Mark Pittaway. The Workers' State

A posthumously published book on labor history, a subject unpopular for decades, must seem at first like a tragedy rather than a groundbreaking academic achievement. Yet Mark Pittaway's The Workers' State is not only a thorough and well-written study of early communist Hungary; it also represents a major contribution to our understanding of that country in particular and of postwar East-Central Europe more generally. Shortly before passing away at the age of thirty-nine, after he had already begun to engage in new, innovative, and promising studies on the history of the Hungary-Austria borderlands during and after World War II, Pittaway completed his manuscript. This book is the result of many years of meticulous research in an impressive number of national, regional, and local archives. It demonstrates the author's analytic skills and his extraordinary ability to relate his seemingly limited study of the micro-politics of local industrial communities to the core problem of the postwar regime: the lack of legitimacy of a state built for the working class and dominated by a party that claimed to represent them. During the 1956 Revolution the party elite was stunned to find out that it was mostly young workers who turned against “their” state. Hundreds of thousands of workers demonstrated in the streets, and some even took up arms to fight the Soviets and Hungarians loyal to them, a decision that resulted in more than 3,000 people killed and tens of thousands escaping to the capitalist West.

Communism · Economic history · Elite · Legitimacy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Tragedy (event) · Working class · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies