Eurocommunism in crisis

Eurocommunism in ruins Kirsten Cale and Mike Freeman 'A hundred and twenty five years after Lasalle, and a hundred years after the founding of the Second International, the socialist and labour parties are at a loss as to where they are going...

Our movements, the classic socialist or communist labour parties.

were born in a specific coch which has now passed."

(Eric Hobsbawm, speech at the centenary of the German Social Democratic Party, Bonn, August 1988)?

The presence of Eric Hobsbawm, distinguished labour historian and leading theoretician of the British Communist Party, at the SPD's centenary celebrations was guaranteed to turn the proceedings into a wake. Hobsbawm has been a longstanding advocate of the doctrines of Eurocommunism, and a particular devotee of the scrupulously moderate policies of the Italian Communist Party? In recent years, however, he has become increasingly despairing of any future for the parties of the traditional labour movement, unless they abandon their distinctive class character and dissolve themselves into alliances with centre parties." The gloomy prognoses of this guru of the international communist movement reflect the apparently terminal crisis of Stalinism and traditional social democracy in Europe in the late 1980s.

Throughout Europe parties which call themselves socialist and communist have moved along two broadly distinct courses over the past decade. Some, notably the Socialist parties in France (PS), Spain (PSOE) and Greece (PASOK), have become mainstream parties of government, pursuing policies of strict capitalist orthodoxy. They have secured substantial middle class support while loosening their ties to the organised working class.

Others, most notably the French Communist Party (PCF) and smaller Communist parties everywhere, have experienced a rapid decline in electoral support, membership and influence in 61

the trade unions. These parties have become increasingly marginalised rumps reliant upon declining sections of the traditional working class, often in crumbling regional power bases. The British Labour Party and the Italian Communist Party (PCI) cling desperately to their aspirations to remain in the former camp, while the logic of their own strategies pushes them towards the latter. An atmosphere of paralysis and decay surrounds the European Communist parties today. Few would dispute the judgement of one academic observer that communism in Western Europe has entered a phase of irreversible historic decline and is doomed to disappear'+ The once confident leaders of mighty parties now speak in cautious and defensive tones. This is how Italian Communist Party leader Achille Occhetto attempted to rally the faithful at last year's Festa dell'Unita in Florence: •Well, then, here is the party people claim is uncertain, lost and closed in the past... 'So, here we are as people who begin to say: the PCI was some use after all, it's not scrap iron. it's of some use to Italy and democracy."

Not surprisingly, Occhetto's feeble rhetoric has failed to arrest the haemorrhage of support from the PCI, or to halt the parallel rise of Bettino Craxi's Socialist Party (PSI). Meanwhile in France, the PCF's residual base of support in the municipalities crumbled further in the March elections.* The Spanish Communist Party (PCE) has fragmented into several bitterly squabbling groups as its electoral support has slipped below the five per cent required to qualify for public subsidy and its power in the unions has fallen drastically.

The pervasive pessimism of the European Communist parties in the late eighties stands in stark contrast to the confidence of these parties only a decade ago. In the mid-seventies the tide of Eurocommunism was in full flood and it seemed to many that the Communist parties had finally succeeded in casting off the legacy of Stalinism.? In southern Europe, in particular, the Communist parties appeared to have broken out of the electoral and social ghetto which they had occupied since the Cold War period of the late forties and early fifties. After looking briefly at the rise and fall of Eurocommunism, well concentrate on the responses of the Communist parties, particularly in France and Italy, to the failures of the Eurocommunist strategy and then assess the prospects of the Communist parties as they look 62 towards the nineties.

The rise and fall Two factors were crucial in the emergence of Eurocommunism.

The first was the recession which struck the Western world in the of early seventies. The capitalist drive to restore profitability Eurocommunism demanded raising unemployment, holding down wages, cutting welfare spending and restricting trade union militancy. These measures had to be imposed on working class movements that had built up strong and stable organisations over two decades of post-war expansion. While workers turned to their traditional political organisations to defend jobs and living standards, governments looked to the same labour movement parties to persuade the working class to make the sacrifices required to maintain national capitalist interests. Where social democracy was traditionally weak —in southern Europe-the Communist parties were called upon to mediate the growing conflict between capital and labour. In the same period, the relaxation of East-West tensions allowed the Communist parties to overcome, to a degree, the anti-Soviet prejudice that had long provided the right with its central propaganda weapon against the left. The era of détente from the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to the occupation of Afghanistan in 1979 was the second factor in the rise of Eurocommunism. The collapse of military dictatorships in Spain, Portugal and Grecce in the mid-seventies was an additional element which added momentum to the Eurocommunist project. In the carly seventies all the Western Communist parties, Lo a greater or lesser extent and with more or less enthusiasm, embraced the doctrines of Eurocommunism. In fact there was little new in the theory of state monopoly capitalism and the strategy of advancing towards socialism through alliances with other class forces within the framework of bourgeois democracy.

These notions had deep roots in Stalinist adaptations to social democracy from the twenties onwards." The only novel feature of the seventies was the extent to which the Communist parties went in explicitly repudiating fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism (the dictatorship of the proletariat", democratic centralism") and in criticising the policies of the Soviet state (its repressive treatment of dissidents and the Eastern bloc). These measures were deemed necessary to win legitimacy and popular support in Western democracies and appeared to be vindicated by the successes of the Communist parties in the mid-seventies.

The Spanish Communist Party, under the leadership of Santiago Carrillo. a pioneering force in the Eurocommunist movement, emerged from exile and clandestinity as the central 63

focus of opposition to the caretaker regime installed upon the death of General Franco in November 1975. In France, the Common Programme agreed by the Socialist Party and the Communist Party in 1972 appeared little different from the PCFs own programme, and the Union of the Left made dramatic advances in the 1974 presidential elections. The party's twenty-second congress in 1976 was hailed as the triumph of Eurocommunism and it was widely expected that the PCF would coast to power in alliance with the PS in the elections due in 1978. In Italy, the PCI pursued the strategy of seeking an "historic compromise' with the conservative Christian Democracy (DC) to save the nation from economic and social collapse.

Between 1972 and 1976 it advanced from 27 to 34 per cent of the popular vote and the attempts of the corrupt ruling regime to exclude the PCI from a share of government power appeared increasingly forlorn. Yet the promise of Eurocommunism was not to be fulfilled. At critical moments in 1977 and 1978 Eurocommunism experienced setbacks which presaged its demise. In June 1977, in the first free elections held in Spain since the Civil War, the PCE won less than 10 per cent of the vote. Felipe González' PSOE, a party that had scarcely existed three years earlier, won 29 per cent. Carrillo's recognition of the monarchy, his adoption of the monarchist flag in place of the republican tricolour, his outspoken criticisms of the Soviet Union, his cringing moderation in all matters all these concessions had failed to convince the middle classes that the PCE could be trusted to modernise Spanish capitalism. In September 1977 the PCF broke off talks with the PS over updating the Common Programme for the 1978 elections. Communist Party leader Georges Marchais was concerned that unless the PCF took a more independent line François Mitterrand's PS would extend its already significant gains among PCF supporters. In the event the PCF suffered heavy losses and social democracy overtook Stalinism at the polls for the first time in the post-war period.

In Italy, the critical setback came in March 1978 when, after months of negotiations and PCI concessions, the Christian Democratic leadership pushed the PCI into endorsing what amounted to a reshuffled DC-dominated coalition with unreconstructed DC policies. Though the subsequent ultra-left kidnap and assassination of DC chief Aldo Moro plunged Italy into a prolonged national crisis which distracted attention from the humiliation of the PCI, this moment marked the effective 64 end of the strategy of the historic compromise. Over the next

two years the PCI experienced its first serious electoral reverses since the fifties. By the early eighties the crisis of Eurocommunism was the subject of general debate?

There were two aspects of the crisis of Eurocommunism. The first was that, from the point of view of the capitalist classes in southern Europe, by the late seventies the Communist parties had largely served their purpose in containing working class resistance during the first phase of the recession. Despite its electoral setback in June, in September 1977 the PCE was the key signatory to the Moncloa pact, through which the labour movement acquiesced to rising unemployment and falling wages in the national interest. In January 1977, Enrico Berlinguer launched an appeal to Italian workers to accept a similar austerity programme which was publicly endorsed by the communist trade union leader Luciano Lama. Twelve months later, in an agreement signed at the EUR conference centre outside Rome while Berlinguer's negotiations over the historic compromise continued, Italian unions agreed to continuing austerity in return for measures to tackle unemployment and poverty in the south of the country.

In France, the full impact of the recession came slightly later and the capitalist class placed less reliance on the mediating role of the official labour movement. However, the imposition of the 1976 Barre plan, which promoted a shake-out of traditional industries as well as broader austerity policies, benefited from the French Communist Party's influence in the main union federation, the CGT. Preoccupied with the Union of the Left strategy, the PCF discouraged localised rank and file resistance in favour of national days of action" It emphasised that the election of a radical coalition government was the only real solution to the economic difficulties facing the working class. (It was not until after 1981, when four members of an electorally humbled PCF accepted junior ministerial posts in Mitterrand's Socialist government, that the PCF was seriously compromised with its supporters as a result of its support for a brutally anti-working class counter-crisis programme.)

In their determination to win legitimacy at a time of national crisis, Eurocommunist leaders preached restraint and discouraged militancy. By the late seventies the result was rapidly rising unempleyment, stagnating living standards and growing working class demoralisation. If the capitalists could achieve all this without bringing Communist parties into government or even introducing major reforms, then why bother? Sidney Tarrow sums up the role of the Italian Communist Party in the 65

period when it was closest to government office: The party remained tangential to the cabinet; it was exploited for its usefulness in reining in organised labour and for spreading among its supporters a moral revulsion against terrorism that helped the government to adopt more serious police measures; but it was largely ignored when it made even modest reform proposals." By the end of the decade the Communist parties in Spain, Italy and France had served their purpose, the pressure was off and the capitalist classes had little need to grant further concessions, let alone bring communists into coalition governments. The second aspect of the crisis of Eurocommunism was that the Communist parties' pursuit of the policies of class collaboration not only failed to consolidate middle class support, but began to alienate traditional working class voters, supporters in the unions and even party members. The origin of today's problems of electoral and organisational decline can be traced to the heyday of Eurocommunism. In France and Italy a clear pattern is discernible in the electoral sphere, In the early days of Eurocommunism, the Communist parties new approach enabled them to reach beyond their traditional proletarian heartlands, to win support from wider layers in the cities, from voters in rural and provincial regions where communist support was historically weak, and from women and young voters. However, the parties" support for capitalist austerity policies and their apparent willingness to make any concession to win the approval of middle class public opinion led to growing alienation among working class supporters from the late seventies onwards. By the early eighties, disillusionment with communist policies at national and local level meant that the parties could neither hold on to their new voters nor guarantee the loyalty of traditional supporters. Martin Schain's study of the French Communist Party in local government reveals the shifts in the party's support.!2 While the PCFs share of the vote in national elections remained fairly steady at around 20 per cent throughout the seventies, local pacts with the PS enabled the PCF to extend its municipal power considerably after 1972, at the expense of the centre right.

The PCF reached out from its traditional base in the solidly working class Paris suburbs to many provincial towns with a more socially diverse population. By 1981, 42 per cent of the larger towns with PCF mayors were in the provinces, and only 14 per cent had a majority working class population.'? Yet when the PCF began to sustain its heaviest electoral losses in 1983, it 66

was hit hardest where it had been in power longest —in the Paris "red belt'-where working class disillusionment, reflected in abstentions and votes for other parties, was greatest.l4 The breakdown in cooperation with the PS also led to defeats in less secure towns and by the mid-eighties the PCF was driven back to an even weaker position than it had been in before its Eurocommunist phase began more than a decade earlier. In 1986 the PS won more votes in the Paris red belt than the

PCF. 15

Surveys of the pattern of voting for the Italian Communist Party in the seventies reveal a similar trend. The PCI's breakthrough in 1976 was achieved through broadening the party's support from the 'red triangle' of Tuscany, Umbria and Emilia-Romagna to include areas of the south and northern cities in which the party had long been weak. When the PCI's fortunes changed in the late seventies, its heaviest losses were often in its working class heartlands.!

Stephen Hellman's detailed study of the results of the 1978 referenda on the public financing of political parties and on repressive anti-terrorist legislation in the northern city of Turin provide local confirmation of the general trend.!? In its desperate bid to prove its respectability, the PCI took what was widely regarded —even by loyal party supporters—as a reactionary line on both issues. The results showed that the lowest turn-outs and the highest proportion of spoiled votes were recorded in areas where the PCI was formerly strongest. It only succeeded in winning majority support for its line in its most loyal areas. The highest votes against the PCI line were recorded in the volatile council housing estates occupied by the poorest workers, where the party had only begun to win majority support in the early seventies. Hellman's conclusion was prescient: *Most alarming of all, the areas of the greatest triumphs of the mid-1970s, the large urban centres, had produced results that were embarrassing in the immediate sense and potentially disastrous in the longer run."* The Italian Communist Party has been realising this potential ever since. One study of the 1979 elections, in which the PCI lost 1.5m votes nationally, observed that in the industrial cities of Bologna, Genoa and Verona: "The PCI not only lost working class votes, but it practically lost only working class votes. "9 67 Wider surveys confirmed that it also lost votes in the south

and among the young. Again Hellman accurately sums up the trends: *The PCI's policy choices demobilised the working class and underclass, alienated young people, and discouraged the opinion voters of the more educated middle strata. "20 Hellman's latter point reveals another defect of the Eurocommunist strategy. In their quest for legitimacy in societies strongly influenced by anti-communist and reactionary Catholic prejudices, the Communist parties went to great lengths to propitiate the establishment and the hierarchy and to display their own commitment to democratic principles and their respect for traditional moral values. As a result they often found themselves, on issues of civil liberties and matters such as divorce and abortion, well to the right of an increasingly radical and secular public opinion. This was particularly striking in Italy where the PCI was nearly as shocked as the Vatican to discover in 1974 that 60 per cent of the population favoured divorce and in 1981 that 68 per cent supported a liberalisation of the abortion law? Eurocommunism's determination to appear respectable meant that the Communist parties were slow to respond to trends such as feminism and to the hostility of many young people towards the repressive state measures introduced in the guise of 'anti-terrorist legislation.

Just as Labour's social contract with the unions in Britain in 1974 led to the 'winter of discontent' in 1978-79, the austerity programmes of Eurocommunism provoked damaging conflict both within the unions and between the unions and the Communist parties. In a period of rising unemployment and intensifying management attacks, the influence of Eurocommunist moderation on the union leaderships provoked growing rank and file disillusionment. Union membership, particularly in traditional manufacturing where communist organisation was strongest, slumped. The defeat of the left in the 1978 elections in France led to a more aggressive government attack on the unions, at a time when the breakdown in the Union of the Left deepened divisions between the PCF-linked CGT and the PS-inclined CFDT. Both parties' attempts to use the unions to bolster their political strategies only exacerbated tensions: the formal cooperation between the major union federations that had prevailed through the seventies broke down in autumn 1980.

One survey summed up the outcome of the decade of 68 Eurocommunism:

*From a position of growing strength and effectiveness in 1970, French unions had, by 1980 moved precipitously towards renewed weakness and divisive pluralism. 22 A similar trend was evident in Italy. When the PCI was on the verge of coalition power between 1976 and 1978, the CGIL.

preached restraint and austerity. One result was the riot that crupted when CGIL chief Lama, the leading advocate of austerity, came to address students at Rome university in March 1977, sparking off a wave of riots around the country. Another result was the massive metalworkers' demonstration against the government and the PCI in Rome in December 1977. Mounting trade union unrest greatly reduced Berlinguer's room for manoeuvre in his historic compromise negotiations with the Christian Democratic leaders. When Italian Socialist Party leader Craxi subsequently became the key power-broker, the CISL took the lead in calling for tighter official curbs on wage rises through the wage-indexation system.

Though the PCI opposed PSI austerity measures, it maintained its moderate approach on wider trade union matters. The PCI'S endorsement of the victimisation of 60 militants at the Fiat plant in Turin in 1979, which led directly to the major defeat for the unions at the plant in 1980, was a decisive setback for the party's prestige in the organised working class.23 The 'march of the 40 000'-foremen, supervisors, technicians and white-collar workers-organised in autonomous unions outside the traditional federations and protesting against the strike against job cuts by the bulk of the Fiat workforce was an ominous sign of a trend that has become increasingly familiar in Western Europe in the eighties. The growth of autonomous union organisation, particularly in the public sector, in some circumstances very militant, in others playing the role of scab unions, has contributed to the fragmentation of the unions. By 1984 the long strained cooperation among the big three union federations in Italy was finally abandoned in a further round of conflict over the wageindexation system. By the turn of the decade it was evident that the parties that had embraced Eurocommunism needed to reorient their strategy to avoid disaster. One result of the defeats of the late seventies was the eruption of internal debate on an unprecedented scale inside the Communist parties. Let's turn to look at how the major Eurocommunist parties responded to their loss of momentum and morale. 69

Survival The Communist parties undoubtedly experienced a more diffistrategies cult political climate in the eighties. The capitalist classes in Western Europe entered the second phase of the recession with the balance of class forces tilted much more in their favour than it had been a decade earlier. Employers and governments now embarked on a more confrontational approach in their dealings with organised labour. Throughout western Europe the working class was weakened by mass unemployment and increasingly disillusioned with its traditional organisations: union militancy and support for radical political change showed a general decline. While far-left groups dwindled to insignificance and Communist parties continued to decay, social democratic parties in southern Europe made headway by shifting to take advantage of the disarray of the right and occupying the centre The revival of Cold War tensions after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Ronald Reagan's election victory in 1980 and the Polish crisis in 1981 once again put the Communist parties on the defensive over their historic allegiance to Moscow A general shift of intellectual and middle class opinion to the right, most notably in France, renewed the isolation of the communist movement from the mainstream consensus. 24 Three options have been widely canvassed in the communist movement over the past decade. First, some have called for a return to pro-Soviet orthodoxy and to the Communist parties proletarian roots and traditions. It was after all the influence of the Russian Revolution that launched the European Communist parties in the early twenties and the prestige of the Soviet Union in alliance with wartime resistance movements was crucial in their revival in the forties. Loyalty to Moscow remains strong among an older generation of working class communists throughout Europe. However, this is an ageing and declining section of society, and, even under Gorbachev, the model of Soviet society holds no inspirational appeal to the vast majority of the population of modern Europe.

Second, others have recommended that the Communist parties reach out to the 'new social movements' around issues of peace, women's rights and the environment. Taking up thesc causes could allow the Communist parties to tap new layers of support and absorb the impetus of radical movements which attract widespread and youthful support. The problem with this strategy is that adopting fashionable policies might alienate traditional supporters, who often espouse conservative and even hostile attitudes towards the new movements.

70 The third option has been the further pursuit of Euro-

communist adaptations towards social democracy. In a period of growing reaction, adopting more moderate policies appears to be the only way to win wider popular approval, yet the tendency for established social democratic parties to gain at communist expense creates grave tactical difficulties. The fact that all the Communist parties have at different times and to different degrees adopted all three of these options explains the appearance of instability, confusion and incoherence that is the most striking characteristic of these parties in the eighties. Let's look more closely at the cases of France and Italy.

France The French Communist Party has long had the reputation of being the most pro-Soviet of the major Western Communist parties so it was inevitable that the failures of Eurocommunism would provoke a vigorous backlash from the orthodox Stalinist camp. This was already apparent at the 1979 congress, which, after a decade of mounting criticism of Moscow, declared that the record of the Eastern bloc was 'on balance positive!? The PCF was subsequently the only Eurocommunist party to back the Soviet Union over Afghanistan and it took a highly equivocal line over the suppression of Solidarity in Poland in December 1981. It maintained a broadly pro-Soviet, anti- American line on third world conflicts and even refused to condemn the Soviet Union for shooting down a Korean airliner in September 1983.2 However, the PCF came into conflict with the Kremlin over its involvement in Mitterrand's coalition government at a time when it was supporting the installation of US missiles in Europe and even recommending a vote for the right in Germany over this issue.??

In 1988, with perestroika and glasnost in full swing, the Soviet press was openly critical of the PC's sectarian tactics in the presidential election; L'Humanite replied angrily with detailed criticisms of 'human rights violations' in the Soviet Union.2 In any event it was apparent from the election results of the eighties that a closer identification with the Soviet Union was not a vote winner. As Tiersky concluded in 1988, 'the time is past when radical changes in Soviet foreign policy could have decisive effects even for the better, as Gorbachev's innovations once might have-on the political fortunes of French communism' 2º Though the PCF has long proclaimed itself a party of all the French people, its image has remained obstinately 'ouvrièrist: reflecting its heavy reliance on the manual working class. The strongly conservative and chauvinist outlook long promoted by 71

the PCF has rendered it particularly insensitive to wider developments in society. Hence radical trends have generally emerged outside, and often in a spirit of hostility towards, the PCF. This was true of the women's movement, which emerged around the radical upsurge of 1968 and the revival of interest in the writings of Simone de Beauvoir. It was also true of the Greens who were encouraged in an aggressively anti-PCF direction under the influence of the former Stalinist Andre Gorz, The virulent national chauvinism of the PCF meant that from 1977 onwards it supported the force de frappe', France's independent nuclear strike force. Hence, when mass anti-nuclear missile demonstrations were taking place in the rest of Europe in the carly eighties, France remained quiescent. The PCF dismissed the peace movement as a manifestation of German irrationalism and anti-Soviet prejudice.!! It was not surprising that later attempts by the PCF to climb on the anti-nuclear power bandwagon were greeted with some scepticism.

The PC's anti-racist reputation was seriously discredited by the party's support for strict immigration controls and its record in local government. This was symbolised by two infamous incidents, one at Vitry in December 1980 when a mob including PCF members wrecked an immigrant hostel in a working class suburb of Paris, and the second at Montigny in February 1981, when the PCF mayor led a demonstration outside the house of a Moroccan suspected of being a drug dealer. The radical antiracist movement SOS Racisme subsequently took off outside the influence of the PCF at a time when it was increasingly concerned about losing working class support on issues of law and order, race and nation, to the far-right Front National.

It was not until the mid-eighties that the PCF seriously set about trying to incorporate the new social movements. In 1984 it launched its new alliance strategy under the banner of the Nouveau Rassemblement Populaire et Majoritaire, which proclaimed the leading role of the PCF over a 'multiplicity of struggles"* The new movement was characterised by the PC's new-found modesty about propounding 'global' programmes for change and by an extreme flexibility. Given the record of the PCF and its inability to offer any distinctive direction to existing campaigns, its supporters remained sceptical of its capacity to play a leading role and the new movement has remained an empty shell. In 1987 the PCFs leading renovateur, Pierre Juquin, finally quit the party to run with the support of a number of radical factions on an independent "Red/Green' platform in the 1988 presidential election, winning two per cent 72

of the vote half that of the official Green candidate and nearly a third of the vote for André Lajoinic, the PCF candidate.

Given the high risks of both the pro-Soviet and the new social movements options, the PCF leadership had good reason to stick cautiously with the Eurocommunist approach. As Marchais put it immediately after the 1978 election defeat, the party had "no spare strategy"" After a wide-ranging debate on the left's defeat in the 1978 election, the twenty-third congress of the PCF in 1979 opted to continue on the Eurocommunist course." The congress opted to support "autogestion", the combination of workers' control and workplace industrial democracy long promoted by the Socialist Party, but traditionally opposed by the PCF as a cover for class collaboration. The PCF also adopted a new constitution which formally ratified the abandonment of the dictatorship of the proletariat (first announced by Marchais on television back in 1976) and "Marxism-Leninism'.

It also repudiated 'democratic centralism' and loosened its conditions of membership, cell structure and restrictions on internal debate. In programmatic terms the PCF showed its willingness throughout the eighties to follow the PS in every policy adjustment towards the right. After Mitterrand's 1981 victory, the PCF offered its 'unreserved solidarity' to the Socialist government and its ministers provided a left cover for austerity policies until trade union revolt in spring 1984 forced them to resign.* This did not mark any break in PCF approval for the main thrust of the PS programme of national economic rationalisation, nuclear and conventional militarism, and tougher policies on law and order and immigration. The problem, however, lay in devising an appropriate tactical approach towards the PS in a period in which it was steadily encroaching on the PCFs electoral base.

After the break-up of the Union of the Left and the 1978 debacle, the PCF attempted to strengthen its position against the PS by taking a more independent stand and by openly criticising the PS for its moderate and collaborationist policies. The anti- PS campaign ended abruptly with Mitterrand's victory in the first round of the 1981 presidential elections in which Marchais received a humiliating 15 per cent of the vote. It seems that the PCF had anticipated a victory for the right which would have crushed Mitterrand's pretensions and 'rebalanced the left in favour of the PCF In the event the PCF dropped its condemnations of the PS overnight and recommended a vote for Mitterrand in the second ballot. From 1981 until 1984 the 73

PCF's criticisms of the PS coalition were muted because of the presence of four PCF ministers in the government. The departure of the PCF ministers and the government's turn to more rigorous austerity policies under the regime of Laurent Fabius in 1984 allowed the PCF to take up a more oppositional role.

The PCF subsequently encouraged the CT to take a more militant line in response to closures and mass redundancies, then devastating French manufacturing, leading to a number of confrontations between striking workers and riot police in 1984 and 1985. Yet the PCF leadership was wary of tarnishing its carefully nurtured democratic image with unpredictable outbreaks of industrial militancy, and, after a decade of vacillation, most French workers were not enthusiastic about going into battle under the banners of the PCF. The 1986 elections to the national assembly led to a victory for the right and further setbacks to the PCF; the outcome was "cohabitation' between Chirac as the prime minister and Mitterrand as president. This result encouraged the PC to adopt a more oppositional role in the hope of attracting the support of voters disillusioned with the whole period of Socialist rule and its consequences in the run-up to the presidential elections in 1988. Hence the PCF-and the CGT-played a more active role in a number of industrial disputes in 1987 and 1988 in the hope of attracting a protest vote.

However, the PC's new line appeared to be more successful in deepening demoralisation in the unions and in further alienating middle class voters than it was in consolidating working class support. The 1988 presidential elections registered a further fall in PCF support as Marchais issued the now routine call on his supporters to support Mitterrand in the second round. In the run-up to the March 1989 municipal elections, the PCF was forced to accept humiliating conditions as the price of securing the local alliances with the Socialist Party on which many of its remaining town hall seats depended —and it still lost ground to the socialists. 38 Italy Just as the PCF has always been the most pro-Soviet of the Eurocommunist parties, the Italian Communist Party has always taken the most independent line. Yet the Moscow link is still a crucial one for the PCI and it remained for some the best safeguard of the party's future after the apparent failures of Eurocommunism in the late seventies. In November 1980, the month in which Berlinguer finally buried the historic compromise, party veteran Paulo Rubotti warned that if the PCI 74

ever turned its back on the Soviet Union it would be 'swept away by the party base, unshakeably and for all eternity pro-Soviet 39 This was undoubtedly an exaggeration, but it contained an element of truth which no Stalinist party leadership could ignore. When the PCI leadership openly sided with Solidarity against the Stalinist regime in Poland in 1981, another PCI veteran Armando Cossutta spoke out on behalf of the party's pro-Soviet faction.4* However, the orthodox Stalinist trend in the PCI did little more than warn the party leadership against going too far in an anti-Soviet direction. Few seriously believed that Moscow could provide any answers for the post- Eurocommunist malaise of the PCI.

Like the PCF, and for many of the same reasons, the PCI was slow to recognise the importance of the new social movements.

We have already noted how the PCI's deference to Catholicism and reaction rendered it aloof from secularising and radical trends in Italy. As a result it was outflanked at the polls by the radicals and the socialists. When it finally tried to connect with the new movements, by sponsoring independent feminist, gay and Green candidates in the 1987 elections, its unfamiliarity with these issues was all too apparent. When PCI leader Alessandro Natta appeared to flirt with anti-abortionists, party officials had to rush in to rescue the party's feminist credentials."

The PCI's approach was widely regarded as electoral opportunism —it also sponsored a Milanese banker and a friend of notorious land speculators in the south. As Hellman argues, the problems went deeper: the PCI revealed its rampant eclecticism, a pluralism devoid of central guiding principles!* Not surprisingly, this strategy failed to win votes and the election registered further decline. However, for the new party leader, Achille Occhetto, who replaced Natta after the 1987 election setback, the PCI's future lies in promoting the party's Green, feminist and pro-European policies-these were the main themes of the March 1989 congress.43 For the PCI, to an even greater extent than the PCF, there has been little real alternative but to pursue the adaptation towards social democracy that formed the core of the Eurocommunist strategy. Like the PCF, the PCI has proved willing to make any programmatic concession to the socialists, indeed to the demands of the Italian capitalist class. Yet even though the PCI started from a much more substantial social base in Italian society (around 30 per cent throughout the seventies), and the Italian Socialist Party from a smaller base (around 10 per cent), the tactical problems of dealing with the socialists have proved a 75

major headache for the PCI leadership.

For most of the seventies the PCI dismissed the PSI as irrelevant as Berlinguer sought his 'historic compromise with the DC. However, when the PSI advanced as the PCI declined, and Craxi began to act as a key figure in Italian coalitionbuilding-becoming prime minister himself in 1983—the PCI was forced to take the socialists seriously. Craxi's party skilfully attacked the PCI from both the right (emphasising its Stalinist past and its questionable commitment to democracy) and from the left (denouncing its support for austerity, class collaboration and clerical reaction).44 In 1980 and 1981 the PCI attempted to redefine its policy towards alliances with Berlinguer's democratic alternative: This proposed an alliance of various small parties and dissident Christian Democrat factions under PCI leadership, but leaving out the PSI. It indicated the PCI's attempt to ster a course independent of the PSI which was proposing a 'left alternative' an alliance between the PCI and the PSI. The PCT's independent stand infuriated not only Craxi but also the PCI's right wing headed by Giorgio Napolitano. When the PSI became part of the government coalition with the DC in 1983 relations between the two parties of the left deteriorated still further. However, the PCI's subsequent attempts to restore its relations with the working class through taking more militant anti-government positions —notably its defence of the wage-indexation system in the 1985 referendum backfired badly. The PCI lost heavily in the referendum, while the governmental status of the PSI was strengthened. The 1987 elections confirmed the steady rise in PSI support as the PCI decline continued.

The PCI has cultivated relations with European social democratic parties, notably the German SPD, and has even suggested its desire to join the Socialist International. Yet the PSI remains the obstacle on the international as well as on the domestic level to the PCI's attempts to win full social democratic respectability: Results As we have seen, the Communist parties" responses to the failures of Eurocommunism resulted in even worse disasters.

The PC's result in the 1988 presidential election was its worst since 1924. In 1987 the PCI was reduced to the position from which its take-off had started in the late sixties, though it still retained the support of around a quarter of the electorate.

76 Elsewhere in Europe, with the exception of Greece, Cyprus,

Portugal and Finland, Communist parties are a marginal force.ª In addition to losing voters, Communist party membership has been decimated. Between 1976 and 1986 the PCIlost 12 per cent of its members, though it still claims 1.6 million.

Between 1978 and 1984 the PCF lost 27 per cent, bringing it down to 380 000; in the same period the PCE lost 65 per cent of its members, reducing it to 60 000. In the smaller parties losses of the order of 30 to 60 per cent are commonplace.

The other legacy of Eurocommunism was internal strife and fragmentation. One of the most extreme cases is in Spain where there are now a handful of parties —a pro-Soviet party led by Civil War veterans Gallego and Lister, a grouping led by the former Eurocommunist party leader Carrillo, a majority faction led by new party leader Julio Anguita González who succeeded former boss Gerardo Iglesias in 1988, and a few more.* In the PCF internal dissent erupted after the breakdown of the Union of the Left and the 1978 defeat. Prominent intellectuals such as Louis Althusser and Jean Ellenstein published extensive critiques of the party leadership in the mainstream press. For a period the leadership tolerated the debate and then in 1979 clamped down, forcing the resignation of Henri Fiszbin, secretary of the rebellious Paris federation and suppressing dissident publications,47 However internal unrest continued, the self-styled renovateurs rallying around Pierre Juquin before his departure from the party in 1987. In the PCI, factional strife has long been institutionalised with clearly defined right (Napolitano, Amendola), and radical (Ingrao), as well as orthodox Stalinist (Cossutta) wings. While tensions increased in the eighties, the PCI avoided damaging splits.

In many of the smaller Communist parties splits between orthodox pro-Soviet and resolute Eurocommunist factions accelerated the decline of the international communist movement. In the late eighties there has been an apparently contradictory trend towards the reunification of formerly bitterly antagonistic Communist party fragments. In both Spain and Greece, for example, orthodox Stalinist and Eurocommunist groupings have reformed common electoral platforms. But this indicates a clinging together out of a feeling of isolation and weakness, not a genuine rallying of forces with a positive sense of direction. It is more likely to exacerbate tendencies towards disintegration than overcome them. On a wider international level no joint meeting of the European Communist parties has taken place since 1976 (there has been no world conference since 1969). Finally, what next for the European Communist parties?

77

Can the It is useful to compare the position of the Communist parties Communist today with that of 20 years ago, when they emerged from the parties recover? long Cold War years of isolation and stagnation. The Communist parties were excluded from the political mainstream, but they retained strong regional bases of support among workers in the more traditional manufacturing industries. Their most important inheritance from the Stalinist tradition was its insistence on high standards of membership training, discipline and organisation. Hellman notes that the term "professional revolutionary' was widely used in the Italian Communist Party until the 1970s.4k The fact that the Communist parties were cadre organisations enabled them to survive long periods of isolation, repression and even, in the cases of the Spanish, Portuguese and Greek parties, exile, when social democratic parties crumbled. For all their adaptations to social democracy, it was this organisational tradition that gave the Communist parties their distinctively Stalinist character, It enabled the French and Italian Communist parties to survive for decades with programmes that were obsolete (anticipating pauperisation at the height of the postwar boom), with strategies for leading non-existent mass struggles and with organisational structures which reinforced their remoteness from new social trends (the growth of whitecollar and female employment, urbanisation and secularisation).

The upsurge of working class militancy and youth radicalism that shook Europe between 1968 and 1972 at first passed by the Communist parties. In May 68 in France the students revolted against the PCF as much as against the French establishment and workers came out on strike against the advice of the PCF and the CGT. In the 'hot autumn' of 1969 in Italy the initiative came from unskilled and unorganised workers, often newly arrived immigrants from the south, and beyond the influence of the PCI or CGIL. Yet the organisational strength of the Communist parties enabled them to catch up with the radical upsurge and become its ultimate beneficiaries. Eurocommunism provided the vehicle through which the Communist parties incorporated much of the energy of this period and turned it to short-lived electoral advantage.

Eurocommunism gave the Communist parties a programme state monopoly capitalism that at least appeared modern. It also offered a strategy of advance through alliances with other social forces that appeared plausible and popular. Eurocommunism's emphasis on internal democracy and pluralism 78 also helped to open the parties' formerly rigid structures to the

influence of the new movements. Though the party leaders were slow to adopt the policies of the new movements, there is much evidence to suggest that at local level the Communist parties were successful in attracting activists from diverse radical campaigns into their ranks during the seventies. The very ferocity of internal debate in the PCF, the party with the most rigid and orthodox bureaucracy, is testimony to the extent to which it incorporated representatives of the new social movements into its ranks. Hellman's fascinating study of Turin reveals two waves of recruitment to the PCI: the first, immediately after the 'hot autumn', appears to have been former party militants returning to the fold; the second took place between 1975 and 1977 as the new generation of 1968-69 found its way through other movements to the PCI.49 It seems that the organisational strength of the PCI gave it a resilience during these turbulent years that was lacking in the groupings spontaneously thrown up in the course of struggles or spawned by various far-left factions. When the spontaneous movements flagged, the PCI mopped up. As we have seen, the radical impetus of the carly seventies carried the Eurocommunist parties to their successes in the following years.

Yet the generation of 68 turned out to be a Trojan horse inside the citadels of European Stalinism.

If we turn to look at the plight of the Communist parties today, we find them again without a distinctive programme or strategy and isolated from the political mainstream. Indeed the most striking feature of the Communist parties today is their programmatic exhaustion. Like Neil Kinnock with his Labour Listens events in Britain, European communist leaders reveal their lack of any idea of the way forward with slogans such as the PCFs 'let the people set the pace and let us discuss what you think, or the PCI's proposal to participate in a coalition government around a 'programmatic alternative' the content of which is entirely open to negotiation. 50 The new-found commitment of the Communist parties to 'openness" and "flexibility" is simply an admission of political bankruptcy. But what about the roots in the working class movement and the traditions of cadre organisation that were so important in enabling the Communist parties to rejuvenate themselves before?

Contrary to the impressions of many academic apologists for the electoral decline of the old labour movement parties, this cannot be attributed to the disappearance of the working class.S!

The working class is still there, with a more heterogeneous 79 character than 20 years ago, but it is now much more alienated

from the Communist parties. This is the result, not of changing styles of work or new patterns of consumption, but a response to the political failures of Eurocommunism. The Eurocommunist parties promised new ways of transforming capitalism into socialism but rapidly turned to persuading their supporters to pay the price for transforming stricken capitalist economies into more competitive national enterprises. The result was mass unemployment, poverty and repression—and mass disillusionment with the Communist parties.

Over the past decade the Communist parties have experimented with various means of winning back working class support or attracting wider middle class support, and have failed to achieve either. Indeed they have discovered that the old appeals for loyalty to Moscow or for more union militancy are simply ineffective in rallying the workers while they are quite effective in alienating the professional, administrative and technical strata. The Communist parties retain a residual working class base, but their capacity to reach beyond it now seems more circumscribed than ever.

Not only have the Communist parties seriously destabilised their working class bases during the Eurocommunist period, they have also squandered their most precious asset-their tradition of cadre organisation. In all the major Communist parties an older generation of activists, steeled in the Stalinist tradition, has been gradually replaced by a new layer of activists who have brought the characteristic features of petit-bourgeois organisation into the Communist parties from the new social movements. These movements have made a virtue of indulging individualistic preoccupations, a lack of discipline and commitment and organisational sloppiness.

For example, George Ross has noted how in the decade from 1968 to 1978 there was a large influx of new members into the French Communist Party, many from middle class backgrounds, and how it cultivated a more open regime, and relaxed standards of recruitment and membership.32 He (and Jane Jensen) also noted how declining standards of training and education led to a growing generation gap within the party. Writing in 1978, Ross noted that the Eurocommunisation of the PCF has partially opened up the party's structures, in ways which, in certain circumstances, could make it extremely difficult for the leadership to control rank and file life': 54 In the circumstances of mounting setbacks, such as the party experienced in the eighties, the legacy of Eurocommunist principles of organisation was growing 80 incoherence and fragmentation.

Hellman has noted a similar trend in the Italian Communist Party in Turin. Whereas in the sixties the PCI formed' its own activists, in the seventies they came via other organisations, often organisations which had been opposed to the PCI.' By 1980 the *generation of '68" was dominant in the party apparatus, but these activists were highly heterogeneous and could not serve the same role as the generation of experienced and disciplined cadres they replaced, who had acted as a bridge between the party of the fifties and that of the seventies. The result was that during the eighties the PCI suffered organisational paralysis as well as its problems of programme and strategy. By the end of the decade, it was, as Hellman well summed it up, 'an organisation that [was] no longer in a position to set the political agenda, or even to catalyse dissent and carry forward a broad movement for change"s* One indication of its predicament was that the average age of party members was more than 50 and that of new recruits, 36; less than 10 per cent of party members were less than 30 years old and 30 per cent were pensioners.57 *Part of our identity is our rejection of any narrow, classoriented vision of society' declared PCI leader Occhetto in an interview with L'Unita in September 1988, continuing that "we see our task now as creating a new consensus in the centre of Italian society!* This appears to indicate the ultimate social democratisation of Italian Stalinism, its repudiation of any affinity to the working class in its devotion to the nation. In fact it amounts to a liquidationist perspective, because the PCI's role in the Italian nation depends upon its capacity to represent the working class on the national stage. Occhetto's willingness to surrender what constitutes the essential identity of the PCI simply reflects the party's instability and loss of direction.

The discussion around the March 1989 PCI congress about changing the party's name reflects the same anxieties. Rightwing party Icader Napolitano told the press with evident approval that there had been several attempts to get rid of the name 'communist since the sixties." Yet while Occhetto ruled out any immediate change, he seems as concerned to drop the word party' as 'communist from the title. Some in the PCI now favour the party adopting the sort of light structure' appropriate for an organisation which seeks more to influence public opinion than to intervene in the class struggle."® The ultimate aim seems to be to transform the PCI into the metaphysical expression of a new Italian consensus. If the European Communist parties continue down this road, their future 81 appears bleak indeed.

Notes 1. Published in Farewell to the classic labour movement?, New Left Review 173, January/ February 1989, Pp69-70.

2. See The Italian road to socialism: an interview by Eric Hobsbawm with Georgio Napolitano of the Italian Communist Party, 1977. See Hobshawm et al, "The forward march of labour halted?, 1981, and the most recent collection of essays, Politics For a Rational Left: Political Writings 1977-88, 1989.

4. M Lazar, "Communism in Western Europe in the 1980s, Journal of Communist Studies, Vol 4 No 3, September 1988.

"How we are building the new PCI, speech published in The Italian Communists: Foreign Bulletin of the PCI, No 3, July/September 1988, p53.

6. Communists lost 15 towns and gained one, while the socialists gained 35 and lost 14 to the right-Guardian, 20/21 March 1989. 7. Take the following example, published in 1979: 'It is hard to resist the optimistic feeling that this process [Eurocommunism] must culminate, sooner or later, in the "Westernisation" of the parties concerned and the end of the Leninist heresy.' A Levi, 'Eurocommunism: myth or reality?", in P Filo della Torre, E Mortimer and J Storey (cds), Eurocommunism: Myth or Reality?, 1979, p19. 8. See F Richards, "Revisionism, imperialism and the state: the method of Capital and the dogma of state monopoly capitalism', Revolutionary Communist Papers, No 4, February 1979. 9. See for example the special feature Eurocommunism: an obituary, the next step, April 1981.

10. See P Lange, GRoss, and M Vannicelli, Unions, Change and Crisis: French and Italian Union Strategy and the Political Economy, 1945-1980, 1982, pp35-55.

11. "Eurocommunism in Italy", in H Machin (ed), National Communism in Western Europe: A Third Way For Socialism?, 1983, pl36. 12. French Communism and Local Power: Urban Polities and Political Change, 1985. 13. Ibid, p17. 14. Ibid, pp44-5. DS Bell and B Criddle, Mortal allies: the French left in the 15. eighties, Parliamentary Affairs, October 1986.

16. See J Ruscoe, The Italian Communist Party 1976-1981, 1982, pp19,3-6. 17. Italian Communism in Transition: The Rise and Fall of the Historic Compromise in Turin, 1975-1980, 1988.

18. Ibid, p82. 19. Corbetta quoted in ibid, note 48, p234.

82 20. Ibid, pl05.

21. For a fuller discussion on the PCI and secularisation sec T Abse, Judging the PCT, New Left Review 153, September/October 1985. 22. Lange, Ross and Vannicelli, op cit, p69.

23. The events at Fiat are discused by M Kreile, The crisis of Italian trade unions in the 1980s, West European Politics, January 1989, and in Abse and Hellman, op cit.

24. See G Ross and J Jensen, The tragedy of the French left, New Left Review 171, September/October 1988.

25. MAdereth, The French Communist Party: A Critical History (1920-1984), 1984, p244. 26. A Antomari and I Wall, The French communists under François Mitterrand", Political Studies, June 1985.

27. In April 1983 Jeannette Thorez-Versmeech, the staunchly pro- Soviet widow of the former Stalinist leader of the PF, called on the party to leave the government and lead the peace movement—see Antomari and Wall, op cit. For further discussion of the PCF line on nuclear weapons see D Johnson, "The French left and the bomb', New Left Review 146, July/ August 1984. 28. R Tiersky, The declining fortunes of the French Communist Party, Problems of Communism, September/October 1988.

29. Ibid. 30. See A Hirsch, The French Lefi: A History and Overview, 1982 31. Johnson, op cit. 32. Adereth, op cit. 33. Sec E Dainov, "Problems of French communism 1972-1976, West European Politics, July 1987.

34. Adereth, op cit, p221.

35. See Ross and Jensen, 'Conflicting currents in the French Communist Party, Socialist Register, 1979; and Adereth, op cit, pp247-55. 36. See Ross and Jensen, "Pluralism and the decline of left hegemony: the French left in power', Politics and Society, (14) 2, 1985; and Antomari and Wall, op cit.

37. See Dainov, op cit. 38. Financial Times, 12/13 January 1989.

39. Ruscoe, op cit, p56 40. P Daniels, "The Italian Communist Party in the mid-eighties", Journal of Communist Studies, June 1985.

4L. Hellman, 'Italian communism in crisis, Socialist Register, 1988, p280. 42. Ibid, p279. 43. See Sunday Times, 19 March 1989 and Guardian, 22 March 1989. 44. See Daniels, op cit. 83 45. For recent surveys see L Marcou, "The impossible ally: a

survcy of Western communism in the eighties, Journal of Communist Studies, September 1988; and Lazar, op cit.

46. For a blow-by-blow account see E Mujal-Leon, The decline and fall of Spanish communism, Problems of Communism, March/ April 1986. 47. See Ross and Jensen, 'Conflicting currents...', op cit 48. Hellman, Italian Communism in Transition.... pl68.

49. Ibid, pp58-64. 50. Ibid, p220; and Dainov, op cit.

51. For a discussion of this debate in the context of the decline of the British Labour Party sec M Freeman, The decline and fall of British Labourism, Confrontation, No 4, Summer 1988.

52. 'Crisis in Eurocommunism the French case, Socialist Register, 1978, pp185-7. 53. The unchartered waters of destalinisation: the uneven evolution of the French Communist Party, Politics and Society, (9) 3, 1980. 54. *Crisis in Eurocommunism...', op cit, p187.

55. Italian Communism in Transition.... op cit, pp172-76.

56. Ibid, p214. 57. Hellman, 'Italian communism in crisis...; op cit, p260.

58. Republished in The Italian Communist, No 3, July/September 1988. 59. Sunday Times, 19 March 1989.

60. See Hellman, 'Italian communism in crisis...', op cit, p264. For a British example of a similar trend, see S Benton, 'The party is over", Marxism Today, March 1989. Benton, once a prominent Eurocommunist, is now political editor of the Kinnockite New Statesman and Society: 84