The political game
International Viewpoint #76 • December 25, 1989 he was discredited in their eyes, then with Marian Calfa, the new Prime Minister, it got a government that this time had a majority of non-CP members.
The CF's main tactic has been to get a transitional government acceptable to it, which could organize free elections (that is, with freedom to put forward candi-
THE organization of the mass movement in Czechoslovakia showed a sharp rise at the end of November. More than 900 local committees of the Civic Forum (CF) had then been set up, and 7,200 factory strike committees had been formed. The relatively autonomous student movement is also highly structured with an elected leadership representing all the strike committees in the country. Moreover, the movement exists on a nationwide basis, even if until now liaison with
Prague seems to have been limited and difficult. This has largely been made possible by the activity of the students who have gone all over the country to explain their movement to the people, who, until the Friday preceding the general strike of November 27, had remained totally uninformed.
CLAUDE DEVILLIERS
ODAY, the crisis inside the
T
Czechoslovak Communist Party
(CzCP) seems to be very deep.
The initial regroupments and differentiations which are now going on bear witness to this situation, which may have existed latently inside the party before the current events.
There is then a very important rise of the mass movement and the beginning of self-organization, the indispensable preconditions for any revolutionary situation.
Dismantling of militia
The people are conscious of the fact that, whilst changing the government is one thing, it is another to clear the system of its bureaucratic structure. And in this area, the movement, backed up by the obtained the dismantling of the militias.
The question objectively posed today is that of generalized self-organization and inspection. Such an objective would require the formation of the initial elements of a vanguard leadership that could accompany, promote and lead such a process. The spontaneous movement will not be enough to do this. For the moment, the emergence of such a leadership remains hypothetical.
The leading personalities of the CF initially explained that they had no desire to participate in the government. This position followed mainly from the fact that the CF is a structure created very recently, after the repression against the stuhomogeneity. It functions as a more or
4 less centralized network, around a group or personalities in roguend in Braise but, for the moment, there is no organizational project. It is very significant that, until now, the local committees of the CF have formed spontaneously and have not yet given rise to a centralized movement with an elected leadership.
However, the fear of a political vacuum, in the absence of parties and clear strategic projects, has forced the CF to present itself as a candidate for power. You cannot continually demand a better governmental composition, if you are not prepared to participate yourself. There are then, at first sight, two Civic Forums - a Civic Forum of the leadership and another of the base, with few organizational links between them and different social compositions, even if the latter for the moment accepts the former as its natural leadership.
The general programme of the CF is radical democratic in nature. If the CF had to take a position today on the economic and political future of the country, on the great strategic choices, it would certainly split quickly enough. At Bro, in Moravia, the movement demanded at the start a place in all the institutions of the Czech republic, a bit like a monitoring structure. The expressed objective is then a radical reformist one.
Until now the CF has played the card of dialogue with possible reformers within the party. At first, hope was placed in Adamec (the former prime minister). But the sort of government he proposed
La large majority of CzCP members) led it to draw a negative balance sheet of the negotiations, and forced it to step up its pressure, particularly by threatening a new general strike. Continuing to negotiate with Adamec, although dates) for no later than July 1990 (Calfa has expressed a preference for the end of June). Their hope, obviously, is that the CzCP will then be definitively and democratically put in a minority position. Recent events show that the CF intends to put itself forward at these elections?. This could pose a certain number of problems - how are radically different opinions on the major choices facing society going to be expressed within the CF current? This will imply that so as not to put itself in a minority, each component will have to stand in the name of the CF. Of course, all this remains uncertain, because the more the debates develop, the more the CF is itself going to be exposed to numerous pressures, and the experience of government will be a major test.
It should be stressed that this movement has only existed for some weeks. Any activist current would have a lot of trouble in linking itself up rapidly with such a massive and spontaneous movement. But, this said, the social composition of the CF leadership limits today its organizational capacities. The CF is made up of intellectuals, artists, journalists, ex-dissidents, etc., and this does not permit it to turn rapidly towards the militant workers in the factories.
### Leading personalities dominate Civic Forum
Moreover, the CF does not have, present, the structure of an organization, a party, and, consequently, cannot be organized in a democratic way. It is leading personalities of the CF who play the central role, whilst the amount of control the rank and file have over them is very limited. The decision to enter the government is characteristic of decisions taken "from above". But it would be wrong to think that these figures do not more or less reflect the general feeling. They remain the unchallenged leadership of the mass movement, even if this could be called into question as a result of their secret negotiations with the government.
The liberalization of the media remains partial. The bulk of the party press remains entirely controlled by the conservatives (see interview with Václav Havel page 5). The democratic movement has not yet been able to build its own mass press. Cer1. At Bratislava, in Slovakia, the equivalent of the Civic Forum calls itself "The Public Against Violence". 2. The Civic Forum and "The Public Against Violence" will present themselves at the elections as a coalition of all the democratic forces within society, with a common list. Each group or political party would have the opportunity to participate in this coalition.
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CZECHOSLOVAKIA begins
December 25, 1989 • #176 International Viewpoint tainly, it might be thought that this movement is irreversible, and that the conservatives have played their last cards. The people are in general not very well informed on what happens abroad, including in the rest of Eastern Europe. But undoubtedly it is possible to talk about a search for an original road, a "Czechoslovak road". As in the GDR, the people in the street are relatively favourable to Gorbachev. People in Prague say, only half jokingly, that if the CzCP had sent tanks against the demonstrators, the Soviet tanks would have come to the aid of the
For the moment, discussions on economic options are restricted to a few closed circles around the CF and have not yet extended as far as the general public. When "the street" and the factories participate in this debate, the CF will be confronted by great tensions and internal differentiations. The Institute for Forecasts around Komarec (who has just been named first vice-prime minister) is one of the principal figures in this debate, of which the general line is clearly one of a return to the market. But everything remains fairly unclear for now. An element which will undoubtedly play a strong role in these debates in future is national sentiment, and the very widespread axiom that "the country should not be sold to foreigners". Despite the ravages of the bureaucracy, or the "mafia" as the people call them, the Czech population retains a strong consciousness of a collective "public good" and of social ownership?. Consequently, the questions of privatization, opening up to foreign capital etc. could rapidly run into a serious
Although well represented in the CF, the students have maintained a real autonomy, like the movement in the factories. Notably, despite the CF's directives, they have maintained their continuous strike, with occupations of the faculties, until all their demands are met and tangible results are obtained, in particular as concerns the commission of enquiry into the violence on 17 November. This movement too takes the form of a radical democratic movement but it is still difficult to know if crystallized ideological positions have appeared within it. Some of the debates centre on a reorganization of the teaching system. A plan to create a student trade union based on the strike committees set up throughout the country is today being discussed. The students have also criticized the CF's waiting game and manoeuNonetheless, the movement has been very disciplined and has recognized the CF as its leadership — which has not stopped it from demanding more initiatives and Who signed the appeal for the
1968 invasion?
The question of the 1968 "Prague continues to play an important role. One of the CF's main demands was for the publication of the list of CzCP members who had allegedly signed the appeal for the intervention of Warsaw Pact troops. The CF does not propose a general purge, but demands those responsible for this "appeal" be made known. As for those compromised during the period of "normalization", the CF demands that they be dismissed, but through constitutional mechanisms. The 1968 invasion is very much present in the collective memory. Even though a lot of people look back to
CZECHOSLOVAKIA the "Prague Spring" with nostalgia, most of them no longer believe at all that the CzCP or a wing of the CzCP are capable of participating anew in such a process. Some critical currents have recently appeared inside the CzCP. A small group of journalists on the editorial board of a party cultural journal (Tvorba) have formed an independent Marxist club which seeks to renew Marxist thought in Czechoslovakia. Another current has been set up within the CzCP, the Democratic Communist Forum (DCF), of which little is as yet known. The DCF claims to have had some tens of thousands of membership applications within a week. A great many CzCP members are involved in the rank and file organizations, in the student movement - notably through the Young Socialist Organization (SSM, linked to the CzCP) - or in the factories. The base units of CF and the strike committees have confronted this problem and debated whether to admit them into the structures of the opposition. In general, they have been admitted as individuals, on condition that they do not operate as a CzCP faction.
One of the characteristics of the movement is the rejection of violence. The repression of the demonstration of November 17 sent shock waves running through the population. The memory of November 17 is constantly refreshed in leaflets, the demonstrations, and around the Wenceslas monument where a continuous rally goes on. As to the selforganization structures in the factories, it is still too soon to know what they will become. For the moment, it seems that the strike committees will not transform themselves into self-management structures, but, on the contrary, are going to try to work inside the official trade unions with the goal of renewing them. One of the demands is that the trade union congress not be held before the mass movement can take possession of the trade unions, of their infrastructure and their branches. Certainly, some explain that in the event of the defeat of this initiative, it will be necessary to build new trade unions. But the first step is the reconquest of the existing trade unions. * 3. Prague is covered by thousands of posters which are fastidiously stuck on the walls, the metro, the windows, antee plays and edis ingonize to raking down 5 of these posters and the cleaning of the town.
Czechs and Slovaks - two nations in the Central European
CZECHOSLOVAKIA is a federal state of two nations, the
Czechs and Slovaks and the two regions of the country have very different histories. They were united for the first time (if
International Viewpoint #76 • December 25, 1989
CZECHOSLOVAKIA
HE CZECH LANDS were histor-
T ically part of the German (Holy
Roman) Empire, where Bohemia sometimes played a leading role.
In 1620, the Catholic Habsburgs annihiwe leave aside a shadowy Great Moravian Empire in the lated the Protestant Czech nobility at the
Eighth century) in 1918 and were separated again between
Battle of the White Mountain, and the
1939 and 1945. In 1969, after years of campaigning by Slovak
Czech Lands were parcelled up amongst intellectuals, the state formally became a federation. It is loyal lieutenants of the Habsburgs. Thereafter Czech language and nationality important not to overlook this duality: what happens in the were primarily associated with the Third
Czech Lands (Bohemia and Moravia) does not necessarily
Estate; the nobility spoke German.