Marxism differs from bourgeois sociology not only because it is a superior method of social analysis. It differs from all other ideologies in that it is a doctrine of the revolutionary struggle. As such, it is fiercely partisan in the presentation of its viewpoint — the viewpoint of the proletariat. It of necessity must defend the proletarian view of all social phenomena and in particular its view of political struggle the world over. In doing so, it defends its view as against the prevailing view, relentlessly pushed by the bourgeoisie.
Because bourgeois ideology is centuries old and has inherited a great deal from previous possessing classes, and since the mode of bourgeois production is still the prevalent mode, the working class outlook has an uphill struggle in gaining ascendancy even over vanguard elements of the working class. In an era such as we are passing through now, which is characterized by widespread defections from revolutionary Marxism, and in which reformism and revisionism have regained considerable ground, it is all the more necessary to be on guard, not to be taken in tow by the sweep of the new reformism — and, of course, by the assiduous efforts of the bourgeoisie to ideologically capture newly awakening sectors of revolutionary workers.
Viewed in this light, the Conference of European CPs is of special importance to the world working class movement and oppressed people everywhere. Tle bourgeois media everywhere have poured scorn upon it. They have shown a malicious delight in the "break from Moscow" of some of the West European CPs (the Italian, Spanish, and to a lesser extent the French).
Jubilation in the bourgeois camp
The jubilation in the camp of the bourgeoisie over this event should really surprise no one, least of all the class-conscious workers of the world. The imperialists are dead set against the USSR because it is a workers' state, or a socialist state, as it is most frequently called. Any break from the USSR, anything that would hurt the USSR, the imperialists welcome with open arms. They have never been reconciled to the USSR and never will be unless counterrevolution is completely triumphant there a very very unlikely prospect, based on present conditions.
Of course, it matters a great deal to the bourgeoisie what the character of the Soviet leadership is — whether it is reformist or revolutionary. In the final analysis, however, their estimate of the USSR as a class formation hostile to imperialism and in competition with the capitalist system has never varied greatly.
The fact that the bourgeoisie welcomes what amounts to the formal defection of the Italian, Spanish, and some other CPs is based on what they regard as their best interests. Does the split help them or hurt them? Does it advance their interests or the interests of the proletariat of the countries they represent? That's the way the ruling classes took at it. They're not confused by semantics, changes in phraseology, or flexibility in tactics. That's strictly for popular consumption by the masses.
An independent proletarian viewpoint
How should the European CP conference be viewed in the light of proletarian class interests?
The first thing is to establish the complete independence of the viewpoint of the proletariat as against that pushed by the bourgeoisie. The proletariat must make its own appraisal in the light of its own independent class interests, free from the cliches, the slogans, and the subtle influences of bourgeois journalism. A proletarian party should first of all pose the question: What was the nature of the split? Was the split from the Soviet leadership a revolutionary one? Was the break away from the reformism and revisionism of the Soviet bureaucracy a move in the direction of proletarian policy? Obviously the answer to that is no.
A break should not in and of itself be hailed by the vanguard elements in the camp of the working class. To do that is to echo the bourgeois line, the line of imperialism. A revolutionary break with reformist policies is one thing. But a break which deepens the reformism of several of the parties, which is in effect not so much a break with the policies of Brezhnev, Khrushchev, and Stalin, but is also a break with the USSR as a workers' state and a break with Leninism — that is something entirely different. It is not only deplorable, but should be denounced. This should be done in a way that does not rubber-stamp in any way whatever the policies of the Soviet leadership. It is vital that this be done in such a way that it can't possibly be confused with bourgeois anti-communist or anti-Soviet propaganda.
It is unfortunate, but all too true, that in the literature of the radical left in this country, the break is hailed and sounds very much like an echo of the bourgeois line, even if it's not meant to be. Take the Guardian of July 14, 1976. Its headline on this subject reads, "Soviets no longer rule roost — Revisionist bloc crumbling." While the headline is to some degree at variance with the accompanying article by Irwin Silber, it nevertheless is a fair representation of what the reader will gather from the view presented there. In the first place, the "Soviets" have not ruled the roost" over the revisionist bloc for some 20 years now. Whatever truth there is in this headline is at least two decades behind the times.
Silber characterizes the role of the Soviet leadership in the conference as superpower hegemony. The term superpower which was invented by the bourgeoisie, serves its purposes very well. It conceals the class character of the Soviet Union and also hides the predatory character of imperialism putting the USSR and imperialism on an equal footing Employing this terminology not only confuses the reader but makes it impossible to put forth a clear-cut analysis of an important social phenomenon.
Palmiro Togliatti, former head of the Italian CP, in 1956 put the final end to any real dominance by the Soviet leadership over the Italian CP. At that time the Khrushchev report denouncing Stalin was utilized by the Italian CP leaders, not to establish a line of revolutionary demarcation between themselves and the Soviet leaders, but to deepen reformism in the Italian CP and hostility to the Soviet Union and Leninism (not to Khrushchev or later the Brezhnev leadership).
Origins of Italian CP's 'independence'
If we are to believe the Italian CP leaders themselves, their "new independent line" started much earlier, immediately after the Second World War. "Ever since the Party's (PCI) first post-war congress in January 1946, the Communists, firmly rejecting all prospects of the sort unfolding in Greece, indicated ... their preference for Italy's future (to be) a democratic republic founded on a representative parliamentary system, (with) the fundamental rights of citizens, freedom of speech, of conscience, of the press, of religion, of association and expression. ..." So says Sergio Segre, head of the International Department of the Italian Communist Party and a member of its Central Committee, in an article in the July 1976 Foreign Affairs (the journal of the Rockefeller-dominated Council on Foreign Relations!).
What Segre is saying here is that the PCI rejected the revolutionary struggle for proletarian power in 1946 (as in Greece, which unfortunately ended tragically) and adopted the bourgeois reformist line of seeking seats in a bourgeois parliament where the bourgeoisie holds power. The PCI rejected the "Greek line," Segre says, for reasons which have more to do with the brazen British imperialist intervention backed politically and militarily to the hilt by the U.S. than with the mistakes of the Greek CP or the reluctance of Stalin and later Tito to really support the struggle of the Greek people for independence from imperialism and for their right for a new system.
It should not be thought, however, that the Italian preference for the bourgeois parliamentary road was all of its own making. The haste with which Stalin immediately extended diplomatic recognition to the Badoglio regime in Italy after the war was a tip-off as to what the Soviet leadership's preference was, too. Badoglio had been Mussolini's Minister of War and as much a fascist criminal as Mussolini himself. Nevertheless the diplomatic recognition extended to this western imperialist-imposed regime was a challenge to the Italian anti-fascist resistance movement, led by the PCI. The anti-fascist movement was, of course, an armed movement and at its height had tremendous popular support from the broad mass of the working class, peasantry, and urban petty-bourgeoisie.
What has happened now is a mere continuation and deepening of a process that began long ago, not only in the Italian but in other CPs. It is not only improper, but altogether false, to pin it all on Brezhnev, as does the Guardian, which carried a New York Times cartoon of Brezhnev in the form of a chicken with cracked eggs below the chicken's feet, and the legend, "Have Brezhnev's chickens flown the coop?"
Every communist has a right to regard this as nothing but a veiled form of red-baiting, borrowed from the New York Times.
Nor is it right to pin it all on Khrushchev, or even altogether on Stalin. The break from the Leninist line came during the era of Stalin, who fashioned the politics of the Comintern in his day. But the false policies were not the product of Stalin's own doing alone or even of the Soviet bureaucracy. What is completely left out in the literature of the radical left, and in particular in this article in the Guardian is the severe and unrelenting pressure of world imperialism. To this day it is the fundamental factor from the point of view of the objective world situation, which is holding back, stifling, and where possible destroying even by means of genocide (in Vietnam yesterday and Palestine today), the revolutionary struggle of the masses.
American capital's onslaught in Europe
The conference of European CPs has to be viewed in the context of the ferocious onslaught of American finance capital in its European theater of operations and the struggle of U.S. imperialism against the USSR, as well as, of course, the reformist and revisionist policies of the Soviet bureaucracy. But in all the commentaries in the bourgeois press, and in the radical press as well, this main point regarding the defection of some of the Western CPs is either deliberately left out or not understood.
Why did they break at this particular time? Is it because the Bezhnev leadership is so much more domineering than that of Khrushchev or Stalin? Is it due to a renewed desire to be independent? Not really. The answer to it must be sought mainly in imperialist pressure, particularly on the very large, mass CPs. The Italian CP, for example, embraced the doctrine of the "historic compromise" (a new phrase for an old idea of collaborating with the bourgeois government either with or without a cabinet post) only after the defeat of the Chilean revolution, only after the bloody coup which exterminated hundreds and thousands of progressives, workers students and peasants by the hand of Wall Street-Pentagon imperialism.
Instead of drawing the revolutionary lesson from the Chilean tragedy, the lesson of preparing for armed resistance, they drew an opportunist one. In plain words, it frightened them. The Italian leaders offered this "historic compromise" to ward off a Chilean experience. Demonstrating independence from Moscow in this way, in fact attacking the USSR, is a way of showing allegiance to the bourgeois order in Italy and obeisance to imperialism.
CPs fear another chile
The basic truth to emerge from the so-called independence of the Western CPs is that they are "running scared" in the most literal sense of the word, particularly in the light of the prospect that they may become part of a bourgeois coalition government and become subject to the kind of treatment handed out to the Chileans. Segre points specifically to the Chilean experience in his Foreign Affairs article. Nor has the Portuguese development been lost on the other CPs. In fairness to the communist parties of Italy, France, and Spain, it should be added that from the point of view of a revolutionary struggle for power, none of them are prepared for it. The French and Italian CPs dissolved the partisan armies after the Second World War. They voluntarily gave up their arms to the class enemy, disarmed the proletariat, while the bourgeoisie remained armed to the teeth.
A proletariat disarmed is not altogether helpless. If it is armed with revolutionary doctrine, it will find ways and means to arm itself militarily. But because the proletariat is disarmed is no reason for dissolving revolutionary doctrine, abandoning Marxism and Leninism, and renouncing the class struggle in all but words. Of course, the Soviet bureaucracy is not for a revolutionary armed struggle. It certainly has not promoted one and it is not about to change its policy. But as President Giscard d'Estaing was forced to admit in an interview recently with U.S. News & World Report, "the Soviet leaders didn't encourage an armed struggle in Portugal, but neither did they discourage it." This is an absolutely correct statement Whatever one may think of this policy, it is a long way from domination, or imposition of a political line.
This is not to defend the policy of the Soviet bureaucracy but to define its role in the context of the current state of the European class struggle. It is necessary to state this clearly and explicitly so that the movement doesn't fall captive to the bourgeois version of the European CP conference or join in the false and scurrilous attacks on the USSR and on communism as a whole. The fact of the matter is that the Soviet leadership is not only not dominating the Western CPs, but it has willingly accepted their reformism and is merely trying to ward off anti-Soviet attacks.
USSR and the Third World
What is totally being lost sight of in all the jubilation with the "revolt of the Western CPs over the domination of Moscow" is that it has in effect put the Soviet bureaucracy in the position of being to the left of the Western CPs and has improved the political position of the Soviet leadership in the under-developed world, in the lands of oppressed people. Revolutionary elements in the Third World countries will veer closer to the Soviet leadership as a result of the European Communist conference. They will see the Soviet leadership as being more revolutionary than the Western CPs. They inevitably will think in terms of Angola, in terms of the aid to Vietnam and Cuba. This weighs, on a historical scale, much more in their eyes than does the so-called independence of the Western CPs. Independence in a revolutionary direction, in the direction of independent working class politics, is one thing. Independence to deepen reformism is something else.
CPs bank on capitalist stabilitY
The principal hope of the Italian and other reformist CPs in Europe is based on the illusion that European capitalism will become stabilized and that a new era of reformism is possible, especially with their participation in the bourgeois governments. If the Italian CP leaders were serious in their discussion about their real perspective, they should be raising in a principled manner for political discussion this question: is there a materialist basis for a new reformist period for European capitalism?
In an article in the Monthly Review of June 1976, the question of the character of the new reformism is dealt with and described in terms of the electoral means it seeks to base itself on. The MR likens it to the old reformism of the German Social Democratic Party before the First World War. The analogy, of course, is to a large extent accurate, as anyone familiar with the history of the old pre-World War I Social Democratic Party of Germany can easily see.
Material basis for pre-WWI reformism
But there are fundamental differences not dealt with in the Monthly Review which are extremely important if one is to put the new reformism in the proper historical context.
The old reformism grew up spontaneously on the basis of the expansion of the capitalist system and the conversion of competitive capitalism into monopoly capitalism. The material basis for the growth of reformism in Britain, in Germany, and elsewhere on the European continent was to be found in the predatory and unhindered imperialist expansion of European capital into Asia Africa, and Latin America.
On this basis the labor aristocracy obtained some crumbs. It acted as a means of putting a brake on the revolutionary class consciousness of the working class and put the proletarian revolution into the distant future. It was the day when European capital was supreme over the world and when the United States was a debtor nation and Europe was its creditor.
Such were the world conditions which constituted the material basis for the growth of reformism and the erosion of revolutionary class consciousness. Furthermore, there was not yet a truly revolutionary working class party in the Leninist sense of the word on the European continent the lesson of the Paris Commune notwithstanding.
Today's reality
The picture today is altogether different. Europe is today a continent semi-colonized by the U.S. The multi-national corporations dominated by the U.S. in truth control the destiny of West European capital. The expansion of European capitalism, such as it experienced in the period following the Second World War, cannot be repeated. The advance of the worldwide struggle of the oppressed people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America is an overriding obstacle.
Moreover, U.S. imperialism is more intent than ever on wringing out of the European economy (that is, out of the sweat and blood of the workers) every cent that it can in its unrestrained lust for superprofits. Even when it comes to small things, really picayune when one considers the mammoth size of U.S. imperialism, American finance capital is utterly unrestrained.
Recently, the European Common Market tried to put a small tax on imports of soybeans and soybean oil to ease the overproduction arising out of the capitalist economic crisis. This would have slightly infringed on U.S. exports. The U.S., through Ford's special trade counsel, Frederick B. Dent, immediately delivered an ultimatum: "If the EEC [European Economic Community] adopts this measure ... the U.S. will move immediately and firmly to defend its trade interests." (New York Times, July 12, 1976.)
This is not on a multibillion dollar plane and munitions contract — it's on soybeans. What would the U.S. not do on larger matters and on the broad political issues, such as concern Italy, Spain, France, and others?
Is this the materialist basis for a stable new reformism? On the contrary, the fears of the Italian CP are based on the possibility of a fascist coup more than their hopes are based on the success of the new reformism.
The prospect for European capitalism is one of growing deepening economic crisis in spite of the short-lived economic recovery now said to be in progress. The prospect is one of heightening interimperialist antagonisms among the European capitalist countries and evermore aggressive inroads by American finance capital. All of this will surely engender acute class antagonisms from which revolutionary struggles of the proletariat for power are sure to emerge.
Index
Chapters 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
Last updated: 13 May 2018