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Title: Anarchism in Hungary Author: András Bozóki Date: 2009 Language: en Topics: history, Hungary Source: Bozóki, András. “Anarchism, Hungary.” The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present, edited by Immanuel Ness, vol. 1, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, pp. 127–129.
The anarchist tradition in Hungary survived for almost 40 years from the
1880s to 1919, represented by four different waves. The first involved
an anarchist-influenced radical socialist group led by Ármin Práger and
András Szalay, from 1881 to 1884. These radicals were well acquainted
with the principles, revolutionary rhetoric, and cultivation of the
propaganda of the deed associated with Johann Most, a social democrat
who became an anarchist. The banning of socialist organizations by
Germany’s “exceptional legislation” in 1878 had a direct influence on
Hungarian radicals as a significant number of German socialists and
anarchists settled in Austria and Hungary. By their intermediation, the
radical revolutionary point of view could then recruit many adherents.
The “radical-socialist” group did not reject violent means of struggle
against the system, but it was quickly crushed by the firm intervention
of the government in 1884.
By contrast, the later waves of Hungarian anarchism rejected the use of
terrorism. In the 1890s, the non-violent ideal anarchism represented the
second wave. Philosopher Jenõ Henrik Schmitt was convinced that verbal
persuasion and true Christian moral example were the means to achieve
social transformation. He propagated this approach in his newspapers –
Állam Nélkül (Without State) and Erőszaknélküliség (Non-Violence) – but
failed to influence wider urban circles. However, it did have an impact
on the peasant-based Independent Socialist Party (ISP) led by István
Várkonyi, which later influenced the agrarian-socialist movements of the
late 1890s. The ISP would go on to accept a program of abolition of rule
and state with an ideal of non-violence, but it did not always abide by
this anarchistic principle. Jenő Henrik Schmitt would be remembered more
as a philosopher and prophetic preacher than as an anarchistic
ideologue. He later withdrew from politics and entered the intellectual
world of Gnosticism. Ideal anarchism would remain politically
marginalized, surviving only in religious, messianistic peasants’ sects
until government intervention suppressed harvest strikes and eventually
arrested Várkonyi.
The third wave of anarchism in Hungary came through the rationalist,
solidarity approach of Ervin Batthyány. As the twentieth century began,
Batthyány advocated the labor movement’s theory of class war and
anarchosyndicalism. He edited anarchist newspapers such as Testvériség
(Fraternity) and Társadalmi Forradalom (Social Revolution) in which he
tried to unite anti-systemic forces along anarchist and
anarchosyndicalist ideas. Batthyány also took the idea of revolutionary
education seriously and, in 1905, he founded a school to nurture
critical thinking.
Batthyány and Schmitt were the two most significant figures in the
history of anarchism in Hungary. Both were able to achieve an
intellectual consciousness within a western intellectual tradition.
While Batthyány hailed from English rationalism and Schmitt from German
metaphysics, they were able to share basic principles that were opposed
to rule and politics. Both theorized that the creation of the new moral
world order was not a political question. However, the realities of
their respective movements forced both into active politics and into a
schizophrenic position of theoretical conviction and revolutionary
practice. Both were forced to abandon pure theory through a series of
compromises. Between 1897 and 1899, Schmitt drew near to peasant
socialism and Batthyány, between 1906 and 1908, sought association with
anarchosyndicalism.
The particular features of Hungarian political life, the high salience
of the franchise question, the attacks of the Social Democratic Party,
and the party’s institutional appeal all contributed to the difficulty
of founding an anarchist or anarchosyndicalist movement in Hungary at
the start of the twentieth century. However, in 1919, the Budapest
Anarchist Group emerged around Károly Krausz to become the fourth wave
of Hungarian anarchism. These anarchists, operating legally under the
short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic between March and July 1919,
advocated three distinct paths – critical, revolutionary, and cultural.
The Budapest anarchists’ efforts were anti-parliamentarism,
anti-militarism, direct actions, and the practical questions of the
general strike. Because of limited time and rapid-change politics, the
Budapest anarchists were prevented from developing a theoretical
generalization of their criticism on the contradictory relationship
between anarchism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The pattern of Hungarian anarchism was that it could flourish for
relatively short periods of time. The first wave, having split in the
Hungarian social democratic movement, was linked to the divide within
the German and Austrian movements between 1881 and 1884. In the second
wave, social democracy was incapable of covering the political space of
the emerging radical agrarian movement (1897–8). In the third wave,
Batthyány’s efforts were multiplied by his material sacrifices and the
appeal of French anarchosyndicalism from 1904 to 1910. Finally, in the
fourth case, while the Bolshevik state left a brief opportunity for the
small grou of theoretical anarchists, they were unable to find a social
base in 1919.
These short periods proved to be exceptional in Hungary as a strong
institutional organization of social democracy. Unfortunately, state
repression removed radical socialists in 1884, suppressed the agrarian
movement in 1897–8, and transferred power to the Horthy regime in 1919,
stifling every anarchist initiative in Hungary. The various European
anarchist ideas and movements were confronted with a variety of
geographic, historical, and cultural challenges. In areas such as
Western Europe, where democratic struggles had been established,
anarchist movements were able to find a social base. This was equally
possible in regions where democracy and anarchism were distant from
reality and appeared only on a utopian horizon, as in Russia. Central
Europe, in its transitional flux, seemed only to have democracy within
its grasp. Thus, its immediacy made it difficult for both pre-democratic
and post-democratic anarchism to gain strength. Essentially, the region
imagined a solution that combined the advantages of anarchy and
democracy without the disadvantages of either. While it craved for the
people to hold power, it could not resolve its own disgust with power
itself.
SEE ALSO: Anarchism, Russia ; Hungary, Revolution of 1848 ; Kropotkin,
Peter (1842–1921) ; Socialism
Andersen, A. (1976) Hungary ’56. Detroit: Black & Red.
Bak, J. (1991) Liberty and Socialism: Writings of Libertarian Socialists
in Hungary, 1884–1919 Series. States and Societies in East–Central
Europe: Contributions to Political Thought. Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield.
Bozoki, A. & Sukosd, M. (2005) Anarchism in Hungary: Theory, History,
Legacies. Boulder: East European Monographs.