ABSTRACT
The creation of a politically-important employment prototype is critical to explaining the birth of the employment taboo, as well as the kinds of workers who received protection, and the kinds of social policies aimed at less core workers. This chapter shows that the Hungarian Communist Party's taboo against unemployment, far from being an inalienable system-feature of communism, instead derived from the politics of de-Stalinization. It also shows how the political commitment against unemployment arose from the new political compromise that arose after 1956. Unemployment in 1956-1957 resulted from production bottlenecks that the party attributed to counter-revolutionaries and imperialist agitators who supposedly caused the uprising. The chapter explores how the taboo against unemployment was maintained in the face of economic reforms of the 1960s known as the New Economic Mechanism. The eradication of seasonal unemployment was similarly predicated upon a belief in ever-increasing growth and productivity through planning.
