Gauging the French Communists

...In these regimes, there are no opposition parties, and fundamental political liberties— of press and information, of association and assembly, of the right to strike—do not really exist...

...The PCF continues, she points out, to see the world divided into two camps, one consisting of the "infamous" imperialists led by the U.S...

...Political scientist Maurice Duverger, an adherent of the French Left, accurately summed up the situation in a recent Le Monde article: "Five years of the Common Program had somewhat blurred a half century of monolithism...

...Its elaborate trappings notwithstanding, democratic centralism enables the top leadership to determine policy and have the PCF act as a monolith, irrespective of the desires of the rank and file...

...For in this system centralism always wins out over democracy...

...And here, as Ann Kriegel, a foremost French authority on the PCF, observes in her recent study Another Communism?, the Communist cosmology has not been changed one iota by the French...

...Despite all these developments, however, many observers are skeptical about whether the Communist party here has completely severed the umbilical cord that has bound it to Moscow for most of its history...

...According to Elleinstein, it is precisely because the political realm is autonomous vis-avis the social that Socialism Soviet-style can exist without political democracy...

...He is historian Jean Elleinstein, member of the French Communist party (PCF) and currently the leading intellectual interpreter of its new policies...

...Moreover, the PCF leader continues to insist that there are characteristics applicable to all Socialist nations: collective ownership of the major means of production, central planning and the guiding influence of a vanguard Party...

...Our answer is simple and clear: Yes...

...There are no longer any 'leading' Communist Parties and subordinate parties...

...Kriegel's observation is fully borne out by Jean Kanapa's report on foreign policy to a meeting of the Central Committee in June 1976...

...But you don't have to search hard to find other "unorthodox"—if somewhat less radical— views voiced by party officials that relate to the two critical questions being asked today about the PCF...

...Unquestionably, much has changed in the PCF-Soviet relationship since the period when Maurice Thorez was the party's beloved leader, and Moscow the source of its inspiration, guidance and instructions...

...We would not tolerate any interference in the affairs of our party any more than in our country's affairs...

...In Socialist France, the rights of the minority will be strictly respected provided they operate in conformity with democratic principle, legally...

...For as Albania and China demonstrate, a country may break its ties with the Soviets—indeed be bitterly hostile to them—and still operate a totalitarian regime...

...Is it really independent of Moscow...

...A QUESTION OF FREEDOM Gauging the French Communists by norman jacobs GEORGES MARCHAIS Paws Until now, the Socialist regimes [in Eastern Europe and the USSR] havFall, in effect, only known political systems founded on a party-state—either in the form of one party or a dominant party...

...Will they have a place in a Socialist France...

...and on the other, of a Communist party that alone defends the workers, 'our people,' France, democracy, and liberty...

...The right of opposition parties to become a new majority will be guaranteed...

...Breaking with hallowed Marxist doctrine, he goes on to deny that the mode of production directly determines the political superstructure...

...To convince militants and masses, the (Communist] steamroller has gone into action again...

...The Communists are poring over (Socialist leader Francois] Mitterand's speeches, distorting them in order to make them say the very opposite of what they obviously mean...

...The Communist parties have grown up...

...And if it comes to power in France, can it be trusted to play by the democratic rules of the game...

...And, consequently, the liberty to form and organize political parties, including opposition parties...

...The author of those lines is not, as you might expect, a Soviet dissident or a defector living in the West, or some American political scientist discoursing on the nature of Communist totalitarianism...

...Meanwhile, analysts note, relations at the MAURICE THOREZ top level of the two parties have similarly gone into a deep freeze...

...Among those, naturally, is liberty of assembly...

...In such conditions the right to vote can only be considered a formal right, since the citizens of these countries do not have the means of information or the alternatives required for a free choice...

...In addition to avowing its autonomy, the PCF has for some time been criticizing specific Soviet actions in a way that would have been unthinkable in the days of Thorez...

...That December, the PCF also denounced the deal freeing Chilean party chief Luis Corvalan from jail and bringing him to Moscow, in exchange for the release from prison and exile to the West of dissident Vladimir Bu-kovsky...

...Internally, the party governs LEONID I. BREZHNEV itself by the principles of democratic centralism, a form of organization that is Leninist in conception and Bolshevik in practice...

...This is a far from complete sampling of the reproofs leveled at Moscow by the PCF in recent years...

...Descending from the lofty level of doctrine, Georges Marchais describes very concretely how the PCF would behave if it came to power in France: "(We are asked] what will happen to opposition parties in our conception of democracy...

...For one thing, an obvious inconsistency characterizes PCF attitudes toward its erstwhile ally...

...The last has obvious implications in the field of foreign policy...

...to implant a simple image: on the one hand of a Socialist party given to betrayal...

...There is no longer a Communist international" Marchais declared, "and there is no possibility of reconstituting one...

...and the other made up of the "progressive" Socialists led by the USSR...

...Yet Marchais, referring to the USSR and its Eastern European satellites, wrote not long ago: "What a gigantic work they have realized and what a demonstration of the superiority of Socialism they have furnished...

...Before 1975, Marchais and Soviet Party chief Leonid I. Brezhnev met regularly, but they have not seen each other privately since, and—unlike Enrico Berlin-guer and Santiago Carrillo, his Italian and Spanish counterparts—the Frenchman did not attend the 60th anniversary celebration of the Revolution in Moscow...

...In his book, The P.C., Jean Ellein-stein jettisons Lenin's view that in a capitalist democracy the liberties enjoyed by the citizenry are formal or empty or merely "bourgeois...

...Indeed, more than anything else in the past few months, the PCF's behavior since its split with the Socialists has renewed doubts about the sincerity of Communist democratic avowals...

...One cannot compare this system," state the authors of a just-published study, The New Communists at the Gates of Power, "to one that leads the minority to yield to the will of the majority—that is, to democracy...

...Several years earlier, in The Democratic Challenge, Marchais had defined the PCF's task as building a Socialism adapted to French conditions (awe couleurs de la France), which he insisted French Communists had to do on their own...

...From Elleinstein's acknowledgment that political democracy is nonexistent in the Soviet Union and Marchais' insistence on the inseparability of democracy and Socialism—in his own words, "Socialism is democracy through and through"—it logically follows that the USSR is not a true Socialist state...

...transposed from one country to another...

...And the December 6, 1977, issue of Le Monde reported a speech by PCF Politburo member Jean Kanapa charging the Soviet leadership with not having learned the lessons of the Stalinist period...

...As for its professed conversion to political democracy, the most appropriate judgement is, I think, expressed in a familiar French dictum: Plus ca change, plus c'est la tneme chose...

...In the West, the revolution will be democratic, peaceful, legal, and gradual or it will not take place at all...

...It deals with virtually every sensitive issue—defense, disarmament, Vietnam, Korea, the Middle East, South Africa and Rhodesia, Latin America, etc.—and in its analyses and conclusions, could have been issued by the Soviet Central Committee and published in Pravda...

...Yet the sincerity of these promises is viewed, if anything, more skeptically than the party's commitments to independence from Moscow...

...Marchais' statement can be duplicated by similar PCF pledges repeatedly offered in recent years...

...Equally to the point, and perhaps more authoritative, was PCF boss Georges Marchais' assertion in his report to the 22nd Congress of the party, held in February 1976: "There does not exist, and there cannot exist, any model of Socialism that can be Norman Jacobs, long associated with the NL, recently retired as editor of the Foreign Policy Association...

...I have already indicated that we intend, at every step of our action, to respect all the liberties...

...Until it does, says Kanapa, there can be no guarantee that the "errors of the past" will not be repeated...

...The evidence is not all in yet, but it should be apparent that independence from Moscow is not in itself sufficient to assure this...

...The following year, the PCF Politburo queried Moscow about the continued existence of labor camps in the Soviet Union...

...Virtually to the vocabulary, here are the old techniques of the Moscow trials...

...In terms of Marxist-Leninist theory, there can be no doubt that the PCF has modified orthodox doctrine...

...When I first became acquainted with Elleinstein's latest books and articles, I found it difficult to believe he was reflecting the party line and not merely expressing his personal opinions...

...The reason for this is that the PCF's actions do not square with its words...

...In 1976, Elleinstein and party official Pierre Juquin participated in a Paris meeting organized to secure freedom for political prisoners held in, among other countries, the USSR...

...For our pan, we decide in total independence on our policies, aims and methods of action...

...In my opinion it has begun to mark its distance from Moscow, although how far it will go remains to be seen...

...It is Socialism which in the USSR has realized the immense historical progress that constitutes the disappearance of the exploitation of man...

...While in each country these must be developed in accordance with local conditions, the Communist parties are nonetheless bound together by common objectives, a common doctrine and a common adversary...

...What of the genuineness of the PCF's commitment to democracy...

...And so one asks again: Has the PCF truly changed...

...During the height of the French presidential campaign of 1974, after the Soviet Ambassador to France paid a much-publicized visit to Center-Right candidate Valery Gis-card d'Estaing, the PCF openly voiced its displeasure and astonishment...

...As evidence, consider these two statements from Elleinstein's article in Le Monde commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution last October: "The Soviet model is particularly unfitted to the state of societies in the West and is becoming more and more so...

...prison or banishment," it said, "constitutes an intolerable alternative...

...Roland Leroy [a PCF member of the National Assembly] has assumed the guise and tone of the 'citizen-procurator,' as Bukharin would say...

...and when Pravda criticized L 'Humanite for its position on the matter, Marchais, then on a visit to Cuba, expressed his support for his party's paper...

...A few days have sufficed to make the party fall back on its old ways...

...Conversely, it follows that a country may enjoy authentic freedoms, as in France, without necessarily being Socialist or installing a dictatorship of the proletariat (a concept, incidentally, that the PCF has thrown overboard with much fanfare...

...In 1970, for example, it publicly regretted the Soviet conduct of the Leningrad trial of a number of Jews who had attempted to seize an airplane to escape to the West, as well as the severity of the verdict...

...Frenchmen doubt that either the Socialist party or French democracy will survive intact if the seemingly aborted Union of the Left—the coalition of Communists, Socialists and Left Radicals—ever manages to regroup and comes to power...

...It is therefore not surprising that in collaborating with other organizations to achieve agreed-upon goals, the Communist monolith has so often imposed its will—swallowing up, destroying or weakening its partners...