Szegények mindennapjai és a hatalom diskurzusai a Kádár-korszakban

Absztrakt

Pál Schiffer’s 1971 film, Letters to the Windfall, tells the story of a lottery winner waiter from Gyöngyös, and the reactions of the people. These letters are all the more interesting as they coincided with the first Hungarian research on poverty led by István Kemény. The letters addressed to the lottery winner present a sharp image of the circumstances of the groups which were described in sociological terms by the researchers participating in the study. These evocative documents also reveal how the state, describing itself as socialist, created strong dependencies in all walks of Hungarian society, but provided the least care for everyday people. Majtényi claims that state socialism can be viewed as a postcolonial system, especially in the sense that it treated exclusion and subjection as invariables, mainly associated with the operation of state authorities. Majtényi uses this interpretation in his analysis of the circumstances of the poor in the period, as well as the role of the authorities’ discourses used to conceal or distort their experience of poverty in the public forums of the time.