2025/01/19 by Nathan Lapierre · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Eastern European Communism and Reforms #Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics #Post-Communist Economic and Political Transition
paper · doi:10.29173/cons29555
openalex publication_date 2025/01/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution highlighted the failures of Stalinist policies and violent suppression as a means of establishing legitimacy, prompting the Hungarian government under János Kádár to adopt the New Economic Mechanism (NEM) in 1968. Aimed at revitalizing Hungary’s domestic market and export potential, the NEM replaced rigid Soviet-style central planning with a more flexible, market-conscious system of autonomous enterprises. This study examines the social and economic impacts of the NEM on the Hungarian working class throughout the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on how its implementation eroded working-class power, constructed new forms of class conflict between factory workers and the new managerial elite, and eroded socialist work culture as societal values shifted towards consumerism. Drawing from firsthand accounts, factory surveys, and state records, this study reveals how workers experienced the contradictory repercussions of NEM. Rather than strengthening the working class, as Marxist-Leninist theory would dictate, Kádár’s NEM precipitated wage stagnation, recreated class conflict, and effectively diminished the power of the Hungarian working class. These contradictions, embodied in labor practices and social dynamics, paved the way for the decline of the socialist state and the rise of individualism within the Hungarian workplace and beyond.