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Hungary - the rise and fall of the feasible socialism, Nigel Swain
Hungary: The Rise and Fall of Feasible Socialism

Nigel Swain
Verso, 1992 - 264 страница

Why were Hungarians, including those who would be considered radical in the West, happy to see the introduction of a market economy? Why was there no real opposition to the dismantling of socialist achievements like universal free education and health care? Nigel Swain's topical book answers these questions through one of the most thorough analyses to date of a socialist economy in practice and dissolution.
Carefully tracing Hungary's postwar economic history, Swain shows why both Stalinist central planning and 'feasible' market socialism failed. He argues that these failures were caused not by imperfections in the Hungarian model, but by crucial problems inherent in the socialist project itself. Far from a eulogy to free-market capitalism, yet offering a sobering account of the consequences of socialist economic errors--technological backwardness, corruption and declining morale--Hungary will be a major contribution to political and economic debate on the left.

By "feasible socialism" the author means market, as opposed to centrally planned, socialism "with a human face." Originally he intended to explain why the Hungarian version of this model was eminently superior to the Soviet model of a command economy, and what was needed to further enhance it. But then 1989 intervened, and as someone who believed in the system, he was left to explain why, to use his words, "history has turned its back on an attractive and plausible real-world option," why it has closed the door to market socialism. He focuses not merely on the months leading up to the collapse but on the prior decade, and he deals with both politics and economics, though primarily the latter.