Fin-de-Siècle Communism in Western Europe
Lazar, Marc
THE END of the century, out of convenience or convention, because of nostalgia for the past or apprehension of the future, encourages the drawing up of balance sheets. This is especially so...
...In like manner, the Greek communists made an alliance with the right in 1989 to weaken their socialist rivals...
...Decline With the exception of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), heir to East Germany's communists, all the other communist parties are continuing a decline that began well before 1989...
...They maneuver from day to day without a genuine compass, trying to slow their decline and preserve the last vestiges of their former power...
...Leninists assailed social democracy as a species of social degeneracy (it supposedly expressed the interests of the aristocracy of the working class) and also DISSENT / Winter 2000 • 63 FIN-DE-SIECLE COMMUNISM as theoretical degeneracy (it abandoned socalled "true" Marxism...
...This brings it close to the second possibility, represented by the PCF and the Party of Italian Communists, a breakaway from the Rifondazione comunista...
...They still have some influence thanks to some of their efforts at ideological revival, and it has again become possible for some intellectuals to associate with them, despite the miserable legacy of communism in power...
...In the past, Communist parties claimed to be wholly revolutionary and denounced socialist reformism...
...Instead, they struggle to preserve the social welfare state, fight European integration, and defend demands of feminists and sexual minorities...
...The Swedish Party of the Left fluctuates between 12 percent and 16 percent of the electorate...
...The PCF and Rifondazione comunista do not reconcile "reformism" and "revolution" in quite the same way—not in theory or in practice...
...Those European communist parties that have not been reduced to small sects (as in Belgium or Great Britain) now fluctuate between 4 percent and 10 percent of the vote, whereas back in the early 1980s the Italian CP exceeded 25 percent, the French 20 percent, the Portuguese 15 percent, and the Spanish CP close to 10 percent...
...At the same time that they engaged in this maneuvering the Communist parties also have tried to redefine their ideology, identity, and project...
...In the end, all Western European communist parties are troubled...
...The first is embodied in the Portuguese and Greek parties, which are shrinking into little more than remnants of their past selves...
...All this provides very few grounds for encouragement among communists in a very dark time for them...
...For the moment, they are gaining few new supporters, although they often displease their traditional base, which is turning to the Trotskyist exT T HIS BRINGS US to the third possible out come...
...His latest books are La gauche en Europe depuis 1945 and, with llvo Diamanti, Politique DISSENT / Winter 2000.65...
...To take a single example, the French Communist Party (PC F), which boasted 520,000 members in 1978, now has less than 150,000...
...Now things are more complicated...
...Once powerful because of such electoral strength, these parties have been marginalized...
...Revolution is a second example of the continuities and breaks with communism...
...Notably, this communist pacifism did not do away with two distinctive elements from the past communist tradition: virulent anti-Americanism (and almost complete silence on Serbian crimes...
...Now they are on the defensive and dependent on the choices of their rivals or allies...
...Militants no longer regard the party as sacred, no longer have a relationship of fides implicita with their leaders (as Pierre Bourdieu once put it), and no longer have a religious conception of politics...
...While retaining some of their former characteristics, they have become parties largely like the others...
...To borrow from Raymond Aron, it no longer blends, "more or less successfully," factual propositions and value judgments, and it barely expresses "a perspective on the world and a will turned toward the future...
...Robert Hue, at least early in the Kosovo campaign, declared that "this war is a fuckup (connerie)," an expression that disappeared, however, in the course of succeeding weeks...
...Communism" is now presented as humanistic, democratic, and alternative...
...Milosevic is the prime example...
...If so, how...
...The political value of left reformism has risen and attacks on it have declined, in particular as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the retreat of its champions in the West...
...Communists—more in Italy, Spain, and Greece than in France—also used Kosovo to encourage hostility toward socialist governments...
...My aim here is not philosophical and I don't pretend to be exhaustive...
...It is likely that this would compel further painful changes and provoke new internal splits...
...In our day, the revolutionary hypothesis has lost substance, even if its ritual incantation continues to seduce a small but significant fraction of left-wing opinion...
...The communists managed to construct around themselves an integrated system, including unions, mass organizations, associations under party control, and sometimes, with electoral victories, municipalities...
...The Western parties still hope to profit from radical utopian aspirations and may deep down envisage a recomposition of the left of the left...
...They try to make their voices heard while taking on governmental responsibility and changing dimensions of their political culture and identity...
...While giving up on destroying capitalism, they still intend to "overcome" it, although they are careful not to specify what this means...
...Rifondazione encompasses an explosive mixture of the sort of radicalism that always existed within Italian communism, of a revolutionary sensibility derived from maximalist socialism (embodied by the party's leader Bertinotti), of union members opposed to any social compromises, and of Trotskyists...
...They often make use of notions of structural reform that moved West European socialists of the sixties, sometimes reiterating, without always being aware of it, the "revolutionary reformist" arguments of such thinkers as Andre Gorz...
...In this way, the "New Communists," as they like to call themselves, still condemn reformism but in the name of another, very vague concept of reformism...
...And what should replace it...
...They attempt to be more constructive and "responsible" and, at least in France, to integrate classic left-wing material demands with some "post-materialist" ones (feminism, gay rights, immigrant rights, and, with more difficulty, ecology...
...The Portuguese party still claims to be "revolutionary" in the traditional sense...
...From the beginning of the First World War, Lenin brilliantly grasped the immense import of the triptych of war-crisisrevolution...
...All these elements constitute both a type of continuity with Bolshevik communism as well as a break with it...
...Ideology is no longer a factor of party cohesion...
...It provoked the fall of the Prodi government, foments social conflict at every opportunity, and even approved the theoretical part of the communiqué issued by the Red Brigades justifying the assassination of an adviser to the minister of labor last May...
...Czechoslovakia, 1968...
...Communist parties have not given it up, quite the contrary...
...The latter—the Rifondazione comunista, which split away when the mainstream of the old Italian Communist Party socialdemocratized itself as the Party of the Democratic Left—did not hesitate to bring down the center-left government of Romano Prodi in the fall of 1998...
...On one hand, the German PDS is similar, but is growing, mainly as a regional party concentrated in the east...
...In short, communism combined flexibly the struggle for peace with a warlike posture...
...But what will become of the other parties that remained communist in spirit...
...At the same time, Communist parties don't hesitate to appropriate the word "reformism" and associate it with revolution...
...Of course, all the traditional West European political parties, except the 62 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 British Labour Party, have registered declines in membership...
...In some countries where communism had been in power, ex-communist parties embraced nationalism and a fierce national-communism was the result...
...This is especially so concerning communism, which played such a dominant role in social and political debate and haunted the imagination of the last hundred years...
...This extraordinary mechanism has now become slack, as each component, most notably the unions, has sought to secure its own autonomy, or has simply fallen apart...
...But they also try to set themselves apart from both the Soviet experience and from social democracy...
...Permanent tension is the consequence...
...THE END of the century, out of convenience or convention, because of nostalgia for the past or apprehension of the future, encourages the drawing up of balance sheets...
...Reconstruction...
...The communist parties have been destabilized and their legendary effectiveness blunted...
...For instance, the PCF's national secretary, Robert Hue, invokes the expression "revolutionary evolution" from Jean Jaures, while the Italian Fausto Bertinotti, secretary of Rifondazione comunista, evokes "a reformist choice of alternative...
...MARC LAZAR is professor of political history and sociology at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques of Paris...
...As a result, their social presence has diminished...
...As a result, communist parties have stitched together an ideological patchwork from which a few brightly colored pieces stand out: anticapitalism, anti-imperialism, antifascism, and antiracism...
...Some members of the French CP would also like to follow this path by bringing together various forms of radical communism...
...But the communist parties have been more severely affected because their vitality rested on militants who are now fewer and fewer...
...Italian anti-NATO demonstrators marched with portraits of D'Alema represented as Hitler...
...Communist attempts to reconstruct a coherent whole begin with ideological reformulation...
...This type of pacifism appeared to combine condemnation of war as a means of conflict resolution— any conflict— with the language, close to that of the church, of loving one's neighbor...
...In the seventies they were able to take the political offensive, often forcing other parties to define themselves in relation to communist aims...
...This is why communists, without ever really being pacifists, conducted major campaigns for peace, between the world wars, in the 1950s, and against the French and later the American wars in Vietnam...
...There is one important difference: the latter parties have largely broken with the communist legacy...
...They assail the "neo-liberal offensive" and take malign pleasure in denouncing its "totalitarian" character...
...They have been weakened and are far from the hopes of 1917...
...FIN-DE-SIECLE COMMUNISM In France and Italy, the parties have more or less given up democratic centralism and have broken with their past monolithic authoritarian practices...
...They took under their wing particular professional categories and entire populations, protecting them against the dislocations of modernization, providing them with social services, and offering them a form of sociability and an identity...
...Certainly, they count on exploiting the weaknesses of the reformist left...
...Since then, communists have believed that there are just wars—in particular 64 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 the class war, which justified the resort to arms and class hatred...
...Three possibilities suggest themselves...
...Communist parties no longer constitute powerful counter-societies, crucibles of culture and collective identity...
...Revolution now means, according to a fashionable Gramscian interpretation, a long process that affects all spheres of society and culture...
...The year 1989 perhaps initiates a third phase, marked by the disjunction of these two elements...
...across today's European Union, a surprising picture emerges...
...FIN - DE- SIECLE COMMUNISM Three Scenarios treme left in France and Rifondazione If we look at the map of communist parties comunista in Italy...
...Naturally, all these factors also opened recruitment channels for the party...
...Nevertheless, this development does not have unanimous support...
...Membership has melted away...
...Italy's Rifondazione comunista sustained the same position, which had deep popular sympathy in Italy and allowed the party at once to criticize the government of the Democratic Left's Massimo D'Alema, and to be on the same side as a large part of the Catholic world...
...The legacy of the USSR is generally obscured and written off...
...Thus, although communist parties still lay claim to it, they have slightly modified its meaning...
...Bolshevik language, organization, and practice in opposition— and even more so in power—attest to that warlike stance...
...The enterprise is risky, because communist ideology (the ideology of parties, not of thinkers) no longer survives in its past form as a meaningful representation of the world—it is no longer based on a "scientific" theory (Marxism), which also functioned as a secular faith...
...At the same time, they continued to support armed struggle in the third world or to preserve the socialist camp "in case of imperialist threat" (Hungary, 1956...
...Finally, the parties have found it enormously difficult to establish effective political strategies...
...Does "overcoming capitalism" still mean the suppression of the market...
...In addition, the social composition of party membership, like that of its electorate, is characterized by a diminished presence of workers, peasants, and young people and, conversely, by an increase in unskilled workers of the public sector, the retired, and the elderly...
...What remains of this phenomenon...
...Whereas the French CP was once more revolutionary and the Italian party more reformist-revolutionary, Rifondazione has adopted extremely radical positions on virtually all questions...
...instead, it has be come a source of discord, and the focus of incessant controversy among factions...
...Marxism itself is now redefined as a radical utopia, somehow rooted not just in the social reality but in the soil of national histories...
...However, they are not dead...
...However, in a second phase, beginning in the late 1920s and growing thereafter, communists also used pacifist traditions to defend Soviet interests and for anti-imperialist purposes...
...M M EANWHILE, Western communists became completely pacifist, in an almost fundamentalist way...
...Leninism had provided the most thorough and effective (because it had the USSR) version of the critique of reformism...
...The small communist parties of Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands took advantage of the fall of the Berlin wall to take leave of communism definitively...
...No answers are provided...
...T T HE THIRD example is captured by the war in Kosovo...
...Their only satisfaction consists in using what remains of that strength to pressure, or even to harm the socialist left...
...Communist parties, structured around the proletariat, collective values, and the class conflicts of industrial society, are suffering the repercussions of prodigious societal transformations that, among other things, have brought about the disappearance of entire sectors of the old working class—particularly those in which the communists were strongly rooted—and have both changed the nature and organization of work and nourished individualism...
...They want to preserve their crumbling fortresses and brandish their old torch regardless of social developments...
...Despite their denials, these parties seem to be increasingly the left flanks of the dominant socialist parties, the Socialist Party in France and the Democratic Left Party in Italy...
...In addition, factions within some communist parties (France, Spain, and Italy), continue to reject reformism and condemn the "revisionism" of their leaders...
...I simply offer some observations on the situation of parties in Western Europe that still lay claim to communism, in particular, in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Germany...
...On the other hand, it declared itself ready to enter into alliances with the Social Democratic Party...
...Three examples serve to illustrate this...
...War and peace is a classic issue for communist movements and has had two dimensions in their history...
...Whereas communist parties were once strong in Southern Europe and in Finland, those experiencing significant growth are in the Netherlands and especially in Sweden...
...They condemn forcefully privatizations and resolutely defend the public sector and the welfare state, all while admitting some revision may be needed—and never explains how far this might go...
...In different ways, this is what Spanish, French, and Italian communists have done...
...First, Bolshevism proclaimed itself warlike, in opposition to democratic socialism...
...I i ET US BEGIN with anticapitalism...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
