EUROCOMMUNISM-MYTH, HOPE, DELUSION?:SOME DILEMMAS-AND HOPES

...Even Radio Free Europe, in its surveys of what hypothetical free elections would look like in Eastern Europe, has come up with the result that in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Rumania, were an election to occur, a Socialist party would in each case emerge as the largest by far...

...Third, the West European CPs increasingly stress the importance of the strand of opposition within the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe that is most dangerous to the Russian bureaucracy—the Marxist and socialist opposition...

...It is also true that regardless of the range of criticism of Soviet practices, few Communist theoreticians have attempted a systematic reanalysis of what Soviet society is or is not...

...there also are the stable city machines of the Italian Red Belt and the rural radicals and oppositionists of Southern Italy, the efficient trade-union bureaucrats of the CGT in France, and the reborn Spanish party that is composed mostly of members who were born after Stalin's death...

...Everywhere except in Italy, I believe, such a dialogue will strengthen the Socialists and speed the process through which the West European CPs will either be reduced to sects or emerge as working-class parties operating within a democratic and socialist framework...

...One more general point: whatever its form, a break from Soviet hegemony is clearly a development that is unwelcome and dangerous to the Kremlin, both in the long and short run...

...There are, therefore, a number of divergent strategies that make sense in specific situations...

...The historic examples of such changes in the CPs may be explainable by the one variable that seems to have changed: unquestioned loyalty to the Soviet Union, to the 30 extent of risking one's own party on behalf of an overall policy, which now is missing...

...There are also such currents in all the large Socialist parties...

...In Spain there may well be reason to propose organizational unity between the CP and the Socialists, while in Italy I find the CP far more serious about mass democratic working-class politics than is the Italian SP...

...It doesn't matter for the moment whether one thinks highly of Gramsci as a theorist or not...

...These reflect not merely their respective organizational strengths but often deep-going theoretical differences uneasily covered up in the past and now reemerging with increasing salience...

...Much nonsense, by the way, has been written about the danger the Western CPs face from leftist youth...

...In any case, the parties that undertook those drastic shifts were smaller, less rooted in the political and social fabric of their society, and more utopian regarding the prospects of a ready road to power than are the large Western CPs today...

...The rank and file had simply not moved as far as had much of the party leadership, and a reassertion of familiar politics was necessary to reassure the CP militants that the party would not tail-end after the Socialists in a coalition...

...nor is it to say that all the parties are equally critical of the Soviet Union and its East European dependencies...

...Not only is the membership of the Italian CP hardly a "counter-community" of dedicated professional revolutionists...

...This means continued pressure, continued requests for greater clarity and precision, but also that a dialogue is essential...

...While this is a problem not only for the CPs but for 32 democratic politics in general, I believe it to be much exaggerated...

...This alone sharply differentiates the Italian party from all other European Communist parties...

...In some cases, as in that of Roy Medvedev, the Italian party has gone beyond mere support of "rights"—it supports and publicizes his views...

...So does the German Social Democratic party...

...In Spain and Italy the CPs, in my view, represent parties without which any development toward socialism is inconceivable...

...in other cases they are potential coalition partners, at best junior partners...

...That may be in the relatively distant future, but so long as a remnant of a link remains, even as ephemeral as the name Communist, the CPs will be forced to comment on Soviet developments and comment in such a way as to retain the credibility of their present membership and base...

...The other major historic break, the Popular Front, did not have equally drastic consequences because it represented an intelligent, long overdue shift in line justifiable in its own terms and not requiring loyalty to the Soviet Union to legitimate it...

...In short, the phenomenon of "Eurocommunism" represents, at the very least, the organizational and ideological disintegration of the international Communist movement...

...Second, the new developments reduce the prestige and power of the Soviet leadership both internationally and domestically, since the legitimation of that bureaucracy lay partly in the "leading role" of the Russian party...

...The CPs, in order to maintain their present posture, will have to continue their criticism of the Soviet reality until the point of a final break...

...It follows that it is absurd to talk about a common response to the European Communist parties by other 29 political forces, specifically by democratic socialists...

...Likewise, it is entirely possible that an independent CP in Western Europe will in its own right be sectarian, ultimatist, and parochial vis a-vis European unity...

...If anything, their political memory is that of continual embarrassments caused by Russian and East European repression, combined with growing hostility toward the cynical de facto relations the Soviet bloc had developed with the Franco regime in its final years...

...In France, for example, it was probably rank-and-file resistance of secondary Communist trade-union leaders and provincial officeholders that pushed Marchais into the present confrontation with the Socialists and threatened the possibility of a left-wing majority in the March 1978 elections...

...In Italy, however, that dialogue has to be thought of in European rather than national terms since the Socialists there are so critically weak and the CP has shown such enormous flexibility and resourcefulness...

...Does all this mean that the CPs are or will become models of democratic probity in their internal and external behavior...

...A few other points: In the Spanish party the overwhelming majority of the membership is young and has joined a party that was independent of direct Russian domination throughout their political lifetime...

...The general point, however, is that a mass party cannot, without risking suicide, abruptly change its mainline strategy in midcourse...

...The British Labour party's record in this respect vis a vis Northern Ireland and the Labor record in Israel on Arabs are examples...

...The Spanish CP leaders, with the exception of La Pasionara, remember with pain their years of exile in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and retain a bitterness about the experience that is as emotional as that of any democratic socialist...

...My point is that mass working-class institutions can be bureaucratic and unreasonable in their internal life without that being evidence of Leninist "democratic centralism...

...They carried out the line with considerable reluctance and later threw themselves into the antifascist war, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, with extra enthusiasm to make up for lost time, members, and prestige...

...Only if one takes an almost theologically sectarian view that one must be either on the side of the forces of darkness or of light can one refuse to face the fact that the disintegration of Soviet hegemony over Communist parties, some of which have substantial roots in the West European working class, is a major gain for democracy and the prospect of democratic socialism in Europe...

...In France it is a rival but within a framework that may well include a coalition with or without a common program...

...This does not mean that the French CP has become internally a democratic party or that segments of it do not have an unrealistic and cataclysmic view of the transition to socialism, but those features are today sui generis...

...or of the CPs in the Popular Front period—Stalinized, endlessly opportunistic, and ruthlessly centralized...

...half of this membership doesn't read the Communist press and two-thirds rarely attends meetings...

...It is difficult to imagine a genuine mass party, such as the Italian CP, being an effective instrument for a conspiratorial secret program...

...The Western CPs link with the currents that represent probably the majorities or at least the pluralities throughout Eastern Europe...

...The Soviets make clear that they do not welcome any government of the left in which the CP would be a minor partner—which, after all, in the foreseeable future is the most optimistic possibility for the Western parties...

...Carrillo of Spain is ahead of the pack when he states that the Soviet Union is not a socialist society, but he is clearly not alone...

...Therein lies a continued prospect of internal ferment—a prospect with many possibilities for change, and it is in the interest of democratic socialists to help speed it up...

...The CP in Italy occasionally expels dissidents, very few one might add...

...First, whatever else may be true about the European Communist parties, it is clear that Moscow's domination of their internal life has ended...

...In Portugal the CP is a foe...

...First, the Russians are profoundly conservative and allergic to risk-taking, especially risks that might affect the present balance of relations with the West, including the United States...

...In recent years the record of the Western CPs in defending human rights in Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R...

...For example, it is difficult to see why a new Social Democratic government in Sweden would not continue to accept the support of the handful of CP legislators, as it did in the past...

...The case of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact illustrates this point: it was an unalloyed disaster for the Western CPs...

...Without pursuing this point too far, it means that linkages with Western working-class parties—Socialist and Communist—are important in maintaining the morale of the opposition in the Communist world that is most massive and dangerous to the ruling bureaucracy...

...It is not true, however, and this seems to me self-evident, that there is such a thing as "Eurocommunism," with a common ideology, let alone a common strategy...

...Finally, while the large CPs of Western Europe have come out with reasonable clarity for the defense of their respective countries and Western Europe, and for at least conditional adherence to NATO, it is not at all inconceivable that large sections or entire parties will become neutralist and antiNATO...

...There are a number of reasons for Soviet hostility, and it is sufficient to cite three...

...All this means that mass democratic parties are often inconsistent and that human rights are not the sole criterion by which the democratic credentials of a party can be judged...

...The Italian party, for example, has always tended to be Gramscian rather than Leninist, and while skilled party theoreticians wrote reams to prove that one could be both, the emphasis in Italy was on Gramsci...

...Second, the breakdown of the Soviet hegemony has brought to the fore the always latent and sometimes basic differences among the various Western Communist parties...

...but I would say that the norms of internal democracy that prevail in the Italian CP are not notably different from those in a number of Socialist parties...

...The West German CP, on the other hand, remains an irrelevant group of Soviet pensioners...

...The process I have described differs from country to country...

...Most of the CPs now assert their independence from Moscow with various degrees of harshness, repeatedly stressing their commitment to pluralist parliamentary democracy as the framework for socialism...

...This disintegration may lead to no more than national Communist parties that can be individually as unlovely as the international movement they have replaced...

...The likelihood that these members, plus the assorted Communist mayors and city councilmen of most Italian cities, could suddenly be transformed into ruthless barricade fighters when new orders come from party headquarters is clearly a right-wing fantasy assuming that magic powers are inherently associated with "democratic centralism," whatever that may mean...

...In some cases the Western CPs are rivals and opponents, quite independent of their relationship to the Soviet Union...

...The French party has such a rapid turnover of membership that its overwhelming majority has been politically socialized at a time when the Soviets were already desanctified and at best could be thought of as a lesser evil, and that primarily in foreign policy...

...The polemics of the French party theorists with their Soviet opposite numbers are as harsh as anything written by West European Socialists...

...The terrain "to the left" of the CPS is in general arrid and not inhabitable by substantial movements and remains the domain of political and counterculture sects...

...Is it our memories of the CPs in their pre-Stalinist forms—sectarian, aggressive, ultra-left parties...

...The Italian CP permits no organized factions, only "currents"—neither does Mitterrand's Socialist party...

...has become clearer, and their tone is harsher...

...and in still other cases segments of the CP, or the bulk of the party, has moved sufficiently so that it is possible to conceive of it as a full partner...

...Some democratic socialist and labor parties 31 on the other hand have at times had a murky record in some human rights questions...

...the very fact that the Italian CP had its own indigenous "founding father" has major consequences...

...or yet the CPs of the Resistance period— when the clandestinity and hardness of the parties was an asset in resisting the Nazi Occupation...

...Thus, for example, the Communist miners of Asturias remember all too well that during their strikes throughout the 1960s, the Communist regime of Poland delivered coal to Spain...

...A party's size, I repeat, is relevant, and this can mean that the massiveness of the CP membership limits space for maneuver by the political center, which can sometimes be a bad thing...

...This is not to say that there are no parties, and no groups of members in parties, that remain pro-Soviet...

...All these CPs are historically valid, and so are a number of others: the small Scandinavian parties, which are, with the exception of that in Finland, sects of true believers irrelevant to the political processes of their countries...

...Too many of the commentators on the Western parties have read one or another version of Philip Selznick's Organizational Weapon and, from that point on, stopped bothering to think about any facts that might clash with this image of a CP...

...The very nature of the Soviet system and of the regimes in Eastern Europe will continue to provide endless provocations...

...Clearly, therefore, while welcoming the independence of the CPs from the Soviet Union, Socialists need to relate to the CP strategically only in those countries where the Communists represent a significant section of the working-class electorate and where leftwing majorities are out of reach without them...

...While the Western press focuses on humanrights cases that often are apolitical in the sense that they have no system-wide consequences, the Yugoslays, for example, permit free migration without any notable weakening of party hegemony...

...One could go on, but the central point should be clear: the parties now are in ferment, and it is unlikely that the present balance—ideologically and politically—will be maintained...

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...But, in power terms, the end of Soviet hegemony over the nonruling parties of Western Europe is an important phenomenon in its own right...

...It is also evident that pro-Soviet sentiment, when it does exist, is now the voluntary political expression of views obnoxious to us rather than the response of a coordinated, integrated international apparat...

...In this respect, the Soviet leaders show more insight into the potential and immediate impact of this development than do many Western observers...

...Third, a party's size is another relevant factor...

...All these are "real" Communist parties...