Nobody said there weren't contradictions in Hungary. What was said is that the CIA was actively exploiting these contradictions to foment a counter revolution. And this precisely the formula that has been used since. And of course, history shows us how these spontaneous worker councils work out in practice. Also, somebody whitewashing western imperialism by using disingenuous arguments is not my comrade. People like you are the reason the west is where it is today. You reject practical ways of combating capitalism while peddling Utopian snake oil.

I realize that continuing this is pointless but I'll just suggest that you attack the idea and not the person next time.

I suggest you work on your reading comprehension because I addressed your idea.

No you didn't. You think the Hungarian Revolution was a counter-revolution initiated by bourgeois reactionaries funded by the CIA, with no popular support. I think it was an uprising initiated by students that then became a massive proletarian revolution against the repression of the Rákosi government. You didn't "address" this disparity. You just insulted me.

The book you cited doesn't really talk about the revolution itself, so I have to infer that the author thinks that the psychological warfare waged by the West against the Warsaw Pact countries fooled the revolutionaries into revolting against their government because it convinced them that communism was bad. Again, although the CIA was present, I don't accept this as the primary motivation for the revolution.

It's not what I think, it's what documents released by the CIA say. You're the one who keeps pretending that it was some organic worker movement. Meanwhile, the book describes with numerous examples, of how these reactionaries are groomed and used by the west. It's obvious that you're going to continue believing whatever you need to believe, so there's really no point continuing the discussion.

That's what's so baffling to me. If you read any history, e.g. the one I linked, you can also try the numerous ones on marxists.org, even wikipedia, honestly pick your source on any part of the political spectrum, you find out that there was a student movement, followed by mass protests, strikes at factories followed by a general strike, the Red Army was kicked out, a provisional worker's council committee was established that was democratically elected by workers, then the Red Army came back in force and ended it, after which there were more strikes and mass mobilizations that were repressed by the Soviet military and the Kádár government. There are many accounts of revolutionaries clarifying that they didn't want to return to capitalism, they just wanted the Red Army out so that they could build what they referred to as real socialism.

I'm well aware that Radio Free Europe was propagandizing throughout the 1950s, there were leaflet drops, and the CIA document shows a relationship with Béla Király after the revolution, when they sponsored his organization. The Artemov book on page 36-38 talks about the information warfare waged on Hungary by the West but it doesn't give an account of what actually happened.

The idea that Béla Király was training militants in the mountains with the CIA is also contradicted by the fact that he was imprisonned from 1951 until a few weeks before the revolution. As a sidenote, while he fought on the Axis side, he was later named one of the "Righteous Among Nations" by the World Holocaust Remembrance Center because of his relatively humane treatment of Jewish prisoners.

Anyway I just don't see the weight of historical evidence on the side of "reactionary coup", but I guess I should thank you for forcing me to do more research on this. I did learn a lot.

I don't know what's so hard for you here to understand to be honest. Genuine grievances did exist, but they were exploited and fomented artificially by the CIA. Both things happened at the same time. That's exactly how the CIA operates.

The student movement, the factory strikes, the elected workers' councils, all of that is documented. They had real complaints about living conditions. But real anger doesn't mean the uprising wasn't steered and fomented externally. The CIA and Radio Free Europe agitated for unrest, amplified it, and pushed it toward insurrection. They advised insurgents on how to build barricades and fight Soviet troops. They dangled the false hope that the West would intervene. Dulles saying "we encouraged them but we cannot save them, the propaganda value was enough" tells you everything you need to know about this uprising. They never intended to help, but they wanted a spectacle for anti-communist propaganda and an opening for intelligence expansion, so they helped create the conditions for one.

So the question isn't whether grievances were real. It's who exploited them and whose interests they served. The CIA fomented the uprising to advance its own Cold War agenda to manufacture the insurrection. That doesn't negate the legitimacy of the complaints in any way. It just means the uprising itself was not the organic expression of the Hungarian people that you're making it out to be.

As for Béla Király, you're right that the timeline doesn't support him being a CIA plant before the revolution. He was arrested in 1951, sentenced to death in 1952, and only paroled in September 1956. The CIA relationship came after the revolution, when the Hungarian Freedom Fighter Federation was founded in New York in 1957 with Király as its chairman. But none of that actually matters here because the CIA didn't need a single agent inside to steer the uprising. They had Radio Free Europe, they had leaflet drops, they had a whole information warfare apparatus in place, the operation of which is explained in great detail in the book I linked you. They didn't need to train militants in the mountains when they could push people toward insurrection through propaganda.

The weight of historical evidence isn't on the side of a reactionary coup in the sense that the grievances were fake. The uprising itself was exploited and fomented artificially by the CIA. Both things are true at the same time, and the real discontent of Hungarians was used to serve American imperial interests.

When you hear "authoritarian," are you referring to states in general as instruments of authority, specific forms of states, or a specific metric of, say, representation? The reason Marxists say authoritarianism is a meaningless descriptor is because it doesn't analyze what authority actually is in a way that is useful. I believe in a more unitary system of governance with democratic control by the working class. Some may say the democracy bit makes it non-authoritarian, some may say the unitary aspect makes it authoritarian, some may say the fact that it's a state at all makes it authoritarian, and yet these are all equally valid/invalid usages of the term because it isn't based on objectivity.

I think "authoritarian" is a principle of concentration and protection of power in the same way "democracy" is a conceptual term for structured collective guidance and oversight of an operation, and "anarchy" is the principle of maximizing agency of groups and minimizing the ability of any party to wield coercive power, etc.

They're concepts.

My interest isn't in categorizing and ranking nation states, it's in examining and weighing the qualities of different approaches.

When someone says that a term like "authoritarianism" is meaningless, I just don't feel like having an arugment. It's like 'I don't see color' or 'age of consent? I think maturity is what matters.' Alright, have a great day, I'm gonna go over there.

So if it's a concept, but one that cannot be measured or objectively defined, then it loses its functional utility. The group "tankie" is a nebulous but acknowledged group of people that support existing socialist states, ones commonly referred to as "authoritarian" by "non-tankies." Since this is not a measured approach, but instead a principle, this is now a meaningless allegation without someone doing the legwork to prove that unitary worker democracy negatively impacts individual agency beyond any other approach.

To explain the Marxist position, nebulous allegations of "authoritarianism" have no weight because they do not explicitly address distribution of power, class dynamics, etc. All the allegations do is create categories of "authoritarian vs. less/non-authoritarian" that cannot be objectively understood from the allegations alone. This returns us to the idea that "authoritarianism" is meaningless, it isn't a useful term and everyone has different ways of understanding its application to real systems.

I just think the revolution was a legitimate response to these grievances, and the fact that Western propaganda helped to foment it doesn't delegitimize it. The CIA's role doesn't negate the essentially democratic nature of the revolution or the heavy-handed repression carried out by the Soviets. In my opinion your interpretation removes the Hungarians' agency, and they become proxies rather than people fighting for their own political freedom and material conditions. It gives the impression that sending tanks into the streets of Budapest, and later to prevent a worker committee meeting from happening, was ok because Western Imperialism.

First: I don't consider the term "Tankie" nebulous because I only apply it to people who self-identify as such.

Similarly, I don't go around bringing up authoritarianism. When someone else brings it up to defend it, I generally roll my eyes and move along.

Personally, I find this line of reasoning about definitions semantic in the least productive way. It's just Loki's Wager. So with all due respect, I don't wish to debate you. I answered your question in good faith and I'm content to leave it at that.

If you think that restoration of capitalism, which is what they were trying to accomplish was legitimate then there's really nothing else to say to you. And you're entitled to your opinion which conveniently ignores the power of western imperialism and what happened historically when it wasn't countered with force.

I don't think they were trying to restore capitalism. That's kind of what my whole critique hinges on.

The fact that the CIA was associating with them is direct proof that they were.

I think you're running into a problem, though. You may not call anyone a tankie unless they call themselves one, but my point is that the group commonly called tankies does exist. People argue over what the definition of a tankie actually is, but people aren't arguing over what this group is, and that's what we have to work with. Tankies are essentially people that support socialist states, and authoritarianism isn't a particularly useful word in discussing shortcomings or successes of these states. It isn't a meaningful signifier of anything different from capitalist states, because there's little objectivity to its use.

Someone who supports existing socialist states, generally.