A Response to Katalin Fábián’s Review Essay

The last issue of Hungarian Studies Review featured a review essay of two of our books, among others, by Katalin Fábián.1 In this short response, we thank the author for her thorough and insightful review and share our own observations that may help readers when they consider reading our volumes.We are very honored that Fábián reviewed our volumes among the six or seven books selected for review. Although our respective books were published in two separate book series—Magyarország függő fejlődése: Függőség és felzárkózás globális történeti perspektívában [Hungary’s dependent development: dependency and catching-up in a global historical perspective] by Tamás Gerőcs in the Napvilág’s Helyzet series (2021) and Márk Éber’s A csepp: A félperifériás magyar társadalom osztályszerkezete [The drop: the class structure of the semi-peripheral Hungarian society] in the Social Theory Workshop series, also published by Napvilág (2020)—we have been working together quite intensively in the Budapest-based Working Group for Public Sociology “Helyzet” (Helyzet Műhely) since at least 2011. Fábián has therefore rightly noted in her review that the framework of the two volumes, something that we may call a demand-side explanation, is very similar.It is important to note, however, that the objective of our books was somewhat different from what the reviewer attributed to them. Neither was aimed at explaining the emergence of the Orbán regime in Hungary per se (the topic indicated by the subtitle of Fábián’s review essay, “Explanations for the Consolidation of the Hungarian Authoritarian Turn after 2010”). A csepp was primarily intended as a contribution to the discussion around social stratification and class structure in Hungary, while Magyarország függő fejlődése was offered as a contribution to the discussion on uneven, semi-peripheral, dependent development of the East-Central European region, focusing on Hungarian postsocialist transition from a global historical perspective. Both of our approaches are informed by world-systems analysis and (even more broadly) by that of historical and critical global political economy; indeed, we are grounded in a more economic, or more precisely, productionist perspective which draws from the tradition of critical Marxist scholarship.Both books touch upon the emergence of the Orbán regime from a longue durée standpoint; thus our discussions start much before the first Orbán government took power. However, the ambitions of our books are somewhat different from those solely focusing on the emergence and endurance of the Orbán governments. One major divergence is that we are also much more critical of the period before 2010 than most social scientists who critically analyze the Orbán regime. Our longue durée analysis of these historical processes not only deals with the narrowly defined polity but also the global embeddedness of the regime in which production and social processes are intertwined.In 2019 we co-authored an in-depth essay, entitled “2008–2018: Crisis and Hegemony in Hungary,” about the Orbán regime with fellow members of the Helyzet group in a thematic issue of the journal Fordulat (available only in Hungarian).2 This was one of the most elaborate and concerted efforts of our group to describe the Orbán regime from the world-systems point of view. In our analysis we relied on the classic writings of Robert Brenner, Giovanni Arrighi, Antonio Gramsci, and the neo-Gramscian international relations orientation, describing a “local, semi-peripheral hegemony” emerging in the context of systemic cycles of accumulation of capital, including the long downturn and crisis of American hegemony.3 We therefore did not want to narrow our focus to the Hungarian state, let alone Orbán’s governments, as a case study; however, both A csepp and Magyarország függő fejlődése do also give insights into the birth and operation of the regime.We would also like to say a few words about the Working Group for Public Sociology “Helyzet” (Helyzet Műhely), which is far from being a group consisting of only the two of us. In fact, since it started in 2011, many have joined, with the current membership encompassing 38 scholar-activists and a smaller group of alumni. Although our research topics and analyses are diverse, we naturally cooperate in a well-defined division of labor, helping us create a more holistic framework that no single scholar could devise on their own. In fact, the group’s mission since the beginning has been the production and dissemination of critical knowledge outside of the competitive and hierarchical environment of academia—that is what we understand public sociology to be. Our premise is that well-informed and useful (for social purposes) critical knowledge must spring from a collaborative effort.As a result, many important issues mentioned by Fábián are dealt with not only by the two of us but by comrades in our collective. The Helyzet Műhely is a research collective whose series of publications, written jointly or separately by collective members, build on each other’s work in many respects. Our analytical perspective is rather complex, but it is not possible to represent all aspects at once in each of our products; however, by linking them together with everyone’s contribution, we hope to come closer to a more holistic understanding of our reality in East-Central Europe. A good illustration of our broad perspective is a paper written by members of Helyzet entitled “A rendszerváltozás utáni magyar feminista mozgalom globális, történeti perspektívából” [The Hungarian feminist movement after the regime change from a global and historical perspective], which repeatedly cites Fábián’s own work.4We would also like to highlight the question of collaboration because, for example, the issue of race in the context of class in a critical political economy perspective does appear in the work of many of our members. For example, the work of our colleague Cecília Kovai (especially her dissertation and later book, A cigány-magyar különbségtétel és a rokonság [The Gypsy—Hungarian distinction and kinship]) is particularly important in this regard.5 Although it does not explore the global color line which is the focus of the American sociological tradition (e.g., W. E. B. DuBois), it does attempt to explore the intersections of structure and ethnicity in the East-Central European context. Moreover, following the work of Ivan Kalmar, József Böröcz, Angéla Kóczé, and Anibal Quijano among many others, we acknowledge the importance of race in social analysis, and we will continue to pay attention to this, not only with regard to identity politics but also as a crucial building block in social structures.Let us give a few more responses to specific questions either regarding A csepp or Magyarország függő fejlődése.“His ideological orientation is explicit in wanting to develop ‘sociological creativity’ and raise class awareness and consciousness,” Fábián states (179). A csepp refers to C. Wright Mills’s classic The Sociological Imagination that introduced the notion of sociological imagination and its development. There is indeed both a professional and political side to this. The professional-scientific-academic side is that we must be able to imagine society as a reality organized by relations of production, capital, and class; the political-ideological side is that we must also be able to imagine its changeability. There is indeed a creative side to this endeavor as well, but in the book, emphasis was placed more on the question of imagination than creativity.“Recognizing the many strengths Éber’s book manifests, the many highly relevant observations in this volume could have strengthened the text’s conclusion, had not restraint (or a well-grounded fear of being targeted as a critic of the regime) prevailed,” the reviewer writes (179). We see a different reason why the book’s critique of the Orbán regime has not been sharper. Within the perspective developed in the book, the Orbán regime is a peculiarly Eastern European, semi-peripheral, and postsocialist product, which, according to our assessment, emerged as a result of the decline of US global hegemony. We are becoming increasingly convinced that “racial capitalism” actually has an even greater role to play in this phenomenon than it appeared in either A csepp or Magyarország függő fejlődése. In the Helyzet group, we interpret the pre-2010 Hungarian regimes in the context of this global hegemonic decline, and consequently we see the significance of the 2010 elections as representing both continuity and change. Politically-institutionally, there has indeed been an “illiberal turn,” a “democratic backsliding,” after 2008–10; but in our interpretation, this is just another version of semi-peripheral embeddedness in the global system. In other words, we are not only criticizing the post-2010 period, but we have a critical reading of the pre-2010 period as well (constituting historical modes of semi-peripheral embeddedness and dependent development, as explained in both of our books). This may be the reason why the criticism of the Orbán era could seem relatively muted. On the political side, however, we do not spare the pre-2010 era from criticism.“Who are the workers in contemporary Hungary who will read this book and realize their historically dependent economic context and still develop a new social creativity?,” Fábián asks (179). Our answer in this case comes from the Marxist tradition: those who produce surplus value. Even if we take the labor theory of value out of the equation, as Erik Olin Wright does in his game theory-based theory of exploitation (following John Roemer’s theory of exploitation), the answer is those who are exploited and oppressed. In our analysis we discuss cross-class alliance-building and counter-hegemonic forces, including those who are in an intermediate or intermediary position in the relationship between capital and labor (we deliberately avoid and criticize the notion of the so-called middle class). We certainly cannot expect manual laborers to read these books and thereby be awakened to their class consciousness (or, following Karl Kautsky and V. I. Lenin, to “introduce” class consciousness to the working class by having them read a book). We do hope, however, that these books can be of help in the Left’s anticapitalist struggle in Hungary when it comes to strategizing and organizing amid real political struggles.Another relevant topic posed by Fábián is about the significance of world economic integration with regard to the social and political questions discussed in our books. That is, “What is the significance of the contemporary Hungarian government raising havoc for over a decade as the least cooperative member of the EU and transatlantic alliances?” Hard data on economic dependency do not directly explain these questions, but they can explain the dynamics of external dependencies as the consequence of world-economic integration that is also tied to internal class formation, hence our holistic approach with regard to the linkages between external integration and internal social dynamics. As such, the aim of our project is not to explain the Hungarian government’s willingness (or lack thereof) to cooperate with international donors, the EU, or other organizations. Gerőcs has addressed this issue of external dependency and internal social formation more extensively both in his recent book as well as in several other articles. In particular, he has discussed in more detail how the trajectories of different Hungarian governments, and their social, industrial, and class policies, can indeed be related to the structural position of Hungary (i.e., semi-peripheral dependency) in the international division of labor, affecting the social attitude of various domestic actors. This shows that the Hungarian economy’s dependence on foreign capital and on EU transfers, and its tendency to indebtedness, are not at all related to the post-2010 government’s willingness to cooperate or not, but signal a much deeper embeddedness in the global system with a long history of path dependency, going back even before the regime change in 1989. More narrowly, these books do not deal with the evaluation of the post-2010 Hungarian government, and therefore there is no direct answer in either A csepp or in Magyarország függő fejlődése to all the questions raised in the review essay.We would like to thank Fábián for reading and reviewing our books. The attention, diligence, and thoroughness that she dedicated to exploring our research is very rewarding and an honor, and we are grateful for her interest in our work.

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