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"The Disunion of the Left:A Case Study of How Eurocommunism Doesn’t Work"Stuart Elliott and Gerald Parsh New America January 1978
The breakup of the French Union of the Left is not only one of the most dramatic political events of 1977, it is also a development whose impact will reverberate through Western Europe for years to come. Although the dissolution of the left alliance confounded the expectations that Socialist-Communist differences would be submerged until after a left government had been formed following the March 1978 elections, the breakup could more accurately be viewed as the culmination of a standing political struggle between the Socialists and the Communists. With the left facing the prospect of almost certain victory in the March legislative elections, it would seem that the Communists preferred a split in the left alliance to a Socialist-dominated government. Indeed, the PCF had for many months seemed intent on sabotaging the left's chances for victory even as it remained part of the alliance. This spring, one day before Francois Mitterrand's television debate with centrist Prime Minister Raymond Barre, the PCF released a report of its estimates of the budgetary costs of the Common Program, estimates which were wildly divergent from those of the Socialists and sure to worry the marginal middle-class voters essential to the victory of the left. At the end, in September, the Communist Party abandoned the Common Program and the Union of the Left. On the final night of negotiations to revise the Left's platform, as Communist General-Secretary Georges Marchais and his colleagues dismissed the last compromise of the Socialists as unworthy of discussion, L'Humanite, the PCF's Paris daily, was already going to press with a front page cartoon accusing Socialist leader Francois Mitterrand and Robert Fabre, head of the non-Socialist Left Radical Party of collaborating with French President Giscard. Many observers, including leading Socialists, now believe that the Communists decided to break away even before talks began this spring for a revised electoral program. Speculation has naturally centered on the question of whether the break was ordered by Moscow, as the Soviets have long made clear their dislike for the prospect of a Socialist government in France. There is no reason to believe that the Soviets ordered Marchais to break with the Socialists. However, as Andre Fontaine observed in Le Monde, on fundamental issues the PCF leaders "have absolutely no need for directives from the Soviet Union." The French CP, long the most loyal and Stalinist of the Western European Communist parties, was a late, reluctant, and superficial convert to the more moderate line of the Italian Communists. The summer's increasingly frequent and strident Soviet attacks on Eurocommunism, which pointedly quoted the late PCF chief Maurice Thorez's denunciations of national communism, may have encouraged the hard-line Stalinists in the French party and strengthened the doubts of the more flexible minded about the wisdom of the party's Eurocommunist tactic. Ideological resistance to Marchais's verbal concessions to democracy probably played less of a role in the PCF's reversals of policy than alarm at the growing strength, dynamism, and confidence of the French Socialists. Following the 1973 Assembly elections, when the Socialists nearly matched the PCF's electoral strength and won a substantially greater representation in the Assembly, and even more marked Socialist gains in a series of 1974 by-elections, Roland LeRoy, rumored to be the leading opponent of Marchais's tactical line, was named editor of L'Humanite, and a vicious attack on the Socialists was launched. At this and many other points the Union of the Left seemed on the verge of disintegrating, but the differences were papered over enough to hold the alliance together until September. One poll early this year showed the Socialists gaining more than 30 percent of the vote, with Communist support falling under 20 percent. The tendency for the alliance to benefit the Socialists must have been particularly troubling to the PCF. At the 1974 PCF Congress, Marchais set a goal of increasing the party's share of the vote from 21 percent in the 1973 elections to 25 percent, but many French observers speculated that it might instead be reduced to 15 percent. Even more disturbing must have been the realization that given the peculiarities of the French electoral system, it would not be impossible for the Socialists, if they received 30 percent in the first round of voting, to gain an absolute majority in the Assembly without the support of Communist legislators. Insistence on maintaining a vanguard role made it imperative for the Communists to strike at the Socialists before the Socialists could cement their position as the "first party of the left, first party of the nation." The Communist motivation in breaking with the Union of the Left, was nothing less than the destruction of the Socialists. The PCF would probably have been willing to accept a position of numerical subordination within the left alliance provided that the party was still able to exercise the central animating leadership influence within the alliance and so long as its vanguard identity was not blurred by partnership with the Socialists. If the Union of the Left and the challenge of the Socialists forced the Communists to make limited ideological concessions to democracy and to voice criticisms of Soviet human rights violations, while defending the Soviet Union as 'Socialist,' it also created countervailing pressures compelling a reassertion of Leninist conceptions and Stalinist practices. The French Communists, who originally described the Common Program as involving only "democratic reforms," eventually adopted a harder line in an attempt to portray the Socialists as opportunists and to secure their vanguard role. The Communists proclaimed that they would not come to power to manage trie capitalist crisis and demanded the strict implementation of the very same Common Program they had previously described as reformist. In 1977, the PCF escalated its demands even further, calling for nationalization far more extensive than originally contained in the Common Program. The PCF saw no need to revise its attitudes in reaction to the problems created by the depressed growth rates of the Western economies. Their conception of the transition t socialism remains rooted in the strict application of governmental authority, widespread nationalization, and a strategy of escalating confrontation and class struggle leading to "more advanced" solutions—a process of totalitarian logic. The Socialists, in contrast, have recognized the importance of a growing economy to the successful implementation of radical changes. The Socialists' maximum threshold of nationalizations was the Communists' minimum threshold. In addition the Socialists' program which combines, boldly if confusedly, the Swedish social democratic model with auto-gestion (self-management) present a fundamentally different vision of socialism from the warmed-over Stalinist conceptions of Marchais and company. In short, the parties' approaches to the economy revealed clear, basic, and irreducible differences between democratic socialism and communism. Mitterrand and the Socialists were never willing to accept the secondary position to which the PCF's vanguardism would assign them. Mitterrand frequently asserted that the health of the left alliance depended on a "re-equilibrium within it "and boasted that the Socialists could gain three million of the Communists' five million voters. Although the Socialists demonstrated a willingness to pay a heavy price to maintain the Union of the Left as essential to the prospects for a Socialist government, there were clearly limits to the concessions they were willing to make. A decisive indication was the June 1977 Socialist Party Congress when Mitterrand crushed the left-wing CERES faction, despite the desire of CERES and many Socialist rank-and-filers for a compromise. Mitterrand told the Congress that it would be trickery "to marry two policies derived from conflicting political viewpoints." Mitterrand's description of internal Socialist affairs seemed to fit the Common Program perfectly. The PCF, despite its initial enthusiasm for the Union of the Left, could not help but fear that the trick was on them. The PCF charge that the socialists had moved to the right, however, is a falsehood. If Mitterrand tricked Marchais, it was by refusing to submit to becoming an appendage to a vanguard. Despite the collapse of their electoral strategy, the Socialists have shown a remarkable resilience. At the Socialist Party Congress at the beginning of November, Mitterrand set the tone or the upcoming campaign, declaring that the real issue was not how much should be nationalized, but the struggle for power within a eft-wing government, and painting Marchais and his colleagues as spiritual disciples of Stalin. The Socialists published their own economic program, which closely parallels the Common Program, and an electioneering guidebook to go with it. In the election, Mitterrand and the Socialists will present themselves as the true spokesmen of the left, reject offers from thecenter parties, and proclaim their faithfulness to the Common Program. This stance is an understandable result of the electoral and political decline of the old SFIO when it followed a policy of coalition with the center during the 1950s. Equally important is the fact that without mutual voting support on the left, the Socialists and the Communists could win a solid majority of votes in the first round of balloting, but finish the election with fewer seats than they have now. Time and ideological conflicts weigh heavily against a real alliance at this stage; some Socialists feel that another union of the left will be impossible for many years to come. An electoral pact without policy strings, nonetheless, remains a distinct possibility. Polls since the breakup of the left show that slightly more voters still prefer the left parties to the present government and, moreover, indicate that the blame for the breakup may be laid at Marchais's rather than Mitterrand's door. One poll has projected that the Socialists will emerge as the largest party in the 490 seat Assembly with about 160 seats and that the Gaullists should fall from their current 173 members to between 100 and 140. Giscard should be able to muster slightly over 140 centrists and independents, while the Communists should win about 15 seats. Giscard would then be forced to keep afloat a technocratic government headed by the present Prime Minister, Raymond Barre, or make a serious effort to form a center-left government with the Socialists. The Communist destruction cannot be viewed solely as a tactical maneuver, rather it must be seen, in part, as a response to the party's serious identity crisis. The two-thirds of its members who have joined since 1975 have no doubt been affected by the "liberalism" of the PFC's Common Program line. A September poll showed that 46 percent of the PCF members consider the Soviet system "a setback to the cause of freedom."These sentiments must have alarmed the middle-level cadres, as well as hardliners on the Central Committee, even though the party's democratic centralist structure prevented any nascent democractic impulses from influencing the party's policies. Despite valiant attempts by the French Communists to recast their visage in the Eurocommunist image of the Italian Communists, the French Communists remained essentially Stalinist. In his Le Defi Democratique, the theoretical text of the PCF's "liberalization," party chief Marchais supplied a most orthodox and frightening answer to the question of political pluralism. He gave as an example of party pluralism in a socialist regime the people's democracies of Eastern Europe. The PCF has opted for ideological purity, even at the cost of political expectation. The party's Leninist structure should enable it to minimize the electoral and political cost of the abrupt transition from a flexible policy to a hard one. Nonetheless, the hardening of their profile is not without dangers. Many Communist voters expected a share of power and major social gains from a victory of the Union of the Left and believed in the Common Program, which they saw as representing their interests. The PCF's self-imposed ghettoization may not succeed any better than the Union of the Left with new tensions being created between neo-Stalinists and reinvigorated advocates of the Italian line. The Socialists believe, as one party leader expressed it, "You will always have a Communist Party in France. The question is whether it will be weak or strong, Stalinist or moderate." It now appears that it is both more important and more likely that there be a weak Communist party than a moderate one. A strong and dynamic Socialist Party remains the essential condition for a weak and moderate Communist party. Whether the Socialists will prove equal to the task of exploiting the Communist vulnerabilities is now the decisive question in French politics. The breakup of the French left has already had important repercussions throughout Europe, necessitating strategic and tactical adjustments by the parties claiming to be members of the Eurocommunist guild. As the PCF had drawn inspiration from the Italian Communists and a close relationships had been developing between the two parties, the PCF's return to a hard-line policy is a severe blow to the credibility of Eurocommunism. Santiago Carillo and Enrico Berlinguer are desperately scrambling to dissociate themselves as gracefully as possible from Georges Marchais. The Italian Communists have begun sounding out interest in a West European alliance of leftist parties— both Communists and socialists—in an attempt, apparently, to repair the damage done by the French Communists to Berlinguer's prospects of formally entering the Italian government by 1979. The Italian proposal is not without significance in the history of communism, but given its patently tactical motivation, it is not likely to interest many European socialists, whose healthy skepticism towards Eurocommunism has been reinforced by the events in France. In a particularly important speech on November 18, British Foreign Secretary Dr. David Owen described Eurocommunism as "a dangerous term. It confers a coherence and a respectability on an ill-defined, disparate, and as yet unidentifiable phenomenon....It tends to make people suspend their critical faculties, avoid analyzing the phenomenon seriously, country by country, and instead take refuge in generalities." The fragility of the PCF's commitment to the Union of the Left and the "Eurocommunist" tactic does little to reassure one about the rumored and much-exaggerated democratic transformation of the Italian and Spanish Communist parties. Certainly, too many observers, particularly from the safe distance of the United States, have confused the undeniable fact that the Communist parties of Western Europe have become more pragmatic and modern with the dubious and dangerous notion that the parties are becoming democratic. While there is too much evidence to reject summarily the hypothesis that something fundamental is happening in the development of the West European Communist parties, the overwhelming preponderance of evidence shows that the extent of the change has not been great and, moreover, that the limited evolution that has occurred is ambiguous and reversible in its implications for democracy. So long as "Eurocommunism" remains merely a stage within the evolutionary development of the communist movement, the fundamentally antidemocratic nature of the parties, in structure, practice, and international perspective will not be altered. As the Spanish socialist leader Felipe Gonzalez has observed: "There has to be a coherence between the internal party structures and the democratic structures they propose for society if they are to be believed as democrats. I don't think this coherence exists in the (Spanish Communist] party now." Indeed, there is no secular trend towards de-Leninization, that is, abandonment of "democratic centralism," in any of the Western Communist parties. Although the Western parties no longer automatically identify Moscow's current interests with the interests of the entire world Communist movement, they still act on the basis of "proletarian internationalism." The Italian Socialist Gino Bianco recently detailed the PCI's stance vis-a-vis Russian foreign policy in the third world "American support in Angola was 'imperialism,' while the Cuban troops there at the Russians' behest were 'freedom fighters.' The Israeli liberation of the hostages hijacked to Entebbe was termed an 'intolerable violation of Uganda's national sovereignty' and the PCI called upon the Italian government to denounce Israel at the U.N. When Kissinger proposed a transition to black rule in Rhodesia, the daily Communist paper 'Unita, using the same expressions that had been appearing in Tass and Pravda for days, condemned this as an attempt to 'save the neo-colonial and military-strategic interests of imperialism.'.. Judging by deeds and not words, there is as yet no reason for Socialists and other democrats to be confident of the adherence of West European Communists to the values of pluralism or democracy. |
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