The European Communist Parties - a triple crisis
INTRODUCTION In this issue of International Viewpoint we present a series of articles on the Communist Parties of capitalist Europe. In recent years it has become almost a commonplace to say that these parties are in crisis. But the crisis is much sharper and more visible in some cases than in others. So today we have to understand not simply the general contradictions which affect all of them but to see how these contradictions work themselves out in each specific case.
At the same time when these parties were part of the Stalinised Communist International, they simply applied the line that was imposed by the Soviet bureaucracy, adapting to the changes of line and the successive "right" and "left" turns, more or less simultaneously and relatively independently of the particular conditions of their own countries. But as far as the Communist Parties of Western Europe are concerned, they have been systematically applying a policy of collaboration with their own bourgeoisies for nearly 50 years now, with the exception of the relatively short periods of the Nazi-Soviet Pact (between 1939 and 1941) and at the time of the beginning of the Cold War and the Korean War. This ongoing practice of class collaboration has obviously had its effect on these parties and has become increasingly contradictory with the demands imposed by their links with the Soviet bureaucracy. Of course, the effects of this policy of class collaboration have not been exactly the same for the mass CPs, deeply integrated into the institutions of parliamentary democracy, such as the French and Italian parties, as for the smaller Communist Parties of Northern Europe or the underground Spanish and Portuguese parties.
So the phenomenon of Eurocommunism, which appeared nearly ten years ago, did not express itself in the same way or at the same moment in every party. Nevertheless it is clear that over and above national particularities, the development of Eurocommunism was a theoretical codification of decades of reformist practice. One of the reasons for this evolution was the desire of the Communist parties to get out of the ghetto and become credible partners in government for the bourgeois parties. So they had to take their distance from the Soviet Union and throw overboard part of the theoretical baggage they had inherited from the Third International, notably the Marxist theory of the state.
But we also have to see why this codification took place in the 1970s and not before. There was another motive for the more and more open criticisms of the Soviet Union and the willingness to try and formulate a credible reformist perspective for their own countries. The bureaucrats who lead the Communist Parties are not simply subject to pressure from the bourgeoisie on the one hand and the Soviet bureaucracy on the other. They are also subject to the pressure of their own social base, that is to say of the working class of their own countries, which in the final analysis is the source of their strength and therefore of their privileges, and also of their usefulness for both imperialism and the Soviet bueaucracy. Faced with a working class for which the links with the Soviet Union were no longer an advantage but a liability, they were led to criticise the repulsive features of "really existing socialism". They had to formulate a credible reformist perspective in order to maintain control over the most militant sections of the working class, who were looking for a political outcome to the wave of working-class struggles after 1968, and to derail these struggles themselves.
Today it is clear that far from being the solution to the contradictions of the Communist Parties or a new beginning International Viewpoint 11 February 1985 for them, Eurocommunism was just one stage in a crisis which had been smouldering since at least 1956 and which has deepened over the last decade. And in deepening it has diversified. If the Western Communist Parties are affected by a triple crisis, of their relations with the bourgeoisie, the Soviet bureacracy and the working class, each of them has followed and continues to follow its own specific trajectory. The articles which follow deal with these specificities.
We have chosen to begin with the three parties which were previously the pillars of Eurocommunism. Since the high point of this phenomenon in 1976-77, many things have changed. The Spanish Communist Party abandoned the perspective of the "democratic rupture" with Francoism in order to adapt itself to a transition under the hegemony of the bourgeoisie which left intact the repressive apparatus of the state. Since then the Spanish working class has gone through the experience of the Moncloa Pacts and the "social peace" which ensued. The consequences have been dramatic for a party which did not possess an apparatus solid enough to resist the centrifugal tendencies its own policies gave rise to. In Italy the reality of the "historic compromise" was seen in the support the PCI gave to the policy of austerity and restrucurations conducted by right-wing governments during the periods of "national unity" and "constructive opposition" between 1976 and 1980. But thanks to the depth of its roots in the working class and a favourable relationship of forces with Social Democracy, the PCI has managed to maintain its image of defender of the interests of the working class, even if it has problems trying to resolve the contradiction between that and its reformist political strategy.
In France, the golden days of the Union of the Left and the Common Programme have faded into the past. Since then the working class has experienced the Communist-Socialist split of 1977, the electoral defeat of 1978, the sectarian line of the PCF and finally the victory of 1981 followed by three years of Communist participation in a government of class collaboration. The combination of this series of sharp changes of line with the return to a much more pro-Soviet stance since 1977 has meant that the PCF has lost out on all sides. Today the crisis is beginning to affect the very apparatus of a party whose influence is steadily declining. The party leadership is trying to prevent the crisis having the same consequences as in Spain.
The situation of the two smaller Communist Parties that we deal with, the British and Dutch CPs, is on a completely different level. These parties have always been faced with dominant Social-democratic parties, surviving thanks to their links with the Soviet Union and the combativity of their militants in the unions. Today they are faced with the threat of splits and a process of marginalisation, under the double pressure of the Social Democracy and of the far-left, which is beginning to look as credible as they do.
Our last example is that of a party which might seem at first sight to be the exception to the rule. The Portuguese Communist Party has experienced neither Eurocommunism nor the threat of a split and shows no visible signs of crisis. It seems solid, with 20% of the vote in elections, 200,000 members and the leadership of the main trade union confederation. The article by Nuno Pinheiro tries to analyse the situation of the PCP, starting from the party's history under the Salazar dietatorship and its role during the revolution of 1974-75. But it also shows that the PCP is not immune from the contradictions which have provoked crises in its "sister parties", contradictions which will continue to have their effects in the coming period.
slid to the right, leaving no space for us between it and the UCD." (2)
The balance sheet of the transition has been an inexhaustible source of polemics in the Spanish left. I can only go over this question very briefly here to point up the apologetic character