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Such a statement criticises itself! Varga states quite openly: "Give the workers no more than the appearance that production is being managed and administered by themselves. In reality this has little significance, since we dispose of the central machinery of administration, and it is this central administration which determines, by means of price policy, just what the net income of the workers shall be". All this offers a clear demonstration of how necessary it is that the relationship of the producers to the social product be determined in the objective production process itself, so as to ensure that a new form of class rule cannot arise behind the mask of democracy.
No purpose is served by discussing in detail the particular features of the agricultural economy in Soviet Hungary. The sole conclusion which it is appropriate to draw is that the examples of "communist" production provided by both Russia and Hungary yield a discouraging picture. In the case of Russia, the peasants acted in a purely capitalistic way. "The peasants distributed the land and carried off the agricultural means of production, whereby it was not the poorest but the most prosperous peasants who received the largest share" (Varga, page 103). In the case of Hungary, they did not act at all, which means that up to the present we have no example of how an agrarian proletariat and the small and middle peasants might behave towards a proletarian revolution under West European conditions. Which ideology would become the predominant one in that case? Would they also participate in the revolution in an organised way, and if so in what form? We do not know. The only course open to us is to examine the attitude they adopted towards the proletarian revolutions of 1918-1923.
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