FRENCH COMMUNISTS: CHANGE OR STAGNATION? A Discussion from Paris
We reprint below, with permission, a discussion that appeared in a recent issue of Esprit, the distinguished independent Left magazine published in Paris. The discussion focuses on the problem of...
...As for Minister of Health Simone Veil, she was interrupted ten times by applause...
...Most often the CP tags along, always late and ill at ease, because for it the priority is, "socialize the means of production" and then everything will be in order...
...But in Le defi democratique, Georges Marchais supplied a most orthodox solution to the question, giving as an example of party pluralism in a socialist regime—the "people's democracies...
...that is an unavoidable concession...
...The very fact that the French CP encouraged the writing of this work seems to indicate a new attitude...
...LAVAU: Ask the Communist party to change...
...I'm throwing into the kitty my state socialism and my indefensible friendship for the U.S.S.R...
...But what is worrying the CP now is the large influx of people who define socialism in a radically different way...
...According to your view, the CP confines itself to substituting for this critique a sort of summary, arbitrary recipe...
...You can always ask, but what good does it do...
...For it to change, it's got to be put in a situation where, volens nolens, it changes...
...The CP knows what "backup strength" means, and at the present juncture it thinks that is what it should be in France...
...The discussion focuses on the problem of Communist-Socialist relations in France, on whether the Communist party has begun significantly to change, and especially on the reasons for the recent series of attacks the French Communists have launched against the Socialists...
...It—the CP—is the essential party: "the working class and its Communist party," as the phrase has always run...
...But the arrival on the scene of various leaders of the CFDT [Catholic workers' union] threatens to put the Socialist party into an increasingly critical position vis -a-vis the Common Program and, therefore, vis -a-vis the CP...
...Given the Socialist party's lack of unity, the CP stands only to benefit, posing as a solidly organized party with its own clearly defined truth...
...Our party and the other 244 A DISCUSSION FROM PARIS groups are steadily gathering significant strength...
...Its orthodoxy is the Marxist-Leninist vulgate...
...Relations among us are excellent...
...And while its militancy is not like that of the CP, that militancy exists, whereas for some time it did not...
...Consequently, I believe that the CP continues to be revolutionary in its intentions and in its forms of organization but is constrained to adopt a position that may be called reformist and does not fundamentally aim at initiating a process of revolution in France...
...In France...
...But it is at least, as Laurent says, an example...
...The Party's second response is a determination to be everywhere in evidence, even more than before, and to stand apart from the rest of the Left...
...And what is its essential nature...
...239 OZOUF: I believe the CP is suffering an identity crisis...
...For as late as August 29, Georges Marchais, in so many words, said to reporters, "First, it's my pleasure to assure you that the Communist party is in wonderful shape, and I think I can tell you that this is true of the entire Left...
...For although the CP made some concessions in relation to its own program, they were slight in comparison to those made by the SP...
...First, of all the parties it was the farthest to the Left, and everyone knows what a sympathetic chord that strikes in this country...
...That is why I believe the CP is not changing...
...It exercises its tub-thumping functions— that is, the Party casts itself in the role of champion of the dissatisfied at home—and, at the same time, it lets the Gaullist nationalist policy, which it sees as a positive international policy, continue uncontested...
...However, in the course of later developments, the CP has lost ground...
...The context is perhaps more interesting than the message...
...It would be idiotic to deny there are changes, not only in the image the CP is offering of itself, but also in its position on certain issues...
...Certainly there are always new arrivals, but what people often look for in the CP is, if not certitude, then at least a pole of resistance to chaos...
...Unlike the Socialist party, which can change and grow because it has no orthodoxy and a structure that is flexible, the CP has a firmly established orthodoxy and a rigid structure...
...They have fallen too often into the habit of thinking of the Party in terms of itself and not as an organization that necessarily has a network of relations with other groups that in a measure make the Party what it is...
...OZOUF: This is no longer the case...
...That seems the one new thing in the book—and the one new thing in the Communist party...
...I agree that the CP has a stronger appeal for French society than any other party, but to me the permanence of its essential nature is equally evident...
...democratic debate, as we understand the term, does not exist in the CP...
...There is an enigma in all this...
...That relief said a lot...
...In other words, if Communist membership is changing—and it must be changing, for more than half the members of its most recent congress were people who had joined since 1968—if the Communists are changing it is hard to suppose that the Party itself is not FRENCH COMMUNISTS: CHANGE OR STAGNATION...
...I say "approximately" because of the 1939-41 gap...
...on the other hand, the context in which the CP places its attack...
...OZOUF: I believe not...
...And on that score, when I read the book by Harris and Sedouy I see that the kind of discussion, the internal relationships within the Party are not changing...
...The CP is impotent in matters of innovation...
...And since this suicidal hypothesis is excluded, the historical responsibility of the Socialist party is all the greater, and its task all the more arduous: it must move forward with the Communist party, and in spite of the Communist party it must take responsibility for the socialist aspirations of our country...
...Is there an essential difference between the Party and the Church...
...When Mitterand keeps on saying there is no question of his forming a government without the Communists, I don't see why one shouldn't believe him...
...It has long since adopted an alliance with the Socialist party, it has long since adopted an electoral strategy, and even if the CP no longer has the same precise ties with the Soviet Union that it had in the days of the Comintern, this is not to say that its policy can be at odds with the primary interests of detente or "peaceful coexistence...
...Everything one knows of the Soviet leadership's fear of a rebirth of fascism in Europe lends a measure of credibility to this hypothesis...
...And once again, since 1956 and especially 1960, a new golden age has seemed possible...
...OZOUF: I believe that if the Left does not win the next parliamentary elections, there will be no problem...
...As for what behooves us Socialists, the essential thing is that the Socialist party itself continue to evolve, grow stronger, and root itself especially in the popular, the working, world...
...However, in varying degrees, orthodoxy exists in the others too, for this is what characterizes every organization founded on a dogma, on articles of faith...
...Yes and no...
...There is a genuine conflict in depth and a pseudo-quarrel on the surface...
...I would like to return to the gist of the CP message, to the formulation of CP reproaches and accusations...
...Let's begin with the international political scene...
...In comparison to the behavior of such frivolous, scatterbrained creatures, the "adult" comportment of steady, "responsible" Communists is all the more striking...
...I mean, the Common Program, to which the CP refers constantly as to a doctrinal guarantee, defines grosso modo what I will term state socialism—a socialism from above, which completely satisfies the requirements of CP orthodoxy...
...OZOUF: There is also the inverse interpretation: the crisis in the capitalistic system is indeed real, it is serious, and the Soviets may think they can profit from it...
...WINOCK: I said that the CP remains fundamentally the same, but under the pressure of domestic and external forces it has been led to follow a political line that can vary...
...This does, after all, constitute a threat...
...What was it that for such a long time impelled many people to support the Party...
...The answer—and here again, a careful, detailed study is needed—depends in part on one's reference position...
...I believe that, depending on our domestic situation, the CP has two possible courses of action...
...For reasons of space we have had to condense the Esprit discussion, but the views of the participants remain in our translation substantially the same as in the original...
...On the one hand, there have been "adaptations," which it more or less controls...
...Can one imagine that in the midst of a liberalizing trend that has continued without interruption since '68, with norms and traditions giving way on all sides, the CP constitutes the refuge where men find certitude, discipline, confidence—that, if I may put it so, the Party has become the last of the churches...
...Of course, in the socioeconomic area, it is nowhere near to being supplanted by the SP as the party of the working class, but it must see that the time is not far off when it will no longer be able to claim it is the only party of the working class...
...To the extent that the crisis finds the United States, at least for the moment, in a position of weakness, with a mediocre president, one can make the opposite interpretation of the international scene: would this not be, perhaps, a propitious moment for advancing a few pawns here or there...
...Do you think that herein lies one cause of the problems the Union is currently encountering...
...First of all, thanks to the alliance—and this must be said—the SP has seized a hair of the beast that bit it...
...I will formulate the CP's identity crisis by saying that it is a party that is no longer either revolutionary or reformist—or that it is both these things at once, but is no longer very sure which...
...First, the French CP takes care to say that its criticisms aim "to raise the quality of the Union of the Left...
...Yet at the same time they are calling for the application of "the entire Common Program" of the Left, a program that never proposed total structural reforms...
...A recent book by Harris and Sedouy, Voyage a l'interieur du Parti communiste, offers us a picture of a Communist party made up of youthful members and one that appears to have become at least in part a new organization...
...of a Sunday morning, you find Socialist party supporters—young and not so young—on the sidewalks selling newspapers and handing out leaflets...
...This sudden harshness, based on a quibble here, a quibble there, really justifies thinking that one is confronted by a series of pretexts or a tactic...
...The CP has no wish to be—it will not be—a backup support for another party...
...On the other hand, if the Left wins the next parliamentary elections, it is possible that the CP and the SP would have to manage the crisis— which is to say, produce a sort of "revival" of the Popular Front...
...One should take into account sociological changes among France's active population, and the more restricted role the working 240 A DISCUSSION FROM PARIS class—relatively, if not absolutely—plays in production...
...So, I agree, there is an evolution of line, yet the Party is nonetheless and profoundly its old self...
...WINOCK: As for the identity crisis, I think that the CP is affected by developments in the French and international political situation...
...the second was that the exercise of political power be in the hands of the working class...
...Second, it is necessary to raise the quality of the Union and to clarify relations between the two parties, because, according to the CP, a new situation obtains on the French political scene...
...Georges Lavau, professor of political science at the National Foundation of Political Science of Paris...
...All of which goes to prove that a statement can exist cheek by jowl with a counterstatement...
...You will recall the relief of Georges Marchais after the first round of parliamentary elections in 1973...
...Even if some of them are "middle-class," the phenomenon is utterly new, and the CP is not unaware of its significance, even if it pretends to be...
...it never happened with Leon Blum...
...Then came the nadir of the Cold War, a period of opposition between the two spheres...
...FRENCH COMMUNISTS: CHANGE OR STAGNATION...
...So, my first question is: at this point, can one distinguish individuals from the organization they vitalize...
...245 government "to manage the crisis," to impose sacrifices on the workers, to advocate austerity, etc., since this crisis is the crisis of the capitalist system...
...Which is not to say that its arguments are all bad...
...and from this one might conclude that in the CP the same thing is happening in the same way...
...OZOUF: It seems to me all the more pseudo in that the CP has never found a Socialist ally as faithful as Mitterand...
...We consider this essential, for it has provided the example of liberation from capitalist exploitation...
...After the March 1973 elections, in which the CP heard the bullets whistling around its _ears, Georges Marchais addressed the Central Committee and, on a note of astonishment, declared, "For the first time, the Union is profiting our partners and not us, profiting them more than us...
...The CP remains the church, the school, the family where one can find order and warmth...
...The Gulag Archipelago was sold at this festival...
...His remarks, little noted at the time, reveal that the present quarrel is not really new but has simply been made explicit...
...DOMENACH: Is it possible so sharply to differentiate Communists from the Communist party...
...Its practical problem is not to gambol on ahead of the masses (otherwise, there is no real class it can represent) and at the same time to offer a critique of prevailing ideas...
...But I do not think that together they can build socialism in France because there are too many deep-rooted divergences about the nature of socialism...
...This is why it attacks more violently than before "compromises" made by the Socialist party in municipalities...
...I believe in the importance of the Communist decline in strength at the polls...
...OZOUF: Nonetheless, its loss of voting strength is more important in connection with the CP's "stiffening" position than you've just said, and perhaps more important to it than the problem of "self-managing socialism...
...For the CP, this poses the whole problem of its image and, basically, of its leftist legitimacy in a new climate of opinion...
...I find it hard to imagine a Socialist party ready to fall back into the rut of a centrist union...
...WINOCK: It's my impression that he accepts the fact that the SP will have a slight edge in elections...
...Taking off from this idea, one could suppose that, as happens in ordinary life, people who have different temperaments, social origins, and motivations will also exhibit divergences in political judgment...
...Through its position and its future gains, the Socialist party can win the additional 1 percent of the votes the Left needs to come to power...
...I congratulate you...
...OZOUF: In part yes, but one must also be mindful of the Communists' willingness or unwillingness to share in forming a government in which it would be the second-ranking partner and to do so during a period of crisis...
...Consequently, in order to defend its position, the CP has attacked the SP on the terrain where it is itself the stronger—that of militant dynamism...
...But the September election setbacks came along to sour that idyll...
...It is possible for the two parties to cohabit in opposition, with more or less friction...
...249 the Socialist party must find for the next presidential elections a "good" candidate...
...The Soviets calculate that were the hypothesis to materialize, it would spell the end to peaceful coexistence...
...The Last Church...
...Clearly, it is ideal when the two spheres coincide— when its national and international interests coincide...
...This is why we have everything to fear from the ideological and political hegemony of the CP...
...MICHEL WINOCK: I agree with Jacques Ozouf...
...Solzhenitsyn, you have real courage to have come here...
...241 constrained to change...
...People have always been fascinated by how "different" in character the CP is from other social movements...
...Not since the Party's origins has anything fundamental changed—its orthodoxy defines its structure, and this centralized structure is the tabernacle of orthodoxy...
...Not only does it now scarcely fight anymore but also, up to a point, it practices the pluralism and tolerance that are the mark of our period...
...Rather it is that conditions— both the national and the international political context—are making it not actually "change," ontologically speaking, but somewhat modify its political life...
...But whereas Harris's and Sedouy's book does bring out how dissimilar Party members are, when it takes up their political language, it reveals a totally unchanged conformism and monolithism...
...They have shown that there can be people in the Party who divorce, have a private life, devote themselves to activities other than militant action...
...OZOUF: I'm not sure there is...
...What L'Humanite was latching on to was the difference...
...Addressing his comrades later, he said bitterly that, this time, the Union was advantaging the Party's allies more than the Party itself...
...First, it seeks to demonstrate that it is indeed the toughest, the party most committed to labor demands—in a word, farthest to the Left...
...There we have the original Communist credo, and what is striking in Harris's and Sedouy's book is that again and again we find this reference—no matter who's speaking—to Soviet socialism...
...but change how...
...248 A DISCUSSION FROM PARIS The Alliance and Communist Orthodoxy DOMENACH: One last question: in the light of all that you have said, how do you foresee the future and what do you hope for...
...So—I think this quarrel is partly a pseudoquarrel...
...WINOCK: I think that here one has to do much more with a pretense on the CP's part than with a real fear...
...on the other hand, a FRENCH COMMUNISTS: CHANGE OR STAGNATION...
...It is prepared to lose a few seats in elections...
...I hope that, starting from this base support, it will enlarge its constituency and become the great party it stopped being in 1914...
...All sorts of comparisons have been made on this score, and they have not become dated...
...As Alain Touraine wrote in his most recent book, "The Communist party is not only attached to an outmoded image of society but it is also and for all time at a loss in the absence of absolute power...
...Even if the Moscow leaders do not foresee the appearance of fascist governments, they can envisage other dangers...
...Today, Socialist posters are to be seen on walls...
...Why not in Italy...
...Before the Common Program was signed, there was a long period of criticism, in which the stern teacher chided the inattentive pupil or the dunce...
...WINOCK: If the electoral spread [between SP and CP] were to widen, obviously the CP would be increasingly uneasy and unwilling to continue with the policy of a Common Program...
...Some people offer this hypothesis: Moscow's current analysis of the crisis in the capitalistic system is extremely pessimistic...
...all the renovating of "the old house" would for a long time be compromised...
...The recent by-elections confirmed that, electorally speaking, the alliance is benefiting the SP, and obviously this troubles the CP...
...If the society we aspire to build cannot emerge fully formed from a great Socialist party, I nonetheless believe that its birth presupposes the existence in France of a great socialist power capable of governing...
...And even if this leftism is no longer as strong as it was, its appeal is still operative, mobilizing 3-4 percent of the voters—which is to say there are 3-4 percent fewer votes for the CP...
...ozoUF: Like Winock, I am struck by the conscious determination to preserve orthodoxy...
...Whereas for several days the opinion polls were putting the SP ahead of the CP, the results showed also that, by a few decimals, the CP's percentage was higher...
...Now 25 years ago this could not have happened, for the intellectual and political debate FRENCH COMMUNISTS: CHANGE OR STAGNATION...
...But anyone familiar with the CP knows that this reflects a calculated choice...
...That had not happened for half a century...
...It is hard to imagine a CP launching into any revolutionary action that in a country like France would risk disturbing an international equilibrium apparently so beneficial at the moment to the Russians...
...One can notice the same thing even in parliamentary debates by studying the Communist "applause metering...
...To have bound the SP to a tactical Union of the Left and, above all, to have induced it to sign the Common Program—to my way of thinking, this is its great victory...
...This is what makes for the impression—especially now, when the attack is aimed directly at Mitterand— that the quarrel is a pseudo-quarrel...
...But over and beyond the influence of the international cadre, the French Communist party also has, I think, its own reasons for its present attitude...
...when there is a strike, you meet Socialists at the corner of the Bon Marche, everywhere...
...Some people do not know where to turn in a society like ours, in which everything is collapsing—church, school, university, 242 A DISCUSSION FROM PARIS papa, mama, all the rest...
...Anyone who remembers the Party's firmly stated opposition sees that today this policy no longer prevails...
...nature, in its essence...
...It would be necessary to manage the crisis on the basis of a more or less modified leftist Common Program...
...For example, if victory at the polls brought the Union of the Left to power in France, such pressures might be brought to bear on French Socialists by other social democratic parties (Schmidt on the one hand, Wilson on the other, etc...
...And at least in the long run there'll be the question of its title as "the party of the working class...
...In terms of a determination to maintain orthodoxy, such a statement seems to pass well beyond the believable...
...At the moment a more crucial factor is the international situation...
...Second, if you are right and the Party is effectively resisting change, how do you account for this...
...And in any event, the entire history of the CP shows that when Communists are prepared to swallow insults, they can swallow much bigger ones...
...What conclusions do you draw from that with regard to the Union of the Left...
...Neither can one maintain within the Party the same rigidity in point of view as before...
...The revolutionary thesis still identifies the Communist party...
...I hope that the alliance will produce a weakening of the Communist party sufficiently gradual for the Communists themselves to accept it, but a weakening that also makes possible the existence of a great Socialist party, something that the entire movement toward social progress in France needs...
...Now the CP knows very well what "backup strength" means, since in speaking of party pluralism it gives the example of the "people's democracies...
...Since it is simultaneously a national and international political force, it belongs to two spheres...
...And at the end of this road, in its turn, perhaps the Communist party will change...
...The Party enjoyed such a heyday during the antifascist struggle, between 1934 and approximately 1945-46...
...I agree to being just one of the working-class parties...
...I raise this question because I think it can shed light on developments that, from the outside, may look like reversions to a rigid coldwar stance...
...Today the presence of the SP is no longer negligible even in the forefront of social struggle...
...This seems to me no less necessary were it to remain in the opposition or, after the elections, to take power...
...These reasons for supporting the CP are now weakened...
...One must determine the real significance of this response...
...But from now on, what obliges it to change its position is the renascence of a Socialist party that takes the political union of the Left seriously, and so leads the CP to develop a policy of leftist unity...
...Translated by ADRIENNE FOULKE q 250 A DISCUSSION FROM PARIS...
...As for orthodoxy, what strikes me is that every time Harris and Sedouy try to elicit a definition of socialism, they get one and the same answer, a lame, stammering, chewed-over magic formula: the collectivization of the means of production...
...One cannot totally dismiss the other hypothesis: despite its wish not to be changed, is the Communist party not affected—and herein may lie the cause of its problems today—by the modifications in its relations with other groups...
...On the one hand, a French CP in opposition, continuing an economic struggle that is relatively moderate...
...All that the CP can do is to create obstacles...
...but that leadership, it asserts, is not external to the working class...
...What seems to me contradictory in these Communist statements is the simultaneous summons to apply the Common Program...
...Not that is is offered as the model—the speaker takes care not to say that the same things will be done in France, where, naturally, conditions are not the same...
...one must decode and interpret...
...For this task of criticizing the prevailing ideas of the ruling classes, the CP has equipped itself with (if such cant is allowable) ideological counterapparatuses that are exact reproductions of the ideological instruments employed by the dominant society...
...There is a change in Party congresses, of course: half the delegates have been Party members only since 1968...
...DOMENACH: I was greatly struck by the fact that the French CP now makes use of publicrelations tactics through all the mass media...
...This is basic...
...In sum, by both discouraging a victory for the Union of the Left and making this alliance virtually moribund, one would be winning all round: the French CP would gain, and Moscow would have upset nothing on the international chessboard...
...These new militants in the SP are highly visible, they make themselves heard...
...Obviously, the Communists want no more of that...
...But did he belong to the Party...
...When in France we have a Gaullist, nationalistic, government, which makes overtures to the East, it is almost in the interest of the Communist party to place itself in opposition...
...In all the fresh social critiques of education, medicine, social custom, etc., leadership has come from other quarters...
...One cannot today prevent people—the Catholic Church knows this—from seeing films they want to see, or from reading books they want to read...
...the third was "the functioning of a party capable of playing the role of avant-garde for the working class and of gathering around it the working peasantry, the intellectuals, the middle class"—in a word, the Communist party...
...Everything that has been gained over the last years would come to nothing...
...You reproached the CP with lagging behind in social criticism, at a time when we are living in a society subject to radical criticism from all sides, some of it by people without any "revolutionary commitment" whatever...
...Do reasonable and generous arguments cease being reasonable and generous because Jacques Soustelle or Simone Veil advances them...
...What's more, when Socialists ally themselves with Communists, they, too, are exposed to some risks...
...What's more, during the preparations for the Party's recent congress, it appears that genuine discussion took place in the cells...
...that is to say, it is fed by the CP's resolve to retain the leadership of the Left...
...To advance further toward socialism, the CP would have to change and, in particular, renounce what for the moment is one of its dogmas—i.e., renounce its claim to being the party of the working class, and therefore give up one of the three general conditions stipulated by Georges Marchais in August 1973, in his Le defi democratique as an essential on the road toward socialism...
...Furthermore, when you consider the extraordinary social reforms in France since the '60s, it is striking that the Communist party has taken no part in them...
...By cutting into the strength first of the Gaullist pole and then that of the Union of the Left, this strategy is to recreate a majority of the Center: to weaken the UDR [Gaullist party] and, at the same time, to detach the Socialists from the Communists...
...LAVAU: I believe you are right, and personally, as a member of the SP, I think the Communist party is exploiting pretexts...
...a party that can always be seduced or hoaxed, like the "child" it is...
...If you go by the results of the 1973 parliamentary elections, by Frangois Mitterand's total vote on May 19, by what the opinion polls show, and by the by-elections—not only parliamentary but also the municipal and canton elections—it is clear that within the Union of the Left, the CP is at this moment no longer the first-ranking party...
...Therefore, I believe that if the CP is changing, the change is not in its deepest *The program of reforms on which the Communist and Socialist parties of France formed an electoral bloc...
...That campaign showed that there is a Socialist militancy...
...Is there any foundation for this suspicion...
...its structure is its democratic—allegedly democratic— centralism...
...Can the Party withstand this same evolution...
...It is clear— Communist leaders have been saying as much for weeks—that the CP will not go into the FRENCH COMMUNISTS: CHANGE OR STAGNATION...
...the reformist hypothesis permits it to have a political existence...
...No doubt...
...In the section entitled "Party Pluralism," he explained that political, social, and historical conditions in Czarist Russia prevented there being a pluralistic system of parties in the U.S.S.R., and he went on to say that there can be no question now of asking the Soviets to adopt such a system...
...Because a person joins the Communist party to be assured of certain unchallengeable things, and these have not changed—the party of the working classes, socialist dominance in Eastern Europe, etc...
...One Step Ahead of the Masses LAVAU: I would like to go back to a remark by Michel Winock, because I believe he telescoped two things: the orthodoxy of the French CP, and the too limited nature of its social criticism...
...The developments following the presidential election campaign seem very important inasmuch as during the campaign the entire Left appeared to be the party of Francois Mitterand [the French Socialist leader...
...I think that what's changing in the CP is its appearance—toward an all-doors-wide238 open image...
...The economic crisis may not have worsened recently, but it is far more "public" than during the presidential campaign...
...The CP tends to react to the new situation in three ways...
...Is it as cautious, as conservative, as limping-along as one is pleased to call it...
...Marchais's first words on TV were, "We are still the first party of the Left...
...This accounts for the new emphasis placed during recent months on the benefits of East European socialism—Hungarian "stability" or "the quality of life" in Poland or "the unprecedented harvest" in Czechoslovakia...
...However, the Party has not evolved in any fundamental sense because, to speak schematically, what makes a Communist party is the welding of orthodoxy and structure...
...No one wants the status quo, not even the Right, which governs us...
...Let me take note of two things: on the one hand, the very clear message, which can be isolated and is expressed in a series of reproaches addressed to the SP...
...Soviet leaders fear that the crisis may generate widespread popular revolts that would favor the -accession of the Left to power where that is possible (in France and Italy) and that this would then entail a series of Chile-type developments, in that these leftist governments would be more or less pushed to put through a series of measures that would aggravate disorder and inflation and thereby increase tensions between these countries and Washington...
...The first condition was the collective ownership of the means of production...
...But the moment de Gaulle was no longer in power, the moment Giscard d'Estaing, while only a candidate, appeared like a man who could challenge at least a part of that policy, the CP changed its position...
...After the war, the Communist party was contesting step by step any and all contradictions of its own statements...
...It's ten years or more since the 1965 presidential election, when Mitterand was already in the fiefdom of socialism, and during all this time—despite all the international difficulties, despite Prague, despite the Solzhenitsyn affair, despite the trials of Russian Jews—the CP found itself dealing with a Socialist leader who was faithful not only to an electoral but to a political alliance, indeed to an eventual governmental alliance...
...On what score can we take this new attitude seriously...
...I believe that the CP recognizes what's what only long after the fact and only when it has to...
...The word is passed from the top down...
...But I do realize how precarious the alliance is between the two parties...
...And it is because the Soviet Union has achieved collectivization—or rather state ownership—of the means of production that it continues to be the great model...
...The SP as it is now must realize—and realize when it reads its own papers—that it owes its increased electoral and other strength to the choice it made in opting for the Left and for the alliance with the CP...
...243 was so close that a statement could not quietly coexist with another that contradicted it...
...Obviously, the French CP must not pursue an autonomous policy that might throw a wrench into the wheels of the Soviet Union, which on the whole desires peace and needs trade with the West...
...Whatever the evolution of the Party in relation to the Soviet Union, this reference remains constant...
...I agree...
...Whence the fear—which may betray their memories of Soviet mistakes in the 1928-34 period—of a fascist reaction more or less supported by the United States...
...It must be said that the charge is not entirely trumped up...
...This is very important, because it accounts for a number of tensions between the Communist party and the rest of the Left...
...Third phase: the CP opens fire on the SP with both barrels, finding it laden with every known vice...
...The Church has been constrained to evolve after a fashion because of the evolution in social customs...
...Marchais cites as an example Romania, where, he says, five parties collaborate in governing a socialist society, and where the president of the Chamber of the People is a Christian Democrat...
...Personally, I am inclined to think the CP has had to "absorb" such a quantity of modifications that no matter what its filtering and selfregulating capacities may be (or however "scientific" its theoretical tools), the Party has found itself face to face with a less stable situation...
...If one opens Marchais's Le defi democratique, it is always just that—"the working class and its Communist party"—the decisive force around which the supporting forces agglomerate...
...The two elements are inseparable...
...it has been rejuvenated and, most especially, has retrieved electoral support...
...This answer does not seem entirely satisfactory...
...The CP is intent on continuing to be "the major party in the opposition," to use its own words, and the parliamentary by-elections in September 1974 unquestionably played a determining role in its decision to trigger the current crisis...
...Never is there any serious argument saying why the Socialist party is naughty, then good, then abominable...
...The Stymied Revolution JEAN-MARIE DOMENACH: Has the French Communist party evolved and, if so, to what extent...
...On November 29, 1974, one whole page in L' Humanite was devoted to a report on the debate over voluntary abortion...
...So, to me it appears that the "mixture" is a bit of window dressing...
...Because the CP does want to preserve its identity and not just passively confront changes in relation to the political environment, it is obliged to stiffen its stance...
...Then the French CP would be constrained, would be forced to change, and its evolution would depend on the growth of the SP...
...ergo, it does not now want to come to power...
...I give up democratic centralism, etc...
...And since the congress plays no truly effective role, there is no risk in sending young people...
...One no longer goes to the Catholic Church in search of certitude, but one does continue to join the Party for that reason—which explains why numerous leftists have joined since May 1968...
...After the 1962 Gaullist success, they no longer rolled up the largest vote in terms of ballots cast, but at least they could say, "We are the biggest party on the Left...
...young members are sent to a congress because for them it is their High Mass, their Te Deum...
...It turned out to be rather a nonevent, for of 300 copies a total of 17 were sold...
...That is why FRENCH COMMUNISTS: CHANGE OR STAGNATION...
...The SP has steadily shown growing strength at the polls over the last two years...
...The CP remains profoundly revolutionary in its discourse and also in its brand of Leninist organization, yet finds itself in a situation— here in France and internationally—that prevents it from following a revolutionary strategy...
...I believe it is the Socialist party that holds the key to the Left's electoral success...
...it is a constant decline...
...It claims to be the party of the working class and to provide political leadership to the working class...
...I offer one example: last year, for the first time, the organizers of L'Humanite's annual festival agreed to permit heretical works to appear...
...it was the argument that most affected the masses and that most effectively attracted the undecided...
...and the cornerstone on which orthodoxy and structure rest is the reference to the Soviet Union...
...Today there is a Left that stands farther Left than the CP...
...The Soviets absolutely do not want to risk a world war, and that fact determines the whole of its international relations...
...LAVAU: His answer to you would be, "Don't ask us to stop being Communist...
...One possible answer to my question is that the CP will, at some moment of its own choosing, make adaptations—adaptations only—but will itself remain fundamentally the same...
...I do believe that the alliance between the CP and the SP is extremely productive...
...Has the CP specific and serious reasons to be mistrustful...
...GEORGES LAVAU: I most certainly appreciate the force of the arguments Ozouf and Winock have set forth, and yet I should like to offer another view...
...The presidential campaign in May 1974 can only have aggravated this concern...
...Here it is aiming explicitly at one of Giscard d'Estaing's strategies, which is to undo the bipolarization of political life...
...After all, I can't see the Communist party's saying to us one fine day, "OK, comrades, I give up being what I am...
...It is quite possible that together they could form a government, remain in power for a while, even do something useful...
...There remains a possibility of leftist victory not in the parliamentary but in the presidential elections...
...The participants are: Jean-Marie Domenach, director of Esprit and a major figure in the Catholic Left...
...This is my question: can a political party— even if it is different from the others—remain unchanged when its relations with French society, with other parties, and with the international political scene are being modified...
...A good method, I believe, would be to begin reading naively what the CP is saying...
...This rivalry may seem minor but it is important, especially for the future...
...This image of electoral strength was— and still is—the CP's main window display...
...Contrary to what has been widely said, however, it seems to me that what Harris and Sedouy have shown is how disparate French Communists are with respect to social origins, motives for joining the CP, and temperament...
...If one reviews Communist statements in 1972, 1973, and 1974— up until the end of summer—their purpose was to reassure: "To vote for the Common Program of the Left does not mean you will be led to socialism without knowing and wishing it...
...247 Socialist party whose ties to the CP are sufficiently loose to make the Union of the Left no longer effective in mobilizing social action (and hence the SP could no longer profit from the same), but also an SP that, given its recent development, could revert to a centrist line only at the cost of splitting up into factions and of schisms...
...So there does seem to be a contradiction between the two current Communist affirmations: they refuse to manage the crisis, and they call for the application of the Common Program as a way of emerging from it...
...When Jacques Soustelle tore apart the "terrorist" libelers who amalgamate Nazism and abortion, L'Humanite noted that he was applauded from many benches, "including the Socialist benches...
...The second question is, in my opinion, more interesting...
...As late as July 10, Andre Vieuguet addressed the 97 federal secretaries of the Communist party and insistently reminded them that the Common Program involves only "democratic reforms, efficacious but limited...
...We have almost daily proof...
...Take birth control...
...That changes everything...
...L'Humanite made no such claim, and for our purposes here the basic issues do not matter...
...People always speak of 5 million Communist votes, but since 1945 the French electorate has grown from 24 to 31 million people...
...On December 4, 1974, Le Monde published a quite explicit statement by [CP leader] Paul Laurent: "When the Communist party envisages the conditions that more strongly favor achieving socialism through the success of `the Common Program,'* it puts on the plus side of the scales the existence of a world-wide socialist system...
...LAVAU: Is that what leads you to say there is no change or growth in the CP...
...Without having to resort to any hypothetical "sign" from Brezhnev to the French CP, one could then explain the polemical attack against the SP as the outcome of a convergence of political analysis and selfinterest...
...If the Party does not renounce this last condition, the possibility of there being a common path toward socialism is absolutely excluded...
...You said, Michel, that what strikes you about the CP is its orthodoxy...
...If the Communists are insisting that they will not enter the government to manage the crisis, it means they want to come to power only for the profound structural transformations that will mark the end of capitalism in France...
...Therefore, in the end, the status quo would be preferable to Moscow...
...WINOCK: Personally, I don't think the CP and the SP can cohabit for very long unless both remain in the opposition...
...In other words, those 5 million Communist voters amounted to something like 22 or 23 percent of all registered voters in 1945-46, whereas today they represent only 16 or 17 percent...
...WINOCK: But if one goes back to the de Gaulle period—in other words, to a low-water mark for the Communists—by comparison there has been for some time a recovery of sorts...
...By way of anecdotal interest, let me add that one of the people attending the festival walked up to the bookseller, who was a bearded fellow, shook his hand, and said, "M...
...after all, Mitterand will not live forever, his authority can be threatened, and, last, his record is not one that rules out a shift in direction...
...The moment the head of the Socialist party became president of the Republic—a position that in the present system carries great weight-conditions could change...
...Alliance and Rivalry LAVAU: The contradictions Ozouf has just stressed lead me to think that one must look a bit more systematically into the reasons for the brusque attack the CP has been waging daily against the SP since early October 1974...
...Now there is the atomic bomb...
...Since July 1972, since the signing of the Common Program, the Communists have emphasized that it involved only "democratic reforms...
...I brought up the Catholic Church...
...To be the farthest to the Left is a certificate of purity...
...The CP had not foreseen this and cannot accept it...
...Michel Winock, specialist in contemporary history at the University of Paris...
...Nothing more...
...LAVAU: There is a less dramatic variant of the hypothesis I offered...
...The First Party of the Left DOMENACH: You all seem to believe, with some nuances in opinion, that the French Communist party has not substantially changed...
...Since 1947 the Communists have been able to say, "We are the biggest party, and we are robbed by a voting method that deprives us of our representation...
...that these pressures—combined with domestic problems—would lead the SP to break off its alliance with the CP and accept rightist or centrist or Atlantic-communityminded governments comparable to those that dominate Europe...
...The French Communist party says clearly that it suspects the SP of not rejecting this strategy categorically...
...A second reason for the decline in the CP's popularity is that the Socialist party is again a real presence in the nation—a concrete presence...
...on the other hand, there are conditions to which it must submit...
...One must read between the lines...
...If the French CP is not in the process of change, what are your hopes for the Left...
...DOMENACH: I am extending your thought when I say that you hope, or you conceive of the possibility, that the CP will become not a backstop but a second element of strength in a pluriparty government as it exists in certain countries—Finland, for example...
...And where would the CP stand in all this...
...The third response: the CP also wishes to refurbish its originality, based principally on its not being "a party like the others" and the only party backed by concrete socialist experience— that is, the socialism of the East European nations...
...When Georges Marchais [head of the French CP] says that peaceful coexistence and detente are not the same as the social status quo, he has not committed himself to very much...
...It has to do with its type of organization and with its orthodoxy, as I said before...
...WINOCK: I would judge the first hypothesis the more plausible because there is a difference between the 1930s and the present...
...On the other hand, the Socialist party is perhaps in the process of developing or strengthening—in any event, is receptive to—a socialist current, which is utterly incompatible with CP orthodoxy and which on the Left is called socialisme autogestionnaire ("self-managing socialism...
...Nonetheless, I believe that ideology is important, because until the last few years the Socialist party suffered from a dearth of ideas, it had no clear line to follow, and in these circumstances, the CP could impose its line...
...Still, one must recognize what the French CP's problem is...
...The present real or pseudo quarrel dates from two events—the Socialist congress and the assessment of the by-elections...
...But on the ground of ideology and militant dynamism, it is posing as the champion of a pure and tough socialism in contrast to the pluralistic and uncertain socialism of the SP...
...however, he said, pluralism is to be found in the other countries of Eastern Europe...
...L'Humanite underlined the fact that Communist deputies took no part in this, whereas the Socialists were very much a part of it, and at times acted as a claque for the Minister of Health...
...If one construes orthodoxy in the, let's say, banal sense of fidelity to a dogma, and if one considers it on the level of language—even a language as coded as that of the CP—I'll say that, of course, the orthodoxy of Communists is much more perceptible than that of any other group...
...JACQUES OZOUF: Even Communist reviewers have commented favorably on this aspect of the book...
...that alliance can last...
...Further, the CP appeared to be the most vigorous party, everywhere present, a party of serious, effective, devoted people...
...The CP has its music magazines, its art magazines, its associations of this and associations for that— all ideological counterapparatuses...
...Jacques Ozouf, historian and study director at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, specialist in electoral sociology...
...One example will suffice: when the Common Program was under discussion, there was much talk about party pluralism in a Socialist France...
...So I believe that the far more profound reason is anger, true anger (not caprice), provoked by the growth of the SP in voting strength and in militancy...
...All analyses indicate that the SP can attract votes that never have gone and never will go to the CP...
...This gives it new possibilities and fresh trimmings, of course, but has another consequence as well: amid the plethora of posters and the cacophony of speeches, statements like the one made by Marchais about pluralism in the "people's democracies" are offered side by side with various others that in fact belie them...
...I may observe, to begin with, that since the end of 1971 the French Party has constantly alternated between periods of surliness and of euphoria...
...But 246 A DISCUSSION FROM PARIS it is also a genuine quarrel, arising from the competition—sometimes latent, today in the open—between two enemy brothers...
...WINOCK: I believe that in its relations with the Socialist party over the last five years, the CP has scored a very important point...
...It was trying to establish the vulnerability of the Socialist party, always ready to veer with the wind when questions of reform are at issue...
...Is one no longer to have the right to applaud a law one is voting to support...
...After the signing of the Common Program and up until the end of September 1974, a long period of bliss (localized squabbles apart...
...WINOCK: You were speaking of change, Jean-Marie, and the fact that our Communists are Frenchmen like the rest of us, that they are changing like the rest of us, and that by the same token the Party has to change...
Vol. 22 • July 1975 • No. 3
