In recent years Poland's political life has produced a genuine and interesting revival of the Polish parliament, the Seym. It has been especially significant in the area of legislative committees, which not only grew in number but enlarged their sphere of activities and became more independent. The development had its sources in the “thaw” that followed the death of Stalin in 1953 and culminated in Poland in the so-called “October Revolt” of 1956.

Whether Marx and Engels jointly or Engels alone originated dialectical materialism, there can be no doubt that only Engels should be credited with its codification. This was recognized implicitly by both Plekhanov and Lenin, for they based their accounts of what they regarded as the Marxian philosophy on the works of Engels, above all, Anti-Dühring and Ludwig Feuerbach. They adopted this course because they believed—and impressed this belief upon the world—that there was a complete identity of views between Marx and Engels on all philosophical matters. As far as the conception of materialism is concerned, this meant in fact the substitution of Engels’ views for those of Marx.

The Soviet Paradox of high mechanization and continuing intensive use of hand labor in agriculture has been commented upon many times. For its level of capital intensity, Soviet agriculture is easily the least productive in the world. The purpose of this paper is not to elaborate anew on these well-known oddities or their consequences for the current and prospective (short-run) supply of farm goods in the USSR. The problem here is: Given the collectivist ideology which found expression in the collective-farm and state-farm systems, what will mechanization ultimately do to the farm system? In countries with advanced farm mechanization and effective use of capital, such as the United States, the farm labor force tends to become rather small; a similar development is clearly under way also in western Europe.

This article examines the relationship between the semantics of ideology and political practice under the pressure of socio-economic change in Hungary of the early 1960s, especially 1962-63. The events of 1956 forced the Communist Party elite to recognize the imperative need for internal social change and for control over its dynamics. Manipulation of social forces and ideological currents became a day-to-day concern as soon as it was realized that the political system must rely to an increasing extent upon the introduction of policies which induced support for the system itself—a need undoubtedly arising out of the social transformation that accompanies a developing and modernizing industrial society.