Author: Balint Magyar File Type: pdf In an article in 2001 the author analyzed the way the Hungarian political party Fidesz (the Federation of Young Democrats) was eliminating the institutional system of the rule of law as it was on government for the first time. At that time, many readers doubted the legitimacy of the new approach, in which the author characterized the system as the organized over-world, the state employing mafia methods and the adopted political family. Critics considered these categories metaphors rather than elements of a coherent conceptual framework. Ten years later Fidesz won a two-third majority in Parliament at the 2010 elections, removing many of the institutional obstacles of exerting power. Just like the party, the state itself was placed under the control of a single individual, who since then has applied the techniques used within his party to enforce submission and obedience onto society as a whole. It is common in many post-communist systems that a segment of the party and secret service became the elite in possession of not only political power but also of wealth. However, Fidesz, as a late-coming new political predator, was able to occupy this position through a change of elite. The actions of the post-communist mafia state model are closely aligned with the interests of power and wealth concentrated in the hands of a small group of insiders. While the traditional mafia channeled wealth and economic players into its spheres of influence by means of direct coercion, the mafia state does the same by means of parliamentary legislation, legal prosecution, tax authority, police forces and secret service. The innovative conceptual framework of the book is important and timely not only for Hungary, but also for other post-communist countries subjected to autocratic rules. **About the Author Balint Magyar is a liberal politician and independent sociologist

Author: Mitchell Abidor File Type: pdf The Paris Commune of 1871, the first instance of a working-class seizure of power, has been subject to countless interpretations reviled by its enemies as a murderous bacchanalia of the unwashed while praised by supporters as an exemplar of proletarian anarchism in action, both a successful model to be imitated and as a devastating failure to be avoided. All of the interpretations are tendentious. Historians view the working classs three-month rule through their own prism, distant in time and space. Voices of the Paris Commune takes a different tack. In this book only those who were present in the spring of 1871, who lived through and participated in the Commune, are heard. The Paris Commune had a vibrant press, and it is represented here by its most important newspaper, Le Cri du Peuple, edited by Jules Valles, member of the First International. Like any legitimate government, the Paris Commune held parliamentary sessions and issued daily printed reports of the heated, contentious deliberations that belie any accusation of dictatorship. Included in this collection is the transcript of the debate in the Commune and a selection from the inquiry carried out 20 years after the event by the intellectual review La Revue Blanche.(Revolutionary Pocketbooks Series)