition of “double structure.” In the context of interwar capitalist modernization, Ferenc Erdei spoke of the coexistence of a modernizing, capitalist society and a historical feudal society. 35 Later, researchers into market socialism differentiated between the official redistributive system of state socialism and a parallel structuring effect of the second economy. 36 They created models that expressed the double structure in a graphic manner, such as the L-model of Kolosi or the “double pyramid” model of Szelényi, where the two arms of the L or the two pyramids represented different structures resulting from two different structuring principles. 37 In the context of postsocialism, the duality of Western-type modernization and postsocialist backwardness has been a recurring and powerful theme of transitological inquiry.
One of us has previously argued 38 that the continuous gesture of doubling in Hungarian sociology comes from looking at Hungarian society through contemporaneous universally dominant models of social structure, and using sociological tools defined to reproduce those models. Thus, society as the object of inquiry is constantly divided into two, according to qualities that confirm the given model and qualities that don’t—the latter typically described as backward in time, and less worthy in quality. 39
We suggest that without the normative perspective of “doubling,” findings described as part of contradictory “double” structures would turn out to be interconnected elements of the same social reality. “Feudal” and “capitalist” structures before World War II would appear as functions and effects of Hungary’s historical development in a semi-peripheral position. The market in state socialism, or the “second economy,” would appear as a specific tool of the state socialist economy in conditions of global crisis and dual dependence. Contemporary “western” or “nationalistic” political projects of postsocialism, meanwhile, would appear as interconnected pursuits of various elite fractions in a context of heavy dependence on the West.
We see the sociological habit of “doubling” as an epistemological internalization of Hungary’s context of power relations, where global hierarchies act to immobilize local self-reflection through the power of unquestionable and universalized dominant models. In this case, dominant models of description hide from view the actual articulations of local social structures with their wider context. As Attila Melegh suggests, the hierarchical differentiation of “eastern” versus “western” traits, dominant throughout Hungary’s semi-peripheral modernization, was substituted with the discourse of competing modernizations (capitalist vs. socialist) during the early communist era, but returned as a trope at the time of socialist marketizing reforms, and regained hegemonic status with postcommunist regime change. 40 Up to the present day, the semi-periphery continues to be described as an imperfect center. We find the reformulation of such epistemological effects of global hierarchies on social structure research essential. For a relevant analysis of power relations in Hungary, Hungarian sociology would need to cease to act out such effects of power relations and start to analyze them instead.
A reconsideration of “doubling” as an epistemological distortion caused by the internalization of geopolitical hierarchy is topical also because it plays a central role in contemporary symbolic political identification in Hungary. References to the dual nature of Hungarian society are not specific to sociology, but are also typical of public discourses, implying, at their extreme, the existence of “two Hungarys.”
Starting in the 1990s, and continuing to the present, Hungarian political life has been politically divided between a liberal and a nationalist camp. Róbert Angelusz and Róbert Tardos have identified two crystallized blocs of constituencies based solely on these symbolic identifications and informal ties, unconnected to social status. 41 Hungary’s “left-right” (i.e., west-east, liberal-nationalist) division functions as the most dominant symbolic resource of politics up to the present day.
An emerging English-language literature increasingly addresses this symbolic fracture in terms of class relations and global power structures. For example, following David Ost’s argument attributing postcommunist Poland’s rightward turn to Solidarity’s reluctance to articulate growing class grievances, Don Kalb, Gábor Halmai, and Eszter Bartha connect the rise of neonationalism in Hungary to economic grievances brought about by the regime change. 42 Zsuzsa Gille argues that the hierarchical economic relationship between eastern and western Europe after 1990 was accompanied by a normative European discourse of recognition that favored liberal cosmopolitanism and downgraded engagement in national interests. 43 Economic subordination coupled with symbolic attacks on national worth easily resulted in the conclusion that “the nation is under attack.” As all this suggests, a social knowledge that can see both poles of this symbolic division as elements of the same position, embedded in a wider context of global relationships, will be essential not only for future sociological reflection, but also for any local emancipatory project.
Conclusion
Our approach is to look at the socialist and postsocialist periods from the perspective of transformations in the mode of production and in power relations, with developments in Hungary seen as local instances of global processes. From this perspective, previous Hungarian research on social structure is not just valuable and informative, it is also itself a historical artifact that bears the mark of the processes we wish to study. It shows the mechanisms of knowledge production as themselves subjected to a double subordination—to Soviet-type socialism and western-led transition to capitalism. It shows local intellectual critical agency contained by the premises set by these forces. It is in this context that we interpret the turn towards professional stratification research, and the continued rejection of class analysis. After class-based criticisms of socialism were stifled by the orthodox Stalinist notion of class structure in the 1970s, Hungarian sociology retreated behind the lines of professional stratification research and distanced itself from the notion of class. Ever since, sociologists have stigmatized “class” as part of Stalinist orthodoxy. We hold that the notion of class is necessary to understand Hungary’s new formal integration into the capitalist world-economy, as well as its long-term embeddedness in world-system processes. However, our aim in this analysis is not to praise or condemn our intellectual predecessors. Our aim is to understand their position—and ours—in a wider context.