Awake from your slumber! Class analysis of the recent student protests in Hungary

"As described above, the university system as it exists of today is a regressive system, and one might argue that the students’ rallying cry, “I had a dream, a degree” is just an expression of middle/upper class egoism, ie. their dream was to reproduce their relatively privileged status from public resources. However the new scheme put forward by the government pointed in the direction of an even more regressive system, where university education would become the privilege of the narrowest élite. There is little prospect in Hungary that electoral changes favouring the liberal opposition parties would mean a significant change of course. Paradoxically, such a turn of events might translate into even larger cuts in public expenditures (eg. pensions) as the „pro-Western” liberal parties are  fixated on pleasing headquarters in Brussels, Berlin and Washington and would be unwilling to antagonize any Western interests, ie. taxing multinationals or banks would be off the table. In contrast, it is true that Orban refrained from touching old-age pensions (although disability and early retirement pension schemes are being ruthlessly eliminated) and imposed a large levy on banks and multinationals in the retail and telecommunication sectors. It should be stressed that the revenue raised with these much-touted “unorthodox” measures was largely used to line the pockets of the rich through a large cut in the income tax of upper earners and through subsidies to favoured “national capitalists”. In short, the available alternatives within parliamentary politics seem to be limited to a ruthlessly anti-poor corporatist strategy (Orban) and standard EU/IMF style neoliberalism.
The outburst of students’ despair is clearly connected with the general dysfunctionality of Hungarian capitalism, most notably the fact that a large and growing part of the workforce is simply not needed in terms of profit-making (=employment), left with the options to emigrate, try to survive on dwindling welfare payments, or resort to petty criminality. Hungary is an extreme case at the moment but numerous states of Eastern Europe are sliding into similar kinds of extremism. The more these states turn against their own population and also each other, the more apparent it should become how they suffer from the same symptoms.

The misery of pensioners stripped from their meagre disability pension, of high school students not able to go to university because it is “not affordable” anymore, of university graduates forced to leave their country en masse to take on dishwashing jobs abroad, of public employees fired by the thousands is all interconnected. Moreover, they seem to be more and more uniform not just on the ravaged Eastern European periphery, but moving steadily into the European core by the cancerous spread of austerity policies and precarisation. Even to block the extreme plans of the current Hungarian government would necessitate the formation of alliances between the various social groups within the country run over by the government steamroller. To organize for meaningful self-defense, and achieve any significant changes in the balance of forces this would certainly be necessary too, although probably not sufficient in itself: in Eastern Europe only transnational links could muster the force to put up a serious challenge to the business of usual of capitalist crisis management."