(The following article is an editorial from the January issue of the magazine Quatrième Internationale, published in Paris. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
The international crisis of Stalinism includes a series of crises — of the bureaucratic Soviet leadership, of the leaderships of the other workers states, of the Communist parties, and of the relationships among the Communist parties. It is a chronic crisis that has afflicted all these elements throughout the last twenty years. The Communist party leaders, and especially the men in the Kremlin, have continually endeavored to find a remedy for this crisis but they have come up only with temporary palliatives whose application has often preluded a resurgence of the crisis on a broader and more spectacular scale. The situation is developing toward this once again.
At the time of the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, the Communist party of the Soviet Union for several weeks found itself isolated from almost all the other Communist parties. Even the French Communist party disavowed its action! The Kremlin then made numerous efforts to reestablish its relationships with the majority of the Communist parties. It succeeded at the cost of making various concessions— and notably abandoning the unanimity rule-in achieving an international conference of Communist parties which adopted a document passing over in silence both Czechoslovakia and the Sino-Soviet dispute, that is, the two principal questions troubling the official Communist movement. A few months later, the Kremlin granted other concessions so that a conference could open in Peking-as was desired by many Communist parties — with a view toward halting the dangerous deterioration in relations between the Soviet and Chinese states. These various concessions were supposed to sweeten the "normalization" measures in Czechoslovakia and get the Communist party leaderships to accept them.
But all the attempts by the men in the Kremlin to stabilize the situation in the "official" Communist movement at a certain level seem, once again, to have produced only unimpressive and short-lived results. The signs are increasing of a new ripening in the crisis of the Communist parties. This is especially true in Western Europe, but we must not overlook or underestimate what is occurring in other regions of the world. In Australia, the Communist party, which openly opposed Soviet policy at the Moscow Conference, is threatened with an imminent split. The Argentinian party lost its entire youth organization. In India there are now three Communist parties, one lined up with Moscow, another claiming to base itself on Mao's thought, and the Communist party (Marxist) half way in between. In Japan the Communist party majority is no longer pro-Peking and the groups which used to follow Moscow are now hostile to it. But the crisis of Stalinism seems likely to deepen most markedly in Europe. This is unquestionably bound up with the fact that after May 1968 in France, the workers movement on this continent emerged from a period of political stagnation that had lasted twenty years. It should be remembered also that this is where we find the oldest Communist parties, those that developed under the direct stimulus of the October revolution, and that they are part of a long-established workers movement rich in revolutionary traditions. Stalinism has deeply corroded these traditions but it has not destroyed them; they have reappeared in full vigor in the young generation, somewhat like those cases of babies born not with their parents' features but those of their more remote ancestors.
Let us give a brief résumé of the situation of the Communist parties in capitalist Europe. These parties can be divided roughly into three categories: those without a mass base; those forced underground, on which the impact of the crisis is difficult to estimate precisely; and those with a mass base.
In the first category, let us begin with the new legal German Communist party, the DKP [Deutsche Kommunistische Partei - German Communist party]. In a period that is witnessing a revival of class struggle in Germany for the first time since the fall of Nazism, when the youth
— university and high-school students and young workers — are setting an example of struggle and a real vanguard is taking form, the DKP received a ridiculously low vote in the legislative elections- about 0.6 percent. Although it is not threatened with repression, it cannot claim to have the least perspective. "The German working class will rise again, the German Communist party never," Trotsky wrote in the aftermath of Hitler's rise to power. Now, when the German workers are rising again, there is no future for Stalinism, whether it takes the name of the KPD |Kommunistische Partei
Deutschlands- Communist party of
Germany| or DKP.
Let us go on to the other small parties. In Denmark, the Communist party collapsed some years ago and there has been no revival; what remains of it is reduced to a moribund existence. In Great Britain, the recent congress of the CP disclosed profound divisions over both Czechoslovakia and the attitude to follow in the workers struggles. During the last miners strike, rank-and-file CP unionists were often in conflict with the national union leaders, who are also members of the Communist party. All of this foreshadows a worsening of the internal situation in this party, perhaps even a split. The developments in the Austrian Communist party have been widely reported, even in the bourgeois press.
The Central Committee is deeply split as a result of the expulsion of the philosopher Ernst Fischer, who denounced the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia as Panzerkommunismus (the Communism of tanks]. A split is within the realm of possibility here. In Switzerland, what passed for a Communist party, having no real strength except in French Switzerland, expelled a large part of its vital forces in that part of the country and is also having serious difficulties with its youth in Zurich and elsewhere. In Sweden, the division in the Communist party is expressed in the fact that its publications may follow either a pro-Kremlin line or an opposition line depending on who the editors are. The Dutch CP has slipped totally out of control of the Kremlin, whose numerically weak supporters cannot get organized.
The underground parties are essentially those in Greece, Spain, and Portugal. In the aftermath of the colonels' coup, there was a split in the leadership of the Greek CP (which had a mass base). The majority of the leaders who emigrated remained tied to Moscow, while most of those who stayed in the country, either underground or in prison, disavowed them. The Spanish CP is the largest of the groups operating underground in Spain, but it has not escaped the political and organizational dispersion which afflicts all these groups. Impressed by the May 1968 movement in France, the Carrillo leadership has endeavored to adjust its policy somewhat so as to gain a bridge to the youth. The Portuguese CP is in the course of breaking up.
Among the Communist parties with a mass base, the Finnish CP did not limit itself to advocating "advanced democracy" — it entered a bourgeois coalition government in May 1966 to achieve it. The Finnish CP has not advanced democracy; its policy in the government, including especially a "wage-ceiling policy," has split it from top to bottom. The contending factions publish journals which openly attack each other. Despite the efforts of the Soviets, whose desire to avoid such a spectacle is increased because Finland is on the doorstep of Leningrad-where March 9, 1970
what occurs in the neighboring country is followed closely — the split seems destined to be consummated in the relatively near future.
Let us turn to the big mass parties. The situation of the PCF [Parti Communiste Français - French Communist party] is highly complex. It is making gains on its right; for example, in the strata between the working class and certain categories of the new middle classes. These elements are coming to political life for the first time, or are abandoning the Social Democracy, which is in a very advanced stage of disintegration. This development is expressed most clearly in the progress of the Stalinist-inspired current in the Fédération de l'Education Nationale (National Educational Federation], which is threatening to overtake the reformist wing proper. But at the same time, and this could also be seen in this union organization, on its left flank the PCF is running up against the presence and activity of vanguard organizations and it is losing forces to them. At a recent Central Committee meeting, the member of the Political Bureau who reported on the youth question noted at the same time a radicalization of young people and a failure by the party and its youth organizations to recruit them. In appearance, the PCF remains the Communist party most resistant to internal divisions. But it is no secret to anyone that divisions are rife at the top level, not over the party's basic policy (peaceful coexistence, advanced democracy, etc.) but over the means of overcoming the centrifugal forces that are tearing at the party. The leadership seems united in its determination to oust Garaudy - who is in disagreement with the conference of Communist parties and a good many other things he defended for long years-from its ranks and perhaps even from the party. But the battle continues to rage in and around the Political Bureau over choosing a successor to Waldeck Rochet, who is gravely ill. This struggle is being waged between Marchais, whose get-tough line is patterned on that of the Soviet leadership, and others such as Leroy who think that a more flexible attitude would get better results.
For a long time, the Italian Communist party has been a kind of model for many dissident Communists. It was able to keep its distance from Moscow. It dared to take up questions which were taboo for other parties. It permitted a certain degree of internal discussion. The way it conducted itself after settling accounts with the Ingrao tendency showed that it still had a great deal in common with the other bureaucratic leaderships. The international conference in Moscow indicated that the Italian CP could assume a degree of independence from the Kremlin so long as it did not go so far as to break with it. The increasingly tense political and social situation in Italy led to the revival of divergent currents in the Communist party. This time, the matter was not allowed to slide, at least as far as the editors of the magazine Manifesto were concerned. In fact, several currents exist in the Central Committee of this party. Although the Manifesto tendency received the most publicity in the bourgeois press, it is by no means the only such grouping nor perhaps the most dangerous for the central core of the leadership.
It is absolutely clear that this acceleration in the crisis of the European Communist parties has been provoked by the contradiction between the crisis of capitalist society and the radicalization of the masses on one side, and the policy of the traditional leaderships on the other.* As long as the political situation was stagnant, the reformist character of the policy of the Communist parties did not cause any serious strains in these parties. Only highly conscious and politically alert militants could concern themselves with the consequences of a growing "social democratization" of these parties. But it is quite a different matter when the masses are radicalizing. Even recruiting members coming from traditional reformism or without previous political experience is not entirely safe.
There is a growing contradiction now between the rightwing policy which the leaderships want to pursue and the movement of the masses toward the left. And this essential objective factor is being compounded everywhere by the fact that for the first time since the Stalinization of the Communist parties they are no longer being prodded on their left only by very small formations restricted to propagandistic activity. Now they are being harried by organizations which, while still weak, already have a certain capacity for independent action in some areas and which can thus serve as an example for much broader masses.
We will not review the conditions here that make for this mass radicalization having a rather long duration, for the crises to spread from one country to another, and for them to interact. But from this development, it follows inevitably that the crisis of the Communist parties can only widen.
First of all, the progress of this crisis is going hand in hand with the development of an extreme political confusion, and sometimes surprising occurrences. Thus, in the Italian CP, alongside those elements which proclaim their pro-Moscow sentiments out of an old loyalty, or in some cases out of certain immediate material interests, we see that the most right-wing tendency, that of Amendola, has also been manifesting pro-Moscow inclinations for some time in opposition to the central core of the leadership. A current like that around Manifesto handled political questions in terms that were to the left of the party's official policy. In some cases, opposition to the opportunism of the Communist party tops has profited... the Soviet leadership. For example, some party members associated their leaders' attitude toward May 1968 with the one they took on Czechoslovakia. Both, to be sure, were dictated by the search for bourgeois allies and not by considerations of principle. Thus, the groups outside the Communist parties condemned both the attitude of these parties toward May 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia; but left currents inside the Communist parties that condemned their leaderships' equivocation about the mass movement, on the other hand approved the Kremlin's action in Czechoslovakia.
This confusion has been blocking the development of the crisis. And, for the time being, those leaders taking the toughest line organizationally, regardless of their precise political positions, are gaining the most from it.
We will examine further on another essential element in the international crisis of Stalinism — the perspectives for the Soviet Union.
In a word, at all levels and in every area - among the translations of these editorials, see Intercontinental Press,
October 6, 1969,
"The Turn in the Economic Situation"; and Decempage 877, ber 15, 1969, page 1120, "The Strike Wave in Europe." 214
masses, in the apparatuses and leaderships, and outside the Communist parties - everything occurring points to new eruptions in the crisis of these formations.
It is not yet possible to discern the forms which the next phase of the acute crisis of the Communist parties will take. However, certain aspects emerge when you analyze the brief panorama that we have given above.
Previously the crisis of Stalinism had resulted in a break in the monolith erected in Stalin's time. But this had to be qualified. Broadly speaking, this break was among national Communist parties as a consequence especially of the Sino-Soviet dispute. We have often noted in the past the independent attitude assumed by a growing number of Communist parties. Of course there were dissidents in a number of Communist parties, sometimes even oppositions, but they were either expelled or reabsorbed without too serious difficulties. The tendency which is developing now is toward a breakup of monolithism within each party. In connection with this development, for example, we are seeing oppositionists (like Garaudy and the editors of Manifesto) challenge a "discipline" which they declare is based on a centralism that has nothing democratic about it. An interesting consequence of the progress of this tendency is the fact that because the Soviet leaders see the limits today of their intervention at the top, they have not hesitated in several cases to support-that is, to subsidize — minority factions (Sweden, Italy ...).
The breakup of monolithism on the international scale was in a way a backlash of "socialism in one country" against the bureaucracy which had elevated this "theory" to the heights. The breakup of monolithism nationally is the logical consequence of this breakup internationally. Why should a Communist in a country like France or Italy be a Frenchman or Italian first and a Communist afterwards? Why should he line up with Waldeck Rochet or Longo, who more or less follow Brezhnev, and not Mao Tsetung or Tito, to say nothing of heretics like Che or Trotsky? When the conflict occurred between Tito and Stalin, the Soviet leadership's authority was at its zenith. Only a year later, the triumph of the Chinese revolution was to occur, which bore within it the seed of the entire crisis which, twenty years later, has totally ruined the gigantic Stalinist edifice.
But at the same time as this deterioration of Stalinist monolithism is spreading to every national party, another phenomenon is appearing. The Communist parties have incomparably greater difficulties than the Social Democratic parties in maintaining their unity through a free play of tendencies-even when these tendencies, as has most frequently been the case so far, do not explicitly challenge the reformist policy of the Communist parties and focus their criticism rather on the forms of this policy, rigidity in thought, the procedures of the leaderships, and so forth. Should this phenomenon be attributed to the inexperience of the bureaucratic leaderships in this area, their long habit of monolithism, and their inability to find new organizational forms quickly? Such causes could play only a very limited role. The example of the Italian Communist party leadership, whose flexibility is proverbial, shows that other causes are involved. In fact, we come back here to a question that we have mentioned on several occasions in recent years. The reformism of the Communist parties cannot be equated with that of the Social Democratic parties. It is hard to find any essential theoretical divergences between the CPs and the Social Democratic parties in certain underlying assumptions of their policy (transition to socialism through a gradual expansion of bourgeois democracy, peaceful and parliamentary roads, etc.), and their day-to-day political practice is extremely similar. But these two reformisms differ and clash because their social origins are different. The reformism of the Socialist parties is tied up with the parliamentary democracy in the capitalist states; the reformism of the Communist parties is linked to the Kremlin's poliey of "peaceful coexistence" with the capitalist world. History has shown that in the economically developed capitalist states parliamentary democracy has a relatively large measure of flexibility, though not unlimited of course. "Peaceful coexistence" is another matter. It has been a constant in Kremlin policy since Stalin. However, on the part of a regime where changes of line and personnel have traditionally been carried out in a brutal manner, the pursuit of this orientation has always involved many abrupt about-faces and sharp turns. The Communist parties' ties a source of internal strength with Moscow long constituted for these parties. As Moscow's authority and prestige as an international center have declined, these ties have engendered a growing weakness of the Communist parties. Nonetheless, the CPs cannot definitively cut these ties without incurring greater risks and dangers. They prospered as a result of the capitalist contradictions and the advances of Soviet society; now they are suffering from contradictions resulting from the mass radicalization in the capitalist countries and the contradictions of the bureaucratic regime in the Soviet Union and in the other workers states.
One of the essential elements in the crisis of Stalinism, as we mentioned above, is in the perspectives for the Soviet Union. We have no intention of engaging in vain speculations, above all in predicting rates of development and dates. What we want to stress is that many indicators point in the direction of a mounting crisis in the Soviet Union. "De-Stalinization," the policy of reforms from the top, produced all that it could more than ten years ago. The "reformist" hopes which existed for a whole period in the USSR are dissipating. And the Kremlin leadership is proving itself incapable of responding to the forces that are producing an underlying unrest in the country except by blind brutal repression. However, this repression lacks the vigor of the one carried out by Stalin. The reason is that the times have changed drastically. The repression continues to deal hard blows but it does not intimidate the opposition, which is increasingly organized. It would be, we repeat, pointless to make predictions about the time periods involved. But one thing is certain. The concept that there is no solution for this situation except through an antibureaucratic political revolution, which was developed a long time ago solely by the Trotskyists, and which the Chinese have recently picked up after their own fashion, is, in more or less clearly defined forms, beginning to win ground in widening circles. It is symptomatic that this idea has been expressed, for example, by a Garaudy while still a member of the Political Bureau. But the thought he expressed openly is also shared deep down by others, including high Communist leaders, col leagues of Garaudy who continue to advocate defense of the Soviet regime. The old bureaucratic "loyalty" has disappeared and all kinds of ideas are being circulated in March 9, 1970
the corridors by these men, expressing their fear of the impasse into which the Soviet rulers are leading the world they control. The shaking of confidence, even the disappearance of confidence in what for so long was the "holy of holies" can, at a given moment, become the decisive factor in the international crisis of Stalinism.
The bureaucratic edifice is rotted both at its extremities and at its heart. Of course confusion is still the dominant note at the present stage of the crisis and it is probable that it will continue to be so for a time. But this will only be a short stage if the revolutionary Marxist forces, the organizations of the Fourth International, grasp the enormous possibilities in the international crisis of Stalinism and intervene vigorously with their program and in action. Since May 1968 Trotskyism has made considerable advances in a great number of countries. It has won young forces. It has attracted the most clear-sighted elements who want to combine revolutionary activity with the theory and program which embody the lessons of the victories and defeats of the workers movement and of the broad oppressed masses. These advances themselves also testify to the considerable potential of the present situation which is revolutionary in the broadest sense of the term. Increasingly firm intervention will help to dissipate the confusion and win the revolutionary Marxist vanguard the following it needs to assure the victorious advance of the socialist revolution.
Notes
* See the editorials in the September and November 1969 issues of Quatrieme Internationale. For English