The Challenge Of Muscovite Revisionism
Daniels, Robert V.
Mr. Coser's burial of the world Communist movement was a bit premature, thanks in part to recent American tactics in Vietnam which gave the discordant Communist powers no alternative save...
...as for Moscow and the general American public, they are alike in still believing in that identity...
...Current Digest of the Soviet Press, Feb...
...I see no reason to go over that argument again...
...This turn of events could be put aside, however, as one of the "temporary accommodations" between Russia and China that Coser saw as "possible, even probable...
...In point of fact it is Mr...
...Daniels' "solution" to the problem of the Western labor movement, "let the Communists just join the Socialist Party," is a wishful fantasy rather than a serious idea...
...And incidentally, Khrushchev's remark about "goulash Communism" was not a promise just for the Russians—he made the statement publicly in Hungary...
...This leads us to the second cause of the Communist schism that Mr...
...and to transfer their membership and allegiance from the Communist party to the Socialist party...
...Daniels mean to say that the Polish October 1956 and the Hungarian revolution were weaker forces for change...
...The notion of static and monolithic Communism never was the academic and diplomatic view: it was and is the popular view of that large body of mid-continental opinion which might be termed, if I may coin a phrase, the Anti-Establishment...
...I did not argue for a Popular Front in Western Europe—as any half-way attentive reader of my article should have perceived...
...In Spain and Portugal there is perhaps a more genuine dilemma for the Socialists—whether to accept the support of Communists (and Anarchists) in the push towards a democratic constitution which will inevitably come after the respective demises of Franco and Salazar...
...but to say it was the strongest is just as obviously nonsense...
...For a big Communist country, such nationalism cannot stop short of imperialism, even at the expense of other Communist countries...
...Tito, furthermore, for all his undoubted political importance, did not have such an earth-shaking effect in challenging the identity of "Communist ideology and Moscow power...
...Coser alludes to in fact antedate polycentrism by a number of years—the de facto abandonment of revolutionary effort by the Communists of Western Europe in favor of parliamentary and trade-union oppositionism...
...Why, indeed, wait for the party organization to change...
...He sees the Communist parties of Western industrialized states, cut loose from abject dependence on Moscow by the advent of polycentrism, both driven and permitted to adjust to the national political tastes of their respective societies...
...Coser raises some intriguing prospects...
...Coser has emphasized—the tie between ideology and power...
...To this "Establishment," whatever it may be, he attributes the "static assumptions" of "defenders of the status quo," and an inability to appreciate the dynamic forces of change in the Communist orbit...
...No "Deutscheresque exercise in neo-Marxist economic determinism" is required in order to see that economic development is a crucial variable in political analysis...
...Some of the changes Mr...
...He imagines only two schools of thought, the "radicals," and the "academic and diplomatic establishment...
...It would seem, rather, that it is the responsibility of individual Communist followers in France and Italy to realize that the Communist idea is worn out, to acknowledge that no matter of principle separates them from the Socialists...
...Nor has national Communism in Poland, Yugoslavia, Albania, Rumania, or Hungary had to wait for the imaginary "new strata of native leaders" replacing "the old Moscow-trained personnel...
...If the Popular Front is attempted at any early date in any of these countries, the weaker Socialists would be captured and victimized by the Communist organization...
...Coser in explaining how Communism reached this condition, or in projecting the direction its branches are likely to take in the future...
...This gives him reason to hope that "the orphans of Western Communism might have to be welcomed back to the House of Western democratic socialism," with all that such a reunification of the Left could mean for the advance toward the Good Society...
...With respect to the future, apart from the foregone conclusion of SinoSoviet rivalry, Mr...
...Given a diversity of power centers in the movement, such as Mao's establishment of a Communist government entailed, it is im possible for the various Communist governments to uphold doctrinal authority at home and still maintain international agreement about the meaning of the doctrine...
...A different approach for the Socialists of Latin Europe is to wait until the Communist leopard changes its organizational spots—to wait, in other words, until the Communist party ceases to be Communist, and then coalesce with it...
...Ideology means so much to each government that it would sooner read the other out of the movement rather than tolerate the doubts of its own legitimacy permitted by "an 'ecumenical' coexistence of variant ideological orientations...
...Whereas the main body of Kautskian Social Democrats were more democratic and gradualist in practice while remaining verbally revolutionary, the Western Communists today have become verbally more democratic and gradualist while remaining doctrinaire and totalitarian in their organizational practice...
...4, 1965...
...The single ideology shared by ideological regimes is a bone of contention rather than a bond of unity...
...In France, Italy, Finland, and Greece, Communist membership and the voting appeal of the party or its front organization are considerable—and con * A. Veber, "Communists and Social Democrats," Pravda, Feb...
...Coser adduces as a rather mechanical explanation for their ferment...
...Now it is perfectly true that changes have been going on in Western Communism...
...My own experience is that academic students of Communism have been ever on the alert for changes in the movement, to the point sometimes of jumping to such premature conclusions as a "Titoist" China in 1949...
...But if the Communist party sheds its distinctiveness, why treat it as a special party...
...That the national-Communist heresy in Eastern Europe in 1948-1949 was the earliest force of change within the Communist sphere is obviously true...
...Fundamentally there is little reason to doubt that the Communist movement is splitting permanently into two—at least two—very different and hostile political forces...
...What Coser is calling for in Western Europe, and what some French Socialists are tempted by, is a resuscitation of the old Popular Front...
...Moscow Communism is analogous to the Social Democracy of 1919, but not identical with it...
...Tactics of nonviolent gradualism were officially sanctioned by Khrushchev as far back as 1956 (though the deviousness of his pitch was manifested by his choice of an example—Czechoslovakia...
...They reside first of all in nationalism—a nationalism which has not only forced Communism to adapt in different countries, but which, in my view, is deeply imbedded in the very nature of the movement...
...In other words, the French and Italian Socialists should use the tactics of the "United front from below," and try to relegate the Communist organization to the insignificance that it enjoys in the rest of Western Europe...
...it was obvious to most knowledgeable people in the West already, and only a few pro-Communists may have been waked up by Tito...
...It looks as though the Communist parties of the West are going the way of the Social Democratic Revisionists of the Second International, just as Peking complains, but they are going that way with Moscow's blessing, not in any polycentric defiance of the Russians...
...Coser's sketch of the history of Communist bloc relations is oversimplified beyond meaning, and his picture of American study of the subject is nothing short of a caricature...
...Does Mr...
...Coser's burial of the world Communist movement was a bit premature, thanks in part to recent American tactics in Vietnam which gave the discordant Communist powers no alternative save to rally round the slogans of proletarian solidarity a little while longer...
...More recently a Soviet theoretician wrote in Pravda to suggest that Communists give up the principle of the one-party dictatorship even after winning power: "The Communists, as we know, have revised certain concepts that no longer conform to reality concerning the role of Social Democracy and the ways of advancing to socialism in the developed capitalist countries . . . the retention of the multi-party system and the ensuring of democratic legality...
...The Socialists would find themselves in the same uncomfortable circumstances from which the Nenni Socialists in Italy have only recently extricated themselves after a long and painful divorce action...
...Between two Communist countries there are only two stable kinds of relationship: domination or repudiation...
...In fact, W. W. Rostow amply suffices in this respect...
...The idea has point only in those countries where the Communist potential is more than minuscule, and to evaluate it we have to examine local conditions...
...Coser who overlooks the earliest and strongest forces of change and dissension within the Communist sphere, namely the nationalCommunist heresy in Eastern Europe in 1948-49, of which Tito was merely the most successful representative...
...24, 1965, p. 6. siderably stronger than the Socialists...
...In sum, the nationalistic forces of polycentrism in the Communist movement are plain enough, and are not clarified any further by a Deutscheresque exercise in neo-Marxist economic determinism...
...Contrary to Marx's belief in an international allegiance—and contrary also to the simplistic American belief that nationalism is good and therefore the Communists can't be nationalistic—the Communist revolutions everywhere, starting with Russia in 1917, have been above all vehicles of nationalistic selfassertion and economic self-determination...
...The Socialists, for their part, should make every effort to capitalize on Communist "revisionism" by explaining that the Socialists are the true revisionists, and pulling the tired Communists over to the Socialist ranks without the incubus of Communist party organizational habits and deceitfulness...
...Granting the present state of Communist politics, however, I find less ground for agreement with Mr...
...Particularly in France or Italy, a Popular Front would be a crippling blow to the hopes for a reformist democratic center coalition...
...Coser has rightly diagnosed the fundamental causes of the schism in Communism...
...The satellites' early and strong urge to independence did not depend on the factor of economic progress that Mr...
...There is little ground to expect that the Communist parties will or can "change the very structure of their organizations...
Vol. 12 • July 1965 • No. 3
