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.

The statistical sources and sociological studies dealing with the era of socialism cannot be used automatically to depict the stratification of society as the language and concepts used by the contemporary works of the period are strongly permeated by the ideology of the past system. The conclusions of the historical works on state socialism – seemingly well grounded and referenced – are often not only based on the processes examined but on the past and changes in the conceptual framework of sociology. Our present knowledge about the society of the age is, to a large extent, based on these concepts, too. It is this lack of conceptual self-reflection of historiography that explains that while several historians believe to be discussing social reality, in actual fact they are interpreting categories formulated in the wake of various party decrees. The automatic acceptance of the conclusions of the sociological works created in the various periods led to a historical image of the development of Hungarian society according to which this society was homogenized in the fifties, then gradually transformed from the sixties onwards, with further differentiation during the coming decades. Individual interpretations could only reach limited publicity during the period and could exert but a slight influence on social discourses: through its conceptual-linguistic dictatorship and the power of interpretation, the party –state was able to monopolize its own interpretation. Unless we are able to uncover the effects of the identity policy that lastingly created the virtual reality of socialist society, unless we recognize the nature and operation of the various discourses of power and science, we cannot reach an understanding of the period’s phenomena. Therefore, the question is not only whether the individual experiences of the age appear, or even can appear at all on the discursive levels of historical and sociological conceptualization, but also the extent to which the effects of these discourses transformed the empirical world of individuals.

Nincs absztrakt.

Nincs absztrakt.

Nincs absztrakt.