There Was and Is No Poverty (in Autocracies)

István Kemény and the Socialist Taboo of Poverty

Kemény was a leading figure in Hungarian sociology, a scholarly field banned in 1948 and revived only in the 1960s. In the 1970s, Kemény lost his job and was forced into emigration because he stated, in a small academic circle, that there was poverty in Hungary. He committed this in 1970 at a session of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, where he presented the preliminary findings of a survey he was leading at the Hungarian Central Statistical Office (HCSO) on the living conditions of the “low-income” population. He argued that it would be more accurate “to talk about the poor, rather than the low-income, to take more factors into account when defining poverty, and to call those poor who cannot live like others.”

His words proved scandalous; “poverty” was, unlike the official term “low-income population,” a taboo. The Academy published the lectures of the session in its own periodical, however, Kemény’s paper was not included. At the time, he was employed at the Institute for Sociology, where he led a nation-wide, representative Roma survey. His contract there was changed to a one-month term and was extended each month until the project was done. He then lost his job, was banned from publishing, his deteriorating conditions eventually forcing him, in 1977, to emigrate. 

We celebrate the centenary of István Kemény’s birth, on August 14, 1925, with the full text of his remarks delivered at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1970. István Kemény's papers, including the typescript of this speech, are preserved at the Blinken OSA Archivum. (The text was also included, in 1985, in a samizdat volume published on Kemény’s 60th birthday.)

Reproducing Poverty: Poverty Is a Consequence and a Cause of Poverty

Kemény was allowed to finish the surveys both on the Roma and on poverty, albeit in an increasingly hostile environment. He summarized the findings of the latter study in a final report, in 1972, which was immediately classified. While the official publication was literally locked away in a safe at the HCSO, unofficial copies of the study were distributed by István Kemény himself—and later it was also sold at the samizdat boutique on Galamb Street, a significant venue of the informal public sphere. The final chapter of the report, entitled The Concept of Poverty—echoing his remarks at the Academy—explored in detail the different forms of poverty and what it meant, in 1972, if someone was not able to “live like others”:

“We certainly talk about poverty when 3,000 calories are not provided for, but also when a family has no winter coats, clothes, sweaters, skirts or trousers, shoes, three sets of underwear in addition to work clothes, two sets of bedding, blankets, etc. . . . We must call someone poor if they cannot go to the movies once a week, see a soccer match, buy a radio, or afford a newspaper. Finally, we also must call someone poor if they cannot raise or educate their children properly.”

He emphasized the issue of education both in his Academy remark and the final report, warning that poverty—when an undernourished child lives in a low-income family in a crowded household with parents incapable of supporting their education—constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to social mobility, determining a person’s fate already in the first years of primary school. “While they are children, this condition is a consequence of poverty; when they grow up, it may become a source of further poverty,” he concluded.

Social Policy: Against Poverty, or Against the Poor?

In his oral history interview conducted, in 1995, by the Black Box Foundatin, István Kemény explained that the surveys he had led were initiated because “communist leaders in Hungary had had no information about society; they knew nothing about what was going on in the country.” The research was commissioned then, similarly to the logic described in the New York Times article, to “provide the leadership with basic information at least, enabling estimates of what would happen if this or that measure were introduced.” Kemény was forced into emigration in 1977. In his study Poverty in Hungary, written in Paris in 1978, he was able to express himself with complete openness (this writing, too, was circulated in samizdat in Hungary):

“Eastern European states do not have any social policy objectives aimed at eradicating or reducing poverty. It is out of their reach, because they are officially in denial of the existence of poverty in their countries. The same states, however, do have an unacknowledged policy against the poor.”