FACE-LIFT FOR THE FRENCH COMMUNISTS

...Dissident voices have been briefly heard, even in the pages of Humanitt, from Communists who feel betrayed and let down...

...It becomes, then, a matter of some importance to determine whether the French CP really has changed its spots...

...They were greatly perturbed when the Portuguese Communists said that there would be no parliamentary government in Portugal, and hastened to explain that they would behave quite differently...

...One empirical test of the sincerity of French Communists is the extent to which they are prepared to annoy Moscow...

...is a sufficient condition for membership...

...Only the most blinkered reactionary would fail to pass that undemanding test...

...Another test of sincerity is the extent to which the French CP is prepared to disturb the faith of old party hacks who are too muscle-bound (or too honest) to dance to the new tunes...

...But the change in strategy has brought with it a partial change in self-understanding: the Party is ceasing to think of itself as the avant-garde, endowed with a privileged sense of the way history is inevitably moving, and becoming a mass party which is unable to insist on strict doctrinal orthodoxy...

...But the main thrust of his laborious explanations is to show that in France Communism would build on the French democratic tradition, and consequently take on a different character...

...Judging the sincerity of any political party is a daunting task, and ultimately the sincerity of the French CP can be proved only in the light of future hypothetical events...

...According to Georges Marchais, leader of the Party, "The desire to work for democratic changes...

...The twenty-second Congress of the French CP, held at De-Saint-Denis in February this year, solemnly ratified the dropping of "the dictatorship of the proletariat...

...The trouble with the French Communists, said one socialist, is that they "combine a left-wing ideology with a right-wing temperament...

...A provisional assessment can, however, be based on the steps it has already taken...

...Of the 1,522 delegates at De-Saint-Denis, 61.29 percent have joined the Party since 1968...

...Jean Ellenstein, in his book Le Phinotnene Stalinien goes beyond the usual line which attributes Stalin's misdeeds to "personality cult...

...The 1,522 delegates voted unanimously for all the resolutions set before them, accepted without demur the loss of "the dictatorship of the proletariat," and elected all the members of the Central Committee who were proposed...

...One could also add that the real reason for giving it up is that it has been discredited beyond redemption...

...At the moment the left-wing alliance has a "Common Program of Government" on which it fought the last presidential election and hopes to win the parliamentary election of 1978...

...Doctrinal requirements may have slackened, but the authoritarian habits do not seem to have changed...

...Moreover, since theory and praxis are indissolubly linked in Marxism, a new "line" had to be elaborated to account for the abandonment of traditional positions...

...There are casualties of the new line...

...But its novelty is precisely what makes it so alarming for many...

...Moreover, the broadly-based movement of the left cannot hope to succeed electorally except in alliance with the revitalized Socialist Party...

...And Marchais showed himself aware of the risk of dilution to which this policy might lead: "We must realize that after the presidential elections, hundreds of thousands of people want to participate in our activity...

...What happened in Soviet Russia can be explained by the special circumstances of that vast country: the structure, the absence of any democratic traditions, the civil war which followed the Revolution...

...Their latest attempt to buy popularity is the most surprising in view of the many tomes of Marxist theorizing on the subject: the French CP has ceased to proclaim "the dictatorship of the proletariat" as its goal...

...Lenin must be spinning round in his mausoleum at such effrontery...

...President Giscard is equally aware of the threat-he will still be President at that date-and made it clear that American expressions of alarm would simply prove counter-productive...

...Stalin's perversion of Marxism, according to Ellenstein, was that he turned it into a dogmatic system...

...Since Stalin (since Lenin, says Solzhenitsyn) it has been a deceitful synonym for "the dictatorship of the party" or even of an individual But whatever the reasons for abandoning the embarrassing term, the fact that it has been abandoned is significant: it will be difficult to smuggle it back in later, This enables one to make a more general point about the French CP: its concessions may have been motivated by an intense desire to achieve electoral respectability and they may be cosmetic in intention, but they constitute a commitment to the "long march through democratic institutions" which is entirely novel in Communist theory...

...In Lenin this term meant that after the revolution the power which had been seized would be turned against those who had previously exercised it...

...Though Italy is undoubtedly in the foreground of these warnings, the homily on the contrast between grim Communists in power and smiling Communists in the bid for power applies equally to France...

...Moreover, the French CP has set its intellectuals the delicate task of rewriting history...

...Only in this way could the "peaceful transition to socialpeter hebblethwaite, a regular contributor from Britain, is the author of The Runaway Church (Seabury...

...Brezhnev...

...If the French CP has become the advocate of democracy-and "advanced democracy" at that-one expects to see rather more evidence of it within its own ranks...

...FACE-LIFT FOR THE FRENCH COMMUNISTS PETER HEBBLETHWAITE Ceasing to think of themselves as the avant-garde So Henry Kissinger went to Paris and wisely refrained from giving advice on how to deal with the French Communist Party...

...They have lost, as it were, the Latin Mass of "the dictatorship of the proletariat," and they feel that the Party is losing its revolutionary ardor and succumbing to a form of social democracy...

...They have declared that there are different roads to socialism, no longer regard the Russian "model" as normative, and have therefore broken with the sacrosanct Russian principle known as "international working-class solidarity...

...They have defended "human rights" in Russia, and took up the case of the interned Soviet mathematician, Leonid Plyushch...

...It now talks a different language, but how sincere is it, and is its search for electoral respectability merely a matter of pre-electoral cosmetics...

...More important still, in signing the Common Programme, the French CP undertook to honor the rules of the French parliamentary game, and to retire with grace if defeated at the polls...

...From the point of view of the Russians, they have behaved outrageously...

...During the heady events of May 1968, it played an essentially conservative* role and denounced as "adventurers" the ultra-leftists who believed that the great eschatological day of revolution had arrived...

...The Common Programme postpones the attainment of "the peaceful transition to socialism" to the never-never land, and substitutes instead the misty notion of "advanced democracy" in terms which would seem moderate to a member of the British Labor Party...

...They made an agreement with the Italian CP, the most revisionist and unreliable of European parties, in July 1975...

...Obviously they do not all have a clear vision of our strategy and of the final objectives of the party...

...Giscard argued, at his last press conference, that the abandonment of the outmoded expression was meaningless, since it was not accompanied by dropping the class-war theory...

...The Communists are the junior partners in this alliance, and constant snarling and sniping in the pages of Humanite have made it an uneasy manage de raison...

...And the less orthodox camp followers do not rise high in the party...

...Again one could object that the French CP was merely cutting its coat according to the available cloth...

...Marchais went on TV to explain that the notion was outmoded, and that just as one abandoned an old and worn-out suit of clothes, so one could discard this piece of Marxist intellectual equipment...

...That would be sinister but for the fact that the concessions to win the masses have actually been made, and to renege on them would prove such intolerable duplicity that the deceived masses would immediately protest...

...Ellen-stein's work can be seen as an attempt to cope with awkward facts which, after Solzhenitsyn, it is impossible to deny...

...But this cannot be an insurmountable obstacle to their membership...

...Kissinger's restraint, and there have been repeated statements in the last few months which have stressed the incompatibility between Christianity and Marxism...

...The French CP ceased long ago to be the advocate of violent revolution...

...The Vatican has not emulated Dr...

...However, there was no dissent at the twenty-second Party Congress...

...That such a massive gathering should be of one heart and mind suggests a high degree of organization...

...but the fact remains that they stood for order and stability in that time of upheaval...

...ism" be achieved...

...Skeptics have said that the Communists were only interested in a revolution that they could control, and that they exercised self-restraint because leadership had passed into other hands...

...Once regarded as the embodiment of Stalinism at its crassest, the French CP, in alliance with the Socialists, confidently expects to come to power in the legislative elections of 1978...

...Marchais's solution to the elite/mass dilemma, then, is to place the elite within the mass as the far-seeing group who know where the strategic concessions are ultimately leading...

...The French CP may find itself hoist on the petards of its own concessions...

...It has still to pass this last test of sincerity...

...It declared that the appropriate strategy for France was not violent revolution but a broadly-based movement of the left which would also be open to non-Communists...

...Georges Marchais did not even bother to go to Moscow for the twenty-fifth Party Congress where he would have heard himself denounced by Mr...