USSR / COMMUNIST PARTIES
THE conservative putsch in
European the Soviet Union and Its political consequences are
Communist an unprecedented trauma for all the Communist
Parties. However, the parties
August Days in Moscow were not a stroke of lightning in a clear sky for implode these parties. The events in
Eastern Europe over recent years have already compelled these parties to make significant revisions. This process needs to be looked at as a whole and the recent events seen as a culminating step in the disintegration of this political current.
CLAUDE GABRIEL
T HE decision of many of them a long time ago to present themselves as seeking a "national" road to socialism represented a first attempt to distance themselves from the Soviet model and permit the widest possible range of political alliances. The Eurocommunism of the 1970s was an important step in this evolution in relation to the increasing involvement of some European CPs in the institutions of their countries.
The social interests of a part of their bureaucracy ceased to be dependent on the "socialist camp", becoming increasingly tied to the emoluments of their own state. Almost everything could be found in the market of European CPs. The differences between, for example, the Italian Communist Party and the Portuguese or Greek CPs were great. Thus, when the era of perestroika arrived, the "socialist camp" was already far from monolithic.
The Gorbachev era, however, speeded up the crisis, the realignments and internal debates. And this has proved true whatever the previous positions of the CP in question.
### Re-appraisal of history
Several factors work together here. In the first place, Gorbachevism provoked a reappraisal of history. Most of the leaderships found themselves compelled to change their balance-sheet of Stalinism and its consequences for the history of their own party several times. Each time, the changes took place under the pressure of the changes in the Soviet Union and the CPSU, which obliged them to go further in their self-critical reappraisal.
The mass mobilizations in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Stalinist regimes smashed the last remaining illusions among the rank-and-file of the CPs about the joys of living in a "socialist"
state. The leaders thus had to come up with a further round of explanations on the "distortions" of really existing socialism".
Finally, and notably for the CPs pursuing a line of reformist adaptation to their own state, the crisis in the USSR and the Kremlin's new international policy removed all hope of a convergence with Moscow around the big ideological and practical issues.
The last demonstration of this was during the Gulf war, when some of the CPs wanted to denounce the imperialist policy at the very moment when the Soviet leadership was voting in support of that policy at the United Nations. There was nothing left of the "international context" which had hitherto permitted them to justify their Muscovite connections on the basis of the fluctuations of peaceful coexistence and references to the existence of a "progressive camp"
Shattering identity crisis
In these stormy years, each CP has tried to survive this shattering identity crisis. Each one has adopted a tone dictated as much by national political factors as internal bureaucratic reasons. Numerous splits have taken place. Many parties have changed their name, some twice, such as the Swedish CP which became the Left Communist Party before turning into the Left Party, or the Dutch CP which is melting into the Green Left.
The conservative coup in the USSR has accelerated this upheaval. All those who had tried to stick the pieces back together again by promoting the image of Gorbachev as a "Communist reformer" have once again found themselves arriving too late. The father of perestroika no longer appears as the master of the situation and the media has had consumining ol images of the "end of communism"
COMMUNIST PARTIES
No party has escaped. On August 19, the political commission of the Portuguese party explained that the state of emergency "arose as an attempt to contain the process of a developing counterrevolution"; two days later they explained that they had "clearly defended the rapid return of the Soviet Union to institutional normality."
The Greek CP, meanwhile, started off denouncing "the opinion of the imperialist forces, the local conservative political forces and all those who are opposed to socialism."
The Spanish Communist Party condemned the Moscow putschists. However, this did not prevent them from experiencing an important internal debate. A minority, led by longstanding leader, Nicolas Sartorius, have relaunched their campaign for the dissolution of the PCE into the United Left (an amorphous coalition under PCE leadership and for the PCE to abandon any reference to a change in the system. Sartorius has the support of Antonio Gutierrez, the current general secretary of current general secretary or the Workers' Commissions, and the leadership of the United Socialist Party of Catalonia.
The crisis in the German PDS is getting deeper. The party presidium's first thoughts on the coup were ambiguous to say the least - ambiguous to say the least -they expressed the hope that it could "prevent the break-up of the Soviet Union" and called on the new leaders to "use the power of the state on a legal basis". On August 25, the PDS condemned the coup, but the Communist
Platform, which presents itself as a Marxist leftwing of the party, had previously justified the coup, since it "opened the road for the renewal of socialism". • Not even the Italian PDS, and all the more the
Movement for Communist Refoundation can escape the great political debate.
The effect of these events on the leaderships is not mainly a matter of independent political choices or "opinions". The apparatuses, where they have not already split as in Britain, Italy and Greece, are dividing once more along lines determined by political and material interests.
Union bureaucracies, local councillors, the internal party apparatuses all split up and redistribute themselves around one basic question: how to survive?
The evident fence sitting or even support (in various shades and degrees) for the coup seen in some quarters were not due simply to thoughtlessness or stupidity. It is true that such positions have resulted in political disaster for those who took them - the leadership of the French
CP being a case in point. But this is the logical choice for some sections of the apparatus and existing majorities on party leaderships. The events in the Soviet Union are pushing ahead to an increasingly thorough balance sheet of the entire history of Stalinism, and thus of the "international communist movement".
These leaderships can either make further compromises with capitalism and social democracy or hold to the idea of the imperialist, anti-communist plot as the main explanation of the new situation in the Soviet Union.
Those favouring the former option want to disembarrass themselves of the weight of the past and wipe clean the Partei ill sich ostanflösen.. Die Partei
That immer 13) slate of their own history. They are on their way to social democracy, just as their counterparts in the Soviet Union have found their way to the market economy. The latter are concerned above all to preserve an "identity" which is in fact nothing other than the preservation of an apparatus.
Avoiding the real debates
The common feature of these two responses is a determination to avoid any serious debate on the history of Stalinism, on bureaucracy and on the thousand and one crimes of the Stalinist international. Amnesia afflicts both the neo-
Stalinists and the neo-Social Democrats.
For the "Soviet shock" immediately raises the debate on socialism, the workers' movement, democracy and the search for new ideals and long-term goals. All these questions touch not only the former Stalinists but the whole of the workers' movement.
If the Stalinist Communist Parties were not democratic, can it be said that the social democratic parties are? If the CPs were at the beck and call of Moscow, the social democrats are totally under the thumb of imperialism!
At a moment when Swedish social
International Viewpoint #213 • September 30, 1991 democracy has just suffered a crushing defeat as a result of its assumption of responsibility for "restructuring" the "Swedish model", where the Dutch SP is not far from suffering the same fate, and where the French Socialist Party can no longer hide the smell of its putrefaction after nine years in power, the collapse of Soviet Stalinism is also going to upset the plans of those who have tried to use the word "socialism" to cover up their social consensus policies.
What will become of the CP militants? Is there a possibility that left currents will emerge capable of really confronting the Stalinist past? It has to be said that after several years of crisis and disintegration of many of the European CPs, this is not the direction in which things have gone. Certainly there have gone. Certainly there will be individuals and groups of tens or hundreds in each country who will not be ready to abandon their commitment to militant activity. The revolutionary left will come across these orphans come across these orphans everywhere. But the currents that have formed and will form themselves feel the pressure of the main tendencies at work in the international political situation; this has already led many to choose the road of Dicke realism at the side of the social democrats or the Green parties. The French Communist Party, for example, has already experi enced three waves of internal challenge, splitting the apparatus from top to bottom. However, none of them have tended to move to the left. In Italy the crisis has given rise to the MRC (see /V 209) and in
Greece it has produced a movement a part of which has attempted a left critique of
Stalinism. In Portugal, the internal opposition has resumed the offensive, and so on.
But the political direction of these currents is essentially determined by the level of activity of the social movements, by their victories and defeats. It is thus the relation of class forces that determines the realignment of those fractions of the old apparatuses seeking a future and above all of the rank-and-file militants who await the possibility of refinding the hope of socialism.
The recent events in the Soviet Union do not only involve Stalinism; they affect the entire epoch in the workers' movement opened by the October revolution.
This means a startling break in people's political understanding.
Only big social and political tests, of a breadth equal to the events taking place, can give back mass credibility to a socialist project. This is the challenge that now confronts the revolutionary left. *
"The party wants to dissolve itsolf." "The party is always right."
Die sel' recht.
"The party wants to dissolve itsolf." "The party is always right."
EUROPE