Heresies in European Communism

...Their importance will probably increase in Sweden and Germany, because of the disintegration of the New Left and Maoist sects...

...I t now is a fact taken for granted that there are a variety of Communist regimes pursuing ever more divergent policies...

...El...

...The Italian Party never suffered the degree of isolation endured by its sister parties...

...The larger and more powerful wing of the Greek underground is now in the hands of national Communists who derive much support from the Italian CP...

...The case of the Greek Communist underground is less well-known, but there also a split was provoked by the Russians...

...But the larger underground organizations have broken off contact with the Center and maintain ties with the independent exiles in Italy and France...

...A stable evolution of the West European parties has been under way for a decade, characterized by increasing independence from Moscow and its supporters (insofar as they remain a bloc) and gradual emergence from political isolation and exile at home...

...Thus, the Swedish Party explicitly states its commitment to political democracy and a multiparty approach to socialism...

...The Greek Exile Center in Prague was physically taken over after the Soviet invasion and a new leadership installed...

...Even NOTEBOOK in France, several opposition groups in and out of the Party maintain regular publications and have an impact on the thinking and activity of the Party ranks...

...but it is a choice that will have to be made if the growing polarization of Italian society is not to result in a resurgence of the Right...

...For all practical purposes it is a left-wing social democratic party participating in a coalition government...

...While the Communist parties are now be deviled by internal oppositions attacking the leadership for moving too slowly toward in dependence, it is important to remember that these oppositions no longer can be reduced to a pariah existence if they are expelled...

...As the tendency toward independence becomes more marked, pressure on the Socialist and Labor parties to reevaluate their attitude toward working with Communists clearly will increase...

...Within Spain the industrial managers often protect local Communist trade union militants, since these illegal trade union leaders are the only ones with whom they can reach an agreement that has any meaning...

...In Germany the Communist youth organization, the Spartakists, has already replaced the remnants of the SDS and anarchists as the major Left force among the students...

...This is not to say, however, that there are no practical bases for a continued alliance—loose to be sure—between parties in the West and the ruling parties in Eastern Europe...

...The only Party supporting the Russians was that of Luxembourg, while in the other parties the pro-Russian line was pushed by minorities increasingly isolated and usually composed of older and less active members...

...The theoretical press of the Party for years has published nonCommunist leftists and the Party publishing house is a major publisher of the East European and Soviet dissidents...

...Yet little attention has been paid to a parallel development among nonruling Communist parties in Western Europe, which range from those with a plurality of working-class votes, as the CPs in Italy, France, Iceland, and Finland, to the small parties of West Germany, Sweden, Britain, and the Benelux...

...presence in Western Europe are viewed not only as potential threats to peace but also as possible internal threats...

...The choice for Italian democratic socialists of developing a broad Left coalition that includes the CPI is of course risky...

...When there is talk about a "Greek solution" in Italy, for example, it gains a certain credibility only if one assumes NATO and U.S...

...It is my view that at least in Italy no conceivable development toward socialism will be possible that would exclude the PCI...

...While these limits vary from country to country, the constant threat of a Russian-provoked split slows down the process of independence—though it has progressed much farther than most people realize...

...This new generation of Communist activists no longer holds the East European and Russian regimes as models of socialism and does not bear the burden of years of apology for the crimes of Stalinism and the Communist regimes...

...Even in the worst days of the Cold War, it was firmly entrenched in Italian political life through its control of the largest trade union federation and numerous city and regional governments...

...A party, particularly a mass party, which engages in a given strategy for a prolonged period, finds that the strategy often becomes irreversible...

...In Italy, the various wings of the Party are by now sufficiently differentiated so that elections for the Central Committee recognize the existence of various tendencies and the branches discuss alternate programs in electing delegates to the Conference...

...The traditional attack on the Communists from the Left—that they were willing to subordinate the struggles of their own working classes to the needs of the Soviet Union—no longer seems persuasive...

...but this was as much a reflection of the Party's domestic needs as of the increasing probability that a pro-Russian wing would be financed and supported by Moscow if the Manifesto group maintained its existence within the Party...

...The process has gone farthest in the CP of Iceland, which is no longer even invited to conferences of the West European parties...

...Any consequent liberalization in Eastern Europe would also have positive effects for the West European Communists—as they have repeatedly stated...

...The movement toward unification of the Italian labor movement, where the Catholic trade unions have taken the major initiative, shows one possible form of the coalition: Socialists, Social Democrats, Communists, and Left-Catholics...

...Expulsion therefore is no longer a surgical operation—for the internal life of the parties is becoming increasingly sub ject to debate and political conflict, and in a number of cases outside opposition has helped alter a Party policy...

...BUT THERE ARE LIMITS to how far the various CPs of Western Europe can go in denouncing Soviet reality...

...To begin with, there is a fair degree of agreement on questions of foreign policy, particularly toward the United States...

...A similar thought is on the minds of the Spanish Communists when they consider the possibilities of post-Franco politics...

...Even the underground organizations in Spain, Greece, and Portugal, which could have been expected to maintain close ties with Moscow if only to obtain aid, have shown a critical independence unheard-of in the days before the Prague Spring...

...The invasion of Czechoslovakia was the Great Divide...

...It has also been successful in establishing a united front of Communists, Socialists, LeftCatholics, and even anarchists, and by all accounts has practically taken over the stateestablished trade unions...

...For example, after the Spanish underground Party had repeatedly denounced the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the pro-Russian members of the Spanish Central Committee (in exile in France) sought a showdown...

...The pro-Russian group even publishes a paper—Mundo Obrera—using the same name as that of the underground Party paper—in which the leaders of the underground Party are denounced by name...

...In their new metamorphosis the Communist parties will have the advantage of organization and stability, and thus attract some of the new young activists who are too radical to go into the Socialist parties yet increasingly perceive the New Left groups as a dead end...

...The Manifesto seeks to address the groups to the Left of the Party and has developed a sharp and cogent critique of the East European regimes...

...The Dutch Party, to be sure, is invited to conferences such as the most recent one in January 1970 in London, but it insisted at this conference, as it has since 1964, that no joint statement be issued and that the sessions serve a purely consultative function...

...The two processes are interdependent and add up to the evolution of the Communist parties into something resembling traditional Social Democratic parties of the period preceding the split in the world socialist movement...

...The Dutch and the Italians publish the Russian dissidents, and even the French CP—the most conservative of all—has been increasingly critical of the realities of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union...

...The London conference issued a statement representing a minimal consensus denouncing the trials in Leningrad, repression of strikers in Poland, anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, and reiterating opposition to the invasion of Czechoslovakia...

...Here we touch on extremely complex problems, beyond the level of a brief report—problems to which we shall have to return...

...backing for a military putsch that would block a peaceful road to power for Italian Communists...

...The situation in which the Communist dis sidents find themselves is not analogous to that of previous oppositions, for the parties now are less monolithic than they have been in the past...

...The group bluntly denies that those regimes are socialists, affirms the existence of class struggle in Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R., and calls for revolutionary activity against the ruling bureaucracies...

...The minor CPs of Britain, Belgium, Sweden, Holland, and West Germany are not faced with these problems since they have opted for the role of ginger groups, presenting themselves as Left critics of the Labor and Social Democratic parties...

...otherwise they must form a bloc with the monarchists and neofascists, precipitating a near-civil-war situation...

...This trend, I believe, is strong and irreversible...

...Though attitudes toward the "socialist bloc" countries continued to change throughout the decade, two factors stand out: they are not held up as a model of what a West European socialism would or should look like, and they are not considered to have authority in matters of theory and practice...

...Its block of deputies in the national parliament has become indispensable for any Left-Center coalition, and this strategic position is, if anything, strengthened by the growing polarization of Italian society...

...The result was expulsion of the pro-Russian wing and the setting up of a Russian-financed and -supported center...

...A second major theme uniting the oppositions is their stress on workers' control...

...What unites these opposition groups is their feeling that new strata have been activated through the student movement and that edu cated younger workers have appeared in the trade unions who are not reachable by the more traditional Left appeals...

...In that narrow sense, the Titoist heresy has won an irreversible victory...

...Even the statements of the Czechoslovak leadership in January 1970 defending the Russian intervention did not prevent further statements by the British, French, Italian, Belgian, and Swedish parties, maintaining their support for Dubcek and their opposition to the invasion...

...The trend in the Communist parties of Western Europe appears, then, to be toward greater independence...

...The Italian Communists, however, fear that in such a coalition they would be the strongest partner and would have a great deal to lose if the coalition fails to carry out a wide-ranging program of domestic reforms...

...The Spanish CP is particularly interesting because it has repeatedly attacked abrogations of democratic rights in Communist countries...

...In varying degrees they lean upon the Yugoslav experience, but seek to develop workers' councils in a far more radical framework than that of the Yugoslays...

...They see a public de veloping to the Left of the organized workers' parties, which can be brought into the political process through a renewed political offensive and a stress on trade union spontaneity...

...A detente or a weakening of the system of military alliances in the West (and East) would have a major effect in opening up possibilities for Communist participation in coalition governments...

...The most successful CP in Western Europe is the Italian, which in its internal makeup resembles the classic Social Democratic party before World War I. It has the same complex network of cooperatives, unions, credit unions, cultural organizations, and other party-run institutions that gave the old German and Austrian Social Democrats their almost unshakable hold on the mass of the working class...

...NATO and the U.S...

...This creates a situation in which an opposition outside the Party is merely the periphery of a spectrum that encompasses substantial forces within the parties...

...If the neofascist MSI grows in political strength, the Christian Democrats will have to seek an opening to the Left by creating a coalition government tolerable to the PCI...

...The development of the West European Communist parties has already gone past the stage where their independence from Moscow could be taken as a mere strategic maneuver...

...This development places the question of joint electoral and union activity between the Socialists and Communists in a new framework, since the traditional objection to the Communist parties as basically appendages of Moscow is now open to question...

...To be sure, a major left-wing current organized around II Manifesto has been excluded from the Italian CP...

...One can polemicize with the mechanical, bureaucratic, and intellectually sterile Communist party of France, 518 NOTEBOOK but it has to be in terms of its own program and activities...