Csillag István - Tetszettünk volna forradalmat csinálni - Reformok and fordulatok

I also had to realize that, looking back now, the brave and even sometimes heroic teamwork with which we facilitated the creation of institutions imitating market behavior in the 1980s (see economic labor community, company council, wealth center) was at best seems to be the pursuit of the "Josephinist illusion" (László Lengyel), we presented the agony of the party state more crudely. Today's readers can rightly ask, if we knew so well that even Hungarian reform socialism is bleeding from a thousand wounds, then why did we try to stop the financial crisis with our proposals, with new forms that dissolve the creaking rigidity and ensure oiling, which ultimately led to the hypocritical Kádár system that we hate , would also have buried the "plastic-market" model of socialism (János Kornai) under it. Without pathos: even then and with my mind today, I thought that I would all risk that the fabric of society would be torn apart in the crisis, and more than existing socialism could be lost. It's true, thirty-five years ago I didn't think that I would have to defend myself because I tried (we tried) to transform the system, and in the end - they ask us not to regret it - we lost our jobs and workplaces because of our proposals made out of defiance, for a while it seemed that we would be unemployed. After the termination of a secure job, our paths diverged. If we had had more endurance, if we had endured the remaining two to two and a half years after the termination of the Institute until the regime change, albeit with more and more enthusiasm and without the usual job that provided security, then today we could all have marched as a unit of the glorious revolutionary vanguard in the into history. Of course, even then we wouldn't have been like the Bibó college students, who pocketed and "took home" the transforming country. We have not become either a revolutionary vanguard or a pickpocket of the country's assets. What was the point of the reforms then? The title of the volume refers to this dilemma "We would have liked to make a revolution". (István Csillag)