The exile historian of workers’ councils
In the resolution he recorded for 31 October, the workers' councils opened with 'The factory is the property of the workers.'
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.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1956Participated in Budapest’s workers’ council movement
- 1956.11Documented the formation and resistance of the Central Workers’ Council of Greater Budapest
- 1961Published the French study La formation du Conseil Central Ouvrier de Budapest en Brussels
- 1964Published Budapest 1956: The Central Workers’ Council in International Socialism
- 2003Died
Related historical events
The Name Michel Varga: Exile and the Problem of the Death Year
Much of this figure's activity survives under the name Michel Varga. The Senate House Library catalogue at the University of London records the creator as 'Nagy, Balazs (1927-2015) Trotskyist' and states that he used the pseudonym Michel Varga; the same record notes that he was one of three secretaries of the Petofi Circle, formed by Hungarian intellectuals in April 1956, and that after the Russian intervention he crossed the Austrian border and became an exile in France. In exile he moved towards Trotskyism after discussions with Pierre Broue, joined the Internationalist Communist Organisation (OCI) in 1962, and in 1963 affiliated the League of Hungarian Revolutionary Socialists, which he had founded, to the International Committee of the Fourth International. He subsequently placed his emphasis on reorganising Trotskyism in Eastern Europe; after a conflict with the OCI he was expelled in 1972, formed the short-lived International League for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International in 1973, and was expelled from that body in turn in 1984 after a factional dispute. The OCI claimed he was an agent of both the KGB and the CIA, but an international Commission of Inquiry formed in 1976-77 with representatives of Lutte Ouvriere, the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire, the US Socialist Workers Party and the International Spartacist Tendency dismissed the charges as unproved. The years given elsewhere on this record (1920-2003) conflict with the 1927-2015 dates in the archive catalogue and in the Marxists Internet Archive. This edit could not establish which is correct, so both are stated; the time and place of death likewise require further documentary confirmation.