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From International Socialist Review, Vol.30 No.3, May-June 1969, pp.41-44.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The following article by Ernst Fischer, the most prominent intellectual leader of the Austrian Communist Party, makes an interesting counterpart to the preceding study. It illustrates the mutual attraction between Stalinism and the Social Democracy in a broad historical and political context.
In this article – taken from the July-August 1968 issue of Weg und Ziel, the theoretical journal of the Austrian Communist Party – Fischer tells about a discussion he had with Otto Bauer in the summer of 1936, a critical turning point in the history of the international workers movement. This discussion was not a casual or purely academic one. Fischer was a representative of the Comintern on a special mission. He appealed to Bauer to use his influence to help bring about an agreement between the Austrian Social Democracy and the Communist Party.
Nor is this interview only of historical interest. In recent years, the Austrian CP has sought to collaborate with the Social Democrats on a common political basis. Fischer clearly uses these reminiscences to point up the fact that the “best” in the Social Democracy were well disposed to close relations with Communists.
Fischer, at the time of the interview an exile in the Soviet Union, was sent to Austria on a false passport to help the Austrian CP implement the Comintern’s new Popular Front line. This policy, adopted in 1935, reversed Moscow’s previous “Third Period” blind factional warfare against all competing working-class parties. Now the Kremlin bureaucrats not only advocated united action with the Social Democrats, but took over their reformist position one hundred and ten per cent, and became the foremost proponents of collaboration with the “democratic” bourgeoisie.
The Popular Front crossed class lines and advocated electoral and parliamentary blocs with “democratic” bourgeois parties. This non-revolutionary policy sought to confine workers’ struggles strictly to this bourgeois-democratic framework.
At about the same time, in the summer of 1936, the Stalin constitution was adopted in the Soviet Union. These purely verbal concessions to bourgeois democracy made in this document won the approval of Social Democrats and liberals throughout the world, including Bauer’s, as Fischer points out.
The adoption of the Stalin constitution was the prelude to the great purges which sought to liquidate all opposition to the totalitarian terrorist regime in the Soviet Union. The co-author of the constitution, Bukharin, was himself to be a victim of the Moscow trial frame-ups. This is the background to the convergence of the Social Democrats and Communists on the question of democracy which both Bauer and Fischer point to in the interview translated below.
The principal point that Fischer tries to bring out in recalling this discussion is that Bauer looked forward to an eventual reunification of the Communist and Socialist internationals. Fischer is careful not to endorse this perspective fully but the direction of the dialogue shows that he favors this long postponed reconciliation today.
It seems unlikely that Fischer is serious about the objections he raises to Bauer’s perspective. But it is probable that Fischer thinks the road to reunion will be difficult. While there is a basic identity between the two wings of opportunism – both of which reflect the viewpoint of bureaucrats who exploit the workers’ movement for their own narrow interest – the Communist parties are subjected to strong conflicting pulls.
Trotsky identified this contradiction in 1938, in an article entitled A Fresh Lesson on the Character of the Coming War.
“As regards the ex-Comintern [that is, it had ceased to be an international in a real sense] its social basis, properly speaking is of a two-fold nature: on the one hand, it lives on the subsidies of the Kremlin, submits to the latter’s commands, and, in this respect, every ex-communist bureaucrat is a younger brother and subordinate of the Soviet bureaucrat. On the other hand, the various machines of the ex-Comintern feed from the same sources of the Social Democracy, that is, the superprofits of imperialism. The growth of the Communist parties in recent years, their infiltration in the ranks of the state machinery, the trade unions, parliaments, municipalities, etc., have strengthened in the extreme their dependence on national imperialism at the expense of their traditional dependence on the Kremlin.”
The process described by Trotsky accelerated during the postwar boom in Western Europe and especially after the East-West detente. In a number of West European countries, Communist parties have tended more and more to move into the positions and fulfill the functions traditionally monopolized by the Social Democracy.
The Kremlin favors this incorporation into the parliamentary framework. Its theory of “socialism in one country” has long assigned the Communist parties in the capitalist countries the role of pressure groups in the Kremlin’s diplomatic maneuvers with “democratic and peace-loving” imperialists.
But association with the Soviet Union imposes big difficulties on “effective” operation in the Western parliamentary arena. The Kremlin line can become extremely embarrassing.
The Communist parties can be subjected to considerable temptation to dissociate themselves from the Soviet Union. They find it difficult to continue repeating the old apologies for the unattractive features of the Stalinist system. Small Communist parties in countries near Soviet bloc countries, such as Sweden and Austria, are especially exposed to such pressures. Unless they can succeed in presenting an attractive electoral face, such reformist parties would be doomed to the slow death of pro-Moscow sects like the superloyal American and West German CPs.
The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia forced the most independent elements in the Austrian CP, of which Fischer was the most prominent spokesman, to come out strongly for disassociation from Moscow on this issue. This could not help but draw heavy fire from the Kremlin. On October 5, 1968, Pravda delivered the following broadside:
“The views of E. Fischer were most clearly expressed perhaps in his book Art and Coexistence put out by the bourgeois publisher Rowohlt in the German Federal Republic. This entire book is pervaded with a spirit of hostility to the countries of the socialist commonwealth and their social system. In this book E. Fischer campaigns against socialist democracy, claiming that ‘insufficient freedom’ is a characteristic of the socialist countries.”
It should be noted, too, that the “Social-Democratization” of the Western Communist parties has not proceeded in a uniformly right-ward direction in all cases. In some instances, the abandonment of the extreme antidemocratic organizational methods of Stalinism has allowed genuine left-wing currents to develop – primarily among the youth.
For example, the liberal wing of the Austrian CP took a moderately friendly attitude toward the revolutionary students who spearheaded the French upsurge in May 1968. On occasion the Austrian CP youth have shown greater militancy in fighting the Vietnam war than the youth groups of the CPs strictly adhering to the Moscow line.
Moreover, the necessity of abjuring Stalinist mythology and of open debate with competing forces has sometimes – though rarely – encouraged individuals and groups in the Western CPs to attempt a serious Marxist approach to specific questions. Although this tendency has never resulted in a revival of Marxism in any CP, it has made certain elements of some CPs permeable to genuinely revolutionary ideas.
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