The Eurocommunist “solution”

Enrico Berlinguer, leader of the Italian Communist Party (centre-left), with Georges Marchais, leader of the French Communist Party, to his immediate right. (3 June 1976)

Three days ago, in the piece I published on this blog entitled Anatoly Chernyaev’s 1973 Diary (3): Georges Marchais’s “democratic challenge”, I examined how, in the 1970s, the French Communist Party (PCF) embarked on a path of social-democratisation under the guise of “democratisation”, and how this transformation of one of Western Europe’s strongest communist parties was perceived within the upper echelons of the Soviet bureaucracy, drawing on Chernyaev’s diary notes from 1973.

This article, by contrast, aims to address the nature of that transformation -entered into by the PCF and other Eurocommunist parties more than fifty years ago- at a more general and theoretical level.

Italian-born German political scientist Johannes Agnoli (1925-2003) conducted a lengthy interview with Ernest Mandel (1923-1995) in 1980, which was published in book form later that same year. [*] Early in the interview, when the discussion turned to the “transition from capitalism to socialism” and the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, Mandel made the following observations:

According to Marx and Lenin, the leap from capitalism to socialism is impossible without the following: 

1. the smashing of the bourgeois state -what Marx, in his assessment of the Paris Commune, described as the destruction of the old state machine;

2. the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, the construction of a workers’ state during the transitional period; and

3. an understanding that this state is a special type of state: one which must begin to wither away from the moment of its emergence and which, in a classless socialist society, has already withered away.

These are the three elements. Marx was not an anarchist; he did not believe that it was possible to leap in a single step from capitalism to a stateless society. In other words, he was a defender of the dictatorship of the proletariat -that is, of the workers’ state. Yet he understood the specific function and distinctive form of this state, the inversion inherent in the fact that we are confronted with an instrument that can no longer be allowed to serve the oppression of the majority of the people. What we witness -whether in the Eastern Bloc, in the historical development of the USSR or the People’s Republic of China, or among those parties and currents that still, in one way or another, claim ownership of that legacy- is a failure to grasp this dialectic. In some cases -this applies to the so-called “European communists”- we see attempts to evade the problem by denying the necessity of smashing the bourgeois state apparatus. In others -this applies more to Stalinist or neo-Stalinist parties and currents- we encounter the denial of the linkage between, on the one hand, the dictatorship of the proletariat as an ongoing process, the construction of a workers’ state and soviet power -that is, the beginning of the withering away of the state- and, on the other hand, the actual exercise of power by the broad masses themselves.

Marx and Lenin’s analyses of the state treat the three elements identified by Mandel as a dialectical whole. Yet in the so-called “socialist” countries, where power was held by a privileged bureaucratic caste, this dialectical link between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the withering away of the state was completely severed. The workers’ state was stripped of its character as a temporary instrument -one meant to overcome itself- and transformed into a permanent apparatus of power, legitimised in its own right and even sanctified. Under these conditions, the dictatorship of the proletariat degenerated: it ceased to function as the driving force of a process advancing towards a classless society and instead became a new form of state -one that ruled over the working class and other labouring strata, exercising domination and repression over them.

It should be added here that the goal of the withering away of the state under the rule of the working class can be secured only within the perspective of world revolution. Accordingly, the adoption of the theory and programme of “socialism in one country” went hand in hand with the abandonment of the third element in Mandel’s schema.

Another important point emphasised by Mandel is the following: the denial of this dialectic in accordance with the material interests of the bureaucratic caste did not remain merely an internal problem of the bureaucratic regimes in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc; it also had a profound impact on the communist parties of Western Europe -and, of course, on those elsewhere in the world. The emergence of police-state practices and state terror in the USSR, China, and Eastern Europe made it increasingly difficult for communist parties in the West to defend the political line they had broadly pursued between the 1930s and the 1970s.

Santiago Carrillo (1977)

Under this pressure, the “solution” devised by a section of the Stalinist parties in Western Europe amounted, in essence, to a political manoeuvre of evasion. The parties that came to be known as “Eurocommunist”, rather than seeking to re-establish the link between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the withering away of the state -for having abandoned the perspective of world revolution in the latter half of the 1920s, this was no longer possible for them- attempted instead to resolve the problem by denying the necessity of smashing the bourgeois state apparatus. As a result, the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat was abandoned, and the idea that the bourgeois state could be “democratised” through parliamentary means was placed at the centre. Thus, for example, Santiago José Carrillo Solares, former General Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party, declared that their aim was “to democratise the apparatus of the capitalist state, without needing to destroy it radically by force.”

In summary, Eurocommunism, as Ernest Mandel also pointed out, was a theoretically regressive response to the historical and political crisis produced by Stalinism -an anti-Marxist answer grounded in adaptation to the capitalist base and its institutional superstructures. It envisaged a turn towards social-democratisation under the guise of “democratisation” and, in this sense, was itself a product of Stalinism.

[*] The book was originally published under the title Ein Gespräch über Dogmen, Orthodoxie und die Häresie der Realität [Open Marxism: A Conversation on Dogmas, Orthodoxy and the Heresy of Reality] (by Ernest Mandel and Johannes Agnoli, Frankfurt, Campus Verlag, 1980). In 1993, the book was published in Turkish by Kardelen Yayınları, translated by Nail Satlıgan, under the altered title Contemporary Society and Marxism (Çağdaş Toplum ve Marksizm).