The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power [antikvár]

PREFACE My friend George Konrád and I wrote this essay between December 1973 and September 1974 in Csobánka, a small working-class commuter village in the Buda Hills, about an hour's drive from Budapest. In it we attempted to sum up the results of the studies we had carried on in Hungary since 1965 and to formulate our conclusions. The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power is not a conventional academic study. It is more an Eastern European samizdat and as such does not always meet the formal standards of Anglo-Saxon scholarship. We did not cite any literature and consistently avoided footnotes. We were writing an Eastern European sociological essay and not a research report in Kremlinology. Our aim was to clarify for ourselves the kind of society we were living in, without any internalized censorship and with due disrespect for all oflBcial ideological taboos, and we decided to publish the unaltered text of the book to document what kind of conclusions social scientists committed both to the cause of socialism and to critical social analysis could draw in 1973-74 in Eastern Europe. In the course of our research we became convinced, little by little, that Eastern European socialism has produced a new system of oppression and exploitation of the working class, and that under the "dictatorship of the proletariat" it is actually the workers who make up the most underprivileged class. We came to realize that the dictatorship of the proletariat is a myth, an ideology which legitimizes the power of an oppressive new social force. We were not Communists, had never joined the party, and did not even think of ourselves as Marxists. But as professional sociologists we felt called upon to examine the functioning of the Eastern European social system from the point of view