[The following article appeared in the July 21 issue of Inprecor a fortnightly news bulletin published by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.]
On June 23 the Soviet weekly Novoye Vremya (New Times) launched an inquisitorial attack on Santiago Carrillo, secretary general of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), because of his book "Eurocomunismo" y Estado ("Eurocommunism" and the State). The three major counts of the indictment were these: "opposing the Communist parties of the European capitalist countries to the Communist parties of the socialist countries"; "denigrating real socialism, that is, the countries which have already created a new society, and first of all the Soviet Union"; upholding a conception "which in practice amounts to maintaining the division of Europe into opposed military blocs and, in addition, to strengthening the aggressive NATO bloc." The Soviet press agency distributed the text of the attack widely; it was reproduced on the front pages of Tribuna Ludu and Rude Pravo, the central organs of the Polish and Czechoslovak Communist parties respectively.
Where It Hurts
Thus, one year after the conference of Communist parties in East Berlin, where the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) was compelled to renounce the rule of unanimity, Brezhnev has issued a warning to Carrillo, one also aimed at Georges Marchais and Enrico Berlinguer, the leaders of the French and Italian Communist parties. The Kremlin associates are not given to improvisation. Although the attack was carefully timed, it had been prepared long in advance and certainly polished up in Sofia, Bulgaria, last March, where Boris Ponomarev convoked the leaders of the CPs of the "satellite countries" to examine "the case" of those who were meeting in Madrid at the same time, namely Berlinguer, Carrillo, and Marchais. It was the Bulgarian Telalov who was assigned to demand a resolution against "Eurocommunist deviationism." New Times responded to this demand by targeting the secretary general of the PCE, for this party had just run up a rather inglorious electoral score, in spite of (or because of) its reverence for the Spanish monarchy. The Kremlin bureaucracy has thus officially taken note of a new stage in the crisis of Stalinism, bringing it into the public domain.
On June 29 a delegation of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) arrived in Moscow. It was composed of three members of the leadership, Gian Carlo Pajetta, Paolo Bufalini, and Emanuele Macaluso. The attack on Carrillo, or more precisely the themes of the diatribe, were at the center of their discussions, as Berlinguer's three confrères confirmed upon their return.
A new stage in the crisis of Stalinism, which has been ripening since 1968, has now spilled out into the public square. What has come to be called "Eurocommunism" constitutes one of the facets of this crisis, that of the relations between the Soviet CP and the CPs of Western Europe; many of these CPs must confront a rise of the mass movement and some of them are planning to participate in governments before too long.
The whole content of the indictment concocted by the Kremlin scribblers indicates that what is involved here is not at all a debate on the strategy of the West European CPs in coming to power. The function of the few murmurs on this subject is to gain the ear of a minority of militants trained during the period when two-faced language was used to get the reformist line across. Instead, the New Times article is entirely devoted to defending the bureaucratic regime in which, according to Moscow, "the working class constitutes the motor force of society, in which it assumes, along with the peasantry and the intelligentsia, the full plenitude of power." Now, in his book Carrillo contests precisely this dogma, which constitutes one of the ideological foundations of this bureaucracy which has expropriated the working class of all political and economic power. This central aspect of the conflict comes through very clearly in the accounts of the discussions in Moscow. Reviewing the themes broached by the CPSU and PCI delegations, Bufalini declared: "We examined various international questions, among them the New Times attack. On this latter question, the Soviets told us that the assertions of Comrade Carrillo on the non-socialist character of society and the state in the USSR were unacceptable." (Repubblica, July 5, 1977) In a front page article in /'Unita, the daily of the PCI, Bufalini asserted: "The Soviets exhibited a different concern: that the criticism of the USSR, the importance attributed to the 'dissidents,' and the tone sometimes used (not by us, it is true) in discussing Soviet society could be used by forces interested in impeding the détente. ... In other words, for the Soviets the 'dissidents' are a false problem, a diversion, an expedient concocted to prevent détente, something that does not concern the masses or the real processes." (July 5, 1977) These assertions reported by the Italian delegation clearly highlight what the
Kremlin bureaucracy's real fear is: Above all they are afraid of their own proletariat; they fear that the Soviet workers might be contaminated and encouraged by certain ideas and criticisms now formulated even from "within" the "international Communist movement" that Moscow assembled in Berlin less than a year ago.
The Eurocommunists, the Dissidents, and Soviet Society
The marked sensitivity of the Brezhnevs, Suslovs, Ponomarevs, and others to the interaction that has developed between "dissidence" in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and the other "people's democracies" and the positions of the various "Eurocommunist" CPs has a real basis. First of all, the statements of the French, Spanish, and Italian CPs on the situation in their own countries somehow legitimize the oppositionists in the USSR and East Europe in the eyes of the international workers movement. Thus, when the French Communist Party (PCF), following a French television broadcast on "labor camps" in the USSR, comes out against the existence of this prison system, the PCF is objectively stating that in the conflict between the Soviet bureaucrats and those in the USSR who wind up in that prison system one fine day precisely because they denounce it, the latter are correct.
Second, a portion of the opposition has fully grasped this dialectic. It has been able to make use, for its own particular needs (which may also correspond to those of a policy of putting pressure on the bureaucracy from within), of the West European CPs' obligation to take some distance from a bureaucratic dictatorship which they have long presented as a model society. For instance, on March 17, 1977, eleven former members of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak CP addressed an appeal, from their isolation, to the European CPs on the occasion of the repression against the signers of Charter 77. They were able to state their case in such a way as to have some effect on the leaders of the CPs, who have to count votes and know how to do so: "This is not the first time since 1968 that important population groups have been victims of discrimination because of their convictions. ... [These methods] heap discredit on socialism not only in Czechoslovakia, but throughout Europe....
These practices damage the interests of your own parties and cannot be considered merely internal affairs of the Czechoslovak Communist Party." (Le Monde, March 19, 1977)
Finally, some oppositionists who themselves have a project of reforming the system from within may also be encouraged by the positions and declarations of the Eurocommunist CPs. After semiofficial relations were established between the PCI and Dubcek, Carrillo has now gone so far as to declare: "Why not imagine that a Dubcek, or a new Khrushchev, might arise in the USSR one day and make the necessary changes?" (Television broadcast on Antenne 2, July 14) This must raise the hackles of Bilak and Brezhnev. Even though the words fit into a perspective of bureaucratic reformism, after Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia the Soviet leadership has learned to regard these reformists as dangerous sorcerer's apprentices.
Nevertheless, there is another dimension to the crisis of relations between the Soviet bureaucracy and the CPs of West Europe. Because of the exigencies of their own reformist strategy, the "Eurocommunists" put forward a series of themes which enter into resonance with the social contradictions of the bureaucratically degenerate or deformed workers states. In the long run these themes may be perceived by layers of workers as partial responses to their own aspirations. Indeed, taken in different social formations (in which the private appropriation of the means of production and generalized commodity production do not exist), these themes assume subversive properties, for the central question in these countries remains that of proletarian democracy, as is clearly shown by all the beginnings of mass movements. For instance, when declarations such as those of Berlinguer and
Carrillo in Livorno in July 1975, Berlinguer and Marchais in Rome in November 1975, or the three together in Madrid in March 1977 stress the inseparability of democracy and socialism, call for a multiparty system and respect for civil and political liberties, and preach the development of democracy as a condition for the development of socialism, the words are perceived in the East as an encouragement to demand the conquest and application of these rights and norms. The fact that these themes are organically linked to counterrevolutionary strategy, to the social conservation of a capitalist system in crisis, do not prevent them from being able to constitute, in the immediate sense, elements of reference for the development of movements of antibureaucratic demands. In an interview granted in Moscow to the Spanish weekly Cambio 16 Roy Medvedev affirmed: "Undoubtedly, many of the aspects of Eurocommunism certainly appear dangerous in the Soviet Union. ...
The successes of pluralist socialism
(Eurocommunism) in the West can exert strong attraction on socialist countries like Hungary, Poland, and Rumania, and even on Soviet public opinion. Carrillo, Berlinguer, and Marchais go further than Dubcek-type reformers, and it was a similar fear that moved the Warsaw Pact tanks to occupy Prague." (July 17, 1977.) Elleinstein, high priest of Eurocommunism in the colors of France and theoretical ambassador of the leading nucleus of the PCF, has written in the review of the CERES (the Socialist Party minority), "What could be the source of the Soviet Union's uneasiness about a political transformation in France and Italy? To my mind, it would relate to one essential point, the construction of another type of socialism than that which exists in the Soviet Union and the countries that are close to it. Let us put it clearly: a democratic socialism in France could constitute a pole of attraction for those in the Soviet Union or the socialist European countries who aspire to more democracy within the framework of the existing socialism." (Repères, March 1977.) Through their distorting lenses, these two reformists of differing horizons confirm the fear of the Soviet bureaucracy, each in their own way. They are in good position to know. It is no accident that the same issue of New Times that contained the attack on Carrillo also published an article in which F. Patrenko asserted: "Pluralism is purely and simply a defect of bourgeois society."
On this point we find ourselves confronting a historic paradox. Although in the past Stalinism concocted the theory of "socialism in one country" in order to subject the entire international Communist movement to its strategy, today the Communist parties are turning the same argument against Moscow. On the one hand, the Stalinist strategy has stimulated the adaptation of the Western CPs to their own respective national realities (one of the decisive material bases of their present orientation); on the other hand, these parties are preaching the "national road" in order to justify their autonomy and the need for a public debate. Alfredo Reichlin, editor of l'Unità, wrote in an editorial, "We have taken a position on the New Times attack on Carrillo not only because of the tone used, which incidentally appears inadmissible to us, but because of the substance of the attack itself: we consider it not so much an excommunication (who excommunicates and who is excommunicated when there is no longer any discipline or leading center, let alone a church?), but more a direct public attack on a party and its principal leader. Which is different from a completely legitimate criticism of an essay that formulates debatable hypotheses and explores open problems." (July 10, 1977.)
Eurocommunist Diplomacy
It is true that the "Eurocommunists" have no common strategy except to respond to their own national exigencies. But from the standpoint of the Soviet bureaucracy there is another common denominator: the criticism of, the distance taken from, the "Soviet model," and the demand for autonomy, which does not mean independence. So long as the PCI was a voice in the wilderness, the PCE was consigned to the background because it was illegal, and the PCF could still pass for one of the Kremlin's loyal subjects, despite its reticence, the situation was not too worrisome for the old men in the Kremlin.
But as of 1975 the PCF began trumpeting its "Eurocommunist" faith with the fervor of the newly converted. The conversion was formalized at the twenty-second party congress in 1976, at which Fiterman, a Marchais loyalist, no longer defended the "unjustly slandered socialist states" and Kirilenko, Brezhnev's emissary, no longer received the applause of a hall packed with unconditional supporters, as had been the case at the twenty-first congress. Moreover, the death of Franco in November 1975 inaugurated a situation that was to see the PCE come out openly. It was therefore able to express with more authority the ideas Santiago Carrillo had already expounded in his interview with Rossana Rossanda published in the Italian daily il Manifesto in November 1974 (an interview which had provoked some discontent at PCI headquarters).
The Eurocommunist regroupment then began to take shape and exhibit a dynamic of its own. This was of greater import than the dissidence of an Australian or even Japanese Communist Party. In fact, it involved the CPs most directly linked to the October Revolution, the creation of the Communist International, its Stalinist degeneration, and the important moments of its history (the Popular Front, the Spanish revolution, the anti-Nazi resistance, the Liberation). But these were also CPs which command a mass audience and which, in the current European situation, present themselves as credible candidates for government participation. The debate with Berlinguer or Marchais as leaders of parties thus threatens to become a debate among men of state. This is enough to provoke anger in the Kremlin, but controlled anger. Roy Medyedev, who knows the milieu, explained in his interview: "Thus, the possibility of Western Communist parties participating in the governments of their respective countries, of becoming parties in power instead of simple opposition parties, is becoming more concrete. The USSR has to consider them real forces. This novelty is shaking the bureaucratic and dogmatic mentalities of the Kremlin." Macaluso of the PCI delegation noted upon his return: "The clear impression I came away with was that this was not the beginning of a salvo against the Eurocommunist parties. Now that the opening round has been fired, the Soviets want to muffle the consequences." (Panorama, July 12, 1977.
The role played by the European CPs in the current period not only has implications for their relations with Moscow, but is also involved in the internal balances between the Soviet CP and the CPs that hold power in Eastern Europe, which relations constitute yet another facet of the crisis of Stalinism. It was no accident that in Sofia, Kadar of Hungary seems to have been slapped on the wrist for his December 1976 declaration in Vienna that "Eurocommunism is not a new form of anticommunism." (Espresso, July 3, 1977.) Nevertheless, in Rome on June 9, 1977, Kadar sinned again, saying of the European CPs' claims of the right to differ: "This is not only their right, but also their duty. With or without the dictatorship of the proletariat, with a pluralistic or some other socialism, all I wish is that they open their people's road to socialism as quickly as possible." (Le Monde, June 26-27, 1977.) Thus, the government perspectives, at least of the PCI and the PCF, like their intrinsic weight in Italian, French, and Spanish political reality, foster diplomatic initiatives by these CPs not only toward "third world" countries, but also toward the "people's democracies." This desire corresponds to the specifie interests of some bureaucracies of Eastern Europe (especially the Hungarian and Rumanian), which would look kindly on changes of regime in France or Italy, even if only because of the increased diversification of their trade and the favorable credit conditions that would result. In addition, they would like to take advantage of the centrifugal tendencies intensified by Eurocommunism. Nevertheless, one must not lose sight of the contradictory aspects of such a situation. On the one hand, it constrains Western CPs to be cautious with the Soviet "big brother," whose economic and military power remains the largely dominant factor for the "people's democracies." On the other hand, the East European bureaucrats must also take account of the effects of "contamination" of their own working classes some of the themes developed by Eurocommunism could have. The Eurocommunist road is thus a narrow one.
The Kremlin and the Status Quo
There is no doubt that the Kremlin bureaucrats, who seem to have learned nothing from their previous attempts, have tried to create difficulties for Carrillo within his own party. Several weeks before they had failed in an attempt to have Jeannette
Vermeersch-Thorez raise the Stalinist clarion against Marchais, through attacking Elleinstein.
On June 25 the Central Committee of the PCE passed a unanimous motion (with one abstention) supporting Carrillo. The latter declared, mincing no words: "At this stage no diplomatic caution can prevent me from saying that the splitting attempts first of Eduardo Garcia and then of Enrique Lister were organized and stimulated by the same people who wrote this article. They did not succeed then and they probably expected greater success from this offensive. After each of these attacks, realizing their failure, they have held back for some time, at least publicly." (Triunfo, July 2, 1977) There are at least two reasons for the failure of Stalin's heirs. First, the latter have lost the authority of their testator. Second, in the social and political context in which they find themselves, the CP leaderships-who tend to be thrown off balance among their own bourgeoisie, their working class, and the Soviet bureaucracy-cannot afford the luxury of instituting in their own ranks the sort of public discussion they demand between themselves and the Kremlin. They have to close ranks to negotiate a perilous turn. Macaluso understood the reaction of the PCE Central Committee very well: "In any event, they (the Soviets) made a mistake. The Spanish party has proven united, and there are profound reasons for this unity." (Espresso, July 3, 1977.)
The splitting operations having been aborted, the Kremlin will not take initiatives that would result in a break, at least not in the present period. Having no available alternative option, Kremlin is acting empirically, aware that this is a permanent problem whose roots lie in the present historical phase. Indeed, in large part Eurocommunism represents an attempted political response from CP leaderships confronted with a series of common questions: the pressures of the national context are coming to bear with increased force; the trauma provoked by Stalinism in the ranks of the workers movement in the European countries has left deep traces and the limits of the twentieth congress of the CPSU are felt especially strongly; the junction of the crisis of capitalism and the rise of the mass movement has fostered the flowering of a lively antibureaucratic sentiment among broad sectors of the working class; through demagogic references to self-management the SPs have often been able to capture a part of this radicalization and to put themselves forward as both competitors and necessary allies of the CPs in the perspective of assuming government power. Hence, the Kremlin will seek a modus vivendi the Eurocommunist CPs. This is just what Macaluso reported in l'Unita: "The Soviets affirmed that they did not want to envenom the polemic with the Spanish CP and still less to undertake one with the other CPs of West Europe. They thus hope to come to a more tempered discussion, one which does not exclude, they stressed, this or that criticism of socialism in the USSR but does exclude general condemnation of it." (July 5, 1977.)
The desire of the CPSU leadership to reach an accomodation in spite of its brutal actions (which do not have much effect in any case) rests in the final analysis on a material base: to maintain the status quo in Europe in order to preserve its own stability. The
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bureaucracy dreads the activity of its own working class. For this reason, it fears that the discontent of the latter could be fueled by some of the themes articulated by the Eurocommunists. But what frightens the bureaucracy more than anything is that these words of socialism and freedom trumpeted by the Eurocommunists might actually take shape in the course of a victorious workers upsurge in Western Europe giving rise to a genuine Soviet system, to a democratic regime of workers councils. Then the working class in the USSR and the people's democracies would no longer turn to the (misleading) formulas of the Eurocommunists, but to the example of self-managed socialism, the living negation of the bureaucratic regime and usurpation. Brezhnev knows very well that in face of this mortal danger the CPs remain a decisive element in damming up, controlling, and driving back the rise of the mass movement. They therefore remain, even the Eurocommunists, a factor preserving the status quo in Europe. Granted, history has already shown (in Germany, France, and Spain) that this is a shortsighted view. But the bureaucratic caste responds to its own immediate interests. Very often when the Kremlin speaks of the "risks courted by the détente" or of the "destabilization of the socialist community" it is actually referring to the specter of socialist revolution in Europe.
The Eurocommunists Seek Accommodation
An amiable solution is also in the interests of the apparatuses of the CPs of Western Europe. They also do not want a break. There is an inertia in the links forged with the USSR over decades. When he returned from Moscow Bufalini repeated once again: "None of us has forgotten what the Soviets have represented for the struggle against Nazi-fascism and for the development of socialism in the world after the war. Nevertheless, this attach ment is not in opposition to the Italian road to socialism." (Repubblica, July 5, 1977) But above all the bureaucracies of the CPs have to assert their own political identity at a time when their strategies of "historic compromise," "union of the French people," or "national reconciliation" make it difficult to trace out strategic differences with the Social Democracy. To the question, "Are there great differences between the PCE and the PSOE (the Social Democrats)?" Carrillo responded,
"There are many similar ities in the theses developed by the two parties." (Le Monde, June 28, 1977.) Nevertheless, on July 13 he told French television, "What I am concerned with is to give a theoretical basis to Eurocommunism, otherwise Eurocommunism and Social Democracy could be confused."
Avoiding confusion is fundamentally an electoral consideration and not a theoretical one. Without a simple and perceptible difference clear to broad masses of worker-voters just awakening to politics, the CP bureaucracies face the prospect of electoral defeats which would precisely undermine the essence of their present material base in bourgeois society. The reference to the USSR as a "socialist country" remains the cornerstone of the construction of this identity. Rinascità, the PCI weekly, has written: "To those who ask that the PCI denounce the nonsocialist character of the USSR and make political democracy the axis of a new international organization, we answer, once again, No. The basic problem remains the political one of the reality of the socialist countries in the world, of what they are and represent in the concrete equilibriums of the world these days." (July 1, 1977) And in his l'Unità editorial of July 10, Reichlin reiterated this position with embellished formulas in order to respond to Craxi, the secretary of the Socialist Party, who had enjoined him to go to the end and adopt the Social Democratic position that capitalism reigns in the USSR.
Nevertheless, the necessities of the present political period require of the Eurocommunist apparatuses more than this recognition of the USSR as a "socialist country" and "force for progress in the world." The poverty and ossification of the ideology diffused by the Soviet bureaucracy are such that this ideology is of no aid to them in elaborating a political justification for their strategy, especially in face of a rising mass movement and a real renaissance of Marxism in West Europe. Manuel Azcárate, a member of the Political Bureau of the PCE, has said: *The profound weakness of the socialist regimes and concretely of the Soviet regime ... is undoubtedly directly linked to the lack of existence in these countries of a real democratic political system. The regime in the East is based on authoritarianism, founded in face on an a-Marxist conception of metaphysical origin, which consists of believing that one can impose ideology through diktats." (Triunfo, reprinted in Politique-Hebdo, March 14, 1977.) Fraudulently calling upon Gramsci, the CP leaderships are attempting to coherently codify their reformist practice, which leads them not only to renounce any literary reference to the "dictatorship of the proletariat," but also to explicitly reject any even artificial reference to Leninism and specifically to Lenin's whole analysis of the bourgeois state. The PCI and the PCE have done this and the PCF is preparing to. Hence, paradox of history, those who have blithely manipulated "Leninism" to justify all their turns are now denouncing Lenin's taste for quotation as a symptom of social conservatism in their tutor. On returning from Moscow, Pajetta declared: "There is still (among the Soviets) a love of old definitions: of right, left, Trotskyist. Although the PCI is trying to reconsider the history of polemics, for some Soviet leaders everything remains unchanged. For them, for example, everything there is to say about Karl Kautsky was already said by Lenin in 1917: renegade." (Panorama, July 12, 1977.)
The Achilles' heel of this vast and open revision and of this attempt to "give a theoretical basis" to Eurocommunism remains how to integrate the analysis of the USSR into the framework of the system now under construction. Berlinguer, educated in the Philistine tradition of Togliatti, rapidly understood that Carrillo was opening a Pandora's box when he directly took to the field of analyzing the character of the USSR and not simply of criticizing "deformations," "errors," and "backwardness." But even with all his diplomatic talents, Berlinguer will have difficulty preventing the public debate from extending to this question.
But another complex diplomatic task awaits Berlinguer and his colleagues. They are conscious that the maintenance of the social status quo-along with their own survival (as shown by the example of Chile)-once they accede to government and face an active mass movement necessitates at least a certain "neutrality" on the part of the imperialist bourgeoisie. A vast economie blockade immediately after the formation of a "left government" would stimulate uncontrollable reactions among the toiling masses. That is the origin of the efforts deployed by the PCI toward the German and North European Social Democrats. Berlinguer has met with Brandt, Pajetta has seen Mitterand, Sergio Segre, the PCI's minister of foreign affairs, has visited Palme. Napolitan, another PCI leader, has discussed with representatives of the British Labour Party. In autumn Cerardo Chiaramonte is to tour the whole Scandinavian Social Democratic circuit (Norway, Denmark, Sweden). The PCF will not be left behind. One of the stakes of its quarrels with the SP is precisely the strengthening of its position in directly negotiating at Mitterand's side with the German and Scandinavian Social Democracy, and also, why not, with the American ambassador, whose address the PCF knows. The autonomy of the Eurocommunist CPs must also be measured by this yardstick.
For many years the European CPs have been built and developed on the basis of the contradictions of the capitalist system as well as the economic progress and growing strength of the USSR as a world power. Today the junction between the exacerbation of the contradictions of the capitalist system and the crisis of control of the Kremlin bureaucracy over Soviet society are fueling the present crisis of the monolithism of the Stalinist system. This can only lead to a crisis of the internal monolithism of each national CP. The second chapter of the history of Eurocommunism will open when that occurs.