This paper compares and contrasts two of the few radical political artistic groups of late socialism in Hungary. Through an analysis of the Orfeo and Inconnu groups we highlight their patterns of politicization and de-politicization to show that the critique of existing socialism was not free floating but was embedded in social structures. By going against the current of individualizing and moralizing artistic biographies, we give a historical materialist account of the two groups. Firstly, the paper shows how the anti-systemic mobilization of the two groups was conditioned by changes in Hungary’s world-economic integration and the subsequent restructuration of its field of cultural production. Secondly, it analyzes the tension between two groups’ critique of the oppressive nature of state-socialism and their politics of everyday life, by paying special attention to their uneven gender-relations. The analysis places the political ideas of the two groups not only in the changing landscape of late-socialist dissent, but we link them to class positions and social biographies. The article also highlights how radical, left-leaning criticisms of the state-socialist regime were co-opted into the competing liberal and nationalist cultural-political-economic complexes of the post-socialist order, and how the ways of incorporation were the products of individual but socially situated biographies of the intellectual actors. By combining class analysis and comparative historical research with a sociology of culture and intellectuals, this article draws attention to the role of determinate and contingent historical processes in the formation of anti-systemic mobilizations in late-socialist Hungary.
Since the beginnings of Marxism there has been a persistent demand to understand this theory, as well its practical and organizational development, according to the principles of Marxism itself. By “Marxism” I mean here historical materialism: not mechanical determinism but the interaction of transformational praxis with continually changing reality. Th is interaction may be confrontational and, as the poet-philosopher Bertolt Brecht said, “like everything that pertains to confl ict, collision, and struggle, it cannot be treated without the materialist dialectic.” (Gesamtausgabe, vol. 23 [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993], p. 376.) In the following article I want to show that Brecht’s thesis is also valid for the history of Marxism and its forms of motion.