France's Communists in Turmoil
JACOBS, NORMAN
DISSENT OF THE INTELLECTUALS France's Communists in Turmoil BY NORMAN JACOBS Paris The French Communist Party (PCF) is experiencing the most serious crisis of its postwar history. The trouble...
...Marchais' comments—widely interpreted as an attack on party intellectuals—backfired...
...It was Louis Althusser, a spokesman stated, that Marchais had in mind...
...The grumbling reached its peak when the Central Committee convened for a three-day session on April 26 to review developments of the preceding months...
...As the leaders tried to suppress its expression, the discontent only mounted and its focus soon shifted to the issue of internal democracy...
...Althusser, for instance, attacked the various mechanisms that permit the leadership to set the party line...
...We should respond to their questions and be receptive to their valid criticisms," he said...
...and in an obvious effort to discredit dissident criticism appearing in the bourgeois press, he intimated scornfully that this was the product of intellectuals for whom it was easy to sound off from behind their desks—sheltered as they were from contact with real life—and to find eager takers for their output...
...Had they, at the same time, been permitted to express them in L'Humaniti and other party organs, the growing dissatisfaction would have probably been assuaged and a crisis avoided...
...Party leaders' allegiance to democratic centralism will not waver because it guarantees them continued power and the job security that goes with it.So the hierarchy can be expected to finally impose its will...
...Poperent, though, was anything but conciliatory to the allegedly small group—whom he carefully distinguished from the great majority— and, who, he asserted, were the instigators of the trouble...
...whatever criticism showed up in Le Monde one day was invariably rebutted the next...
...Within the last decade, and particularly since the 22nd party Congress (1976), these new and relatively younger comrades have heard their leaders preach the gospel that socialism and democracy are indivisible—that socialism means democracy...
...Recognizing the blunder, PCF leaders quickly moved to repair the damage by narrowing the target of Marchais' criticism...
...Many believed what they heard, and when they tried to criticize party policies in the PCF press and found they could not, they refused to remain silent...
...No sooner did the Elleinstein articles finish than Le Monde featured a more extensive series—four pieces, each some 7,000 words long—by the party's top "conservative" intellectual, Marxist scholar Louis Althusser...
...Indeed, PCF chief Georges Marchais at first spoke of the heated discussions taking place within the cells as evidence that the 22nd Congress' efforts to strengthen intraparty democracy were succeeding...
...As for L 'Humanite, it still refused to publish the dissidents but it hardly ignored them...
...Let the leaders elect another people...
...The peak of the crisis had clearly passed, and at the meeting of the Central Committee convened on June 20, Politburo member Claude Poperent held out a conciliatory hand to most of the dissidents...
...Isn't this precisely one of the chief problems posed by the evoluNorman Jacobs, long associated with The New Leader, now lives in Paris...
...But this implicit threat again failed to have the desired effect...
...Marchais reaffirmed the correctness of the party's policies during the legislative elections...
...Three-quarters of the present membership joined since 1968...
...It warned the signatories in the harshest terms it had yet employed against dissenters that they were engaging in "fractional" activity, which is strictly forbidden by regulations and in the past has led to the expulsion of offenders...
...Thus the debate the PCF hierarchy wanted to avoid took place anyway...
...I beg the comrades who might hold it against me for doing what I am doing to consider the reasons...
...During June.the flow of material to Le Monde started to ebb...
...The trouble began in early April, just after the national legislative elections, when the rank and file voiced dissatisfaction with the leaderships' conduct—specifically, its policy flip-flops during the campaign and its placing the entire blame for the defeat of the Union of the Left on the Socialist Party...
...he minimized the significance of dissent within the ranks...
...they would be shown no leniency and would be combatted by political methods...
...The attempt to single out and isolate Althusser boomeranged as well...
...The result, said Althusser, is that membership in the party is like belonging to a secret military group, where operational efficiency means absolute authority at the top and compartmentali-zation of the units at the bottom...
...PCF Secretary Georges Marchais' three-hour long report provided the point of departure for the Committee's deliberations...
...These people, he declared, had engaged in forbidden activity...
...Decisions are made by the Politburo or Secretariat, he charged, and are automatically ratified by the Central Committee...
...about half since 1972...
...And the revolving door through which millions of Frenchmen have entered the party over the last 58 years and then left it will spin again as the latest crop of frustrated and disillusioned members pass through to swell the ranks of those who quit before them...
...It contended that existing statutes did not permit printing such a debate, except during specified periods preceding the PCF congresses.The ban merely angered those already unhappy and spurred them to turn elsewhere...
...and to reflect on the arguments I shall offer, rather than excommunicate the Communist intellectual about to present his confidences in a non-Communist newspaper...
...Party officials, failing to sense the depth and extent of disaffection, have blundered in coping with it...
...Meanwhile, horizontal relationships among members of different cells are forbidden lest this lead to the creation of fractions...
...Marchais' relaxed attitude unquestionably encouraged and emboldened dissenters to voice their opinions...
...What this means was left unclear...
...no slight had been intended, of course, to intellectuals as a group...
...The document expressed the solidarity of the signatories, criticized the leaders for their conduct of the legislative elections and their efforts to censor debate, and urged reforms of the party's undemocratic structure.The party hierarchy reacted toughly to this statement...
...And so it went day after day, week after week, with Communists unburdening their hearts...
...this "vertical flow" enables party functionaries to make sure that what rises from the base conforms to decisions made at the top...
...Over 900 additional signatories joined the original list...
...But their chances of succeeding are, to put it mildly, negligible...
...The crisis has been notable not only for the volume of criticism it has produced about the way the party functions, but also because it is the first important conflict in the PCF's history where the Soviet Union has played little or no direct role...
...It is the absence of democracy within the party, affirms Louis Althusser, that accounts for the high rate of membership turnover, and he recalls Bertolt Brecht's bitter comment on the 1953 workers' uprising in East Berlin: "The people have lost the confidence of their leaders...
...Karl Marx, it was pointed out, also sat behind a desk when he labored...
...The most insistent theme of the critics has been the undemocratic nature of key features of "democratic" centralism—the party's internal system of governance...
...Some analysts hold that the Politburo is itself divided over how to treat those it deems guilty of fractionalism...
...Should the dissenters yet succeed in bringing about a modification of current practices by infusing a significant dose of democratic procedures, this would doubtless add to the party's attractiveness to potential members and make it a more dangerous challenge in the future...
...tion of the French Communist Party...
...He promised, moreover, that there would be no expulsions of those few who had already stated their grievances in the bourgeois press...
...This monopoly of the decision-making process, he continued, is responsible for the "military nature" of the party's structure...
...Over 300 party intellectuals, including Althusser and Elleinstein and representing virtually every part of France, signed a lengthy statement published in the May 19 issue of Le Monde...
...I should have liked to publish these articles in my party's press," wrote the leading "liberal" Communist, Jean Elleinstein, in the opening paragraph of a series of articles that ran for three successive days in Le Monde, "but it would appear that this is not possible in the present state of affairs...
...A flood of letters, petitions and articles penned by the dissidents began appearing in the regular Parisian dailies, particularly in Le Monde...
...But the leadership refused to allow an open discussion of policy in the party press...
...The ferment should not have surprised the PCF upper echelons...
...It is no accident, according to Althusser, that the party is compartmentalized in a way that forces the flow of communications to rise vertically upward from the cells through the intermediate bodies to the Politburo...
Vol. 61 • July 1978 • No. 15
