WORK FOR SOCIALISM IN DENMARK
By HANS ARENDT
Denmark, like a great part of the capitalist world, is in a period of boom, which has taken an upward turn over
The most important products of the country are agricultural, and during the last 15 years these have an increasing yield: partly because of a better exploitation of the acreage, partly by a more rational technical processing of the products such as butter, eggs, bacon and canned goods, which are world market goods disposed
In the last years there has been some anxiety about this market, in which Britain is the biggest customer, because the British Dominions, in competition with Denmark, compel Britain to limit her imports from Denmark and force the prices down. . But just now the market is stable and prices on the British market
Due to the mechanization of agriculture the number of agricultural workers is decreasing, and their influence will decrease proportionately. The farmers are firmly organized two large organizations, for the smaller and bigger farmers respectively. These groups work quite well together, but in politics the smaller farmers support the government, and the bigger and biggest the opposition. the general crisis of the thirties there was a very strong fascistic agricultural organization, working hand in glove with the Nazis. In the favorable agricultural conditions of today the latter has little importance, but it maintains its organization in being and, at the smallest sign of a weakening in the position of agriculture it will reappear. Its policy — state support for agriculture, modification of taxes and raising of prices on the home market - is directed against the towns and especially against the trade unions. It includes bigger as well as smaller farmers but, in view of the record-breaking harvests of the past years, has been holding its hand.
Industry, especially the highly-developed Danish shipbuilding industry, is in a period of progress, with sale of the products at rising prices. This is also the case with the shipping trade, of great importance in proportion to the size of the country, which like its Norwegian counterpart earns big money by freighting abroad.
These three sources of revenue — agriculture, industry and shipping — give their owners a principal influence in Danish politics.
These three groups have given the formal parliamentary leadership of the country to the strongest parliamentary Party, the social-democrats, who command 41% of the votes and a proportionate number of seats in the oneHouse parliament. (Folketinget.) This Party, as in Norway and Sweden, has been unable to increase its strength for the past 40 years; nowhere in Scandinavia do the labor parties poll as much as 50%. But the tremendously increasing proportional influence of the managerial class, and the stagnation in the trade-union organizations, point to the fact that it will take rather a long time to come to socialism the parliamentary way!
The Danish social-democratic overnment has tried tr ret a coalition with two small Liberal-capitalist parties whose one or two members in the government strengthen direct capitalist control over the economy, procuring for the particular groups whose interests they represent the necessary places and orders they demand. The social-democratic leaders have long since gotten accustomed to this cog their policy to the working en with an albi in justily-
The boom, with increased productivity and full employment for the workers, has clearly set its seal on political life. The idea of a welfare state has penetrated deep into the minds of the workers, who once had a socialist outlook: but this latter has disappeared from both the social-democratic and the trade-union organizations. The workers are on the whole satisfied when their wages cover the steadily rising inflation (about 5% per year); though they obtain these increases only about once in three years after a tug-of-war with the employers' organizations, when the increases are backdated to cover the arrears. The workers do not reflect that increased production is due above all to the application of technique gained through scientific investigation, and not at all to the forms of political life, and that the workers' share in increased production has not increased during the last 70 years.
As a corrective to the seeming political stability, it can be mentioned that in 1956 there was a labor conflict on a wide scale, where a compromise from the side of the social-democratic government was rejected by a vote of the workers. During this conflict there was one week in which, to the surprise of everybody, a positively revolutionary atmosphere arose, increasing from day to day. Not only that the old workers' representatives were pushed aside, but they were replaced by representatives elected for the immediate situation by a "workers' council," a new formation whose consequences the workers were not aware of, but which had been put forward by the Communist party. A thorough radicalization was set in motion.
Seeing this, the government, wanting to help the employers restore "law and order," brought in a bill to give the proposed compromise the force of a law. There was a predominant feeling in favor of defying the bill, introduced by the social-democrats and recommended by the trade-union leaders. But this would have led to a change of government: the social-democrats would have been superseded by the conservatives, and here, to the disappointment of the workers, the Communist party completely failed. Pleading that the Party would not contribute to the defeat of the social-democracy, they called the action off; the defeat of the workers was thus sealed, as they could not win the battle without the support of the Communists, or against them.
The disappointment among the working class was great.
he Communists expectation that they would gain tro le social-democrats due recognition for services rendere was, as usual, disappointed. The apathy towards struggle. political or trade-union, which followed, unfortunately took even deeper root with the economic upswing. But during the last six months a long series of illegal strikes have broken out, all of them due to the severe rationalizations and the pockets of unemployment thus created, which opens the possibility of a greater stress on the employers.
The workers' greatest problem at present is to get rid of the "September compromise, " forced on them 60 years ago after their defeat in a lockout. This now takes the form of a fundamental law for the workers (the "workers' constitution"'), a treaty between trade unions and employers for legal and professional regulation of conflicts, and a string of regulations intended to give the employers any support they might want.
demand phone is de a man of undered acal
and hygienic interests must wait. It is a fact that "defense" (integrated with NA TO) has unlimited capital at its disthe workers are not deeply influenced by events relating to foreign politics. Rather these are ripples on the surface, as the workers are not accustomed to generalizing the news they receive nor to making a socialist analysis. Th hold of social-democracy on the workers must be considered safe for some years, as also its direction of the policy of this Liberal-capitalist society. Though most of reärmament and approval of the American-directed
40 NA TO. This great price they are willing to pay to defeat
Soviet Union and communism; and it is this price which the social-democratic leaders are glad to demand from the workers so as to be allowed to retain formal power in the state. Under these circumstances stability seems to have set in, and displacements in the state of the Parties have for years been minimal. There are no signs of revolutionization of the workers, saving the radicalism evoked by the present lay-offs resultant from rationalizathe split in the Communist party will be instanced as a sign of such a process. But it is not. This split is part of a world phenomenon, and must in this country be regarded as evidence of latent reformism on the part of a great many members of the CP, afraid that Moscow might instruct them to execute a "Left turn" after the pattern of 1948-52.
Although this split has resulted in the formation of a about half the former members of the CP are participating; new Party, the People's Socialist in which by now and although this Party has been supported, from the revolutionary side, by Marxist-Leninists; this is because this new socialist Party, as a protest against Stalinism, has felt obliged to appeal to everybody who wants to be active in working for socialism in Denmark and has been compelled, in accordance with the democratic traditions of the country, to promise to abolish terror in the Party, to allow criticism of the Party from within, to do away with authoritarian Party discipline and to fight bureaucracy and careerism. The Party has a fairly good social composition, with industrial workers and trade-union officials forming the overwhelmingly larger part of its central committee. Among the 26 CC members there are only three university men, and two or three clerks. Axel Larsen, for 30 years chairman of the Danish CP, has secured a majority on the committee tor his triends and former associates such as Willy Brauer, chairman of the typographers, Over Petersen, chairman of the metalworkers and Hans Jensen, chairman of the works committee in the country's biggest armaments factory. On the other hand the editor of the Party paper, Kaj Moltke, is an old revolutionist, an expert on foreign affairs, who used to be in vigorous opposition to the CPD. Because of a rather complicated electoral law, the Party retains about seven seats in parliament formerly held by the CP, which has lost all five seats remaining to it at the time of the split.
But the new Party (the P SP) has not succeeded in absorbing the discontented social-democrats, not to mention the prominent Left-wingers in that Party. This may seem rather strange, and it is a great disappointment to the leaders of the new Party, and most of all to Larsen, chairman. Many malcontents have explained that Stalinism has repelled them from all communist formations. the real explanation is that many PS P with Larsen, whom they still distrust despite the fact that he has turned away from Stalinism and is maintaining that the PSP is independent of the USSR - it is same distrust that prevents many former members of the CP from joining the PS P.
The social-democracy has a certain justified fear of the SP because a minor displacement in the distribution of seats between the three government Parties and the conservative Parties might lead to a situation the attitude of the PSP could be of decisive importance in determining the balance of the parliamentary scales. It is the hope and wish of Axel Larsen and his immediate supporters that the government Parties of this be prepared to pay a price for the P SP's support though it has long been the dream of the leaders of the moderate wing in the old CP. This dream during the occupation, when they were fighting alongside the bourgeois Parties.
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
The CP D carries on unconcernedly as the vassal of the Soviet Union, like the CPs of the other ! European countries, and is able to do so much more freely in that most critical members have now left the Party, so that the rest are much easier to manage. A part of the members stay
Party from loyalty and through the law of inertia, combined with uncertainty about the new formation. Part of them stay because they are recipients of some of the favors which the Party has at its disposal, and which have for years been used for the benefit of many members: for the hundreds, indeed thousands, who travel every year to the Soviet Union or the other workers' states, who have joined brigades for work in these countries or have joined the many cultural associations which have arisen around the embassies of the "socialist" countries, and which are nurseries for loyal "friends of the Soviet Union" _ with their cocktail parties, social gatherings, festivals, travel facilities, cultural delegations, and so on. Finally, the great economic and technical progress of the Soviets, and the international position derived as a consequence therefrom, of course impress many people and bind them to the old Party, because for many people, inside and outside the Party, the Soviet Union and communism identical concepts. A great number of Party officials keep with it, moreover, for bread-and-butter reasons, as is the case with the string of Communist authors economically dependent on the market provided by the non-capitalist countries — both categories being of great value for the propaganda of the Party.
If, however, the Soviet Union found it opportune to leave the CPD to its own devices, withdrawing port, the life of the Party could not continue. grammatic position on NATO with which, like the C PID, A most significant directive by the PSP is its it is in favor of breaking off all connections, and its consequent demand for disarmament: not a man, not a gun, not a cent for imperialist war. This is sharp and clear, and appeals to the traditional antimilitarism of the workers. It is also something which appeals to and finds an echo in agricultural circles, because of the economic advantages they would gain by abolishing the enormous military expenditure. This military policy will by the next election be of much use to the PSP, at the same time cutting the ground from under the feet of the CPD. The latter Party, recoiling from "pacifism," will now take its stand on a somewhat reduced military program, about half that of the government - in fact neither fish nor fowl, but surely in harmony with the wishes of the Soviets.
Of course the bourgeois Parties in Denmark, as elsewhere, consider Trotskyism to be the "most dangerous form of communism." And as there are no signs of the rehabilitation of Trotsky in the US S R, and therefore in the other workers' states, this is also the case inside the CPD. Axel Larsen, who was a ' Trotskyist in the Soviet Union, has been trying for the last 30 years to whitewash this "youthful error, and is naturally anxious to make quite sure that he and his close friends are not mistaken for "Trotskyists." In truth he is definitely oriented towards reformism and has already begun the fight inside the PS P against the program of the 1Uth International, just like his former associates in the CPD and in the Soviet Union. He is also, to some extent, interested in fighting the friends and adherents of Trotskyism active in the P SP.
The Danish Trotskyists continue undismayed, however, their activity for the ideas of the IVth International, fighting against terrific odds. A leading figure of the Left,
Georg Moltved, has broadcast three programs on Trotskyism over the Danish national radio: soviet, its birth under Trotsky, its victory under Lenin, its liquidation under Stalin; 2) Lenin pushes forward the revolution in spite of the leaders of his Party; 3) Homage to Trotsky, on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of his without advance censorship. The Danish Trotskyists have also begun translating The Revolution Betrayed.
Resolutions of the XXIInd Plenum of the I E C
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