Balázs Nagy

Nagy Balázs

1920–2003 ○ Natural death

The exile historian of workers’ councils

Balázs Nagy was a Hungarian revolutionary socialist and exile writer who documented how workers’ councils created an autonomous political and economic organisation outside the state apparatus and party bureaucracy during the 1956 revolution. He left a firsthand account of the formation of the Central Workers’ Council of Greater Budapest, its strike after 4 November, and its negotiations with the new government; the study was published in French in Brussels in 1961. His work shows both how working-class self-organisation functioned as an alternative political form amid defeat and the limits imposed on it by military intervention and repression.