THE FRENCH COMMUNIST PARTY: A CRITICAL ANATOMY
Castoriadis, Cornelius
Over the past few years Dissent has printed a number of articles expressing various opinions on the complex problem of "Eurocommunism." (For such a variety of opinions, see, among other pieces in...
...The decomposition process was officially initiated at the 20th Congress of the CPSU and it eventually turned the bureaucratic ideology into an empty husk...
...However, such fluctuations are on a scale that the French CP has experienced several times before...
...The apparatus still dominates the organization, the top leadership still enjoys unlimited power...
...and it could endow its "democratization" with credibility by creating the possibility that when the left in France took over the government, a breakdown in international relations (and perhaps a civil war) could be avoided...
...The attempt to adapt the "line" of the French CP to political conditions in France has therefore failed...
...what it has supported is the dictatorship of the French Communist party...
...Their feelings have changed...
...The bureaucracy of modern societies is typically a "soft" bureaucracy...
...Even more, it is now obliged to assert that 319 no "model of socialism" exists...
...For the Russian or Chinese bureaucracy, the question of self-preservation and reproduction coincides with the preservation and reproduction of totalitarian Russian or Chinese society...
...C.C...
...The CP emerged from its 25year isolation, and it felt it could count on two seemingly—and truly—irreconcilible objectives: it could restore credibility to its goal of seizing power...
...For the same reasons, the human reservoir from which the Party draws its militants has changed...
...but now it is beginning to collapse fast...
...Contemporary society secretes bureaucracy through all its pores...
...The long-term effects of the disintegration of the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideology are, of course, another matter...
...The unlimited power of the apparatus over the organization is evidence that essentially this power is subject to no rules...
...Contemporary society poses its problems in such a way that the only possible answer is a bureaucratic one: "organization," "regulation," "competence," hierarchy, division of tasks, pseudo"rational" efficiency...
...The French CP is simply not a bureaucratic party like the SP, or the British Labour party, or the 323 German Social Democratic party...
...The lesson here, though not new, continues to be of fundamental importance...
...The apparatus must make its ideology a state ideology...
...The French CP was forced to backtrack, so that its central task has been to survive while waiting for better times...
...Its power is not limited by any boundary between a "public sphere" and a "private sphere," nor does it recognize sectors of activity that in principle would lie outside its power...
...Nonetheless, it was and remains a base of opposition in a country where for a century half of the population has voted left...
...For having forgotten this elementary truth his bungling heirs have paid with a series of difficulties...
...Stalin or Mao die...
...The Preservation of the French CP B efore considering how the French CP's accession to power might be a realizable goal, let us examine the questions raised by the Party's astonishing survival over some 30 years...
...The real and imaginary interests of individuals constitute a kind of cement for a bureaucracy in power...
...So the French CP can no longer refer to a "finished model" of the socialism it would aim at...
...Into this combination people project themselves and their interests, although the latter are generally not decisive...
...For an organization in opposition no such cement exists...
...Repeatedly, the CGT forestalled conflicts, or subordinated them to the Party line (during the Cold War, the Algerian War, and in 1968), or arranged shameful compromises...
...and what it would do or what it would be led to do were it to come to power—these questions are posed on different, though related, levels...
...For reasons of space, the article has been somewhat abridged...
...It is the ultimate fulfillment of the bureaucratization process insofar as the bureaucratic apparatus achieves the maximum of its power...
...yet, the examples of Italian fascism or certain East European countries today show that this tendency need not be fully realized, provided 316 the fundamental postulate remains undisputed— that the "truth" about society and politics must be determined by the apparatus...
...It is a totalitarian apparatus, defined by its objective: the total domination of society through the exercise of government power...
...How this situation would evolve would have been determined in a decisive way by the relation of forces (parliamentary and extraparliamentary) within the Union of the Left...
...Most striking of all, the situation was only slightly altered by the appearance of the CFDT (Confederation Francaise Democratique du Travail), for all that the CFDT did offer an alternative...
...Upon coming to power, the Party's apparatus is not bound by any system of rights or law: law is what the apparatus decides and what it does...
...As the major labor group in most business enterprises, the CGT was able to act both as "defender of labor's demands" and as co-manager in some areas of business administration...
...For a long time, the hoax of Russian socialism survived the harshest blows that facts could deliver...
...During the last 20 years, only one nation has come near to achieving that ideal—Maoist China...
...Business would retain "managerial autonomy," but would no longer determine investments and could not dismiss employees...
...In the most general sense, these ambiguities resulted from the impracticable nature of the Common Program...
...It is transforming itself into a new and hitherto unknown variant of the totalitarian organization...
...The apparatus of the French CP is not merely a bureaucratic apparatus such as one finds in the state, the army, the church, or in a modern business enterprise...
...This voluntary acceptance of delirious Stalinist scenarios for half a century by otherwise perfectly normal people, this alienation that can only be described as psychotic and that, moreover, annuls both reality and the most elementary habits of reasoning, poses a problem of the first magnitude...
...and although occasionally he attacked the Party apparatus as such, the purpose and the result of his maneuvers were twofold: to renew the domination of the apparatus over Chinese society and, at the same time, to modify the relationship between apparatus and leadership—i.e., himself...
...Now once again, the French CP has chosen to isolate itself...
...Economic expansion and changes in life styles are altering the public's preoccupations...
...One may safely conclude from this that the chances of the Communist apparatus seizing power to fulfill its totalitarian mission are practically nil...
...Furthermore, what connection do such programs have with socialism, if any...
...indeed, they rarely express and most often camouflage the relationships and rules actually in control...
...Briefly, the persistently archaic characteristics of French capitalism have contributed to the survival of the French CP (France and Italy are the only industrialized nations in which a strong Communist party exists...
...The Goal of Power Finally, the Party apparatus can maintain its momentum only because of its goal of coming to power, and only if that goal seems realizable...
...And what would their impact be on people's daily lives...
...Until 1958, French capitalism was entangled in problems of modernization...
...Stalin could physically destroy three-quarters of the individuals who comprised the apparatus only so long as he preserved the apparatus as such...
...One encounters more of the same in the method of designating Party leaders: co-optation by the leadership...
...nationalize...
...new members have been recruited in sufficient numbers to make the Party's presence felt throughout the country...
...although rules exist on paper, they are purely pro forma...
...Were the day to come when "new ideas" would be allowed, and Party managers could be defeated by a vote that was not fixed in advance, the French CP would begin its transformation into a merely bureaucratic party, like the Socialist party...
...That at least the shrewd Stalin understood...
...But because even survival has grown more and more difficult in a changing society, the apparatus has been compelled to modify its line...
...The "economic order" it outlined was a construct that could not even be called mythical, for it was incoherent...
...With impunity, the CP shifted from the most sectarian to the most compromising policies—the Cold War, voting special powers to Mollet to wage the Algerian War...
...On the one hand, society does continue to produce some individuals still adapted to the authoritarian mode (one indication is the relative inflation of Trotskyism and Maoism after May 1968...
...The apparatus may try to remain unchanged, but it is immersed in a society—contemporary French society—which has been changing rapidly...
...As in all modern bureaucracies, one finds here a fundamental structural phenomenon that reflects the difference between formal and real processes...
...The effective power at the bureaucracy's disposal permits it to go far along this road...
...AUTHOR'S NOTE: The following article, reprinted here with permission, was first published in the French journal Esprit in December 1977...
...How, then, and thanks to what, has the apparatus been able to maintain and perpetuate itself...
...How can it be better...
...The French CP's "statutes" do not govern its existence...
...Finally, not only does the relationship between leadership and apparatus include discrepancies between the leadership's policy and the interests of the apparatus, but such discrepancies are, in fact, inevitable...
...and finally, to abandon or pretend to abandon— the difference is likely to be slight—their ideological monolithism...
...It is still very far from that...
...It would be possible for the Russian bureaucracy to rid itself almost entirely of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideology...
...A problem as important as Gulag and the power of Stalin or Hitler, if not more so...
...In no sense is it topical...
...Even before assuming power, a totalitarian party—Communist, Nazi, or other—is already a totalitarian micro-society in the context of a global society that has not yet become totalitarian...
...The cadres decide everything," Stalin used to say...
...Let us rather consider the problems the French CP has faced since signing the Common Program in June 1972, and how it has been affected by the 1978 elections...
...The power of the state 318 ensures recruitment, which is only the extension of the dominant class...
...However, a state ideology need not be total...
...The more the risk of CP domination 322 within the left seemed to recede, the more were people disposed to vote left...
...So far, the Party has paid a very modest price for all its inconsistencies and volte-faces...
...That political objective is not necessarily "conscious," and even less is it "rational...
...In any case, the question of whether modern totalitarianism is indissolubly linked to the power of a single 317 person has been answered by history once and for all: No...
...Impossible, therefore, to attempt to weigh the totalitarian chances of the French CP apparatus without holding on to the following certainty in the clearest corner of one's mind: In France, with its old civilization, its long and critical tradition, its struggle for democracy, millions of people, subject to no police restraint, have followed the daily monstrosities of 1'Humanite for 50 years—not simply lies, but fantastic challenges to the simplest common sense...
...But this rupture of the Union of the Left was inevitable from the beginning...
...the leadership can impose its decisions equally well on the basis of these rules or in defiance of them...
...To try to explain each shift rationally would be a mistake, for essentially these shifts show that the Party's choice lies between poor alternatives...
...But a host of contemporary examples shows that it is not absolutely necessary...
...Were national elections to be held at this moment, the CP's percentage of the total vote would shrink by perhaps two or three points...
...B ut we still have to reflect on the question: What are the chances of totalitarianism in a "developed" contemporary society...
...from 1958 to 1968, this program was carried out under the aegis of de Gaulle...
...The leadership is subject to no rules in the nomination of its members...
...What is it that alters modern society, within the space of 10 or 15 years, let us say from 1918 to 1933, to go far beyond any conceivable "objective necessity" and impresses individuals, by tens of millions, to embrace totalitarian activities, to join Fascist, Nazi, Communist parties, revel in atrocities, to man gigantic concentration camps...
...Thus they are led to put more and more distance between themselves and Russia, to modify their public behavior and, up to a point, their internal functioning...
...During the most acute period of the Cold War (1947-53), the French CP was practically converted into a Russian guerrilla detachment, and with the justification that an international crisis was imminent, it indulged in some suicidal operations...
...Therefore, a new definition becomes necessary...
...and this power—the glory and might of the Russian (or the Chinese) Empire—is on the way to becoming the principal ingredient of its "ideology...
...EDS...
...To see whether this means anything different from the Stalinists' usual protestations about their love of democracy, whether it is deceptive propaganda or a tactical switch, one must analyze the real nature of the French CP...
...And so, the French CP harped more and more on "democratization," coolness and independence with respect to Russia, hoping to regain at least part of the terrain yielded to the SP...
...Neither Hitler nor Mussolini were revolutionaries...
...And since one confronts a management that controls everything (funds, press, internal bulletins, cadres, specialists, news releases, etc...
...But it can no longer depend on the great majority of young people...
...it faced virtually no competition...
...It wants to be "different" or "better...
...It can offer its militants neither a definition nor a projection of what it claims it is doing...
...The CP tried to respond by pretending to de-Stalinize itself, by marking itself off from Russia and even somewhat from its own past...
...If so, to what extent and in what direction...
...The first of these rationalizations was a pure act of faith, constantly contradicted by the most immediate, direct experience...
...The surprising thing is not that there should eventually be an evolution in the French CP but that there was no such development over so long a period of time, that the Party has been able to remain fossilized for years...
...it is constantly nourished by the external and internal activities of the organization...
...plan...
...is far from accidental...
...What the Common Program set forth was not an economic policy but an economic nightmare...
...Like all other incarnations, this one has its tragic aspects...
...Its position in case of an electoral victory would have been even more difficult...
...Similarly, the political "line" proclaimed by the French CP does not faithfully translate its true political objective...
...One may anticipate that it will continue for a long time—at least until the next presidential election campaign in 1981...
...The apparatus can exist only as the seat of an absolute power, and this power is necessarily invested in one or more persons...
...It is this impasse that drives the Party to its tactical "shifts...
...But other factors—the collapse of the Union of the Left and the CP's continued political monolithism—appear to belie such developments...
...But it is just through these tensions between leadership and apparatus that their basic unity becomes manifest...
...Party ideology is reduced to the invocation of the Party's name: "We are Communists because we call ourselves Communists...
...Certainly, electoral defeat of the "Left" damages the Party, but it has survived other defeats...
...the apparatus endures...
...For a totalitarian apparatus in "opposition," like the French CP, things work out differently...
...This power is limited only by the struggle of the people against bureaucratic exploitation, and by the irrationalities inherent in the totalitarian organization itself...
...Apart from this, many factors cause the apparatus to deviate in varying ways from its ideal goal of totalitarian domination...
...Within itself, such a party has already established the kind of social relations and values it will strive to impose upon the whole of society when it comes to power...
...In the 50-odd volumes of Lenin's Complete Works, at least one statement remains true: "In politics, only fools take others at their word...
...Had the SP given in—this was judged to be least likely—the CP, after an eventual electoral victory, would have acquired additional ammunition for moving to power...
...Totalitarianism, a monstrous historic creation, is rooted in a thousand ways in what precedes it, but it also goes in a thousand ways beyond all "logic" and "causality...
...Everything points to the fact that it will maintain itself not so much by its "adaptations" (which are essentially verbal) to changes in French society but rather because of the rigidity of its bureaucratic apparatus, which refuses to yield one iota of control over the Party organization...
...The more the Stalinists "liberalize" themselves, the more their influence erodes...
...The ambiguities of the Common Program, which were apparent from the outset, exploded during the discussions of how to implement it, and the resulting disagreements served as a pretext for dissolving the Union of the Left...
...There is the sociological chance, in Max Weber's sense of the term, that rules can be made to prevail against the will of the existing authority...
...Instead of hegemony or at least electoral parity with the SP, the CP found itself further and further removed from parity...
...Its hard core has been the reference to two mythical "realities" that one may define as "another place" and "another time...
...the supply of leaders and cadres has been constantly renewed...
...Some evolution is suggested by the line adopted by the Union of the Left, by modifications in the Party's language, and by the distance it has put between itself and Russia...
...In other words, the social historical situation must offer a real chance—not an empty probability—that the ambition of the apparatus indeed can be achieved...
...Despite the endemic crisis of French capitalism, from 1947 to 1958 and even later, the CP's accession to power was conceivable only with the military support of Russia...
...We can count on Marchais and Seguy to be at one and the same time in the government, support strikes against the government, and stifle them should they get out of control...
...Because it is the French CP that is demanding it...
...It would have received the most unpopular ministerial posts in a left government...
...During the most demented period of Stalin's power, at the very moment when he was sending "devoted cadres" of the Party to their death by the hundreds of thousands, he simultaneously had to reaffirm the power of the Party as such, to proclaim that "the cadres decide everything," and to invest every local Communist despot with the same type of power in relation to the Party and the people as that which he himself exercised...
...Much more important were discussions relating to the actual control of these enterprises (which the CP hoped to exercise through the power of the CGT and, above all, those concerning the effective control of the economy, which could be resolved only in terms of the nature of the government...
...No doubt, many old-timers register their dissatisfaction by "voting with their feet"—they drop out with no fuss...
...including articles by Bogdan Denitch, Lewis Coser, Irving Howe, Leszek Kolakowski, and Henry Pachter, in our Winter 1978 issue...
...The whole Party organization is put together in such fashion as to ensure that members are trained in obedience to the leadership, thus ensuring its hold on power...
...But maintaining its essentially totalitarian characteristics goes hand-in-hand with changes in its relation to Russia, to international communism, to ideology, to its public attitudes and, up to a point, to its internal functioning...
...The French CP is not a "social democratic" party, but neither is it the pure Stalinist totalitarian party it once was...
...In other words, it was conceivable only in the context of a worldwide conflict, for then as now it would seem that the United States could not passively accept Europe's passing into the Russian camp...
...it is manifest in its very being, inscribed in its life and daily functions...
...Nor can an explanation be found in the acute crisis of an established society...
...Above all, more and more, the younger generations reject the authoritarian relationships of a totalitarian apparatus...
...Even when these goals are baptized "democratic," they seem very puny when compared to the plump old myth of those Russians who, under an inspired Stalin, sang as they built "Socialism...
...Any attempts it made to penetrate the state apparatus and the management of the major enterprises would have been opposed, on one level by the SP, on another by the CFDT (Catholic trade unions...
...That the brutal methods of earlier days have been softened makes for no basic change...
...the leadership perpetuates itself by co-optation...
...The "rational"—better, the "rationalizable"— component in French CP policy beginning in 1972 can be understood only as a move toward a by no means fresh tactic of seizing power through an alliance with the Socialist party, which at the time was considered too feeble to interfere with the CP's hegemony...
...It does not follow that in the Party bureaucracy the leadership's mastery is absolute, independent of limits that external and internal "reality" impose on it...
...To be sure, not all possibilities for maneuvering would have been shut off...
...It seems to me that recent events confirm the interpretation...
...At a given moment—for example in 1945— it happened that the CGT [the Communistdominated Confederation Generale du Travail] was the mass labor group in France...
...Its supreme victory comes when this model is embraced by those supposedly challenging the system...
...Organization as Ideology U ndeniably, however, for some years the French Communist party has given evidence of some evolution—even if only on the level of its public utterances—and one should consider the causes and meaning of this evolution...
...Like ,'Mao's "great leap forward," Stalin's policy again and again led the Russian state and Communist party to the brink of ruin (from which they were rescued only by the similar follies of Hitler...
...what it believes it is aiming at...
...i.e., a few new members chosen by people already on the team...
...they embody one of the basic irrationalities of a totalitarian bureaucracy...
...The Common Program was signed and the Union of the Left was formed in 1972...
...The French CP may declare that it is the partisan of democracy or pure anarchism or Zen Buddhism, but the structure of its organization and the permanent dominance of its leadership can mean only that its true objective is totalitarian...
...Rigorous measures" would be taken to "strengthen control of the exchange" while at the same time foreign trade would be permitted to be free...
...All that would have remained would have been to choose the least favorable moment of splitting, to appear as "defender of the workers," but also as the party responsible for the failure of the "experimental government of the left...
...the others were promised that they would not be nationalized until later, but meanwhile they would be expected to manage their businesses and investments "efficiently...
...The situation is very different when one comes to ideology...
...Furthermore, the power of the apparatus is not limited by any restraints in the social body...
...what it actually does aim at...
...A substantial private sector" would be allowed to exist and production would be regulated only by capacity and profits—but business would be restrained from making a profit...
...And now, after the retreat of the movement, almost all those who hoped to continue their activity joined explicitly totalitarian movements (Stalinism or Maoism), or moved toward a totalitarian dynamic (Trotskyism...
...In these circumstances, the organization's ideology tends to become the organization as ideology...
...This provides a comical illustration of the leadership's power: all of a sudden, the Political Bureau has a vision, and within a few hours, oh miracle of democratic unanimity, to a man the Congress shares that vision...
...Parenthetically, today, who knows and says that the French CP never effectively opposed that war...
...In another type of bureaucratic apparatus—for example, a Socialist party or a Western-style government or a large business— the rules that limit the leadership's power are very real...
...the more "sincere" they want to be, the less they are believed...
...It has not abandoned its essential totalitarian characteristics...
...When the French CP "abandons" the dicta...
...After the Union of the Left broke up in September 1977, the CP waged an increasingly violent campaign against the French Socialist party...
...One can observe the cumulative effect of Tito's schism, the 20th Congress, the events of 1956 in Poland and Hungary, the break with China, the removal of Khrushchev, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the massive wheat purchases from the United States, the construction in Russia, with American capital, of Pepsi-Cola factories to quench the thirst of "the new man," the dissemination of the truth about the Gulag, "psychiatric" repression, dissidents in the East, etc...
...As an organization, the French CP depends primarily on this element...
...Eurocommunism has developed out of the effort of the totalitarian Communist party apparatuses to adapt to a situation in which their accession to power, as prescribed in the classic scenarios, seems to be indefinitely unrealizable and in which, given social changes, they would risk withering away were they to limit themselves simply to struggling to stay alive...
...it benefited from this double role...
...But, then, how many true Christians have ever lost their faith in a God of infinite goodness by considering the world's miseries...
...he claimed to know what the German people needed...
...It would be silly to try to discuss the Party's line and the modifications thereof as if they had to do with "rational" strategies "rationally" adjusted...
...An analogous situation would have existed had the Party remained outside the government...
...But how can we forget certain consequences that followed the events of May 1968, the clearest being those on the "organizational" level...
...This was perhaps its least irrational decision under the circumstances...
...The leadership is the incarnation of the apparatus—its culmination...
...tenure is not determined by any regular method...
...The apparatus has its own level of existence as an ensemble of relationships and rules that ensure its self-perpetuation...
...It has turned to good account several factors that have been traditional in France since 1789—Jacobinism, anticlericalism, "revolutionary" patriotism...
...Nonetheless, there are no guarantees...
...If the takeover could be carried out legally and peacefully, the Stalinists could hope to have enough time to augment their penetration of state and industrial management apparatuses, gradually ingesting the Socialists...
...320 Yet, as French society evolves and is modernized, the preservation of the French CP, old-style model, becomes increasingly difficult...
...As to why the French CP has been able to maintain itself as a totalitarian apparatus, I offer an explanation that the reader may view as academic or dialectical, according to whether he belongs to the French or Chinese cultural tradition...
...But, obviously, one cannot be a Stalin under any and all circumstances...
...The intrinsic fragility of such wishful thinking was compensated for by obsessive reference to a current mythical "reality" (unverifiable since it was in "another place"), which was the building of socialism in Russia...
...More often than not such crises have found other outlets...
...Has the French Communist party truly changed...
...To proclaim that one is abandoning something one has never in fact sought simply perpetuates a hoax...
...torship of the proletariat, some people approve its taking this "democratic" step, while others criticize it for having thereby abandoned Marxism...
...French society produces in shrinking quantities the type of individual prepared to become a militant, for whom politics is a central, life-long activity...
...This apparatus is not identical with the aggregate of individuals who comprise it...
...the essential elements of its structure have been preserved...
...Allegedly, the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was "abandoned" only after long democratic preparation at the last Party congress...
...The strategic impasse that has always confronted the CP remains unchanged...
...Yet, it is evident that the French CP never has supported the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...As in the case of the Italian and Spanish CPs, we are witnessing the emergence of a historic novelty: a totalitarian apparatus that can no longer preserve a totalitarian ideology and is forced to modify gradually its totalitarian grip on the organization...
...It is a truism to say that these questions present themselves in an entirely different way once the totalitarian apparatus has seized power...
...Accordingly, what the French CP says it is matters little...
...Disappointed in this hope and with the hour of electoral truth approaching, the French CP (which has repeatedly demonstrated that it is as much concerned about its "programs" as about Lenin's first pair of shoes), became increasingly intransigent toward the SP...
...Debate had centered not only on the number of enterprises to be nationalized and the fate of subsidiary companies...
...But into what is it transforming itself...
...In the political sphere, the situation is similar...
...In the eyes of its militants, whatever the Party did, it continued to be vaguely "revolutionary" because once upon a time it had been and, when circumstances permitted, would be so again, and because Russia was building "socialism...
...Stalin imposed and consolidated the Russian CP's totalitarian power independent of any crisis...
...any other is, accordingly, treason...
...This "line" contained so many contradictions that it is not certain that, even had it been able to preserve its dominance, the French CP would have welcomed victory as an unmixed blessing...
...315 To discuss the question one must push beyond the conventional meaning of words...
...Until 1958 and as late as 1962, French capitalism was helplessly mired in the chaos that resulted from the conflict between its accelerated modernization and the survival of superannuated forms of organization...
...If, while a bureaucracy is coming to and then consolidating power, a "granite ideology" (to use a term of Solzhenitsyn's) is indispensable, the relationship of the bureaucracy to its ideology becomes much more elastic once its power is firmly secured...
...And so on and so on...
...For the Communist parties this ideology has not consisted only or so much of successive versions of "Marxism...
...Between the "personified" leadership and the apparatus, tensions are always possible and can become important...
...The question of how long a regime can survive in pure and simple cynicism confronts the totalitarian societies far more urgently than those in the West...
...in fact, the issue had not even been brought up at the Congress, and the policy shift was made up on the orders of the Party managers...
...These young revolutionaries knew nothing else, could think of nothing else—whatever they may have known or thought during the May and June days—than to submit themselves to a fixed dogma incarnated in an organization that they would obey like corpses...
...In all these respects, the French Communist party is a totalitarian organization...
...Thus, one sees how totalitarianism does not necessarily imply that knowledge must be identical with the possession of power, much less need power rely on rational knowledge...
...Throughout these years, social democracy in France steadily declined...
...The goal of the apparatus—the totalitarian domination of society—is not merely external...
...a pro321 gressive hardening of the CP in relation to its "allies" commenced in the spring of 1977 and ended with the breakup of the Union in September 1977...
...What does perform this binding function is a combination of ideology and a believable prospect of eventually seizing power...
...How long such an organization can be historically viable is a question to which I do not have the ambition to reply...
...The power of the apparatus cannot be limited by any "ideas" that would oppose or even challenge its dominance...
...But when has inconsistency ever prevented anyone from surviving...
...The situation would be further aggravated by measures aimed at augmenting, in various ways, the incomes of large social categories, which a leftist government would have been obliged to put into effect rapidly...
...Any advantages would have been heavily dissipated by having to support an "austerity" policy that a government of the left would have immediately been forced to adopt...
...their thinking has not...
...Its objective is not only what holds the apparatus together and keeps it in motion...
...and since deviations continue to be forbidden, the recent so-called free discussion within the Party is nothing more than a safety valve permitting the release of some internal pressure...
...What the French CP says it aims at...
...To do this, a totalitarian apparatus must be able to ensure adequate recruitment, reproduce its internal structure, preserve its aim of coming to power as a realizable goal, and maintain an ideological cement...
...The reality of a totalitarian organization lies in its apparatus, but the apparatus can become real only in terms of those individuals who make up the leadership...
...Eliminate the power of the monopolies...
...Nothing helped...
...this campaign was suspended during the elections of March 1978, only to be resumed even more violently thereafter...
...Translated from the French by ADRIENNE FOULKE...
...The article also offers an interpretation of the changes in the French CP's strategy and tactics since 1972...
...Its influence has been relatively stable (one-fifth of the electorate at large, almost half the labor vote...
...Below is another opinion by an independent French leftist, deeply skeptical of recent claims regarding the "democratization" of the French CP...
...The leadership is the "personified" part of the apparatus...
...The French CP could benefit from the ambiguities of the Common Program and the general confusion that would follow the elections, if it kept political superiority and could prevent independent intervention by the population...
...The largest capitalist groups were to be nationalized...
...It is an ideal that never can be achieved, for total power is strictly visionary...
...There is also the decomposition of its ideology, the crushing weight of its residual allegiance to Russia, and the impasse into which its former political line had led it...
...The French CP has remained the same at the same time that it has transformed itself...
...324 An overwhelming question: What is this deep-rooted fragility incorporated in the psychopolitical personality of Western man, this man formed since 1789 and 1776, and long before in the struggle against dogma, arbitrary power, limitation of freedom and expression of opinion, against national oppression and political, economic, and social injustice...
...Its purpose is to explain how a totalitarian political apparatus like the French Communist party has been able to survive and perpetuate itself for more than 30 years in a rich and "democratic" country, and during a time when French social life has become rapidly modernized...
...The French CP has come to a point where it cannot say in what way its accession to power would be "socialist" in nature—except that it would be, of course, its accession to power...
...The rationalist observer will always search for a rational explanation of this policy, but it will remain an exercise in rationalization...
...Nonetheless, the change in the Party's formulation of that hoax is significant: it is the Party's way of signaling that it has renounced its objective of holding exclusive power...
...The "dissidence" of a few Party intellectuals has been effectively neutralized, and there has been no split in the organization...
...Thus, it is clear that the leadership's unlimited power does not necessarily take the form of the power of a single individual...
...I noted above that nothing seemed to doom French society to a totalitarian future, that individuals produced by this society more and more reject any and all models of authoritarianism...
...There is no "favorable" solution...
...But rupture with the SP is also a trap...
...That one day it will abandon these characteristics is not out of the realm of possibility, and if this should ever happen, we would have ample time to verify it...
...The "Union of the Left" seemed to be the only possible policy, and it became a trap into which the CP fell...
...However, the CGT was already there, it was the union...
...The Totalitarian Apparatus Fundamental to the French CP is its organization and bureaucratic apparatus...
...That so far it has preserved its influence raises only more urgently the question: How and why can a totalitarian apparatus remain solid, and what appeal can it exert in a society that seems in no way predestined to a totalitarian future...
...for the apparatus, society is simply a malleable raw material...
...And who will say what they would have been capable of doing, had their organization taken power...
...This is the ultimate goal the apparatus strives to achieve...
...For such a variety of opinions, see, among other pieces in various issues, our special section, "Eurocommunism: Reality, Myth, Hope, or Delusion...
...The problem would have been transposed to whether or not the CP should support the government by its votes in parliament...
...But bureaucracy does not signify totalitarianism...
...The astonishing survival of the French CP will not allow us to brush this question aside...
...Do such phenomena belong to an already vanished epoch...
...And it can survive as a bureaucratic capitalist society only if it imposes this model everywhere, right into the consciousness of individuals...
...Hitler did not claim that he or the Nazi party knew everything...
...there are only less unfavorable solutions...
...Since 1968, the modification has been gradual and painful, and is undoubtedly still incomplete...
...The enforcement of such measures would create immediate chaos, which would be intensified by the response of working-class elements to a leftist victory at the polls and by panic in capitalist circles...
...Hence, as far as possible, the Party must adapt, revise its idiom, change its work style, substitute for the simple Diktat a more complex manipulation...
...Of course, the fact that at periods of peak strength modern totalitarianism has been yoked to the power of a single man (Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, etc...
...It makes no sense to see in this evolution of the French CP a return to a social democratic type of organization...
...Given the refusal of the SP to yield, the CP was able to choose the moment for the rupture...
...Yet, no one can say for sure that had the French CP remained 100 percent Stalinist and proRussian its relative loss of influence would not have been greater...
...it elicits only a faint echo...
...The consequences of May 1968 have weighed heavily on the French CP...
...Here was a momentous movement that began and deployed itself under the sign of the struggle against authority, bureaucracy, hierarchy...
...The French CP preferred a new "historic falling back...
...So viewed, the CP's existence has been more than "objectively" difficult since it left the government in 1947...
...When the Party cries "Wolf...
...Here is another example of the limits of all historic "explication" that would reduce what is coming to what has already been...
...The Cold War was followed by a cold peace, which was succeeded by so-called detente...
...In any case, the evolution of French political opinion made this unrealizable...
...Of all the instruments at the disposal of the Russian bureaucracy, it is ideology that has become the most time-worn, a burdensome yoke even to the bureaucracy itself...
...These changes are intelligible insofar as they seem to have been imposed by the evolution of French society and the problems preoccupying the population...
...We cannot exclude incredible upheavals...
...In Russia one finds perhaps the first known example of a cynical society...
...This effort to adapt is strained by inconsistencies, as one sees in the case not only of the French CP but also of the Italian party...
...The whole left is for nationalization, but the French CP wants more...
...Totalitarian conquest has generally corresponded to what must be called a sudden and brutal anthropological mutation, a veritable landslide of the terrain increasing with lightning speed and far exceeding all possible explanation and, afortiori, all prevention...
...Its essential domain, where it can tolerate absolutely no dissent, is in the area of policy, of social organization and objectives...
...But how long could they have played this game and at what risk...
...Thus, the decline of the CP's relative influence took on a self-catalytic character...
...Numerous French "leftist" intellectuals were wildly enthusiastic about Maoist totalitarianism at the time of the "Cultural Revolution...
...another time" was both time past and time to come: the imaginary "revolutionary" past of the French CP, and the notion that its reactionary policy could be passed off as a mere tactic that the Party would finally redeem by unveiling its true revolutionary essence in the "seizure of power...
...These questions, no longer conjured away, are being widely debated...
...It has also benefited from members' holding public office (there are 28,000 elected Communists in France serving in administrative posts, mainly as town councillors...
...At most, however, its actions created breaches only with individuals or tiny minorities, or disillusioned some workers...
...The totalitarian lie must be total under penalty of complete ineffectiveness...
...Is there in such a society an "objective probability approaching zero" of a totalitarian mutation...
...Its natural tendency is to invade all other domains...
...Analogous factors have produced an analogous result in other Communist parties, especially the Italian...
...Another place" was Russia, where "Socialism" was being actualized...
...For example, during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao tried to rouse the people against the dominant faction in the Chinese CP he relied on a fraction of the Party and on the army for support...
...ergo, it continued to be the union...
...Totalitarianism cannot be explained away as the conjunction of bureaucracy and revolution...
Vol. 26 • July 1979 • No. 3
