On 15 October 1973, the young poet Miklós Haraszti stood arraigned before a People’s Court in Budapest for ‘grave incitement’. He had ‘written a book liable to provoke hatred of the State’. The charge carried a possible eight-year jail sentence. The basis of the charge: Piece Rates, a brief monograph in which Haraszti describes what it is like to work in a major Hungarian factory. The extracts which follow are from this book, now published in the West. footnote1 In it Haraszti joins descriptions of his personal experience, careful analysis of hierarchy and procedures in the factory, and documentary evidence of conditions there, to create a reportage of great originality. There are many accounts, fictional and biographical, of prison camps in the Soviet bloc. Now, for the first time, there is an equally revealing account of conditions inside a communist factory.
The passages which follow are the first of Haraszti’s writings to appear in English. He was born in 1945 into a family of Hungarian communists, who had fled to Jerusalem to escape the Nazis and returned to Budapest in the year of Haraszti’s birth. In 1966 he came of age by organizing a student Vietnam solidarity committee which collected money for the liberation forces and held demonstrations outside the us Embassy in Budapest. For opposing imperialism without permission he was promptly suspended from the university and put under police observation. The following year he edited and translated Verses, Songs, Revolution. Brecht, Mayakovsky and many writers from the Third World made the volume a unified introduction to communist poetry and radical protest songs from across the world. This brought him ‘house surveillance’. In Hungary the police have special powers which allow them to enforce virtual house arrest; they can confine individuals to their homes for up to twenty-two hours a day and in addition can restrict their movements during the period they are allowed out. In this instance Haraszti was forbidden to visit publishing houses and university buildings. After three months, reckoning he had been warned sufficiently sharply, the authorities lifted all restrictions.
Haraszti continued to publish his own poems and to speak out against the régimes enforced uniformity, calling for public debate in the arts. In late 1969 the review Uj Irás carried Che’s Errors, a satire in six stanzas of bureaucratic condemnations of leftism, written in the tradition of Brechtian irony. Haraszti was attacked for his poem in the official party organ, but also given the right of reply. He answered with a defiant bluntness, quite out of keeping with Brechtian guile. footnote2 Arrest soon followed. He was interrogated, finally expelled from the university and together with his friend Georgy Dallos placed under six-month house surveillance. Later, the police threatened to further renew their restrictions unless the two would agree to remain silent on political issues. They refused, were jailed and Haraszti went on hunger strike. Taken to the police hospital he was force-fed until, after twenty-five days, the Ministry of the Interior released him under pressure from a number of Hungarian intellectuals, Lukács most prominent among them.