The 1956 Hungarian counterrevolution and Jacobin's false narrative of a “working-class revolt”

By Nikos Mottas 

Seventy years after the counterrevolutionary events of 1956, Hungary remains a powerful reminder that the struggle between socialism and capitalism does not end with the overthrow of bourgeois power. The restoration of capitalism was not an abstract possibility, nor was the danger of counterrevolution confined to external imperialist intervention. It could also emerge through the exploitation of internal contradictions, political mistakes and the advance of opportunism within the communist movement itself.

Truth and Lies about the 1956 counterrevolution in Hungary

The historical experience of socialist construction in the Soviet Union and the People's Democracies of Europe confirmed that class struggle continues during socialist construction, which means that a counterrevolution is possible. 

 

The attempts to overthrow the workers' power in a number of European countries (counterrevolutionary attempted coup in the GDR in 1953, attempted counterrevolutions in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1980-81) was nothing other than efforts of the defeated bourgeois classes of these countries to retake power. These efforts, as we shall see below, were strongly supported by international imperialism in a multifaceted way.