From: Joanne Landy <joanne.landy at igc.org> Date: July 16, 2009 10:46:25 AM EDT To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Extraordinary interview with Hungarian ex-dissident
Below is an interview of Gaspar Miklos Tamas by Chris Harman, editor of the British journal International Socialism. Ihttp://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=555&issue=123
It appeared in the journal. --Joanne
Interview: Hungary—“Where we went wrong”Issue: 123 Posted: 24 June 09
GM Tamás, a prominent Hungarian dissident and now professor of philosophy in Budapest, spoke to Chris Harman about developments in Eastern Europe since the fall of Stalinism. This is the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Stalinist regime in Hungary and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is also a year in which the world economic crisis has hit Eastern Europe with devastating effect. You were one of the dissidents before 1989.
The dissident movement here in Hungary was not very large. I was one of the leading figures in it and played a part in the resistance from the end of the 1970s. When I decided to take on the regime fully I was still a left wing person, a libertarian socialist. I and my friends in the dissident movement practically all came from the left and as a body became liberals. Some went quite far in that direction, including myself, others less so. The intellectual and sociological origins of these groups almost everywhere in Eastern Europe had been on the left. Our first quarrel had not been with socialism as such but with the Stalinist regimes.
Two ideological figures here were quite characteristic, János Kis and myself. János Kis was a second generation pupil of György Lukács and produced Marxist works of a high quality (which unfortunately are not generally translated).1 I was less of a Marxist but a libertarian socialist and very much on the left. We all went in a liberal direction, together with our Polish and other brothers and sisters in arms. And by the time we reached the watershed—it was 1988 in Hungary— we were quite committed to a liberal human rights programme. This happened to practically everyone.
Miklós Haraszti, who wrote the book A Worker in a Workers’ State,2 which had a big impact on the left in Britain, went the same way.
Absolutely. He was originally a Guevarist and saw himself as a consistent communist. He is now press freedom commissioner of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and I saw him in a picture of a meeting of “coalition of the willing” types in Slovakia with George W Bush when he visited that country. Haraszti is a fighting liberal as far as press freedom is concerned and a fighting neoconservative as far as social and economic issues are concerned. Eventually I went a different way, but until the mid-1990s I was not different from the rest of my generation.
During more than 15 years of dissidence I was unemployed and lived by doing translations under other people’s names and black-market language teaching work to support myself. I was a dissident intellectual, writing theory, political essays and political journalism in samizdat.3 We did illegal seminars on historical, political, economic and sociological topics. Then from 1986 on I was allowed to teach abroad, in the US, Britain and France, and did some research at Oxford. Beginning in 1988, I participated in the increasingly organised and formalised resistance movement against the regime. I spoke at demonstrations and took an active part in protest actions. There was a flowering of civil society, thousands of new groups, discussion forums and clubs. It was a beautiful time. We didn’t sleep very much—I didn’t sleep much from 1988 to 1992. It was talk, talk, talk, talk among many, many people. It was a period of social imagination out of which nothing much came but it was a moment of perceived and hoped for freedom. I was at the centre of all that, later elected an MP for the Free Democratic Alliance, which was then the party of the dissidents and the second largest party in parliament. It was a liberal party and I was quite on the right wing of it.
“Liberal” in the European rather than the British or North American sense?
Both, actually. It was rather left wing as regards human rights, minority rights, cultural freedom, equal rights for gays and lesbians and so forth—in this respect very much like American liberalism. But economically it was neoconservative. And I, too, proposed a mixture of this kind.