On Being a Marxist: A Hungarian View

Abstract

The following text represents one of the first major fruits of the revival of samizdat activity and democratic opposition in Hungary since the late 1970s. The text originally appeared in 1978 as part of a collection entitled Marx in the Fourth Decade, which together with Profile (a collection of essays which had been rejected by official publications produced around the same time) marked the first effort at samizdat publication in Hungary. The editor, Andrhs Kovics, circulated a questionnaire on present attitudes towards Marxism among a loose circle of friends who in the 1960s had been caught up in the 'renaissance of hlarxism' in Hungary, an independent current of Marxist thinking which based itself on a revival of interest in the early work of Lukixcs, and whose ideas bore certain afinities to those of both the Western New Left and Czechoslovak democratic socialism. The contributors were asked to consider both their personal relationship to Marxism and its wider contemporary significance. As the editor's letter began, 'The thinking of the great majority of our generation was determined in some form or other by Marxism'. The second main question was; 'How far is or is not Marxism appropriate in Eastern Europe today? The recipients of the questionnaire were asked in addition whether they believed Marxism to be of continued relevance for the left in the West and in the Third World, even if they no longer regarded it as such for Eastern Europe.