EUROPEAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY-NEW PROBLEMS, NEW PROSPECTS:The Socialist Left In Europe

...With the Communists excluded from normal political processes in France and Italy, a left majority was impossible...

...One, associated with the Fabians and the Labour party's right wing, stresses the view that socialization of industry is necessary for efficient production and planning and that it can gradually be made acceptable to broad sections of the population, primarily through proof of its efficiency...

...The first, developed in France, dealt primarily with the socialist transformation of advanced industrial societies, taking into account the shifts in occupational structure after World War II...

...This is why the early Communist movement attracted such diverse followers in the various European countries, ranging from revolutionary syndicalists to small groups of Marxist sectarians, from traditional maximalists to left-wing socialist youth and the more radical trade unionists...

...In this optimistic milieu the prospects for a socialist left appeared marginal at best...

...A move to the left, however, has its own attendant risks, and one of the major distinctions between leftand right-wing socialists is in how they estimate this calculus...

...One nationalizes in order to strip the ruling capitalist minority of its economic and social base of power...

...radical transformation in the Communist bloc would lead to a similar evolution into modernity...

...The Jusos, for example, believe that a breakthrough is possible by offering a more radical socialist program that would mobilize the traditional support of social democracy and extend it among the younger voters who are not as yet integrated into the value nexus of the capitalist system...

...Left wings rearise in the mass parties despite their historic tendency to split away and form alternate sects or parties...

...They argued that the welfare state in Great Britain, while undoubtedly a major achievement, maintained the basic class structure of British society and in effect helped to stabilize British capitalism by nationalizing those sectors of the economy that were financially unattractive...

...Insofar as the French left socialists do have a defense policy, and it is not clear that they do, they support the concept of defense in depth, or a general "people's" defense...

...The very class structure of modern industrial society, which had given rise to the mass socialist movements, was now assumed to be in flux, and the middle-class styles and values would become the norms for the majority of the population...

...Wedgewood Ben and Michael Foote are typical...

...The Jusos, whose leadership consists mainly of former students and some middle-class professionals, are influential in a few major unions...

...Mallet argued that the masses of professionals and technicians would be driven by their life condition to organize analogously to industrial workers and that both could unite against the capitalist order...

...The major industries should be taken over, whether they are losing or gaining financially, in order to 263 equalize the distribution of power in the society...

...For the student left, China and the Third World played much the same role as the Soviet Union had played for an earlier generation of European leftists...

...modern, efficient management would assure undreamedof prosperity...

...The second was the activation of fairly broad groups of younger intellectuals, often graduates from ultraleft student radicalism into the left wing of a mass party, which now act as ginger groups within the parties...

...The student rebellion in the '60s was in part directed against the complacency of their own societies, heightened by the fact that there was a drop in the prestige of the intellectual professions for which the students were being prepared...

...To begin with, it does not support Atlanticism and NATO, but instead would have France—that is, a socialist France,—be oriented toward the formation of a socialist Mediterranean bloc, which would in turn develop ties with the nonaligned bloc and the Third World...

...The classic dilemma of the socialist left has always been that, while their program presumably responded to the needs of the industrial working class, it succeeded primarily in attracting younger intellectuals and ideologues rather than the bulk of the socialist workers...

...And, most important, by the '30s the Soviet experience began to look less and less attractive...

...In foreign policy, the Bevanites and their allies tended to deemphasize the ties with NATO, seeking to replace NATO with a looser defensive alliance...

...Instead of seeing this as an enlargement of the middle class, which would threaten the parties of the left, Mallet saw the "new working class" as an intellectual salaried class, subject to factorylike conditions and hierarchical discipline, within increasingly bureaucratized sectors of the economy and society...

...Their growing influence is likely to sharpen class and political cleavages in Scandinavia, and since they attract especially the younger and newer supporters of the parties, they appear to be the ascendant wing...

...Today no major working-class party in Europe finds it necessary to defend the Soviet Union...

...The result was to limit sharply the range of options available to European social democracy...

...The socialists appeared to be committed to no more than creating extensive welfare states on the Swedish model and the role of junior partners in an anti-Soviet Western alliance...

...in the other, isolation from Moscow...

...The weakness, however, is that this emphasis of the French socialist left makes almost certain a predominantly intellectual and middle-class composition...

...The significant aspect of student radicalism is therefore the radicalization of the younger professionals who provide the class-based organization of socialists with indispensable technical cadres for the running of a modern economy...

...They are for an extension and a deepening of the Ostpolitik, assuming that increasing ties with East European countries will help liberalize those regimes, and that within a liberalized East European Communism class politics will push toward an extension of workers' power against the Communist bureaucracies...

...This created divisions, loosely speaking, between reformism and revolutionary socialism...

...Since the French left coalition now probably has more than 51 percent of the electorate, concessions toward middle-class parties are unlikely, and no left-coalition partner thinks in terms of an Italian-type "historical compromise...

...He pointed out that in France unions of professionals and technicians tended to be more militant than blue-collar workers in raising issues about control of the work process...

...What is required is a massive socialist takeover of the economy, which, whether compensating the former owners or not, would deprive them of the major levers of economic and political power...

...NeoMarxist theorists both of the Frankfurt school and of its equivalent in Eastern Europe, the Praxis group in Yugoslavia, tended to reduce their critique of the existing social order to attacks on bureaucratic drives they saw as endemic to the modern industrial order...

...They now can do so, for they are freed of the fear of involvement with Moscow and of U.S...

...The welfare state is taken for granted, as a given...

...Rather than being purely ideological, it can be seen as reflecting the discontent of the future members of a new exploited class now being formed in the universities...

...the gradual emergence of the Italian and French Communists from the enforced political ghetto of 264 the Cold War...

...The French writer Serge Mallet, in agreement with a number of American and European sociologists, studied the large number of white-collar workers and professionals who had appeared in the welfare state...

...The broader left wing in the British Labour party (BLP) centers around the Tribune group and has many prominent spokesmen, both among Labour MPs and in the Cabinet...

...The difficulties that the classic social democratic parties in Britain and Germany have had in maintaining a degree of enthusiasm and support among younger workers further encourages sections of those parties to move the the left...

...Both American and European analysts celebrated the "death of ideology" and the concomitant death of a class-conflict-oriented politics...

...Generation after generation of socialist youth seems to rediscover the themes of the socialist left, often without much of a sense of continuity with long261 established traditions, and therefore often repeating the fate of earlier socialist left movements—splintering factions followed by a breakaway, and attempts to set up "purer," more principled movements...

...The lines between left and right wings were very sharp, and the resultant tendency to break away from the SP (SFIO) led to repeated attempts to set up new parties—ranging from the RDR, which included Sartre and other *SFIO: Section Frangaise, Internationale Ouvrire predecessor to the present SP (Partie Socialiste...

...262 The Post-World War II Left and the Cold War Period THE POST-WORLD WAR II SITUATION differed drastically from the prewar scene...

...In their view the emphasis the social democratic governments have put on taxation of income, rather than to attack ownership, has created resentment among the middle strata and even the more skilled workers toward high tax rates— without decisively attacking the major strongholds of class power, which still exist in the corporate sector...

...In short, Europe was being Americanized and European parties were presumably going to respond to the new reality by becoming less ideological and more prone to consensus...

...Specifically, the contribution of the French socialist left to the French left electoral bloc is a stress on the condition of migrant workers, a 268 Mediterranean orientation, and an emphasis on workers' councils and decentralization...

...During this period hostility to the U. S. grew continually because of the seemingly endless Indochina war...

...Until the Bolshevik Revolution, there was a loose left /right division in the Socialist International, often leading to intense factionalism and splits with regard to the kind of organization that socialists should favor...

...The domestication of a social democratic party, it seems, encourages passivity and inactivity among workers and sharply limits the party's ability to mobilize massive enthusiasm for its program...

...The development of EuroCommunism opens up the prospects for social transformation in Western Europe, while the difficulties within Eastern Europe make the Soviet-dominated bloc appear less monolithic and threatening externally...

...This movement was paralleled by similar developments among left Catholics in Spain and Belgium and formed a new "objective basis" for the revival of a socialist left...

...One is a systematic revival of Marxist and neo-Marxist thought, emphasizing primarily the ideas of the young Marx, of Gramsci, and of a few Trotskyists such as Ernest Mandel...

...Put in a different way, the French Communist party concedes the desirability of a number of parties forming a socialist government, but it only accepts the notion that those other parties represent strata other than workers...

...Thus "maximalism" thwarted the rallying of the support of stable majorities for the socialist parties...

...The problem of a socialist transition in France is therefore more acute than in Italy...

...The French left, both in and outside the SP, differs from Francois Mitterand, the party's leader, in several respects...

...It is also increasingly open to demands for workers' control...

...As a social democratic party moves toward respectability, it makes limited inroads on the traditional middle-class vote, which in any case tends to prefer centrist and conservative parties...

...Both of these cleavages were still further complicated by the tendency of socialists to distinguish between maximal goals and immediate strategies and tactics...

...Their critique of social democratic gradualism is that it neither mobilizes the traditional working class nor draws younger middle-class and intellectual elements into the movement...

...In Germany, the Jusos, or young socialists, form a substantial sector of the Social Democratic party...

...Maximal goals were often stated in cataclysmic terms by socialist movements that in practice were committed to day-to-day struggles for reform, to the building of trade unions, cooperatives, etc...

...What they did say was that the practice of the Labour government of appointing retired admirals and generals to head the nationalized industries, while pleasing the middle-class moderates, perpetuated the upper-class domination of British industry in the nationalized sector...

...The program of the Swedish Social Democratic party was considerably affected by a left wing that may well become more powerful as a result of the electoral defeat of the party...

...In that fact lies both temptation and a promise...

...They argue that in Sweden, for example, under the social democratic government, there was far less social ownership of the economy than there is in France or Italy...

...q 270...

...Throughout the '50s, the unprecedented prosperity of the welfare states and their apparent success in stabilizing the economic cycle led to "postideological" analyses of the European and American societies...

...In France alone, there now appears to be a viable left majority—a left majority that goes beyond traditional social democracy...

...To summarize: out of a number of different sources, a left-wing socialism has been reborn within and near European social democracy...

...Both the Socialist and the Communist parties had built-in constraints to discourage internal groups that were in programmatic disagreement from breaking off and setting up independent organizations...

...The training that the students receive presumably enables them to generalize about their social condition and makes them more volatile once they enter into the work process...

...RDR: Rassemblement Democratique Republicaine — an attempt, in the late '40s, to form a broad left-socialist party...

...The present majority response in the socialist movement is "more of the same," and while that appeared to be a solution in a Europe seen as stable, prosperous, and politically immobile, it is inadequate today, when faith in the present system has been substantially shaken up and a new generation of young intellectuals and worker activists is emerging on the scene...

...This meant continued centrist or conservative governments and a further gradual domestication of the social democratic parties...

...and the reemergence of class cleavages in European politics...

...A second cleavage, coinciding at times with the first, centered on attitudes toward the existing social order and estimate of its openness to fundamental reforms...

...Then, too, there are such developments as the new Euro-Communism, and the prospect of a Mediterranean bloc in which Communist and Socialist coalitions would dominate...

...This convergence theory applied not only to the non-Communist advanced industrial polities...

...Its insularity, however, cuts it off from the European socialist strategies...

...The single major gain for the socialist left that arises out of the new developments within the Communist world lies in the freeing of Europe's working-class movements from identification with the Soviet "model...

...Usually, such groups have later sought reentry into the mass socialist party...

...The working class was slowly losing its class identity and was merging into the middle class, coopted by the growing consumerist temptations of an increasingly prosperous and stable Europe...

...The German social democracy, they argue, is too established to be viewed as a vehicle of social change, and that explains its inability to advance today politically...

...In Britain this was hardly a problem, since the industries taken over had been chronically undercapitalized and were losing money...

...Since both were relatively unknown, one could project upon them whatever utopia one had in mind...

...The maximum program was reserved for passionate May Day speeches...

...The Cold War had two major impacts: on the one hand, the disillusionment with Soviet reality and its imposed replicas in Eastern Europe...

...In this perspective nationalization of services indispensable to the entire economy should be begun, and a nationalized industry should be run in a hierarchical manner not particularly different from the private economy...

...The New Working Class and Workers' Control SEVERAL of the theoretical developments that occurred in the middle '60s still affect the strategies and programs of left socialists today...

...Here at last were seemingly broad and growing strata "to the left" of the organized radical movements on which some sort of new politics might be based...

...This polycentrism led to a thaw in European leftwing politics...

...It revives classic Marxist and early Bolshevik 266 themes but does so under new circumstances and in the presence of a far more educated working class than existed in the past, and with material conditions for workers' control that are far superior to those in relatively underdeveloped Yugoslavia...

...They have grown in part because of the extraordinarily cautious program of the majority Social Democrats...

...Socialist strategy in France is further complicated by a key difference between the French CP and the Italian and Spanish ones...

...As a result, the new groupings of the socialist left in the '30s tended to be attracted to splinter parties that emerged from the Communist parties, or to set up their own institutions, or work as factions within the existing socialist parties...

...They thus inject a more radical tone into the movement...

...The terrain to the left of the existing mass working-class parties appears amorphous and more suited to small transitory grouplets and sects than to the formation of a new mass party aspiring to win a majority within the working class...

...If anything, it served as a barrier to the serious adoption of a minimal program, since it managed to frighten off potential middleclass supporters...

...These problems require more drastic restructuring and redistributive measures...

...The prospects for a radical transformation of the capitalist order were thus limited in two important respects: measures that would provoke the United States into cutting off credits were unlikely to be undertaken by any West European government, and the alliance with the United States militarily stabilized the continental status quo...

...As such, workers' control is the link between the ideas of the French socialist left, the left-wing movements in the British Labour party, the German Jusos (Young Socialists), and similar new left-wing currents within some Cummunist parties of the West...

...They represent an increasing problem for the party leadership, since their growth in the party, though not necessarily in the electorate, is used by the Christian Democrats to frighten off middle-class voters...

...The extension of state ownership of the means of production and exchange can be proposed for several reasons...

...The PSU did not really emerge as a significant force until the revitalization of the French Socialist party under Mitterand in the last several years...

...In a number of socialist parties, they have acted as a bridge between the relatively 267 antiquated party cadres and younger technicians, intellectuals, and professionals...

...On the other hand, the French establishment is both more homogeneous and powerful, as well as more prone to extralegal solutions, than its Italian equivalent...

...In France, the post-World War II socialist left had firmer ideological roots, particularly in the large Federation of the Seine, but it operated in a drastically different milieu...

...Traditionally, one of the left wings' major focuses has been the youth organization of the socialist parties...

...Historically, Eduard Bernstein has won the ideological battle in European social democracy, which in practice has adopted his statement: "The final goal is nothing, the movement everything...

...The French CP supports a left alliance with the socialists, provided—and always provided—that the CP maintains its hegemony within the working class...

...Two other matters give the German left a special character: one is the massive presence of foreign workers who occupy the bottom of the class ladder and are, to all appearances, a permanent factor in German society...

...The Bevanites concentrated on a critique of the moderate domestic program of the British Labour party and the foreign-policy alliance with the United States...

...Revived theories of imperialism saw the U. S. as an imperialist power devoted not to progress and modernization but to the maintenance of a world status quo that increasingly doomed the Third World to poverty and dictatorial rule...

...the cement that held the Communists together was loyalty to the Bolshevik Revolution as institutionalized in the new Soviet state and the Communist International...

...What finally remained were Europe's mass social democratic and Communist parties, and within their orbits new programs began to emerge...

...But a major factor can perhaps be found in the exhaustion of social democratic reformism whose rightward drift in the '50s and early '60s was not substantively reversed...

...All of the basic reasons for the existence of a socialist left exist in Germany: major class differences, an economy firmly dominated by the private sector, a welfare state that has made few major advances in a decade, and a nation that too obviously is the major U. S. ally in Europe...

...The Bevanites revived the debate about nationalization that had been troubling European socialists for some time...

...The cement that held together the socialist and social democratic parties was their massive electoral and organizational base...

...In one case, isolation from the mass socialist base and trade unions...

...While the second may often have been the case in practice (except perhaps for the period immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution), the first has never really been true...

...And they do not generate more work or cope effectively with inflation...

...This was nicely illustrated in the Italian socialist movement around the time of World War I, when a compromise between the left and right wings was institutionalized by the adoption of both programs...

...Liberalized Communist states would become increasingly technocratic and, during the '60s, the golden era of East European liberalization, one found East European experts echoing their West European colleagues...

...Today "maximalism" is seen as a burden by most social democratic parties and, in the postWorld War II period, a number of them shed their programmatic heritage in order to become mass parties of social reform...

...the second is the prosperity of German capitalism, which creates more 269 options for economic and social change than is available to the stagnant economies in Britain and Italy...

...They stress the need for a more drastic discontinuity, which alone could make the workers' councils effective and rally enthusiastic support to the left...

...Convergence Theories and the European Left THE FINAL PERIOD Of the postwar era saw the development of polycentric tendencies in the Communist world and the disillusionment of many Communist activists after the Russian suppression of the Hungarian revolt...

...And their tie with the revolutionary center in Moscow, in turn, provided some stability for the early Communist movements, giving them a measure of legitimacy...

...The very fact that such majorities exist gives debates over programmatic alternatives an urgency they (lid not have in the past...

...Thus the SP participated in governments that had embarked on a series of bitter colonial wars leading to defeat after defeat...

...There were other important factors: the development of independent regimes in the Third World and the growth of neutralism and nonalignment...

...The new middle class, or Mallet's "new working class," tends to be, if anything, more radical than the mass social democratic parties themselves...

...However, no equivalent organizational focus was provided, and this particular leftism therefore soon began to disintegrate...

...The industrial hierarchy would be reorganized so as to place authority within the nationalized economy in the hands of elected public bodies...

...In foreign policy, the Jusos' goals resemble those of the Italian Communists...

...By the late '60s several factors had changed the strategic relation between Socialist and Communist parties in Europe...

...This places the French left socialists in conflict with the Communist party, which is suspicious of worker-control schemes and stresses centralized state control and planning...

...Demands for workers' control presuppose a far more radical reordering of society than mere nationalization...

...Alienation was now seen as the most acute form of exploitation—not the alienation in the process of production stressed by Marx, but the alienation of promethean intellectuals and frustrated youth...

...Socialist parties in Europe attract a number of different clienteles...

...French teachers and technicians had long been organized in Christian and independent unions...

...Europe, immediately after World War II, desperately needed Marshall Plan aid and American credits, and it seemed to need the NATO shield for its very self-preservation...

...This duality can be expressed as "socialism from above versus socialism from below" and "bureaucratic versus spontaneous organizational theories...

...they seek 'to make changes that would decisively tip the social power in their countries...

...However, the French left tended to fracture—and by the '60s even the PSU had several highly organized, factions...

...The argument of the French left socialists regarding internal French development concentrates on the need to break up the highly bureaucratized centralism of the French state, which they see as the major prop for French capitalism...

...Left-wing socialists argue that even traditional trade-union strategies, favored by right-wing socialists, require international cooperation by trade unions and socialist parties, and in countries where there are Communist as well as socialist parties, they require Socialist-Communist cooperation...

...Both left and right wings are endemic or "natural" tendencies in the socialist movement...

...The Bevanites argued from the basically egalitarian premise of socialist thought...

...The approach of this BLP left can be summarized as Bevanism in modern dress...

...The primary one was the stabilization of the Cold War, so that Russia was no longer seen as an active military threat to Western Europe...

...In other words, if the workers' councils are gradually extended into the economy, they will be perceived by the workers as yet one more bureaucratic trade-union operation limited to activists and the already committed...

...Two new poles of attraction had developed for radical dissidents in modern industrial societies: an abstraction known as the Third 265 World, and another known as Communist China...

...They are more involved in nontraditional programs than the majority social democrats, supporting feminist, student, and anti-imperialist issues...

...Within that framework, several strands of the post-World War II socialist left emerged...

...This last factor in many ways was the most immediately important for the new growth of the socialist left...

...In a number of countries the new Communist parties did not manage to obtain a substantial organizational base...

...Its roots can be seen: in the economic crisis that now has shaken up Europe after two decades of uninterrupted prosperity and economic expansion, in the disillusionment with U. S. leadership in world affairs, in a new sensitivity to the problems of the Third World, and in a general feeling that social change again is realistically on the agenda...

...The mechanical transfer of Russian practices info the early Communist parties turned a number of these parties into sects with little relevance to their own countries...

...For a split to make sense, one had to assume that it was easier to attract workers to a radical or left-wing socialist program from outside the existing mass socialist party rather than through a struggle for a majority within it...

...the polycentric breakdown of the Soviet bloc into a number of divergent structures—Russia, China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, etc...

...Scandinavian welfare states are often described by left-wing Scandinavian socialists as tending increasingly to neocorporatism rather than to socialism...

...THERE Is a classic dilemma in any possible strategic calculation regarding the future of European left-wing politics...

...The more daring theorists saw it as a historic worldwide phenomenon, for the bureaucratic despotisms of the Communist bloc would also begin to behave more and more like all modern industrial polities...

...But this neat division between revolutionary socialists, organized in the early Communist parties, and reformist social democrats...

...And from now on most of these parties will be judged more and more on the basis of their own programs and politics...

...Some are attracted primarily to the Fabian task of reforming and humanizing the existing social order, while others are stirred by the vision of an egalitarian society sharply discontinuous from the existing social order...

...The tendency is, therefore, to think in terms of European strategies—or, first, West European and then European strategies—to prevent individual socialist governments from being penalized by a flight of capital and to carry out transnational trade-union actions dictated by the fact that corporations can now shift production from England to Germany, from Italy to France, etc., when faced by workers' militancy in a single country...

...Welfare-state measures of the classic social democratic type tend to reach their limits relatively early, and do not deal effectively with the type of economic difficulties that have characterized the European economy in the recent period...

...A third set of themes leading to a revival of left-wing socialist politics is related to the growth of multinational corporations in Europe's economies...

...Therefore, the left socialists argue, rapid extension of social ownership in the French economy would be more broadly acceptable than in the northern countries—but, given the experiences with state-run industry, that extension cannot maintain popular support unless it is coupled with workers' councils...

...Today the French left is a potpourri, drawing on numerous strands of thought, but acting more or less in concert with the Socialist party...

...Thereby, some organizational continuity was assured to both...

...This "new working class," said Mallet, has nothing to fear from social ownership of the economy and tends to link its particular demands to those of industrial workers...

...Theorists of neocapitalism within the socialist movement tend to stress the supranational character of the capitalist system and the difficulty of coping with it strategically within the framework of a nation-state...

...They wanted both to loosen ties with the U. S. and Nato, and not to expand the British military capacity to a point where such dependence would seem unnecessary...

...The growing independence of the Communist parties of Western Europe makes possible coalitions and left-wing majorities in France, Italy, and Spain, perhaps even in Greece, Portugal, and Iceland...

...was not to continue...

...Workers who form the main social base of socialist parties tend to be tenaciously conservative in their organizational attachments and intensely loyal to whatever is the primary workers' party in their country—and left-wing splitoffs have rarely affected the mass base of these parties...

...The left wing's program became the maximum program, and the right wing's the minimum program...

...However, the left socialists are not merely more radical than the social democratic parties...

...intervention...

...Class conflict was a thing of the past...

...Two possible assumptions could lead a left wing to form a separate organization: there are masses of unorganized radical workers and others to the left of the existing socialist parties who would respond to a new organization or the party is internally so blocked by bureaucratic constraints that no serious possibility remains for internal change...

...The left wing approached the problem from a sharply divergent point of view...

...Social and economic differences in France are extreme, while the privileged strata are more compact and powerful than in the rest of Western Europe...

...The intellectual socialist left, mostly student-based, around such British journals as New Left Review, grew somewhat in the '60s...

...The Italian and Spanish CPs, however, see the coalition as including not only nonworkingclass parties but accept, at least theoretically, the possibility of several "legitimate" working-class parties...

...The intellectual socialist left in England and elsewhere had few or no ties with the working class, and sometimes even revealed an antagonistic attitude toward trade unions and workers' economic demands...

...To begin with, in post-World War II France the CP rather than the SP (SFIO) was the larger and more cohesive workers' party...

...The second development affecting left socialists today has been the growing interest in workers' control, as distinct from various "participation" schemes, within the European labor movement...

...The most significant, perhaps, was the Bevanite group in the British Labour party, whose continuity was assured by its paper, the Tribune, and by a base consisting of traditional radical trade unionists, socialist youth, and some intellectuals...

...In practice, of course, it was the minimum program that guided the day-to-day life of the party...

...These federations, originally organized by the Christian trade-union movement and now dominated by an alliance of left-wing socialists and left-wing Catholics, adopted a program stressing self-management, equality, and radical social transformation...

...The implication here, of course, is that class politics are again assuming a primacy...

...Basically, it is still wary about European solutions, and is left-wing insofar as it feels that nationalization and social-welfare measures ought to be radically extended beyond the present Labour party program...

...The Jusos, unlike their British and Scandinavian counterparts, are more explicitly Marxist...

...left-wing intellectuals to the PSU, which is an almost classic left socialist party.* Because the French CP was so powerful and the French pay such close attention to ideological questions, the ideology of the French left had to be sharply defined...

...The Socialist Left in Western Europe THE DEVELOPMENT of a New Left in the '60s made several contributions to the traditional workers' parties...

...European socialism is becoming increasingly autonomous in terms of its domestic politics, and under these circumstances the normal left-right division reasserts itself...

...From 1945 to the late '50s, the Cold War was a central foreign-policy issue, and the European Communist parties, with the exception of the Italian one, were rigidly isolated domestically...

...The Bevanites and their successors were never quite clear as to the degree of workers' control they envisaged...

...The major difference would presumably be that no profits would be paid to shareholders...

...on the other, the dependence of Western Europe on its alliance with the United States, with the implicit limitations this entailed in domestic policies...

...With the left united, at least electorally, the tendency of socialists in France and Italy to participate in centrist governments is discouraged...

...In practice this means defense policies based on the Swedish and Yugoslav model: a powerful, independent deterrent (short of atomic weapons), calculated to up the costs of any invasion to a prohibitive level, but outside of formal systems of alliances...

...And right wings are always there...

...PSU: Partie Socialiste Unifie — present leftsocialist party...

...The question is, what lies beyond...

...The left socialists tacitly shared many assumptions of the theorists of mass society, with this difference: that, instead of celebrating, they deplored...

...Since most of the unions were dominated by the CP, the French SP kept losing its working-class base and was becoming a party of lower government functionaries and, in the South, of small-town reformers...

...But, with few exceptions, its members were concerned with the poor and the Lumpenproletariat rather than with a working class, which they saw as sluggish and coopted...

...They look forward to a socialist Europe, independent and acting as an alternative to the Russian and American blocs, and while for the time being they are ambivalent about the necessity of maintaining the NATO shield, they are clear about their Europeanism, that is, in their assumption that socialist developments in Western Europe will facilitate progressive social change in Eastern Europe...

...In general the French socialist left criticized the French Communist party from the left, attacking it for its internal bureaucracy, caution, and lack of meaningful domestic program...

...The Communist-Socialist Split THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION transformed the left / right dispute by providing an example of a victorious revolution in a backward country, and also an apparently exportable organizational model—that is, a disciplined party committed to the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois social order...

...This left wing voiced a critique of the Scandinavian welfare states, which they see as maintaining gross class inequality through the control that a relatively small number of corporations has of the economy...

...Euro-Communism and Strategic Opportunities for the Left GENERALLY, the socialist left in Europe has gained from the disintegration of the old monolithic Communist bloc...

...Most of the student organizations of the '60s were profoundly antiorganizational, and when organizations did emerge they tended to resemble the familiar sects and splinters of the past...

...Historically, these left-wing splits, with the major exception of the Communist one, have been doomed to sectarian isolation...

...In 1959 the German Social Democrats removed from their program an earlier emphasis on class struggle, formalizing what by then was reality for the Socialist International as a whole...

...Mallet's theory also provides a theoretically useful way for socialists to analyze student radicalism and discontent...

...Therefore the program of a French left government is likely to be more radical than any of the proposals put forward in Italy by the CPI...

...A more conservative version of the "new workingclass" doctrine, as adopted by the majority of the Socialist party in France, gives it a radical technocratic bent that makes it attractive to middle-class radicals and professionals...

...Thus, unlike their British and Scandinavian comrades, the French left socialists developed an analysis of the Soviet Union describing it either as a "state capitalist" (i.e., a nonsocialist) state, some new type of exploitative social order, or, borrowing from the Trotskyist tradition, as a "degenerated workers' state...

...Therefore, the establishment of workers' control has to be dramatic and has to occur parallel to and outside of the formal trade-union structure...

...All of these themes resonate in sectors of the French electorate and therefore give the French socialist left a potential mass base outside of the traditional trade unions and party militants...

...In the past, the identification of the European Communists and of some European socialists with the Soviet experience indeed frightened off many potential supporters of the left...

...Like their British counterparts, the Scandinavians—even the Scandinavian leftwing socialists—tend to be programmatic rather than ideological, and to be constrained by criteria of efficiency and consensus...