When they picked up their morning papers last week, Budapesters could scarcely believe their eyes. The front-page attack on lazy Hungarian workers sounded like a product of "the slanderous propaganda machinery of Wall Street industrialists," and yet it had been signed by none other than Matyas Rakosi, the country's No. 1 Communist.
Neither workers nor administrators seem to realize, Rakosi complained, "that labor discipline is a political weapon of prime importance." He revealed that wages had increased by 20%, despite a decrease in industrial productivity, a clear violation of "the supreme law of socialist work, that living standards can only be...