USSR / COMMUNIST PARTIES European Communist parties implode
International Viewpoint #213 • September 30, 1991
COMMUNIST PARTIES
No party has escaped. On August 19, the political commission of the Portuguese party explained that the state of emergency "arose as an attempt to contain the process of a developing counterrevolution"; two days later they explained that they had "clearly defended the rapid return of the Soviet Union to institutional normality."
The Greek CP, meanwhile, started off denouncing "the opinion of the imperialist forces, the local conservative political forces and all those who are opposed to
The Spanish Communist Party condemned the Moscow putschists. However, this did not prevent them from experiencing an impor tant internal debate. A minorilogical choice for some sections of the apparatus and existing majorities on party leaderships. The events in the Soviet Union are pushing ahead to an increasingly thorough balance sheet of the entire history of Stalinism, and thus of the "international communist movement".
These leaderships can either make further compromises with capitalism social democracy or hold to the idea of the imperialist, anti-communist plot as the main explanation of the new situation in the Soviet Union.
favouring the former want to disembarrass themselves of the weight of the past and wipe clean the
Partei democracy has just suffered a crushing defeat as a result of its assumption of responsibility "restructuring" the "Swedish model", where the Dutch SP is not far from suffering the same fate, and where the French Socialist Party can no longer hide the smell of its putrefaction after nine years in power, the collapse of Soviet Stalinism is also going to upset the plans of those who have tried to use the word "socialism" to cover up their social consensus policies.
What will become of the CP militants? Is there a possibility that left currents will emerge capable of really confronting the Stalinist past? It has to be said that after several years of crisis and disintegration of many of the European CPs, this is not the direction in which things longstanding Die will sich selbstauflösen.. have relaunched their campaign for the dissolution of the PCE into the United Left hat immer recht. under PCE leadership) and for the PCE to abandon any reference to a change in the system. Sartorius has the support of Antonio Gutierrez, the current general secretary of the Workers' Commissions, and the leadership of the United Socialist Party of Catalonia.
The crisis in the German have gone. Certainly there groups of tens or hundreds in each country who will not be ready to abandon their commitment to militant activity. The revolutionary left will come across these orphans
But the currents that have formed and will form themselves feel the pressure of the main tendencies at work in the international political situation; this has already led many to choose the road of realism at the side of the
PDS is getting , deeper. The party presidium's first thoughts on the coup were "The party wants to dissolve itsolf." "The party is always right." ambiguous to say the least — they expressed the hope that it could "prevent the break-up of the Soviet Union" and called on the new leaders to "use the power of the state on a legal basis". On August 25, the PDS condemned the coup, but the Communist Platform, which presents itself as a Marxist leftwing of the party, had previously justified the coup, since it "opened the road for the renewal of socialism". Not even the Italian PDS, and all the more the Movement for Communist Refoundation can escape the great political debate.
The effect of these events on the leaderships is not mainly a matter of independent political choices or "opinions". The apparatuses, where they have not already split as in Britain, Italy and Greece, are dividing once more along lines determined by political and material interests. Union bureaucracies, local councillors, the internal party apparatuses all split up and redistribute themselves around one basic question: how to survive?
The evident fence sitting or even support (in various shades and degrees) for the coup seen in some quarters were not due simply to thoughtlessness or stupidity. It is true that such positions have resulted in political disaster for those who • took them - the leadership of the French CP being a case in point. But this is the slate of their own history. They are on their counterparts in the Soviet Union have found their way to the market economy. The latter are concerned above all to preserve an "identity" which is in fact nothing other than the preservation of an apparatus.
Avoiding the real debates
The common feature of these two responses is a determination to avoid any serious debate on the history of Stalinism, on bureaucracy and on the thousand and one crimes of the Stalinist international. Amnesia afflicts both the neoStalinists and the neo-Social Democrats.
For the "Soviet shock" immediately raises the debate on socialism, the workand the search for new ideals and long-term goals. All these questions touch not only the former Stalinists but the whole of the workers' movement.
If the Stalinist Communist Parties were not democratic, can it be said that the social democratic parties are? If the CPs were at the beck and call of Moscow, the social democrats are totally under the thumb of imperialism!
At a moment when Swedish social social democrats or the Party, for example, has already enced three waves of internal challenge, splitting the apparatus from top to bottom. However, none of them have tended to move to the left. In Italy the crisis has given rise to the MRC (see /V 209) and in Greece it has produced a movement a part of which has attempted a left critique of Stalinism. In Portugal, the internal opposition has resumed the offensive, and so
But the political direction of these currents is essentially determined by the level of activity of the social movements, by their victories and defeats. It is thus the relation of class forces that determines the realignment of those fractions of the old apparatuses seeking a future and above all of the rank-and-file militants who await the possibility of refinding the hope of socialism.
The recent events in the Soviet Union do not only involve Stalinism; they affect the entire epoch in the workers' movement opened by the October revolution. This means a startling break in people's political understanding.
Only big social and political tests, of a breadth equal to the events taking place, can give back mass credibility to a socialist project. This is the challenge that now confronts the revolutionary left. *
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Die Partei
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6
EUROPE
Indeed, an important part of the dialogue between Brussels and Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia obviously concerns control of the migratory flows. For, while the western capitalists note their own national labour forces' lack of mobility, they are now seeking, in essence, to keep the available labour force of Eastern Europe where they are.
Other more long term considerations could lead the EEC countries, taking account of the relative shrinking of their active population, to plan for some con-
THE political events of the last few months have revealed with great sharpness the problems of managing the new migratory flows in Europe. The Yugoslav crisis, the attempt made by thousands of Albanians to disembark at Bari (see IV 212), the
European Community's negotiations with the three Baltic states and its great prudence in relation to the other Soviet
Republics, are all directly connected to the regulation of the labour force in Europe. How are the diverse components of the labour market to be controlled in the "new Europe", especially when millions of individuals are progressively entering this market, following the political upheavals in
Eastern Europe? From now on these will be crucial questions for European leaders, to start with those of the European
Economic Community (EEC).
CLAUDE GABRIEL
N MARCH 1990, Social Europe, the publication of the European Community, unambiguously outlined this new challenge!. Beyond analyses of migratory fluxes, the underlying issue is the management of the labour market.
How will it be possible to simultaneously increase to the maximum the free circulation of capital towards Eastern Europe whilst taking protectionist measures to control the circulation of labour?
This same review stressed that the reality of the current "migrations" is totally different from what was initially hoped for; today there is a "Community" labour force (composed of citizens of EEC which is increasingly states)
"mobile", including within the states of the Community, and an increasingly strong exterior pressure from the extra-
"flood",
Community notably coming from the Eastern European countries.
Little movement between
EEC countries
Today, less than 2% of Community nationals live in an EEC state other than their own. There is nothing very astonishing in that. But it should be remembered that the "free circulation" of persons resident in the EEC, presented as a means of resolving the irrationalities of the national labour markets and thus ultimately a factor contributing to the reduction of unemployment, was among the founding dogmas of the Single European Act.
This new "democratic right" was sup posed, moreover, to exercise discipline on wages. The experts in Brussels have now discovered that there are many sociological parameters which hinder this mobility.
Two million unemployed in