What's Left? The West European Communist Parties in crisis
Introduced by Francois Vercammen
The fall of the Berlin wall and the disintegration of the USSR meant the historic defeat of the Stalinism which was at the root of the long-term crises of Communist Parties across Europe. This was partly because a positive reference to the USSR was a key element in the identity of these parties, and partly because this positive identification with the first country of Stalinism was the basic element in the cohesion between tendencies inside each party, and between the parties at the international level.
No party nowadays can avoid drawing a balance sheet of the various stages of development of the Stalinist cycle, or rewriting a programmatic text which fills the vacuum in politics which has opened since 1989-90. And all the parties surveyed in this issue of International Viewpoint are also required nowadays to make policy as they go, in rapidly changing conditions.
What are the overall tendencies in this mutation of the West
European Communist Parties ? First of all, no party has gone back to the revolutionary Marxist roots of the Third International in 1917-1922 to search for new inspiration. Instead, the leaders of all the parties, and a majority of tendencies in each organisation, tend to share a neo-reformist vision of social transformation, which brings them closer in spirit to the social democratic or the Green parties. Having said this, ex-Communist leaders in western Europe face two major obstacles:
* Despite its Stalinist deformations, the traditional ideology of these parties contained real anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist elements, which can be suppressed only with great pain to the organisation and its militants.
* secondly, the real problem in any transition from post-
Stalinism to social democracy is that collaboration with the ruling class in order to win limited reforms - which is what social democracy boils down to - is more difficult in the 1990s than 30,
20 or even 10 years ago. In the old days, social democrats argued with conservatives about how to run the welfare state and where to invest to create most jobs. Nowadays, support for the system means sharing the responsibility for the brutal dismantling of the welfare state and a neo-liberal reform of the economy as a whole.
The price a left wing party pays for this collaboration is already
International Viewpoint #264 MARCH 1995
Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) had very little effect on the Portuguese left: a few important intellectuals left the Party known: look at the crisis in the social democratic parties. Of course, all the Communist Parties try to protect their apparatus of full-time party workers. But whereas the French or Portuguese traditionalists do this by a sectarian and defensive proclamation of pride in the "communist identity" of a shrinking section of their supporters. They refuse to take part in the management of the capitalist crisis, but they also refuse to link up with other social and political forces which are available and ready to do something to confront capitalist policies. The situation in Spain, Italy and Germany seems rather different. Large sections of the former Communist Parties have broken with their Stalinist past, without drifting into social democracy. While their desire to protect the party apparatus results in the strengthening of a new centre of gravity of the parties in their parliamentary caucuses (the part of their party apparatus they can have financed by the bourgeois state itself, their real success among a part of the working class exposes them to other, contradictory pressures. They are still mindful that their electoral success is the result of their support for extra-parliamentary activities and their fundamental support for the interests of the lowest sections of capitalist society. And they have also understood that an effective fight-back in the 1990s obliges as never before the united action of different sections of the left, and a real respect for the autonomy of mass organisations like trades unions from the political parties they may be closest to The United Left in Spain, "Communist Refoundation" in Italy and the Party of Democratic Socialism in Germany are the major political force opposed to the bourgeoisie and to social democracy in their respective countries. Their future is far from pre-ordained. Their programmatic and political make-up is very heterogeneous. Their past experiences and their historical references can lead them to support "economic realism" or to make their peace with the institutions of the state instead of defending always and everywhere the interests of the oppressed But as we hope to show in this dossier, there is another possibility... *
----- photo credits and running heads -----
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International Viewpoint #264 MARCH 1995 on both occasions, but there was no development of a political and intellectual would question the development and the international politics From revolution to normalisation
The PCP responded to the revolution of 25 April 1974 by entering the provisional government and the state structures, including a policy of infiltration and political activity among the armed forces. At the same time, the Party retained mass sympathy in the trades unions and social movements. This is because the PCP participated in the state apparatus in the context of a pre-revolutionary crisis. Participation in the government and civil service seemed to be a way of transposing the social conflict into the very organs of state power. This is quite different from the latter participation of moderate EuroCommunist Parties in stable bourgeois administrations.
One of the first things the PCP did when it entered the provisional government was to organise a trades union movement against the wave of wild strikes factory occupations and land occupations that had, quite naturally, started. When this PCP initiative failed, the Party started trying to control, channel and institutionalise the spontaneous workers' and peasants' movements. Land reform must not challenge the basic order, reforms in industry must be agreed with the bourgeois political forces.
It was only latter that the PCP rationalised and justified its participation in state power. They claimed that there had been a situation of dual power, particularly in the economic sphere, at the time when the large industrial groups were nationalised. Supporters of the party accepted this reformist strategic vision to the extent that it was based on concrete measures which seemed to be a step forward for ordinary people
Having said this, the PCP was obliged, at the same time, to take the leadership of mass struggles and areas of social resistance. So the party became clearly linked to nationalisations and land occupations, and to the opposition to the various attempted coup d'Etat against the provisional government. And this was at a time of violent social confrontations, with a very active extreme-right. There were numerous arson attacks against PCP offices, our own offices, and trades union offices.
The PCP was expelled from the government as part of the process of 'normalisation' after the November 1975 coup. The naked reality of the balance of class forces demonstrated the weakness of the previous reformist line and radical rhetoric. In response, the PCP replaced its policy of participation in state structures with the catastrophic and demagogic position that the revolution was still under way. This not only justified their class collaboration in 1974-5, which contributed to the final blockage of the revolutionary process in 1975, but it enabled them to consolidate a certain militant base. They rejected all social democratic tendencies, and proclaimed the need to effect a transition to socialism and the classless society. The first time PCP Secretary General Alvaro Cunhal met with the leaders of our party, in the early 1980s, he claimed that even then, the revolution was still under
Ideologically, this demagogy enabled the PCP to ignore the eurocommunist developments across most of Western Europe. Openly hostile to the evolution of the Italian Communist Party under Enrico Berlinguer, the PCR maintained relations more or less exclusively with the traditionalist French Communist Party, and became Moscow's most faithful ally in Europe.
This radical position has ensured a fairly constant 15-18% of the vote in municipal elections, and until recently at least 10-12% during national elections. The Party remains the majority current in the trades union world. All this gives it a real political importance. No change possible under Cunhal
International affairs had little effect on Portuguese political life during a long period, and information on foreign affairs did not circulate in society. At the same time, the PCP formed a semi-autonomous social and cultural segment of society, with its own means of communication. Journalists visiting the Party's rural strongholds in the Alentejo region have shown that many workers and peasants simply did not believe that the Berlin Wall had fallen. They had absolutely no doubt that the entire business was media intoxication and bourgeois propaganda.
Internally, the PCP is extremely bureaucratic. The historic leaders of the party, some of them in place for over 50 years, others, like Cunhal, having passed long years in fascist prisons, have an immense moral and political authority controls everything in the party. It is difficult to build an opposition to them.
Slowly but surely, of course, the news filtered through. And the loss of credibility of the Party in recent years has been brutal.
Both the electorate and the militant base are disappearing. The party has never managed to establish a newspaper close to its views, and has great difficulty communicating to its potential supporters. Their remaining social base is ageing.
What next? The democratic reform of parties like the PDS in Germany, the
Refoundation in Italy, and the United Left
(IU) in Spain, without collapsing into social democracy, came from sections of those parties" apparatus. Nothing similar can develop in the PCP as long as Cunhal is in charge. Afterwards, the minor differences already visible among leading members of the party will doubtless develop into alternative positions and conflicting strategies. Whatever happens, the PCP remains the largest component of the organised workers' movement. Unlike in the revolutionary days of 1974 and 1975, the only realistic perspectives for regrouping the left today are those which base themselves on the transformation of at least part of the Communist Party. *
Splits to left and right...
The PCP was founded in 1921. Like several other southern European workers' parties of the time, it was born after a split in the anarcho-syndicalist movement. This was a very militant milieu, compared to the socialist origins of some of the
North European Communist Parties
The first major split in the PCP came in 1963. A pro-
Chinese faction left the party to form a series of organisations which, taken together, formed an important current in the workers' and the student movements, as an alternative pole to the PCP.
In later years, many dissident tendencies developed in the Party youth and in various trades union fractions. But these resulted in individual resignations from the Party rather than organised splits. Only in 1989 was there a conscious and organised split on 'post-68 political lines. One of the
Party's MEPs (deputies to the European Parliament)
and a section of the official leadership left, several more leaders were expelled. Those who left were opposed to the PCP's positions on capitalist integration of Europe, and in particular the Common
Market (a free trade zone, in which workers may migrate to any member state).
Although this new current advanced left-wing ideas on international questions, and in their support for a democratisation of the trades union sphere, most of these militants have become more and more moderate or right-wing. Its two leading figures have both won elections on Socialist Party (PS) lists: one to the national parliament, the other to a town council in the Lisbon region. A minority has resisted this rightward drift, and some of these militants issue a left-wing magazine. *
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