Universal Labor Party of Hungary

Universal Labor Party of Hungary 

(Általános Munkáspárt; ULPH), the workers’ socialist party of Hun-gary from 1880 to 1890. The ULPH grew out of the socialist workers’ party formed by L. Frankel in 1876-78—the so-called Nonvoters’ Party (or Party of People Without the Vote).

The program of the ULPH was modeled on the Gotha Program of German Social Democracy but differed in that it demanded the socialization of the means of production (including landlords’ holdings) and did not contain the Lassal-lean proposition concerning a “free state”—a false proposition in the context of a society with antagonistic classes—or the thesis that regarded the peasantry as a reactionary group. After Frankel was arrested in 1881 and subsequently forced to leave the country, leadership in the party fell to the opportunist petit-bourgeois elements headed by A. Ihrlinger, Z. Csillag, and J. Kürschner, who were under the influence of the Austrian moderates. They rejected the ideas of class struggle and proletarian internationalism and in effect subordinated the activity of the ULPH to the interests of the bourgeoisie. In 1889 the ULPH took part in the preparation of the Founding Congress of the Second International, at which—in addition to Ihrlinger—Frankel and G. Popp rep-resented the Hungarian workers’ movement. The congress called on the Austrian Social Democrats to aid the ULPH in the struggle against opportunism. On Sept. 15, 1889, a joint conference of the two parties, meeting in Bratislava, removed Ihrlinger from the leadership of the ULPH and chose P. Engelmann, an active figure among the Hungarian Radicals, as leader of the party. The activity of the new leadership was crowned by the creation of the Social Democratic Party of Hungary at the end of 1890.

REFERENCE

Istoriia vengerskogo revoliutsionnogo rabochego dvizheniia, vol. 1. Moscow, 1970. (Translated from Hungarian.)

T. M. ISLAMOV