The Death Throes of Western Communism

...The myth of the heroic revolutionary Soviet Union persisted for a long time, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding...

...What has happened in all of Western Europe, though in unequal degrees, is that economic prosperity has allowed the emergence of a welfare state...

...While in the rest of Western Europe communist parties have become marginal even though, as SPRING • 1989 • 189 Washita Communism in France or Spain, they may still have considerable influence among militant trade unionists, the Italian party has become a party like all others—eviscerated by being admitted into the house of power...

...I think not...

...It is, in fact, simply a more effective social-democratic party than its competitors...

...At the heart of this darkness was the physical destruction of millions in the Soviet Union and the moral destruction of other millions in the European West...

...It is too 190 • DISSENT early to assess Gorbachev's impact among the remnants of Communist cadres...

...But a strong inner-party cadre stayed for very long periods, often through the rest of their lives...

...If I were asked to put into a sentence my evaluation of communism in the West I would say: It destroyed the idealistic dedication of millions...

...In the years of communist ascendancy, typical militants lived, so to say, in the future and tensely concentrated their political activities to help deliver mankind from the scourge of bourgeois domination...

...It has nowadays none of the characteristics of a Leninist vanguard party...

...What needs to be retained is the fact that Stalinism in those years was a corrupt and deadly movement, which, all the same, managed to infuse vast numbers of members and fellow travelers with a large measure of devotion and readiness to sacrifice...

...Blemishes and all, these parties appeared to millions of exhausted, famished, deprived people of Western Europe as capable of overcoming present misery through emulating the heroic deeds of the Red Army and the various communist undergrounds...

...It was a corrupt movement that also inspired actions of unquestionably heroic character...

...In the mass society of the fifties and after, most social strata, most of the time, felt at home...

...The official program carries not even one hammer-andsickle emblem...

...It controls major municipalities, regional governments, and infrastructural bodies, especially the strongest trade union federation...

...These bureaucrats are in many instances pragmatic, passionless time-servers who can be trusted to perform their duties with honesty and with only a minimum of graft or nepotism...

...The party, which for decades claimed that it spoke for the young, that it would liberate youth from the yoke of the elders, has now largely become a party of the middle-aged and the elderly...

...Stalinist militants, and to a considerable extent the rank-and-filers as well as the fellow travelers, completely identified with the Soviet Union...

...With the change in age composition of the parties has come a change in the time perspective of their members...

...Let me now turn from the inner-European factors that have led to the decline of Western European communism to those developments in the Soviet Union that once fostered but now impede the efforts of Stalin and his successors to make Moscow into a third Rome...

...It provided a challenge to the existing state of affairs and made possible devotion to a nonreligious social ideal...

...Just imagine what Antonio Gramsci would have thought of that...

...Several generations of militants were deceived and their energies converted into the manipulated politics of the Comintern and its successors...

...A friend who visited the Soviet Union in the late twenties in the company of some party militants told me that they had had a violent discussion on the train to Moscow about prostitution, the communists maintaining that prostitution had long come to an end in revolutionary Russia and my friend disputing this...

...This year some five million people are expected to visit the fairgrounds in various places for a twenty-five day gathering...

...Politics turns up only in one corner, where an alternative life-style commune is trying to sell wooden toys...

...What is inconceivable is the mobilization of the two million solid citizens that make up the party to mount the barricades...

...There are few cooperatives, trade union locals, or local governments in which it is not represented...

...Theirs was an innerworldly mission, but while living in the alien world they were to be guided by an inner gyroscope that allowed them, rather like the Jesuits, to remain unperturbed by what they considered the currents of alien thought around them...

...The transformation of the Italian party from the days of Gramsci to the present brings to mind a historical analogy: Time and time again the Chinese Empire was overrun by militant nomadic tribes from the Siberian North who imposed their yoke on a population inferior to them in the arts of war, though not in those of peace...

...Goulash communism was not attrac-tal than even Khrushchev's speech or tive in a Europe that was well fed...

...There is one fact that has not yet been sufficiently stressed when it comes to an assessment of the impact of the communist parties of the West for some six decades: The sheer tragic waste of the lives of millions who were diverted from their idealistic and even heroic dedication by the Stalinist commissars...

...The typical Stalinist militant "knew" that the door to a better future was largely barred within his national polity...

...It is, in my view, as significant a feature of contemporary history as the rise and fall of Nazism in the thirties and forties or the impact of the Russian Revolution in the West after 1917...

...It became impossible to maintain an insulation in a welfare state that thrived on open access to people and ideas...

...It is by no means marginalized but is solidly ensconced in the political, social, and cultural scene...

...My friend there indicated to the others that he had won the argument, but they insisted he was totally mistaken...

...Economic development was a precondition but not a direct cause...

...The militants felt not only "in the know" when the higher-ups expounded the arcane mysteries of communist politics...

...In 1939, for example, only 3 to 4 percent of the members of the French Communist party were reported to have belonged for more than six years...

...They were not sheltered from the world of the vulgus by physical removal like the monks of the Catholic Church...

...They have been absorbed in the rich institutional life of contemporary Italy and it is no longer inconceivable to think of a communist prime minister in a coalition government...

...Only a renewed socialist movement that tempers realistic policies with a renewal of social idealism and utopian vision can hope to profit from the disillusionment of former CP members, followers and sympathizers...

...In the rest of Europe, the communist parties are by now negligible...

...Stalinism did not gain majorities in the European working class in the interwar years, but it succeeded—in Weimar Germany, in France, in pre-Mussolini Italy—in recruiting significant minorities among the alienated...

...Khrushchev's and Brezhnev's humdrum poli Western Communism tics had less of an international appeal than ety, and the welfare state were more fundamenStalin's...

...This means, of course, that it has fostered the rise of a bureaucracy utterly dependent on the party...

...It would be simplistic to argue that the SPRING • 1989 • 187 Western Comm ads= amazing economic recovery and growth of post—Marshall Plan economies was the root cause of the decline of communism in Western Europe...

...It is, all in all, an integral part of the socio-political life of Italy...

...But while the old socialist parties had attempted to build up the self-consciousness, the sense of autonomous political power, of those who felt themselves to be disinherited, Stalinism thrived on the sense of impotence that had become widespread in Europe before as well as immediately after the Second World War...

...When they were moved to engage in political actions, it was not because of existential despair but in terms of concrete grievance...

...They tend to see it as a backward society in which even rock and roll has hardly begun to make an impact...

...In a Europe in almost permanent crisis between the two World Wars, Stalinism provided a faith for millions not only in the traditional working class and among white collar workers but also among disaffected and alienated intellectuals...

...And when it comes to the here-and-now, other radical organizations may be better pragmatic instruments than the communist party...

...Yet there is one European country, Italy, 188 • DISSENT Western Communism which seems to contradict what I have said...

...It was not only the fact that the European worker now owned an automobile, a washing machine, a refrigerator, or that he could travel previously unheard-of distances during his (guaranteed) vacation, or that he could be sure that his children would have access to educational channels of mobility that had not existed before...

...The conclusion of Suro's article is worth quoting: "The crowd thickens later when the moon is high and white and the agenda is set by waiters, Ping Pong tournaments, disco dancing and stand-up comics...

...The Stalinist movement became a source of this-worldly messianic hope, and an incarnation of the tangible reality of a Soviet Union that had evolved, though with much blood and tears, into a planned, organized, and what seemed to be a joyful society...

...They succeeded, after a generation or two, in Sinifying the invaders, i.e., in making them accept Chinese ways and customs, so that they gradually became assimilated...

...In Spain the party is split into several independent factions...

...They provided the only message of hope for those who had been progressively disillusioned by the postwar governments and the revived left parties of prewar origin...

...Given these facts, should one not revise the description I have advanced above...

...The Soviet mortgage on the political life of Western Europe has been lifted...

...There is no need here to mention the impact of the writings of Solzhenitsyn and other Russian adversaries of the regime of terror...

...In this respect, I am prepared to defend the thesis that developments in the infrastructure of European societies proved more potent in destroying the Soviet myth than any superstructural development...

...It is also, and above all, a new opportunity for the socialist and democratic left...

...Thousands of intellectuals and millions of ordinary men and women persisted in believing that Stalin represented a future that worked...

...Still, I do not believe that all these acts of defiance, or the Czech revolt, or the Polish resistance before and after the emergence of Solidarity, would have led to so massive a decline of Western European communism had it not been that structural changes in postwar European societies undermined receptivity to the Stalinist appeal...

...But to suggest that they could one day lead the masses in an insurrectionary march to power is sheer fantasy...

...Various radical political movements in the interwar years and after attempted to appeal to the discouraged, but only the Stalinists were able to argue that they acted in terms of ideals that were not just "castles in the air" but were incarnated in a concrete society, the Soviet Union...

...The welfare state and the consumer society were not exactly ideal breeding grounds for communist "Jesuits...

...Only total devotion to the Soviet Union would assure a brighter tomorrow...

...The rest of the exhibits are by commercial enterprises selling stylish consumer goods...

...A considerable proportion of those who succumbed to the communist myth harbored feelings of powerlessness and personal inadequacy that they tried to overcome by identifying with a Soviet power that seemed invincible...

...In some cities, for example in Bologna, it has run municipal affairs ever since 1945...

...Communist militants had to live in the bourgeois world, to be sure, but they were not supposed to be of that world...

...While all other Western communist parties have been in decline over the last several decades, the Italian CP is still a mass party with about two million members, even though it has lost votes in recent elections...

...After the war's end, European Communists had fully recaptured, and even surpassed, their prewar weight in the politics of the most West European countries...

...Gorbachev's revelations in killing European communism...

...In similar ways, Italian society has succeeded in domesticating the revolutionary invaders of the days of Gramsci...

...It is true that the majority of those who were attracted to the Communist parties during the thirties and later soon left them...

...European consumer culture, mass sociThe demise of European communism is one of the most significant events of the second half of the twentieth century...

...It may yet offer a second chance to that left, although most social movements are not granted second chances once they have muffed their original opportunities...

...The French CP has lost all influences among intellectuals, lost control of many municipalities it once dominated, and managed to get only some 10 percent of the vote in recent elections...

...The party has acquired power in all national political institutions except the national government...

...Beginning in the middle twenties, Stalin managed to consolidate his totalitarian grip at home while still fueling the myth of revolution abroad...

...In earlier years the various European communist parties succeeded in insulating devoted militants from the world of bourgeois society by surrounding them, so to speak, with an invisible wall that protected them from enemy contacts and alien ideas...

...The frequent adoption of new names by party militants symbolized this assumption of a new identity...

...Those who had undergone a true conversion clung to their faith with fanatical intensity, living in a mental universe so tightly organized that in good measure they frequently lost their sense of reality...

...The near demise of communism in all of Western Europe is a historic fact that current commentators have not yet fully appreciated...

...The Stalinists, who came after, could profit from the decline of those who had previously dominated the radical scene...

...In addition, the communists attained significant popular gains especially in countries like Weimar Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, where the working classes had tasted defeat and humiliation...

...The devotion of these true believers compensated for the skin-deep involvement of most members and fellow travelers...

...The Italian party has managed to survive in body only after losing its soul...

...This new type of social order has succeeded in creating a sense of belongingness in large strata of the population who previously had suffered from the stigma of exclusion...

...But the faith of the committed began to decline with the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution and the revelations about the Gulag...

...I]t succeeded in appropriating most of the social dynamism of the post-war world, so that both as a system of power and as an ideology it soon came to be a dominant problem of our time...

...This is so not only in England and Germany, but also in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands...

...Being present-oriented, they may at times be mobilized for concrete demands, but they can no longer be moved to forgo present satisfactions for future benefits...

...There, common effort had built a new order that had overcome the inheritance of hundreds of years of sloth and apathy, and had then managed to mobilize masses of Soviet citizens to turn back the tide of barbarism at the walls of Stalingrad...

...Even though the communist parties of Western Europe did not engage in any anti-Nazi activities in occupied or still unoccupied Europe during the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact, they managed in its aftermath to become major and often dominant elements of the resistance movement...

...That is probably why the appeal of Stalinism often continued longer among them than in the working class...

...But such strategies became more difficult after the defeat of Nazism and fascism...

...Since the destruction of Nazi Germany," wrote Irving Howe and I thirty years ago in the concluding chapter of our history of the American Communist party, "Stalinism has been the only political movement able to seize the initiative on a world scale...

...That is, they succeeded in attracting a mass following in those countries in which workingclass organizations had failed, or where workers had never been considered full-fledged citizens...

...This is emphatically no longer the case...

...In the decade or so after the fall of Mussolini one might have found that a high proportion of the party's militants had their quotidian lives anchored in Italian realities of the here-andnow, while their emotional life was largely invested in the distant holy land of the Soviets...

...If this in bare outline is the phenomenology of the Stalinist movement before, during, and immediately after the Second World War, what accounts for the current disarray of Western European communism...

...The Chinese regained dominance through incorporation...

...Generational differences are at least as important as class differences when it comes to explaining the demise of the communist parties of Western Europe...

...At present, however, potential recruits as well as active party militants are largely immersed in the here-and-now...

...As the visitors came to the lobby of their hotel they were accosted by several prostitutes...

...It was indeed a corrupt and corrupting enterprise but—and it is absolutely indispensable to recognize this if its impact it to be assessed—it also managed to capture the idealism of large masses of people...

...The word "communism" is not used once...

...The New York Times for September 8, 1988 carried a story by Roberto Suro entitled "A Fairground Full of What's Called Communism" in which he described with great sensitivity a big country fair organized by the Communist party in a small Tuscan town...

...Stalinism attracted not only the worst but also some of the best among the disaffected...

...Given its 186 • DISSENT Western Communism strictly hierarchical structure, Stalinism could attract the brutal callousness of the commissar as well as the sincere devotion of the rank-and-filer...

...There are forty bars and twenty-two restaurants where cooks from the Soviet Union, China, and the satellite countries display their culinary skills in competition with traditional Italian restaurants...

...This is truly a case of what Max Weber meant by the routinization of revolutionary charisma...

...Italy's Communists may not know who they are, but many people think they know how to throw a party...

...Most members joined and left after a relatively brief stay...

...The children of the television age and the consumer society see no reason to regard the Soviet Union as a beacon of hope...

...The young look upon it as a somewhat comic relic of olden days...

...In addition to the true believers the party also managed, especially during the days of the Popular Front, to attract fellow travelers who saw it as the only bulwark against advancing fascism...

...What was true for Stalinism between the wars is equally true of the variant of Stalinism that came to the fore after the end of World War II...

...These young women were only friendly comrades volunteering to be their guides through the city...

...Their heroic deeds became legend and myth...

...Yet the Chinese had a secret weapon that served them well over the centuries...

...Stalinism in Western Europe gained weight and power because it entered the political scene in opposition to other radical parties that had patently failed to deliver on their promise, be it in the interwar years or after liberation...

...The party controls book stores and newspapers, publishing houses, seminars, and special schools...

...There are pep rallies, of course, and nostalgic appeals to the glorious past, but most of the visitors come to eat, flirt, dance, and drink...

...Nothing like this has happened on the European scene since the horrid waste and deception by which Christian crusaders in the Middle Ages were made to serve the political and commercial aims of those who made the crusades into large-scale instruments of terror, rape and conquest...

...How times have changed...

...But it is too early to tell if the European socialist left will prove capable of seizing that chance...

...Above all, he no longer felt demeaned by the solid middle-class citizens who used to dominate the social and political scene...

...The membership statistics of all Western European communist parties show a uniformly constant process of aging...

...This insulating strategy became difficult to maintain during the Popular Front period when active communists were supposed to mingle with ordinary men and women and not to display their own esoteric ideological baggage in public...

...Especially those of us who, as "premature antiCommunists" fought the inroads of Stalinism in the thirties and later, must recognize that it succeeded in attracting thousands upon thousands of selfless militants who, to use Ignazio Silone's phrase, were "in search of comrades," even thought it also attracted cynical manipulators, power-intoxicated bureaucrats, and manipulative and ruthless commissars...

...Communists are somewhat more influential in Finland and Greece, but this is due mainly to geography...

...they knew that they knew, that they participated in the precious aura of the all-knowing party...

...To be sure, this was not the case among students and intellectuals, at least not to the same degree...

...SPRING • 1989...

...The weakened self sought security in the invincible body of the all powerful and omniscient party...

...Older cohorts of workers there may still include some faithful, though ineffective, Stalinist types, but the young have turned away from the party in massive proportions...

...If the socialist parties of Europe continue on their present course, the chances of their attracting new members and voters that have now turned away from their prior communist allegiances are very small indeed...

...Though our characterization seems still correct for the period in which we wrote, it is completely inapplicable to the current scene...

...This is not the place to go into analytical detail about the differential impact of Stalinism at various periods and in various national societies...

...Some of the Stalinist recruits came from marginal lumpenproletarian strata, but others came from stable trade union backgrounds or from student and intellectual strata in which idealist devotion to the image of socialism mingled in various degrees with the perverse ambition of becoming Stalin's European "engineers of the human soul...

...In fact, communism in Western Europe and most probably elsewhere, rather than being an inspiring messianic movement, has now become a grotesque relic...

...Even during the monstrous show trials of the thirties and the collectivization of agriculture that cost millions of lives, Stalin managed to be widely portrayed in the West as the benevolent carrier of the hopes of mankind...