Anatoly Chernyaev’s 1973 diary (3)

Georges Marchais’s “democratic challenge”

In a diary entry dated 16 September 1973, Anatoly Chernyaev summarises the key points that struck him after reading A Democratic Challenge, a book by Georges Marchais (1920-1997), General Secretary of the French Communist Party (PCF).

1. Private ownership of the majority of the means of production will not be abolished when French socialism is established.

2. There will not be any collectivization of agriculture.

3. Crafts and trades will not be organized in cooperatives. In general, “comprehensive collectivism” will not be allowed.

4. There will be no control of the economy from a single center. The state will only regulate.

5. There will be no censorship. “We cannot prosper without creative freedom; we cannot develop without freedom of thought, without its free expression and dissemination.”

6. Unconditional recognition of the principle of “rotation” of leadership; submission to the electoral will of the people. The people have the right to withdraw their confidence in the communists, who will then leave without a murmur.

7. One-party rule is out of the question during the transition to socialism; right to opposition, to the existence of opposition parties.

8. The possibility of “our philosophy” (i.e. Marxist-Leninist) turning into the official social ideology is out of the question.

9. Integration of the state with “our ideology” is out of the question.

10. In general, why should we object to the term “democratic socialism.” It is slander to say that communists are against democratic socialism. On the contrary, they cannot imagine socialism that would violate the democracy that was won in the people’s revolutions of the past (i.e. bourgeois democracy).

Georges Marchais

After making this summary, Chernyaev poses the following questions:

The question is, what do the abovementioned points and our textbooks on historical materialism, scientific communism, the history of the CPSU, and hundreds of other books and articles in theoretical and political journals have in common? What do they have in common with the CPSU Program, or with the documents from our congresses?

But if French Communist Party chose revisionism as its Program, then what is left of the communist movement, and can the International Conference of Communist Parties continue to have an ideological nature? What ideological unity can we speak of?

 The programme is no mere detail

At the heart of Chernyaev’s concern lies a profoundly simple yet vital material reality: programmatic choices concerning property, state power, and the organisation of production are not abstract doctrinal disputes. What is at stake is nothing less than which class will rule.

The state, property relations, and the party are instruments and expressions of class domination. If a so-called “workers’ party” accepts in advance the continuation of private ownership of the means of production, the decisive role of the market mechanism, the dispersal of economic power into private hands, and the fundamental pillars of bourgeois law, then the material foundation of capitalist class rule remains firmly in place.

In such a situation, what emerges is not socialism but, at best, a variant of capitalism softened by certain social reforms. At the inevitable moments of crisis inherent in the capitalist mode of production, the interests of private property and the imperatives of capital accumulation will always prevail, and the social-democratised “Communist Party” will fall back into the very policies it once opposed -as the recent Greek Syriza experience has shown all too clearly.

Marchais’s views -or rather those of the French Communist Party as summarised by Chernyaev- thus fall squarely within a classic social-democratic/reformist line: the preservation of private property, market coordination, and the ideological neutrality of the state. Historical experience has repeatedly shown that this line leads to three concrete outcomes (with the Syriza experience being merely one of the most recent examples):

First, despite the rhetoric of “socialism”, what is preserved is the rule of the capitalist class. Reforms may bring temporary improvements in a capitalist society during periods of rapid growth; yet as long as property and the apparatus of coercion remain in the hands of the bourgeoisie, capital will always be the ultimate determinant.

Second, it entails the political subordination of the working class to bourgeois institutions and parties. May 1968 in France stands as one of the most striking examples: at that critical juncture, the French Communist Party and the General Confederation of Labour, rather than carrying the revolutionary initiative of the working class forward, instead served to stabilise the bourgeois order in France -and, in fact, across Europe and the wider world.

The PCF’s emblem at the time

Third, it entails the intellectual and organisational erosion of revolutionary principles. Electoral calculations, bureaucratic accommodation, and the rhetoric of “responsible governance” erode the political independence of the proletariat, normalise class collaboration, and entrench opportunism. This is precisely the political logic to which Lenin was pointing when he insisted that a revolutionary party must be qualitatively distinct from loose, broad mass organisations.

What is decisive is not formal similarity -the presence of the word “communist” in a party’s name or the hammer-and-sickle emblem- but material content. Unless the social ownership of the means of production, the dismantling of the bourgeois state apparatus, and the planning of production through the working class’s own democratic organs of power are set as objectives, parliamentary, legalistic, and market-friendly formulas amount to nothing more than a different mode of administering capitalism.

Chernyaev’s diary constitutes a historical document in its own right, recording this moment of rupture within the PCF from the perspective of a senior Kremlin bureaucrat.

Source: Anatoly S. Chernyaev, Diary of Anatoly Chernyaev (1973), trans. Anna Melyakova, ed. by Svetlana Savranskaya, pp. 61-62.