Enver Hoxha
EUROCOMMUNISM IS ANTI-COMMUNISM
As we mentioned above, modern revisionism emerged in the period of the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. It became an ally of the bourgeoisie and imperialism and joined in their efforts to contain and divert the great tide of proletarian revolutions, national liberation struggles and the peoples' anti-imperialist democratic movement. As such, the new revisionism could not fail to assume different forms and appearances, to use methods and tactics adapted to the needs of capital in each country. It assumed its greatest development, its extension in the communist and workers' movement after Khrushchevite revisionism emerged on the scene.
The betrayal which took place in the Soviet Union was of incalculable assistance to the bourgeoisie and imperialism at the moments most difficult for them. It gave big capital possibilities to attack the Marxist-Leninist theory and the practice of socialist construction, to create doubts about the revolutionary strategy of the proletariat, and to cause the ideological and political degeneration of the communist parties. Above all, the communist and workers' parties of Western Europe which followed the treacherous line of Tito and Khrushchev, were severely shaken ideologically. In these parties, the terrain had long been prepared for them to embrace the Khrushchevite revisionist ideas and practice and carry them further. Their organizational and ideological degeneration to different degrees and in various ways had begun earlier. Pseudo-revolutionary theories and practices had long been applied in their ranks.
During the Second World War many positive factors which made the transformation of the anti-fascist war into a profound popular revolution both possible and necessary, had emerged in Europe. Fascism had eliminated not only the national independence of the occupied countries, but also all democratic freedoms, and had even buried bourgeois democracy itself. Therefore, the war against fascism had to be not only a war for national liberation but also a war for the defence and development of democracy. As regards the communist parties, the achievement of these two objectives had to be linked with the struggle for socialism.
In the countries of Central and South-eastern Europe, the communist parties knew how to link the tasks of the war for independence and demcracy with the struggle for socialism. They worked out and applied a policy which led to the establishment of the regimes of the new people's democracy. Meanwhile, the communist parties of Western Europe did not prove capable of utilizing the favourable situation created by the Second World War and the victory over fascism. This showed that they had not properly understood and did not apply the directives of the 7th Congress of the Communist International. (The congress was held July 25 to August 21, 1935) This congress instructed that in the course of the opposition and fight against fascism, in certain conditions, the possibilities would be created for the formation of united front governments which would be entirely different from the social-democratic governments. They were to serve the transition from the stage of the fight against fascism to the stage of the fight for democracy and socialism. In France and Italy, however, the war against fascism did not lead to the formation of governments of the type which the Comintern wanted. After the war, governments of the bourgeois type came to power there. The participation of the communists in them did not alter their character. Even the French Communist Party, which up to the end of the Second World War had a correct line in general, was unable to overcome and correct its mistakes, weaknesses and deviations on certain problems, which stemmed among other things from lack of realistic analyses of the internal and external situations.
The French Communist Party played a primary role in the creation of the Popular Front in France. It launched the slogan of the Popular Front at its Congress of Nantes in 1935, a slogan which quickly found an echo among the broad masses of the French people. The Comintern made a high valuation of the efforts and work of the French Communist Party for the creation of the Popular Front. However, it must be said that the party did not know how or was unable to take advantage of the situation and utilize it in favour of the working class.
The Communist Party spoke openly about the danger threatening France from internal and external fascism, denounced this danger and came out in the streets in demonstrations, but it expected the measures against fascism and everything else from the "legal" governments, from the bourgeois governments, formed by combinations in the bourgeois parliament. This was apparent at the time of the creation of the Popular Front which was a success for the French Communist Party, because in the complicated situation of that time it blocked the way to the setting up of a fascist government in France. Although it took some measures in favour of the working class, the Blum government violated and betrayed the program of the Popular Front in its internal and foreign policy. The Communist Party, which did not take part in the Popular Front government, but supported it in Parliament, was unable to stop this process. The struggle of the masses, strikes, demonstrations and actions were replaced by the once a week meetings which Leon Blum held in his home with Thorez and Duclos.
The leader of the Popular Front government was a socialist, and the socialists made up a large part of the government, but the government apparatus at the centre and the base remained what it was. The army remained "la grande muette". It was commanded, just as under all former governments, by the reactionary caste of officers trained at the bourgeois military schools for the purpose of suppressing the French people and occupying colonies, but not fighting fascism and reaction.
The French Communist Party did not carry its actions through to the end, it was not organized for real struggle against fascism and reaction. The propaganda and agitation, the demonstrations and strikes it led, were not on the line of the seizure of power from the hands of the bourgeoisie. Irrespective of the fact that the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism were not denied, the activity and struggle of that party unwittingly and unconsciously assumed the nature of the struggle for reforms, for economic demands on the trade-union level. Of course, the trade-unions, play a revolutionary role when they are under correct leadership and a revolutionary situation is created in them, otherwise the trade-union movement is turned into a routine concocted by the trade-union chiefs through stands which are sometimes correct, sometimes deviationist, sometimes liberal, sometimes opportunist, but which, in the final analysis, end up in fruitless talks and compromises with the employers.
When the war broke out in Spain, the French Communist Party actively assisted the Communist Party of Spain and the Spanish people in the war against Franco with agitation and propaganda and material aid. It called for volunteers to go to Spain, a call to which thousands of members of the party and other French anti-fascists responded, and three thousand of them fell martyrs on Spanish soil. The main leaders of the party took part directly in the war or else went to Spain on various occasions. Most of the volunteers, who set out from many countries to join the International Brigades in Spain, passed through France. It was the French Communist Party which organized their passage.
During the Spanish War the communists and the working class of France gained new experience in battle, and this was added to the old tradition of the revolutionary struggles of the French proletariat. This constituted a great capital, a revolutionary experience gained in organized frontal class battles against the savage Franco reaction, Italian fascists and German nazis, as well as against French and world reaction. This revolutionary capital should have served the party in the critical moments of the Second World War and the occupation of France, but in reality it was not utilized.
The French Communist Party exposed the policy of Munich with which the Daladiers and Bonnets made concessions to Hitler, selling out the interests of the Czechoslovak people with the aim of turning the Hitlerite war machine against the Soviet Union. It unwaveringly defended the Soviet-German non-aggression pact and withstood the slanders and persecutions of the bourgeoisie. It called for resistance and rose boldly in the fight against the German occupiers and their collaborators of Vichy. This struggle, which began with actions, strikes, demonstrations and sabotage, was steadily extended. The FTP [Francs Tireurs et Partisans] created by the Communist Party were the only formations which fought the occupiers, while the Gaullist reseaux, as the name shows, were nothing but a network of the Secret Service to gather military information useful to the Allies. While the Gaullists advocated waiting for a landing before going into action, the Communist Party fought valiantly for the liberation of the country.
In the liberation war the French Communist Party organized and developed the resistance against the occupiers, and tried to and did achieve something in connection with the anti-fascist front. However, as the events showed, it had not considered and had not planned the seizure of power, or if it had planned this, it abandoned the idea.
This is confirmed by the fact that during the war the party created many committees for national liberation, but it did not give any attention to them and did not take any measures to ensure that these committees affirm themselves as the nuclei of the new state power. From beginning to end the partisan formations remained small and without organic links with one another. At no time did the party raise the question of the creation of big formations of a real national liberation army.
The French Communist Party carried on an anti-fascist liberation war which it led itself, but it did not turn this war into a revolutionary war of the whole people. Moreover, it considered it more appropriate and "revolutionary" to beg De Gaulle to be allowed to send one of its representatives to his "Free France Committee". All this meant, "Please, Mr. De Gaulle, accept me into your Committee too." This meant, "Mr. De Gaulle, the French Communist Party and the partisan forces are going under your command and the 'Free France Committee'" This meant, "Mr. De Gaulle, we communists have no intention of carrying out any revolution or of seizing power, all we want is that the old game of parties, the 'democratic' game, will be played in the France of the future and that on the basis of polling we too will take part in the future government."
While the French communists were acting in this way, the bourgeoisie was preparing and organizing its forces to seize power in France, which it would assume when the Anglo-American allies landed there. The National Committee, created and led by the De Gaulle group in London, and turned into a government in Algiers, would be the most suitable force to take over this power. Of course, it would do this together with the internal forces which the bourgeoisie had prepared and set in motion together with the old army commanded by generals who after having served Petain, had placed themselves into the service of De Gaulle, when it became clear that the German ship was sinking.
This was a dangerous situation, which the French Communist Party did not appreciate and assess correctly, or did not analyse thoroughly. It was afraid of complications with the allied forces which were landing, it was afraid of De Gaulle and the forces gathered around him, hence it was afraid of civil war, and especially of war with the Anglo-Americans.
The Communist Party forgot the example of the heroic communards, who encircled by Bismarck's German armies, rose in revolt against the Versaillese, "storming the heavens", as Marx said, and created the Commune of Paris. Theoreticians may try to justify this fatal mistake of the French Communist Party during the Second World War by saying: "The strength of the forces had to be taken into account." Of course, the strength of the forces had to be taken into account. But since the communards, without a party, without organization, without links with the peasantry and the rest of France, and encircled by foreign occupation troops, launched the attack and seized power, the French working class with its party at the head, tempered in battle, enlightened by Marxism-Leninism, and having such a great and powerful ally as the Soviet Union in its struggle, at the head of the working masses and the genuine patriots, could have carried out the immortal deed of the communards a hundred times more successfully.
The leadership of the Communist Party in general proved hesitant and weak in fulfilling with courage and wisdom the desires and aspirations of the French communist militants and proletariat, who fought with determination and heroism against the Hitlerite occupiers. It did not proceed on the Marxist-Leninist road, on the road of revolutionary struggle. It did not follow in the footsteps of the communards.
The anti-fascist war in Italy had its own characteristics and features, but the objectives which the leadership of the Italian Communist Party had set itself, its vacillations and concessions are similar to those of the French Communist Party.
The start of the Second World War found most of the leading cadres of the Italian Communist Party in France. Nearly all of them fell into the hands of the police. Amongst them was the general secretary of the party, Palmiro Togliatti, who as soon as he was released from jail, in March 1941, went to the Soviet Union.
Although the Italian Communist Party took a correct stand towards the aggressive war which the fascist powers launched, and condemned it as a predatory imperialist war, its activity remained restricted. All the efforts of this party were centered on the creation of a coalition of the anti-fascist parties in exile, on issuing a number of appeals, resolutions and propaganda publications.
In March 1943, the party, which had begun to develop its activity within the country from the middle of 1942, managed to organize a series of powerful strikes in various zones, which testified to the rise of the anti-fascist people's movement. These strikes accelerated the developments which led to the overthrow of Mussolini.
Fear of the revolution had made the Italian bourgeoisie and the symbol of its rule, the king, summon Mussolini to power in 1922. This same fear made the bourgeoisie and the king remove Mussolini from power in July 1943.
The overthrow of Mussolini was carried out by means of a coup d'état of the ruling caste. The take-over was the work of the king, of Badoglio, and other leading figures of fascism. Seeing the inevitability of Italy's defeat, by so doing they wanted to forestall the danger that the working class and the people of Italy would rise in struggle and revolution, which would not only overthrow fascism and the monarchy, but would place the domination of the Italian bourgeoisie as a class in jeopardy.
The resistance movement of the Italian people against fascism assumed great development especially after the capitulation of Italy. In Northern Italy, which was still occupied by the Germans, on the initiative of the party, the liberation war, which included the broad masses of anti-fascist workers, peasants, intellectuals and others, was organized. Big regular partisan formations were created, the overwhelming majority of them under the leadership of the party.
Likewise on the initiative of the Communist Party, national liberation committees were formed in Northern Italy, along with the partisan units and detachments. The party struggled to make these committees new organs of the democratic power, but in fact they remained coalitions of different parties. This did not permit them to be transformed into genuine organs of the people's power.
Whereas in Northern Italy the struggle of the party in general was developed on the right road, and could have led not only to the liberation of the country but also to the establishment of the people's power, in the South and on a national scale the party did not raise the question of the seizure of power. It sought only the formation of a strong government with authority, and did not fight for the overthrow of the monarchy and Badoglio. At a time when favourable conditions existed in the country to carry forward the revolution, the program of the Communist Party was minimal. The party was for a parliamentary solution within the framework of the laws of the bourgeois order. Its maximum claim was for its participation in the government with two or three ministers.
In this way, the Italian Communist Party involved itself in bourgeois political combinations and made unprincipled concessions one after the other. On the eve of the liberation of the country it had great political and military strength which it did not know how to use or did not want to use, and it disarmed itself voluntarily to the bourgeoisie. It abandoned the revolutionary road and set out on the parliamentary road, which gradually transformed this party from a party of the revolution into a bourgeois party of the working class for social reforms.
In regard to Spain, it must be said that the directives of the 7th Congress of the Communist International had greater results than in France or Italy. The effect of them was especially apparent during the Civil War. At first the communists did not take part in the Popular Front government, but gave it their support. Nevertheless, the Communist Party criticized the government for its irresolute stand and demanded that it take measures against the fascist danger, against the activity which the fascists carried out, especially the caste of officers, who constituted the immediate danger at that time.
On July 17, 1936 the fascist generals launched their "Pronunciamento". The fascists' plot was well co-ordinated. They had acted under the nose of the leftist government and the authorities established by a government which had emerged from the coalition of the Popular Front. All the anti-fascist forces lined up against this danger. In November the government headed by Largo Caballero was formed with two communist ministers included. Thus a common front was formed to defend the Republic even with arms. The government granted autonomy to the Basques, confiscated the lands of fascists in favour of poor peasants and nationalized all their property.
Right from the start, the Communist Party called on the working class and the people for resistance. The Communist Party did not content itself with appeals, however, but went into action. The members of the party went into the barracks to explain the situation to the soldiers, telling them what the fascists were and what a threat they presented to the workers, the peasants and the people. In Madrid, the capital of Spain, the fascist coup failed.
In other cities, the people, and first of all the working class, attacked the military units which had risen against the Republic and paralysed them. In Asturia the fight of the miners against the fascist troops raged for a month and this province remained in the hands of the people. The fascists could not pass there. The same thing occurred in the Basque region and many parts of Spain.
In the first days of August it seemed that the fascist generals were on the way out and their defeat would have been complete had the troops of fascist Italy and nazi Germany not gone to their assistance immediately, together with the troops recruited in Spanish Morocco and those sent by fascist Portugal.
In a country where the army was led by an old caste of reactionary royalist and fascist officers the fate of the country could not be left to the army, of which a part followed the fascist generals while the rest began to fall apart. Therefore, the Communist Party called for the creation of a new army, an army of the people. The communists set to work to create this army and within a short time managed to set up the Fifth Regiment. On the basis of this regiment, which achieved great fame during the Spanish War, the people's army of the Spanish Republic was built up.
The resolute stand of the Communist Party against the fascist attack, the bold example it set by placing itself at the head of the masses to prevent the advance of fascism, the example which its members set, 60 per cent of whom went to the different fighting fronts of the war, greatly increased the authority and prestige of the party among the masses of the people.
A party grows, wins authority and becomes the leadership of the masses when it has a clear line and hurls itself boldly into struggle to implement it. During the Civil War the Communist Party of Spain became such a party. Between the beginning of the fascist insurrection in July 1936 and the end of that year, the Communist Party increased the number of its members three fold. And despite the fact that in those days people turned to the party, not to cast votes in elections but to give their lives, at no time has any other party, whether the so-called communist party of Carrillo or the other revisionist parties which have opened all their doors to anyone, with religious beliefs or otherwise, workers or bourgeois, who want to join them, been able to show such a growth of its authority and influence as that which the Communist Party of Spain achieved during the time of the Civil War.
The Spanish War came to an end at the beginning of 1939, with the extension of Franco's rule over the whole country. In that war the Communist Party of Spain did not spare its efforts or forces to defeat fascism. If fascism triumphed, this is due, apart from various internal factors, first of all to the intervention of Italian and German fascism, as well as to the capitulationist policy of "non-intervention" followed by the Western powers towards the fascist aggressors.
Many members of the Communist Party of Spain gave their lives during the Civil War. Others fell victim to the Francoite terror. Thousands and thousands of others were thrown into prison where they languished for many years or died. The terror which prevailed in Spain after the victory of the fascists was extremely ferocious.
The Spanish democrats who managed to escape arrest and internment took part in the French resistance and fought valiantly, while the Spanish democrats who went to the Soviet Union entered the ranks of the Red Army and many of them gave their lives fighting against fascism.
Although in extremely difficult conditions, the communists continued the guerrilla war and the organization of resistance within Spain. The majority of them fell into the hands of the Francoite police and were condemned to death.
Franco dealt a heavy blow to the revolutionary vanguard of the working class and the masses of the Spanish people and this had negative consequences for the Communist Party. Losing its soundest, most ideologically prepared, most resolute and courageous element in the armed struggle and during the fascist terror, the Communist Party of Spain came under the negative and destructive influence of the cowardly petty-bourgeois and intellectual element, such as Carrillo and company, who became dominant. They gradually transformed the Communist Party of Spain into an opportunist and revisionist party.
The economic and political conditions which were created in Western Europe after the Second World War were even more favourable to the consolidation and spread of those mistaken opportunist views which had existed previously in the leaderships of the communist parties of France, Italy and Spain and further encouraged their spirit of concessions to and compromises with the bourgeoisie.
Amongst others, such factors were the abrogation of fascist laws and of other measures of restriction and compulsion which the European bourgeoisie had adopted from the first days after the triumph of the October Revolution and had maintained up to the outbreak of the war, with the aim of restraining the upsurge of the revolutionary drive of the working class, to hinder its political organization and prevent the spread of the Marxist ideology.
The re-establishment on a more or less extensive scale of bourgeois democracy, by completely legalizing all political parties except the fascist parties; permitting their unhindered participation in the political and ideological life of the country; giving these parties possibilities for active participation in the electoral campaigns, which were now held on the basis of less restrictive laws, for the approval of which the communists and other progressive forces had waged a long struggle, created many reformist illusions among the leaderships of the communist parties. The view began to establish itself among them that fascism was now finished once and for all, that the bourgeoisie was no longer able to restrict the democratic rights of the workers, but on the contrary would be obliged to allow their further development. They began to think that the communists, emerging from the war as the most influential and powerful political, organizing and mobilizing force of the nation, would compel the bourgeoisie to proceed on the course of extending democracy and permitting the ever greater participation of working people in running the country, that through elections and parliament they would have possibilities to take power peacefully and then go on to the socialist transformation of society. These leaderships considered the participation of two or three communist ministers in the post-war governments of France and Italy not as the maximum formal concessions which the bour geoisie would make, but as the beginning of a process which would develop gradually up to the creation of a cabinet consisting entirely of communists.
The development of the economy in the West after the war also exerted a great influence on the spread of opportunist and revisionist ideas in the communist parties. True, Western Europe was devastated by the war but its recovery was carried out relatively quickly. The American capital which poured into Europe through the "Marshall Plan" made it possible to reconstruct the factories, plants, transport and agriculture so that their production extended rapidly. This development opened up many jobs and for a long period, not only absorbed all the free labour force but even created a certain shortage of labour.
This situation, which brought the bourgeoisie great superprofits, allowed it to loosen its pursestrings a little and soften the labour conflicts to some degree. In the social field, in such matters as social insurance, health, education, labour legislation etc., it took some measures for which the working class had fought hard. The obvious improvement of the standard of living of the working people in comparison with that of the time of the war and even before the war, the rapid growth of production, which came as a result of the reconstruction of industry and agriculture and the beginning of the technical and scientific revolution, and the full employment of the work force, opened the way to the flowering amongst the unformed opportunist element of views about the development of capitalism without class conflicts, about its ability to avoid crises, the elimination of the phenomenon of unemployment etc. That major teaching of Marxism-Leninism, that the periods of peaceful development of capitalism become a source for the spread of opportunism, was confirmed once again. The new stratum of the worker aristocracy, which increased considerably during this period, began to exert an ever more negative influence in the ranks of the parties and their leaderships by introducing reformist and opportunist views and ideas.
Under pressure of these circumstances, the programs of these communist parties were reduced more and more to democratic and reformist minimum programs, while the idea of the revolution and socialism became ever more remote. The major strategy of the revolutionary transformation of society gave way to the minor strategy about current problems of the day which was absolutized and became the general political and ideological line.
In this way, after the Second World War, the Italian Communist Party, that of France, of Great Britain and after this, that of Spain too gradually began to deviate from Marxism-Leninism, to adopt revisionist views and theses and to take the course of reformism. When Khrushchevite revisionism emerged on the scene, the terrain was suitable for them to embrace it and unite firmly with it in the struggle against Marxism-Leninism. Apart from the pressure of the bourgeoisie and social democracy within their own countries, the decisions of the 20th Congress of the CPSU exerted a great influence on these parties to go over completely to anti-Marxist, social-democratic positions. The first to embrace the line of the 20th Congress of the CPSU were the Italian revisionists who immediately after that congress, loudly proclaimed the so-called Italian road to socialism. As soon as fascism had been overthrown, the Italian Communist Party had come out with an opportunist political and organizational platform. When Palmiro Togliatti landed in Naples on his return from the Soviet Union in March 1944, he imposed on his party the line of class collaboration with the bourgeoisie and its parties. In the plenum of the National Council of the Party which was held at that time, Togliatti declared, "We do not put forward the seizure of power as the objective of our struggle, because of international and national conditions; we want only to destroy fascism completely and to create a 'truly progressive, anti-fascist democracy'. The ICP 'must view every problem from the angle of the nation, of the Italian state'." (By P. Spriano, The History of The Italian Communist Party, Turin 1975).
In Naples Togliatti put forward for the first time the idea, and indeed the platform, of what he called the "new party of the masses", which differed in class composition, ideology and organizational forms from the communist party of the Leninist type. It was natural that, for a policy of unprincipled alliances and a policy of reforms which Togliatti wanted, he needed a reformist party, a broad unrestricted party which anyone could enter or leave whenever he liked. Many years later a collaborator of Togliatti wrote, "His notion of a mass party which has its roots in the people assumes all its proper value if we link it closely with the national component of the communists' struggle. Their objective, in fact, is to achieve profound changes in society...by means of reforms" ( G. Ceretti, In the Shadow of the Two T, Paris 1973). With the liberation of the country, the working class of Italy hoped for profound social justice, expected that things would change and that at last it would have its say. But this did not occur. And this was because of the organization and managernent of the life of the country by the different bourgeois parties, including the Communist Party. To deceive the masses and to give them the impression that their voice was being heard in the governing of the country, they arranged political life with majority and minority parties, with parties in office and parties in opposition, with all the parliamentary games and tricks, with all their lies and humbug.
At first the Italian Communist Party received two unimportant portofolios, which the big bourgeoisie allowed it within the "democratic" game, in order to strengthen its position, restore its army, the police and all the network of suppression, and in order to use the presence of communists in the government to strangle and paralyse any tendency of the working class and the Italian people to settle accounts with those who exploited them, oppressed them and sent them to rob other peoples of their freedom, leaving the bones of their sons in Abyssinia, Spain, Albania and the Soviet Union. Then, in May 1947, when they no longer wanted them, the bourgeoisie threw the communist ministers out of the government. The possible danger of an attack by the workers had been averted. The working class had been "lined up", incorporated in different unions according to party colours, and thus the struggle for votes, the parliamentary struggle, began.
After the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Togliatti and the Italian Communist Party publicly proclaimed their old revisionist stands. Not only did they approve every sign of liberalism which came from Moscow, but they raced ahead so fast that they put the Khrushchevite revisionists in difficulties, and thus the Italian Communist Party began to become a worry to them. The Togliatti supporters approved the revisionist course of "destalinization", applauded the Khrushchevites' mud slinging at Stalin and bolshevism, applauded the Khrushchevites' course for the destruction of the socialist foundations of the Soviet state, were in favour of revisionist reforms and the policy of opening up to the capitalist states, especially the United States of America. As revisionists, Togliatti and his supporters were fully in agreement with Khrushchevite peaceful coexistence and rapprochement with imperialism. This was their old dream of collaboration with the bourgeoisie on the national and international plane.
On the course on which the Khrushchevite revisionist party had set out in the Soviet Union it needed unity and friendship with the Italian Communist Party, it needed the support, in particular, of the two revisionist parties of the West, of France and Italy, which were two big parties with a certain international authority. This was the reason for the "honours", which the Khrushchevites paid these two parties, and together with the "honours", which were obvious, went big subsidies under the lap.
Just as the Khrushchevites hastened to turn the Soviet Union into a capitalist country, so Togliatti and company hastened to integrate themselves into the Italian capitalist order. In June 1956, in the report submitted to the CC of the Italian Communist Party under the flamboyant title "The Italian Road to Socialism", Palmiro Togliatti launched a series of theses so blatantly anti-communist that Khrushchev was compelled to tell him that he should restrain himself and should not cross his bridges so hastily.
At that time Togliatti put forward the question of the integration of socialism into capitalism, as well as the thesis denying the role of the communist party as the sole and indispensable leader of the struggle of the proletariat for socialism. He said that the impulse towards socialism might come even where there was no communist party. These theses were identical with those of the Yugoslav revisionists.
It is not accidental that the Italian revisionists proved to be ardent supporters of the rehabilitation of the Yugoslav revisionists. Togliatti personally went to Yugoslavia to bend the knee to Tito and to help make him "acceptable" in the international communist movement.
The Italian Communist Party and Togliatti spoke out against Moscow being "the only centre of international communism". They preached "polycentrism", the aim of which was the creation of a new revisionist bloc, headed by the Italian Communist Party, which by opposing the Soviet revisionist bloc, would raise the authority of the Italian Communist Party in the eyes of the Italian and world bourgeoisie. Togliatti thought that he would win the trust of the Italian monopoly capital in this way and be invited to join in its dance. Khrushchev saw the danger of the revisionist parties, both those of the countries which were members of the Warsaw Treaty and those which were outside it, breaking away from the tutelage of Moscow, therefore he tried to preserve "unity".
However, Togliatti's "polycentrism" and Khrushchev's "unity" were opposing and unreal things. Revisionism splits and does not unite.
The revisionist party of Togliatti today, under Longo and Berlinguer, has steered an obscure and by no means clear course. Intellectualist and social-democratic views have made deep impressions on its line and stands. The leader of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti, manifested these views with increasing stridency, up to his famous "testament", which he wrote a short time before he died in Yalta. This "testament" represents the code of Italian revisionism on which the views of Eurocommunism in general are based today.
After the 20th Congress of the CPSU modern revisionism found an environment suitable for its spread in the French Communist Party also. The idea of parliamentarianism, the idea of "alliances" with social-democracy and the bourgeoisie, of struggle for reforms, had long been implanted in the leadership of this party. This was not proclaimed openly as it is now, that is, it was not raised to a theory. But the opposition to and struggle against fascism, the struggle for the defence and development of democracy, for the improvement of the situation of the working people, all of these actions correct in principle and also correct as tactics, were not linked by the French Communist Party with the final aim, with the socialist perspective. For the leadership of the French Communist Party, this perspective was obscure, or something which was accepted in theory but was considered to be unrealizable in the conditions of France.
The French Communist Party, as we said, had avoided changing the war for national liberation into a people's revolution, had turned away from the struggle for the armed seizure of state power. The working class and its party shed their blood, but for whom? In fact, for the French bourgeoisie and the Anglo-American imperialists. How should this course of the French Communist Party be described? Bluntly: betrayal of the revolution. Politely: an opportunist liberal line.
It is true that the French Communist Party was not liquidated either by the German occupiers or by reaction, but the negative phenomenon occurred that, with the liberation of the country, the partisan forces which were led by the party were disarmed by the bourgeoisie, or more precisely, the leadership of the party itself took the decision that "they should be disarmed" since "the Homeland had been liberated".
With the liberation of the country, the bourgeoisie again took power while the communists were left out of the banquet. The victor's carriage was prepared for De Gaulle, who was proclaimed the saviour of the French people. To avoid the resistance and strikes of disillusioned and revolted workers, De Gaulle summoned Maurice Thorez; and one or two other communists to the government. The Communist Party paid for this place at the bottom of the table which the bourgeoisie gave it, by adopting stands contrary to the interests and will of the French working class.
One mistake inevitably leads to another. Dizzy with the electoral success which they achieved in the elections of November 10, 1946, where the communists and socialists won the absolute majority of seats in the National Assembly, the leaders of the French Communist Party went even further down the road of reformism. Precisely at this time Maurice Thorez gave an interview to the correspondent of the British newspaper "The Times" in which he said that the development of democratic forces throughout the world and the weakening of the capitalist bourgeoisie after the Second World War induced him to envisage for France "... the transition to socialism on roads other than those which the Russian communists followed thirty years ago... In any case, the road can be different for each country." (M. Thorez, The Sons of the People, Paris 1960).
Perhaps this road to socialism, about which Thorez spoke at that time, was not exactly the Khrushchevite road, the contours of which were laid out later. But in any case "the different road", which Thorez sought then, was not that of the revolution.
The French bourgeoisie and American imperialism did not allow Thorez and the leadership of the French Communist Party to live long with their dreams of the parliamentary road to socialism. Not much later, through a simple decree of the socialist premier of that time, Ramadier, the communists were thrown out of the government.
At its meeting in October 1947, the Central Committee of the French Communist Party was obliged to make self-criticism about its mistaken stands and actions at that period, about its incorrect evaluation of the situation, the ratio of forces, the policy of the Socialist Party etc.
Thus, beginning from the end of 1947, the French Communist Party began to see certain questions more correctly. It raised the working class in important class battles and big strikes, which had a pronounced political character, especially those of the years 1947 and 1948, which caused panic among the French bourgeoisie. At that time the French Communist Party fought against the Marshallization of France and the warmongering policy of American imperialism. It opposed the establishment of American bases in France and rose against the new colonial wars of French imperialism. The party called on the working class to oppose the colonial war in Vietnam, not merely with propaganda but also with concrete actions.
In this struggle the French working class produced from its ranks such heroes and heroines as Raymonde Dien, who lay down on the rails to stop a train loaded with arms for Vietnam.
The French Communist Party took an active part in the meeting of the Information Bureau which examined the situation in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. It condemned and sternly denounced the betrayal by Tito and his group.
However, after the death of Stalin and Khrushchev's advent to power, vacillations and deviations appeared again in the line of the French Communist Party and the stands of its leaders. These vacillations were apparent as early as 1954, in its attitude towards the liberation war of the Algerian people.
What did the French Communist Party do to assist this war? It waged only a propaganda campaign and nothing more. It was its duty to display its internationalism towards the liberation war of the Algerian people in deeds, because in this way it would have fought for the freedom of the French people too. It did not do this because it was guided by opportunist and nationalist stands. The French Communist Party went even further. It stopped the Communist Party of Algeria from taking part in the war. The facts show that when the flames of the national liberation war were sweeping Algeria, the Algerian communists did nothing, while the general secretary of the party, Larbi Buhali, went skiing and broke his leg in the Tatra Mountains of Czechoslovakia.
When Khrushchev and the Khrushchevites began their activity to seize power and bring about the capitalist degeneration of the Soviet Union, when they launched their attack against Stalin at the 20th Congress, it seemed that, in general, the French Communist Party was opposed to Khrushchevite revisionism and the Italian Communist Party. Apparently, Thorez and the leadership of the French Communist Party regarded the changes which were taking place in the Soviet Union with suspicion.
This could be seen in their stand towards the question of Stalin, when they did not associate themselves with Khrushchev's slanders; it was apparent at the time of the events in Poland and Hungary in 1956, when, in general, they maintained correct stands.
However, after Khrushchev and his group liquidated Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and others, after he consolidated his position in the party and the state and took the bit between his teeth, it was seen that the leadership of the French Communist Party headed by Thorez was wavering. Little by little and from concession to concession. it went over from its anti-Khrushchevite position to the position of Khrushchev. Was this fortuitous? Was it an aberration by Thorez? Was it a retreat on his part or on the part of Duclos and the other leaders in the face of the pressures, praises and blandishments of Khrushchev and his other putschist methods? Of course, those methods were used and had their influence in the transition to, and later, the uninterrupted march of the French Communist Party towards revisionism. But these do not account for everything. The true causes must be sought within the French Communist Party itself, in its earlier stands, in its internal structure and organization, in its composition and in the external environment which exerted its own pressure on that party.
The process of the descent of the French Communist Party into revisionism did not take place within one day. Quantity was transformed into quality over a relatively long period. The parliamentary reformist road, the Thorez road of "the extended hand", his admiration for and concessions to a series of intellectuals, some of whom were expelled after their betrayal, while others remained in the party, and developed defeatism, spreading all sorts of theories which distorted Marxism-Leninism, brought the French Communist Party to revisionist positions. The French Communist Party lived surrounded by a bourgeois, revisionist, Trotskyite, anarchist, political and ideological environment which beat ceaselessly at its walls, which penetrated them and caused the party great damage.
Major international events also created great upheavals in the French Communist Party. The publication of Khrushchev's secret report against Stalin, which was exploited by all the European and world bourgeoisie, also created a turbulent situation in the French Communist Party. The stand which this party adopted towards events in Hungary and Poland encountered the stern opposition of the big bourgeoisie of France, the middle bourgeoisie, the liberal intellectuals, as well as opportunists outside and also inside the party.
The events which occurred in France in connection with the war in Algeria also brought about that the old opportunist views and stands again came to the surface and became predominant in the French Communist Party.
All these factors taken together transformed the French Communist Party, from one of the parties with the greatest authority, as it had been known in the past, into a social-democratic reformist revisionist party. In a word, the French Communist Party turned back to the former traditions of the old socialist party from which it had broken away at the Congress of Tours in 1920.
One of the revisionist parties which has come out most fervently with the banner of Eurocommunism is the party of Carrillo. How did it come about that the Communist Party of Spain, a party which distinguished itself for its resolute stand at the time - of the Popular Front and the Civil War, -became united with the Khrushchevites and reached the state of corruption, degeneration and treachery it is in today? The changes did not and could not come about all at once, without a protracted process of decline and degeneration within the Spanish party and especially in its leadership.
In the early years after the Second World War the leadership of the Communist Party of Spain and the majority of its members were in France, where they lived a more or less legal life. The Spanish Republican government was in exile too. This was the time when the communists were still in the governments of countries like France and Italy. The Spanish communists too, began to act like their French and Italian comrades. In 1946 the Spanish Republican government in exile was re-formed in Paris. The Communist Party of Spain sent Santiago Carrillo as its representative to this government.
When the communist ministers were expelled from the governments in France and Italy in May 1947, the situation began to become difficult for the Communist Party of Spain and its cadres and militants, also. In August of the same year the Spanish communists were expelled from the government in exile. The police searches, arrests and other measures against them began anew. The infiltration of French and Francoite police into the ranks of the Spanish communists and democrats became more intensive.
It became ever more difficult for the leaders and cadres of the party to stay and work in France, therefore, they went to Prague, East Berlin, and other countries of people's democracy. Their exodus towards these countries more or less coincided with the time when the Khrushchevite revisionist scum began to surface in the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe.
The meetings of the Political Bureau and the Central Committee of the Party began to be held far away from Spain. Those communists, who had known the harsh conditions of the Civil War and illegal life in Spain, the difficulties and privations of life in exile in France, began to get the taste for the luxury and comfort of the castles of Bohemia and Germany, to become acquainted with the blandishments an praise, as well as with the various pressures of the Khrushchevite revisionists, the apparatchiki and their secret agents. As events showed, the leadership of the Communist Party of Spain became one of the most obedient blind tools of Nikita Khrushchev and those of his group.
In 1954 the 5th Congress of the Communist Party of Spain was held. At that congress the first elements of the spirit of pacifism and class conciliation became apparent, of that spirit which, a little later, was to become the platform of Spanish revisionism and would find its most complete expression in Carrillo's ultra-revisionist work of betrayal.
Adopting the Khrushchevite road of peaceful transition to socialism, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Spain published a document in June 1956, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Civil War, in which it formulated its policy of "national reconciliation". The Communist Party of Spain expressed its support for an agreement between forces which 20 years earlier had fought one another with opposing armies. "A vengeful policy will not help to get the country...out of this situation. Spain needs peace and reconciliation between its sons..." (C. Colombo, The History of The Spanish Communist Party, Milain 1972.) said this declaration.
The time of the resolute stands of the Spanish communists against the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. The dictatorial fascist regime of Primo de Rivera ruled in Spain from 1923-1930. and the generals' "pronunciamento", stands which had increased the influence of the communist party among the masses and had strengthened and tempered it, had passed. Now was the time of the line of the most vulgar opportunism, of blandishments and of bending the knee to the bourgeosie and its parties, to the Catholic Church and the Spanish army, a line which was to rank the party of Dolores Ibarruri and Carrillo among the typically social-democratic parties.
We were unaware of the internal process of retrogression which had occurred in the Communist Party of Spain, but at the Meeting of the Communist and Workers' Parties in Moscow in November 1960, when the Party of Labour of Albania openly exposed modern revisionism and especially Soviet revisionism, headed by the traitor to and renegade. from Marxism-Leninism, Khrushchev, the Communist Party of Spain and Ibarruri personally attacked us in the most vicious way.
Thus, when it came to defending Marxism-Leninism, the leaders of the Communist Party of Spain savagely attacked the Party of Labour of Albania and defended Khrushchev and his group of traitors to Marxism-Leninism. Time proved that our Party of Labour was on the right road, on the Marxist-Leninist road, while the Communist Party of Spain, headed by Ibarruri, had lined up totally in the camp of renegades from and enemies of communism.
After 1960 major quarrels and differences emerged in the Communist Party of Spain which led to its splitting, as a result of which two anti-Marxist revisionist groups were created: the one pro-Soviet, with Lister at the head, and the other, a faction led by Ibarruri and Carrillo, which sought independence from Moscow in order to adopt the line which later took the name Eurocommunism.
The line of Carrillo became more and more identical with the line of the Italian Communist Party and that of the French Communist Party. Likewise, it conformed with the line of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. Thus a still structureless unity began to crystalize between Titoism, the Italian revisionist party, the French revisionist party, and the Spanish revisionist party of Ibarruri.
At the time when this grouping of West European revisionists, including Tito, which wanted to break away from Moscow, was being formed, Mao Zedong's Communist Party of China welcomed Carrillo to Peking and had close and intimate talks with him. What the content of these talks was has not been revealed, but time is showing that the Chinese revisionists and the Spanish revisionists have many things in common. Therefore, open official links between the Chinese revisionist party and the Spanish revisionist party will be established before long.
Carrillo also adopted the political orientations, the aims, strategies and tactics of the Italian and French revisionist parties for the establishment of close collaboration with the reactionary bourgeoisie and the bourgeois capitalist states. However, the Communist Party of Spain still did not have legal status. For this reason, even under Franco, it made great efforts to be legalized within Spain. Francoism and Franco did not allow such a thing. After the death of Franco, with the coming to power of King Juan Carlos, Carrillo achieved some results in the direction of legalizing the party. However, in return for this legality, he had to make such statements and such colossal concessions in principle that even the French Communist Party and the Italian Communist Party had not permitted themselves to make to the capitalist bourgeoisie of their countries.
In order to return to Spain and legalize the party, Carrillo agreed to recognize the regime of King Juan Carlos, indeed he went so far as to praise it and call it "democratic", and accepted the monarchy and its flag. After this submission, the monarchists gave him carte blanche. The Communist Party of Spain was legalized. Carrillo and Ibarruri returned to Spain together with the whole herd of Spanish traitors.
As soon as they returned to Madrid, the revisionist chiefs openly denied the Republic and declared that the Spanish War now belonged to history. Coalition with the other bourgeois parties and the struggle for participation in the government of the country was proclaimed as the foundation of their line. In the various elections which have been held in Spain, Carrillo's party has not won more than 9 per cent of the votes and has a few deputies in parliament. Carrillo has described this as a "great democratic victory which will change the face of Spain". But in fact, the Spanish revisionists can never clean up the face of Spain because what Ibarruri, Carrillo and company have in their hands is not soap but tar. They have rejected the red flag of the revolution and have shamelessly trampled underfoot the blood of tens and hundreds of thousands of heroes of the Spanish War.
In the reformist and opportunist transformation of the communist parties of the Western countries, the line which the Soviet revisionist leadership established in its relations with them played an important role. The aim of the Khrushchevite revisionists of the Soviet Union was to compel the revisionist parties of the different countries to follow them in the policy of establishing their social-imperialist hegemony over the whole world. They demanded that these parties become their assistants in the fiendish activity they had engaged in.
Naturally, the American imperialists and their allies could not approve the hegemonic and expansionist aims of the Soviet social-imperialists. Nor could the revisionist parties of different countries agree with the Soviet policy. Urged by the bourgeoisie of their own countries, they began ever more openly to carry on separate activities independently of the revisionist party of the Soviet Union.
One after the other, the revisionist parties of Western Europe, Latin America and Asia rose to a greater or lesser extent against the Khrushchevite Soviet hegemony, at the same time bringing out new anti-Marxist theories. The "theories" of the big revisionist parties of Western Europe, which took the name Eurocommunism, very quickly became the most complete and most publicized of these theories. As soon as it emerged on the scene, Eurocommunism, like Titoite and Khrushchevite revisionism, began a frontal struggle against Marxism-Leninism, with the aim of revising and discrediting its fundamental principles in the eyes of the workers.
Eurocommunism is a variant of modern revisionism, a hotch-potch of pseudo-theories opposed to Marxism-Leninism. Its aim is to hinder the scientific theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin from remaining a strong and unerring weapon in the hands of the working class and the genuine Marxist-Leninist parties for the destruction of capitalism, its structure and superstructure, to its foundations, for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the construction of the new socialist society.
The Italian revisionists have defined Eurocommunism as "a third road, different from the experience of the parties of social-democracy and different from those which have been promoted since the October Revolution in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries". As the theses of the 15th Congress of the Italian Communist Party have it, this "third road" is presented as "a solution which is adapted to the national characteristics and the conditions of the present epoch, to the essential features and demands which are common to developed industrial societies, which are based on parliamentary democratic institutions, as the countries of Western Europe are today." (The politics and the organization of the italian communists, Rome 1979). Hence, as the Eurocommunists themselves admit, this "third road", this so-called Eurocommunism, has nothing at all to do with the genuine scientific communism elaborated by Marx and Lenin, embodied in the October Revolution and in the other socialist revolutions that followed it, and confirmed by the class struggle of the international proletariat. Eurocommunism can be described accurately and correctly as European revisionism number three.
Now the French Communist Party, the Italian and Spanish parties, have only the name communist, because the three of them are floundering in the stinking waters of the bourgeoisie which they serve. The programs of the revisionist parties of the Western countries are typically reformist programs, which do not differ from the programs of the bourgeois parties, socialist and social-democratic, which sing the same refrain. Indeed, it is the latter which inspire the revisionists. Their objective is not the proletarian revolution and the socialist transformation of society, but the creation of the opinion among the broad masses that they should abandon the revolution, which, they say, has become unnecessary and inappropriate. But what should be done, according to them? "We must transform our life-style", "we must change our way of life", "we must think about the day-to-day problems", "we must not attack present-day capitalist society", "we must carry out a cultural revolution in place of the proletarian revolution", explain these anti-Marxist parties day and night. "We must live better, must protect our wages and not allow them to be reduced, must have paid holidays and guaranteed jobs", "what more can we ask?" they say to the workers. The Italian and French revisionist parties deal with these questions at every meeting and every congress and feed this stuff to the proletariat and the workers in order to win their votes.
The classical revisionism of the social-democratic type has been integrated into modern revisionism. The theories of Bernstein and Kautsky in various forms, sometimes openly and sometimes modified, are found in the revisionist Browder, are found in Khrushchevite revisionism, in Titoite revisionism, in French revisionism and in the Italian revisionism of Togliatti, in the so-called Mao Zedong thought, and all revisionist currents. These innumerable anti-Marxist currents, which are developing in the present-day capitalist and revisionist world, are the fifth column in the ranks of the world revolution to prolong the existence of international capitalism by fighting the revolution from within.
Negation of Marxism-Leninism is the objective which capitalism and imperialism have always wanted and want to achieve. In this direction modern revisionism is helping them with all its means and ways, open and disguised, with all kinds of pseudo-scientific philosophical theories and slogans.
At the 22nd Congress of the French Communist Party, Marchais declared that they would go to socialism without class struggle, and that the dictatorship of the proletariat was no longer needed to build it. He admitted that in his "socialism" there would be not merely different parties, but even parties of reaction. Thus, for Marchais, as for Brezhnev and Tito, socialism has already begun to be built in many countries where capital rules, and all that is necessary is to put the signboard "socialist country" over the gate.
In other words, since all countries are going to socialism spontaneously, as the revisionists preach, no one allegedly has any need for Marxism-Leninism as the science of revolution and socialism, for it now belongs to the past, and therefore should be abandoned.
The various revisionists allege that Marxism-Leninism "is in its dotage", that it is no longer capable of solving the problems which the developed society of the present day raises, that it is no longer suitable to present-day civilization. According to them, modern society has absorbed all that it can absorb from Marxism-Leninism, and this has entered the ranks of outdated philosophies such as Kantism, positivism, Bergsonian irrationalism and other idealist philosophies. The ultrarevisionist Milovan Djilas writes openly that Marxism-Leninism, a philosophy elaborated in the 19th century, can no longer be valid when contemporary science is much more developed than the science and philosophy of the past century.
Proceeding on this road, during the last two or three years, the Italian, French and Spanish revisionists have made great efforts to formulate in theory their opportunist views and stands, which they call Eurocommunism, and to give them the character of a separate ideological and political doctrine, which allegedly represents "a new development of Marxism". In the recent congresses which these parties have held, and in the programs which were adopted, Eurocommunism assumed a completely defined form. These three parties have officially rejected Marxism-Leninism. The French of Marchais, who consider the theory of Marx a theory with dry and dogmatic concepts, a closed system of unalterable rules, say that the new "theory" which they have created, has "its sources in the philosophical and political currents of our nation". (Cahiers du communisme, June-July 1979, p.392) It is self-evident that the French revisionists are not referring to those revolutionary progressive philosophical contributions which Marx included in a critical way in his work, but precisely to those views which he exposed and refuted and which the revisionists have now made their own.
The revisionists' removal of any reference to Marxism-Leninism in their Constitutions, programs and other documents, is not an act of just a formal character, which sanctions what they had done in practice long before. Likewise this act does not represent only the implementation of the will of the bourgeoisie, its demand that the revisionist parties must no longer mention "the spectre of communism". Neither is it only an act which officially expresses the open transition of modern revisionism to the ideological positions of European social-democracy. The abandonment of any reference to Marxism-Leninism by the revisionist parties, which up till now have used it as a disguise to deceive the working people, shows that they have commenced an open struggle against it from the positions of bourgeois anti-communism. The fact is that on the ideological plane, it is precisely the Eurocommunists who are carrying the banner of struggle against Marxism-Leninism, socialism and the revolution today. The publicity which the big bourgeois press, the publishing trusts, the radio and the television are giving to the articles, books, speeches and congresses of the revisionists is truly astounding. Figures such as Berlinguer, Marchais, and even Carrillo have been transformed by the big propaganda machine into personalities who outstrip not only the film "stars" but even popes and heads of the biggest states. Journalists and writers pursue them at every step and never allow them to drop a word without publishing it in the biggest headlines on the front pages of newspapers.
All this advertisment, all this clamour, is evidence of the great joy of the bourgeoisie, which has found zealous lackeys who are fighting communism from the left, as they say, at a time when its open anti-communist weapons had become rusty and broken. Capital could not find anything better or more effective in the difficult situations it is experiencing than the service which the revisionists offer. Therefore, the praise which the bourgeoisie is heaping on the demagogy and deception, the theoretical speculations and practical activity with which the revisionists are manoeuvring to deceive and disorganize the workers, is completely understandable and justifiable.
The Eurocommunists try to paint a distorted picture of the present-day capitalist society and its contradictions, to present it as a society which has evolved so greatly since the time of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin that their fundamental analyses and teachings about it "are out-of-date and no longer valid".
They see present-day capitalist society as unified and no longer distinguish its polarization into proletarians and bourgeois, no longer see the contradiction between these two classes as the fundamental contradiction, and consequently do not see the class struggle as the main motive force of this society. For the Eurocommunists, of course, there are certain contradictions, which they call contradictions of "development", of "progress", of "well-being", of "democracy", etc., which have allegedly replaced the old contradictions, especially the contradiction between labour and capital, on which the whole Marxist-Leninist theory about the role and the historic mission of the proletariat, the revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism is based.
Today, they say, the proletariat of the time of Marx and Lenin no longer exists, the classes have changed and they are no longer those which Marx and Lenin knew and about which they spoke. Nowadays, say the Eurocommunists, even the bourgeois class has dissolved as a class, has been transformed into "workers" and all the wealth has been gathered in the hands of a small clique of capitalists who preserve and defend this property. Marchais, for example, has "discovered" that in France today the bourgeoisie "that counts" has been reduced to only 25 financial and industrial groups, while the others are "workers". Consequently, stress the revisionist renegades, the present-day bourgeois capitalist state has changed, because society itself has changed and the classes have changed. Therefore, they reason, Marx and Lenin, who did not know the present-day capitalist state, which is entirely different from that of their time, foresaw another role for the proletariat, which differs from that of the present day, another method for the seizure of power by the proletariat, another method of struggle to go over to socialism.
For the Eurocommunist revisionists, all the classes and strata of capitalist society today, and especially the intelligentsia, have been identified with the proletariat. With the exception of a small handful of capitalists, in their eyes all the others, without distinction, want to change society from a bourgeois society into a socialist society. And in order to carry out this change, according to the Eurocommunists, the old society has to be reformed and not overthrown.
Hence, they imagine that state power must be taken gradually, through reforms, through the development of culture, and through the close collaboration of all classes without exception, both those who hold and those who do not hold this power.
All the revisionists follow the course of Marcuse, who when he speaks about the American proletariat, tries "to prove" that in the "highly industrialized American society", a proletariat in the Marxist sense does not exist, because, according to him, this proletariat now allegedly belongs to history.
To Marcuse, Garaudy, Berlinguer, Carrillo, Marchais, and their company, this means that the "consumer society", "developed industrial society" has not only changed the form of the old capitalist society but has also leveled out the classes, and as Georges Marchais in particular has declared, now "we can no longer talk about the French proletariat, but about the French working class".
Marx said that "...our 'proletarian' is economically none other than the wage-labourer who produces and increases 'capital', and is thrown out on the streets as soon as he is superfluous for the needs of aggrandissement of 'Monsieur capital'.. ."
What has changed in France that Marchais can no longer see proletarians? Are there no longer wage-labourers who produce surplus value and increase capital, are there no longer unemployed whom "Monsieur capital" has thrown out on the streets as unwanted?
In socialist Albania, certainly, the proletariat no longer exists in the sense that this notion has in the capitalist countries, because in our country the working class has the state power in its hands, is the owner of the chief means of production, is not oppressed or exploited, and works freely for itself and for the socialist society.
The matter is quite different in the capitalist countries where the working class is deprived of the means of production and, in order to live, is obliged to sell its labour power and submit to capitalist exploitation, which is continuously increasing its intensity. Besides being savagely oppressed and exploited to the bone, the proletariat in those countries also suffers the oppression of the bourgeois army and police. Although the proletariat in the capitalist states may be dressed in the nylon materials which the "consumer society" produces, in fact it remains the proletariat.
It is not without purpose that the modern revisionists change the name of the proletariat. If one speaks of the proletariat, which in capitalism possesses nothing but the strength of its arms, it is self-evident that this proletariat has to fight its exploiters and oppressors. It is precisely this struggle, which has the objective of destroying the old state power of capital to its foundations, that terrifies the bourgeoisie and precisely in this context the revisionists assist the bourgeoisie with all the means they possess.
The denial of the existence of the proletariat as a class in itself, as the most advanced class of society, charged by history with the glorious mission of eliminating the exploitation of man by man and building the new, truly free, equal, just and humane society, is nothing new. The various opportunists were preaching it at the time when Marxism was emerging as a philosophic doctrine and a political movement. Marx and Engels refuted these views and gave the proletariat weapons and arguments to fight not only these, but also the other lackeys of the bourgeoisie, the future apologists of capitalism, such as the modern revisionists today.
One of the greatest merits of Marxism is that it saw in the proletariat not just an oppressed and exploited class, but the most progressive and revolutionary class of the time, the class which history had charged with the mission of the gravedigger of capitalism. Marx and Engels explained that this mission stems from the socio-economic conditions themselves, from the place which the proletariat occupies and the role which it plays in the process of production and socio-political life, from the fact that it is the bearer of the new relations of the future socialist society, that it has its own scientific ideology which illuminates its way has its own leading staff - the communist party.
Despite the changes which have occurred in the development of the economy and the social composition of capitalist society, the overall conditions of the existence, the work and the life of the proletariat today remain those which Marx analysed. No other class or social stratum can replace the proletariat as the main and leading force of the revolutionary processes for the progressive transformation of society.
The teachings of Marx on this question remain unshaken. In the Marxist theory the proletariat finds its own spiritual weapon, just as this theory finds its material weapon in the proletariat. Marx said that the proletariat is the heart of the revolution while philosophy is its head. Marx's "Capital" is the beacon light for the world proletariat, which shows it scientifically in what manner and in what forms the bourgeoisie exploits it. The capitalists chain the proletariat to the factories and machines, but "Capital" teaches the proletariat how to break these chains.
The revisionist theses about the change in the nature of the proletariat and its historic mission have long existed in the communist parties of the Western countries, but the first to come out with them publicly and officially was Roger Garaudy. Garaudy was one of the first revisionist "theoreticians" to develop the theory that one could no longer talk about the impoverishment of the French proletariat and that the various classes and strata of the population were already moving towards blending and unification.
The thesis of Garaudy, now repeated and applied by the other revisionists, is that "in the present situation, there is no longer any need for violent revolution, because the workers are gradually sharing actively in the profits of the big capitalist enterprises, which now are no longer run by the bourgeois owners, but by the technicians who have replaced them". This is a great fraud, because these technicians and specialists are under the thumb of a single management, they are the servants of the big capitalist trusts and monopolies which are the real owners of the means of production.
In the capitalist world, despite the changes which have taken place in the social class structure, nothing has altered in regard to the positions of classes and class relationships. The theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin about classes and the class struggle in bourgeois society retains its full freshness and validity.
A series of other "theories" similar to that of Garaudy emerged in the West from both the "new" French pseudo-philosophers and from their German, American, Italian and other counterparts. All these theories carry the brand of revisionism, Trotskyism, anarchism and social-democracy. The moment arrived when all these theories became completely the private property of the French, Italian, Spanish, British and other revisionist parties, which gathered up all this revisionist and opportunist refuse and codified it in a banal way.
Daily life, the struggle of the working class, has exposed these theories and continues to do so.
It has revealed their reactionary counterrevolutionary aim. It proves that the working class is impoverished the more the capitalists are enriched, that it properly understands what Marx said, that the more wealth each worker produces the poorer he becomes, that the more commodities the worker makes the more he reduces his own value as a commodity, that the proletariat cannot escape from exploitation without taking over the means of production and without destroying the state power of the bourgeoisie.
Today, the modern revisionists such a Marchais, Berlinguer, Carrillo and company, reject this scientific view of Marx. Today, they say, the process of the relative and absolute impoverishment of the proletariat no longer exists because of the development of the technical-scientific revolution and the gains which the workers have achieved through reforms. They want to tell the proletarians that all their demands and needs are being fulfilled from the hand-outs which capitalism gives them, therefore they have no reason to rise in revolution.
Some other revisionist "theoreticians", faced with the undeniable facts of life, declare that it is true that Marx spoke about the exploitation of the working class, but what he said is equally valid for both the capitalist and the socialist countries. Consequently, the working class has no reason to rise against capitalist exploitation because allegedly it can never escape it! This is a distortion of the reality and a slander. The position of the working class in capitalism and its position in socialism are diametrically opposite.
In the capitalist and revisionist countries the worker is not free, either in work or in life. He is a slave to the machine, to the capitalist and the technocrat, who squeeze out the last drop of his labour power and from this create surplus value for capital. Only in the genuine socialist order, in which the working class is in power, do the teachings of Marx, properly applied, provide the possibility for the proletariat to become conscious and completely the master of the means of production and, through its dictatorship, to gain all its political, economic and democratic freedoms and rights.
The binding of the working class with economic chains, with which capitalism shackles it, is the main thing in bourgeois society. The whole capitalist system has been built on this bondage. However, the bourgeois and revisionist theoreticians, being quite unable to deny this great truth, try to obscure the question of economic exploitation about which Marx speaks and which is primary, and to interpret it through a series of concocted theses and false views. Being unable to refute the binding of the worker to capital, these "theoreticians" preach that allegedly there is no longer any need to point out how much the owner in the capitalist order squeezes and enslaves men, but what should be pointed out is that his link with capital is allegedly in favour of the worker because it keeps him alive. Their aim is to divert the proletariat from the class struggle against capitalism by trying to focus its attention on the "blessings" of the "consumer society". The modern revisionists have invented many deceptive theses to divert attention from economic oppression and exploitation. They give great publicity to their thesis that in the "consumer society" the worker enjoys so many things that he regards the economic problems as coming at the bottom of the list. According to them, almost his only worries are the problems of religion, the family, his wife, his TV-set, his car, etc. And as a result the problem of economic exploitation is allegedly no longer the basic problem of the class struggle and revolution. However, they do all these things in order to water down the wine and divert the working masses from the struggle to overthrow the bourgeois order.
In breaking with Marxism-Leninism and wanting to create a new "theory" which is distinct from the doctrine of Marx and Lenin on all fundamental questions, the Eurocommunists have got themselves into a great mess and confusion, into profound incoherence and great contradictions. They are practically unable to explain any contradictions of the present-day capitalist world or to give answers to the problems which arise from them. True, they speak about such phenomena as "crisis", "unemployment", the "degradation and degeneration" of bourgeois society, but they content themselves with general observations which no one, not even the bourgeoisie, denies. However, they consciously try to cover up the cause of these phenomena, the savage capitalist exploitation, and to avoid showing that this exploitation can be eliminated only through the revolution, with the overthrow of all the old relations which keep the system of capitalist oppression on its feet.
With their theses about the "dying out of the class struggle" as a consequence of the "essential changes" which capitalist society has allegedly undergone because of the development of the forces of production, the technical-scientific revolution, the "restructuring of capitalism", etc.; with their preaching of the need to establish extensive class collaboration, because now allegedly it is not only the working class and working masses who are interested in socialism but also nearly all the strata of the bourgeoisie, except for a tiny group of monopolists; with their claim that the transition to socialism can be made through reforms, because present-day capitalist society is allegedly developing on the road of peaceful integration into socialism, etc., the Eurocommunists have identified themselves, not only in theory but also in their practical activity, with old European social-democracy and have amalgamated with it in a single counterrevolutionary current in the service of the bourgeoisie.
Their stand towards the working class and its leading role has been the touchstone for all revolutionaries at all times. Abandonment of the hegemony of the proletariat in the revolutionary movement, pointed out Lenin, is the most vulgar form of reformism. But this vulgarity does not worry the Italian revisionists. Indeed they proclaim their reformism so bombastically that they make themselves truly ludicrous. "The leading role of the working class in the process of leaving capitalism behind and building socialism," they declare, "can and must be achieved through collaboration and agreement between different parties and currents which aspire to socialism, and within the framework of the democratic system in which all constitutional parties enjoy full rights, even those who do not want the socialist transformation of society and oppose it, of course, while always respecting the democratic constitutional rules." (The politics and the organization of the Italian communists, Rome 1979)
This "original Marxist" vision, add the supporters of Berlinguer, is not a new discovery, but the development of the thinking of Labriola and Togliatti. In this case, they themselves admit the source of their ideas. However, it shoudl be added that Labriola, whom they are now making a classic, was not a consistent Marxist. He remained far removed from the revolutionary activity and problems of the revolution. As for Togliatti, his work already shows that he was a deviator and an opportunist.
By referring to Labriola or Togliatti, the Italian revisionists and their counterparts in France or Spain want to leave in oblivion Lenin's theory about the necessity for the hegemony of the proletariat in the revolution and the construction of socialism. In all his work of genius Lenin defended and developed Marx's theory about the hegemony of the proletariat in the revolution, abandoned by the European social-democrats. The social-democratic views on this question have been now revived by the revisionists. He proved that in the new conditions of imperialism, the hegemony of the proletariat is essential not only for the socialist revolution but also for the democratic revolution. He explained that the establishment of this hegemony is essential because the proletariat is interested more than any other social class in the complete triumph of the revolution, in carrying it through to the end. With the theory of Lenin the proletariat has gone into the revolution and has won, while with the theories that the revisionists preach, it remains oppressed by the bourgeoisie.
The Leninist theory about the undivided hegemony of the working class has found a brilliant confirmation and application in the carrying out of the revolution and the triumph of socialism in Albania, too. To the Albanian communists it was clear from the start that only one party, the Communist Party, could lead the National Liberation War through to complete victory, that only one class, the working class, could be the leader in this struggle, that the main ally of this class would be the poor and middle peasantry, that the youth and the students would be the main support of the Party and, together with the Albanian women, would comprise the fighting strata of the people's revolution.
The small number of the working class in Albania did not hinder it in the least from playing its hegemonic role because it had at the head its Communist Party, which was guided by the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. The correct line of our Party, which responded to the situation and the interests of the broad working masses, made it possible to achieve the great unity of the people around the working class in a single front under the sole and undivided leadership of the Communist Party.
The correct line and leadership of our Party led to the extension of the struggle, which gradually built up until it assumed the form of a general uprising, a broad people's armed struggle, up to the liberation of Albania and the establishment of the people's power.
In negating the hegemonic and leading role of the working class in the revolution and the construction of socialism, the Eurocommunists, could not but abandon also the role and mission of the communist party, as it is defined by Marxism-Leninism and as it has been confirmed by the long history of the world revolutionary and communist movement.
The theses of the 15th Congress of the Italian Communist Party say that now a "new party" has been built. What is this "new party"? "The Italian Communist Party," says its Constitution, "organizes the workers, the working people, the intellectuals and the citizens who fight within the framework of the Republican Constitution for the consolidation and development of the anti-fascist democratic regime, for the socialist rejuvenation of society, for the independence of the peoples, for the reduction of tension and for peace, for cooperation among all nations ..." The Constitution continues, "the Italian Communist Party is open to all citizens of 18 years of age, who irrespective of race, philosophical views and religious belief, accept the political program and untertake to act to carry it out by militating in one of the organizations of the party..." (The politics and the organization of the Italian communists, Rome 1979).
We quoted this long clause of the Constitution of the Italian revisionist party, which is almost identical with those of the French and Spanish revisionist parties, in order to show how far the Eurocommunist revisionists have departed from the concepts of the Leninist party and how closely they have approached the models of socialist and social-democratic parties. They speak about a "new party", wanting it to be distinct from the party of the Leninist type, but in fact their party which they call new is an "old party" of the type of the parties of the Second International, against which Lenin fought and on the ruins of which he built the Bolshevik Party which became an example and the model for all other genuine communist parties.
The statement placed at the beginning of the Constitution, that anyone, irrespective of his philosophical views and religious belief, can enter the party, requires no comment to prove that the philosophy of Marx is alien to this party, that its eclecticism is blatant, that the line of compromises of every kind is part of its strategy, let alone its tactics, that the Italian Communist Party is a liberal social-democratic party, with its line, policy and stands determined by the changing political circumstances. Its liberal policy ensures that at times it will get votes, but not that it will take and hold power. It makes the bourgeoisie praise it, and the priests in the churches and the monks in the monasteries sympathize with it.
Lenin's fundamental idea about the party is, that it must be a conscious vanguard detachment of the working class, a Marxist detachment of it.
".... the role of vanguard fighters. Lenin said, can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory." Lenin
This revolutionary vanguard theory, a reliable guide to victory, is Marxism. Not only have the revisionists abandoned the fundamental condition for a communist party to be such, i.e., acceptance of Marxism, but they permit all the bourgeois, opportunist, reactionary or fascist philosophical views to coexist in their party, and this they have sanctioned in their Constitution. The thing that characterizes, that distinguishes the communist parties, is Marxism-Leninism, the sole ideology by which they are guided and to which they loyally adhere in all their activity. Without Marxism-Leninism there cannot be a communist party.
The genuine communist parties are parties to carry out the revolution and build socialism, while the so-called Italian, French and Spanish communist parties and others of this type are parties of bourgeois reforms. The former are parties for the overthrow of the bourgeois order and the construction of the new world, the latter are parties for the defence of the capitalist order and the preservation of the old world.
At the time when Lenin was fighting against the opportunists for the construction of the Bolshevik Party, he said:
"...give us an organization of revolutionaries, and we will overturn Russia!" -Lenin
He built such a party and led the Russian working class to the glorious victory of the October Revolution.
But where do Berlinguer's revisionists want to lead the Italian working class? "We must fight within the framework of the Republican Constitution," they say. And the bourgeoisie says, "Fight as much as you like within the bars of the cage of my Constitution because this does me no harm."
The bourgeoisie maintains the army, the police, the courts, etc., to defend its Constitution, laws and institutions. Lined up beside them now is the revisionist party which is struggling to keep the working class oppressed and enslaved, to corrupt it ideologically and confuse it politically. It has transformed itself into an institution of the bourgeois state to extinguish the revolutionary spirit of the working class, to obscure the socialist perspective, to prevent it from understanding the miserable condition in which it is living and from rising in resolute struggle to overthrow the bourgeoisie.
How do the Eurocommunists envisage socialism? Although they are obliged to speak about socialism for demagogy, the "socialism" which they want to build is simply a fraud and deception.
It is known that not only now, but for years, many bourgeois and petty-bourgeois philosophers and ideological trends have speculated greatly with the idea of socialism. Many utopian schemes and endless misrepresentations have been concocted about socialism. Marx rejected all the old forms of socialism and taught the world proletariat that it should organize and fight to establish the new social order based on genuine scientific socialism.
As early as in the first programmatic document of Marxism, the "Communist Manifesto," Marx and Engels made an all-round criticism of various pseudo-socialist theories, such as "feudal socialism", "petty-bourgeois socialism", German "genuine socialism", "conservative or bourgeois socialism". They revealed their class essence as anti-scientific theories which served the interests of the bourgeoisie. In struggle against bourgeois and petty-bourgeois opportunist and anarchist theories which hindered the emancipation of the proletariat and its struggle, the "Manifesto" taught the working class that it could escape bourgeois oppression and exploitation only by means of the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat and that it could not liberate itself without, at the same time, liberating the whole of society.
History has proved that since the birth of Marxism, every other ideological trend which has come out with socialist slogans, has turned into a reactionary current in the process of the class struggle. Marxism alone provides the accurate idea of the genuine socialist society. No socialism can be achieved or built without being based on this theory.
The first great confirmation of the Marxist theory formulated in the "Communist Manifesto" came in the revolutionary events of 1848-1849, which shook the whole of Europe.
Revolutions not only open the way to social progress but they always become the grave of utopian, revisionist and other false doctrines. This occurred with the doctrines of "bourgeois socialism", "petty-bourgeois socialism", etc., which were buried by the revolutions of 1848-1849.
The main evil of those so-called socialist doctrines was that they completely ignored the revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat and envisaged socialism as the realization of this or that system, invented by this or that "theoretician". This was the source of all those illusions that the creation of associations supported by the state, restriction of inheritance rights, establishment of progressive tax scales would gradually lead to socialism in a peaceful way. Proudhon and Louis Blanc, the German "genuine" socialists and utopian communists like Waitling, Cabets, Desamis and others had preached and were preaching this "doctrinaire socialism".
The working class leaves this doctrinaire socialism to the petty bourgeoisie, says Marx, while " ... the proletariat rallies more and more round revolutionary socialism, round communism... This socialism," he continues, " is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations."
At present the new Proudhonists, such as Georges Marchais, Enrico Berlinguer, Santiago Carrillo and others are trying to impose on the West-European proletariat these old philosophies which were refuted by Marx, dressed up in different cloaks. All the revisionists want to deceive the masses with their "theories" by eliminating the scientific foundations of Marxism. They are simply telling lies when they say that "they are objective in their recognition of the laws which make society advance"! In reality they have become lackeys of the "consumer society" created by the capitalist and imperialist bourgeoisie to ensure maximum profits from the exploitation of the working class and all the working masses. These revisionists also want to consume something from the surplus value which is extracted from the proletariat of their countries.
The question of what socialism is, what socialist society is, what it represents and achieves at present is not a question of the future, but a concrete reality, a whole historical practice, a tangible social system. Genuine scientific socialism, that advocated by the great geniuses of the revolution, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, was achieved and existed for a long time in the Soviet Union and many other former socialist countries, and it exists and is advancing in socialist Albania. The efforts which the Eurocommunists are making today "to prove" that genuine socialism has allegedly never existed anywhere, that the socialist society built in the Soviet Union by Lenin and Stalin was allegedly a "distortion of socialism", indeed a "failure" of the concepts and ideas which Marx and Lenin had of socialism, are nothing but expressions of their hostility to communism, expressions of their desire to keep the existing bourgeois society intact.
The Italian, French and Spanish revisionists have traveled a long road to reach the point of their denial of socialism. At first, they claimed that socialism in the Soviet Union was divided into two parts, a "Leninist socialism" which was good, just, but conditioned by the special historical conditions of czarist Russia, therefore unsuitable for the developed capitalist countries, and a "Stalinist socialism" which was bad, because allegedly it was a distortion of the former, deformed, bureaucratized, and so on. This evolution in judgements is not accidental. If the "Leninist experience" were accepted, even with reservations, if the justice of the use of the revolutionary violence for the seizure of power were accepted, for example, then there would be no place left for the Eurocommunists' "model" of socialism. Lenin's theory on the revolution and the construction of socialism, which is a further development of Marx's teachings, is so much a whole, so coherent, so scientific and logical that it must be accepted as it is or not accepted at all. It cannot be chopped into pieces without falling into irreconcilable contradictions and absurdities of logic.
Thus the Eurocommunists are now no longer opposed only to Stalin, but have abandoned Leninism too, thinking that with this they have escaped and found the way to preach "Eurocommunist socialism". But if they have abandoned Leninism, the proletariat has not done so. Leninism is a living science, the militant ideology of the proletariat, the banner of the revolution and the construction of socialism. Leninism is that powerful weapon with which all genuine revolutionaries, all those who want communism and are striving for socialism, fight against all enemies, against the bourgeoisie and its collaborators. Leninism is the mirror which brings to light the true features of the Eurocommunists and all other revisionists, which reveals the falsity of their opportunist "theories", which shows up their reactionary activity against the proletariat, socialism and the peoples' cause.
In order to avoid the dissatisfaction of the rank and file of their parties, the doubts which the "theories" they propose about "socialism" and their confused, contradictory theses in general arouse, the Eurocommunists declare that their socialism still does not represent a "model", is not yet something clear and defined, but only an expression of the "need to find the way" towards this society which must be discussed. In other words, it is just beating the air, because nothing is being achieved.
The "socialism" envisaged by the Eurocommunists is a society in which socialist and capitalist elements are combined and coexist in the economy and politics, in the base and superstructure. In their "socialism" there will be both "socialist property" and capitalist property, hence there will also be exploiting and exploited classes; alongside the party of the working class there will also be bourgeois parties; the proletarian ideology will coexist with the other ideologies; in this "socialism" the state will be a state in which all parties and classes have power.
The Eurocommunists can dream as much as they like about such a hybrid capitalist-socialist society, but this society which they propose can never be achieved. Socialism and capitalism are two different social systems which are mutually exclusive. Capitalism exists as long as it keeps the proletariat and the working masses oppressed and exploited, while socialism is built and advances only on the ruins of capitalism, after it is completely overthrown.
In order to justify their profoundly opportunist views, the Eurocommunists overrate the role of equipment, of means of production in the development of society, thus slipping into the so-called theory of productive forces, which was the ideological basis of all the opportunism of the Second International.
According to them, the impulse towards socialism comes automatically and spontaneously from the development of productive forces. Therefore, they claim, for the transition to socialism there is no need for class struggle or proletarian revolution. Moreover, according to the Eurocommunists, even in those countries where the revolution has been carried out and socialist relations of production have been established, if there is a relatively low level of productive forces, there can be no talk of genuine socialism there.
In order to see how far the Eurocommunists have departed from the idea of socialism and what sort of socialist society they pretend that they have to build, one need only examine some of their main theses, about which they beat the big drum so loudly as the highest development of the progressive thought of present "day human society."
"An integral nationalization of the means of production is not necessary to achieve a socialist society," declare the Italian revisionists. "Alongside of a public sector... private initiative will operate... Freely united peasant property; crafts; small and middle industry; the private initiative in the tertiary field... will play a special role. In this concept of the transformation of society in the socialist sense, there must be a linking of the economic system in order to ensure an integration between programing and the market, between public and private initiative ..."
The French revisionists also proclaim such a "socialism". This society, they say, "requires a sufficient body of democratic nationalizations, along with other forms of social property and an economic sector based on private property". (L'Humanitè, January 13, 1979) Carillo says, "This system, which will have a mixed character in the field of the economy, will be expressed in a political regime in which the owners will be organized not only economically but also in one or more political parties, which represent their interests. This situation will become one of the components of political and ideological pluralism." (S.Carillo, "Eurocomunisme" et Etat, France 1977, pp.121-122)
It requires no special knowledge of social laws to understand that the tableau of the socalled socialist society which the Eurocommunists present is nothing other than the precise and most typical tableau of present-day bourgeois society. The basic element which determines a social system is the ownership of the means of production. If the ownership of the means of production is private, then we have to do with a system in which man exploits man, in which wealth is accumulated in the hands of the minority at one pole, while the overwhelming majority of the people live in poverty and want at the other pole. It has already been proved that socialism cannot exist without the elimination of capitalist property and the smashing of the bourgeois state. There can never be socialism without the establishment of social ownership of the means of production in all sectors without exception, without the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The proletariat has fought with courage, sacrifice and abnegation to overthrow the relations of capitalist ownership of the means of production. To this end, it has elaborated its own ideology, Marxism-Leninism, which must guide it in the revolution and the establishment of social ownership of the means of production, in the elimination of the exploitation which arises from private ownership of these means, and in the elimination of poverty. The proletariat realized this objective in those countries where the revolution triumphed and socialism was established. This experience, which the construction of socialism in Albania is confirming more and more each day, shows that the fundamental condition for the construction of socialist society is precisely the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the transformation of the whole economy of the country on a socialist basis, the establishment of social ownership of the means of production.
Liberation found Albania a backward country from the socio-economic and cultural viewpoint, mainly an agricultural country, almost without industry, with a very low level of development of the productive forces. Did this constitute an obstacle to the construction of socialist relations of production? Of course. it did, indeed a major obstacle, but not an insurmountable one. Our Party could not wait for the productive forces to be developed to a high level, and then commence the establishment of socialist relations.
Among the first and most important measures which our people's state power took were the liquidation of foreign capital and the transformation of its enterprises into socialist state property, the implementation of an extensive and radical land reform, which not only liquidated the large-scale property of the feudal lords and the estate-owners, but also greatly restricted the property of the rich peasants. These measures of a profoundly revolutionary character created important premises for the gradual socialist transformation of the countryside, for the development of the cooperative movement there.
Having the unerring guide of Marxism-Leninism, as well as the experience of socialist construction in the Soviet Union, the Party of Labour of Albania put forward the liquidation of the economic base of capitalism and the construction of the economic base of socialism in town and counstryside as a main objective.
The socialization of the main means of production was carried out relatively quickly, by means of nationalization without compensation. In 1946, two years after Liberation, the banks, industry, the mines, power stations, transport, communications, foreign trade, internal wholesale trade, part of the retail trade, the machine and tractor stations, the forests, waters and underground assets, were socialist state property. Thus the socialist sector of the economy occupied the commanding position.
A major problem for every socialist revolution is the agrarian problem. The development of the whole economy and the stability of the people's state power itself depend on the correct solution of this problem. In Albania, where the peasantry comprised the overwhelming majority of the population and agriculture was the main branch of the economy, the agrarian problem was extremely acute and decisive. The course which our Party followed to resolve this cardinal question was the Leninist course of socialist co-operation.
Adhering strictly to the principle of the free will of the peasantry to unite in cooperatives, the process of the collectivization of agriculture, which began almost immediately after the liberation of the country, and went on for about 15 to 20 years, was carried out without first nationalizing the land. This was done only after collectivization had been completed, with the approval of the new Constitution in 1976.
With the construction of the economic base of socialism in town and countryside, the exploiting classes were liquidated as classes, and the exploitation of man by man was wiped out. Only two friendly classes remained, the working class and the cooperativist peasantry, linked with each other by common ideas, aims and interests, along with the stratum of the socialist intelligentsia from the ranks of the working people and created during the years of the people's state power.
The construction of socialism cannot be carried out either through decrees or in a spontaneous way. Socialism is built with multiplied forces, with the participation of all the working people, and with a co-ordinated, centralized, overall plan.
By implementing a correct policy for the industrialization of the country, it was possible to transform Albania quickly, from a backward agricultural country into a country with developed industry and agriculture, with advanced education and culture, a country in which the people live in true freedom and happiness.
The Eurocommunists do not accept our experience, or that of the Soviet Union or other countries when they were socialist. They want to invent a "new" socialism. However, you need a crippled logic in order to accept the existence of private ownership of the means of production in society and at the same time think you can avoid the exploitation of man by man, and to speak about "socialist transformations", "equality", "justice", etc., such as the Eurocommunists preach. The preservation of private ownership of the means of production, of "private initiative", that is, the possibility of capitalist accumulation in the society which the Eurocommunists, propose means in fact that the capitalist system will be retained completely intact and inviolate.
In all their philosophical fantasies, as well as in the programs which their parties proclaim, the Eurocommunist revisionists do not touch at all on the question of what will be done with the multinational companies and foreign capital. Since they do not mention it, this means that they will remain integral parts of the "socialist" society which they advocate, this means that big American, West-German, British, French and other capital will no longer think of super-profits, but will serve socialism. This is just day-dreaming. On this question, Carrillo, Berlinguer, Marchais are not as progressive as those circles of the bourgeoisie in many developing countries, which, although they are not for socialism, demand the expulsion of foreign monopoly capital and liberation from the multinational companies.
In regard to the so-called public sector, the existence of which "Eurocommunist socialism" foresees, here we have to do simply with a speculation in terms, with a vulgar attempt to peddle the sector of state capitalism, which exists to this or that degree in all the bourgeois countries, as a socialist sector of the economy.
The state capitalist sector, or the "public sector", as the bourgeoisie calls it, has been created in ways and for reasons that are known.
State capitalism in the industrial countries of Europe existed previously, but it assumed an obvious development, especially after the Second World War. It was created as a result of a number of factors. In Italy, for example, it was set up by the bourgeoisie, as a result of the exacerbation of the class struggle, and the great pressure of the working masses, who demanded the expropriation of big capital, especially that linked with fascism, which was responsible for the catastrophe which the country suffered. In order to escape the further radicalization of the struggle of the working masses and to avoid revolutionary outbursts, the weak Italian bourgeoisie carried out the nationalization of some big industries, a nationalization which fulfilled the minimum demands of the communist and socialist parties, which emerged from the war strengthened. In Britain, the creation of the "public sector" like that of railways or coal came as a result of big capital's abandoning some backward and unprofitable branches. It handed these over to the state, which subsidized them from the budget, from the tax-payers, while it invested its capital in the sectors of new industries with a high level of technology, in which great super-profits were secured more easily and quickly.
Nationalizations of this kind have been and are still being carried out for this or that reason in other countries, too, but they have not changed and can never change the capitalist nature of the system in power, cannot eliminate capitalist exploitation, unemployment, poverty and the lack of freedoms and democratic rights.
As very lengthy experience has already proved, state capitalism is supported and developed by the bourgeoisie, not to create the foundations of socialist society, as the revisionists think, but to strengthen the foundations of capitalist society, of its bourgeois state, in order to exploit and oppress the working people more. Those who run the "public sector" are not the representatives of the workers, but the men of big capital, those who have the reins of the whole economy and the state in their hands. The social position of the worker in the enterprises of the "public sector" is no different from that of the worker in the private sector; his relationship to the means of production, to the economic management of the enterprise, the policy of investments, pay, etc., is the same. The bourgeois state, i.e., the bourgeoisie, appropriates the profit of these enterprises. Only the revisionists are able to find some distinction between the "socialist" character of the enterprises of IRI and the "bourgeois" character of FIAT, between the "free" workers of Renault and the "oppressed" workers of Citroen.
The society of "democratic socialism", which the Eurocommunists preach today, is the bourgeois society which exists at present in their countries. They just want to touch it up a bit, so that the old European bourgeoisie, with one foot in the grave, will look like a young bride, full of life and vitality. According to the Eurocommunists, all that is needed is a bit of retouching, retaining the state capitalist sector alongside the private sector, creating some workers' consultative councils attached to the management of enterprises, allowing the trade-union bosses to call for justice and equality in meetings in the squares, giving the revisionists a few seats in the government and... socialism will come of its own accord.
With their unrestrained zeal to fight and deny Marxism-Leninism, the Eurocommunist revisionists, prettify the present-day reality of capitalist society in every way. To them, the existing social system in Italy, France, Spain and elsewhere, the state which rules in these countries, is a kind of supra-class democracy, a democracy for all. In this society and this state they see only a few difficulties, a few mistakes, a few distortions at the most, but nothing more. On this basic concept and premise they build up their schemes of their "democratic socialism", which in essence will be the same present-day bourgeois society, but without the "defects", "restrictions" and "difficulties" which it has today.
The revisionists declare that in their socialism more than one party will exist and function, along with the possibility of their alternation in government. It must be said that on this question the Eurocommunists are really coherent. It is natural that in this society, in which there will be antagonistic classes, different strata of the bourgeoisie, groups of capitalists with separate interests, there also will be different parties, and that the practice which has existed up to now in capitalist society, that the different parties alternate at the head of this state, according to the occasion and the need, will certainly exist. But where the Eurocommunists deliberately misrepresent matters is that they present this "pluralism", that is, the practice of changing the horses in the chariot of the bourgeois state, as the culmination of democracy, as a situation which creates the possibility to solve all social problems. Their aim is to distort the very concept of socialist society and to present bourgeois democracy and its institutions as capable of realizing socialist aims, with no need for the revolution, without the need to smash the old bourgeois state apparatus. In fact, their ideal state is the current American, or more particularly, the German political system, in which two big bourgeois parties, which alternate with one another at the head of the government, rule. They want two big parties in Italy, France, or Spain too: one of them openly bourgeois, democratic or liberal, and the other a workers' party, whether they call it socialist, communist, labour, or what you will, as well as a few other unimportant small parties, just for the sake of variety. And in this way, "Italian socialism", "French socialism", "Spanish socialism" would be created, just as "Swedish socialism", "Norwegian socialism", and so on, have been created.
In "democratic socialism" the state must not be the state of workers and peasants, that is, it must not be like the state advocated by Marx and Lenin, which would bring the workers from the factories and the peasants who work the land into leadership. The Eurocommunists want a state which will be the state of "everybody", and the government of this state likewise will be of "everybody". But a state of "everybody" as never existed and never will exist.
The Eurocommunists' concepts about the state are very close to those of Proudhon and Lassalle, refuted by Marx more than a century ago. Lassalle, for example, preached that through reforms, in peaceful ways, through general elections, and with the aid of the bourgeois state and of associations of producers, which would have to be created, the reactionary Prussian state could be transformed into a free popular state. He presented this kind of "state" as a model for the new socialist state for which the workers ought to fight.
The Lassallian concept of the "popular state" denied the class character of the state as a dictatorship of a given class.
Marx, especially in his outstanding work "The Critique of the Gotha Programme", confronted the Lassallian concept of the "free popular state" with the concept of the state as a class organ, with his concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
"...one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousandfold combination of the word 'people' with the word 'state'," says Marx.
"...Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformations of one on to the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."
The Marxist theoretical theses and doctrine on the state, proclaimed in the monumental works of Marx and Engels, found brilliant confirmation in the events of the Commune of Paris.
The Commune of Paris showed that the proletariat cannot retain the old bourgeois state machine and use it for its own purposes, to overthrow the capitalist order. The Commune destroyed that machine and, in place of it, created state organisms and institutions entirely new in content and form. The Commune was the first form of the political organization of the proletarian state power. As Lenin stressed, the Commune of Paris showed the historical limitations "...and limited value of the bourgeois parliamentary system and bourgeois democracy...."(Lenin). It was proved in practice that the state which the Commune of Paris set up represented the highest type of democracy, that of the overwhelrning majority of the people. It put into practice the great democratic rights and freedoms which the bourgeoisie proclaims but never realizes.
Later Lenin, in struggle with the opportunist distortions of the chiefs of the Second International, brilliantly defended Marx's theory on the state.
He refuted their concepts that allegedly the state is not an organ of the domination of one class over another, but an organ of class conciliation, that the apparatus of the bourgeois state should not be destroyed, but should be used in the interests of the working people. In his famous book, "The State and Revolution", Lenin showed that the state is a product of contradictions between classes and an expression of the irreconcilability of these contradictions. He proved that the bourgeois state apparatus, an apparatus set up to keep the working class and the working masses oppressed and exploited, could not be used by them for the elimination of oppression and exploitation. The proletariat has to build its own state, new in form and content, in structure and organization, in the people who run it and in their methods of work, a state which will ensure the freedom of the working masses and suppress the efforts of enemies of socialism to restore the capitalist system.
Lenin's book "The State and Revolution" and the Leninist theses on the dictatorship of the proletariat played an important role in the preparation for the October Revolution and the establishment of the Soviet state power in Russia. They remain powerful weapons in the hands of genuine revolutionaries to combat the theorizing of modern revisionists, who are trying to revive the old views of Kautsky and company about the state, which Lenin exposed and defeated.
The theorizing of the Eurocommunists about the state is a consequence of the anti-Marxist line of these renegades, who pretend that not class struggle but class peace exists in capitalism, that the army and the police are no longer retrogressive forces of the bourgeoisie, therefore, there is no need for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the genuine democracy which the proletariat establishes. They want only one state, one democracy - the state of bourgeois-revisionist democracy.
The question of state power has always been the fundamental question of the ideology and policy of every party, irrespective of what class interests it represents. Eurocommunism could be no exception to this. It began its struggle precisely in this field, becoming a new weapon in the hands of the bourgeoisie to protect its power of oppression and exploitation, and to prevent the proletariat from carrying out the revolution, destroying this power and establishing socialism.
In their propaganda against Marxism-Leninisrn, the Eurocommunists, insist that in the conditions of modern society, as they call the present day capitalist society, the theory of Marx about the overthrow of capitalism by means of violent revolution needs new "interpretations". Among the first who began the frontal attack on, to describe as invalid and violate, the thesis of Marx and Lenin about the necessity for the violent revolution, a thesis which they totally distorted, were the Soviet revisionists, as we mentioned above. In order to make their theory of peaceful transition to socialism "convincing", they went so far as to claim that the October Revolution was a peaceful revolution, contrary to what history recognizes it as the first revolution which overthrew the Russian bourgeoisie with violence and established the dictatorship of the proletariat. At the same time they began to propound the theory that the dictatorship of the proletariat was a temporary phenomenon which gave way to the so-called state of the whole people. With these theories, they aimed to minimize and negate the revolutionary class content of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This deliberate distortion of Marxism-Leninism by the Soviet revisionists became the basis on which the Eurocommunist theories on this question were built up. The Khrushchevite theses that with the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union the class struggle no longer existed, that the triumph of socialism was guaranteed and there was no danger of any reversal, that there was no longer any need for the dictatorship of the proletariat, or for the party of the working class, became an inspiration and encouragement for the other revisionists to go even further. Misrepresenting the significance of the changes which have taken place in the world and misinterpreting a correct phrase of Lenin's about the special features of the road to socialism, they stress that at the present time it is possible to go to socialism through parliamentarianism and reforms.
The Eurocommunists present the course of transformation of capitalist society into socialist society as the development of bourgeois political democracy through to the end, as they say, as a peaceful course which does not lead to a qualitative change but only to a quantitative change.
The Italian revisionists say, "Political democracy presents itself as the highest institutional form of the organization of the state, even of a socialist state." (The politics and the organization of the Italian communists, Rome 1979)
If we analyse this so-called thesis, it turns out that "political democracy" for the working people allegedly exists already in capitalism and that socialism is allegedly reached by extending this democracy and, finally, that the fundamental feature of socialist society allegedly is bourgeois democracy which is identified with socialist democracy.
Meanwhile the Spanish revisionists, for their part, claim that "socio-political democracy is not a third road, either capitalist or socialist, but is a transitional stage between capitalism and socialism." (The Ninth Congress of The Spanish Communist Party, Barcelona 1978) "Democracy is simultaneously the aim and the means of transformations,"w1wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww111111 (L'Humanitè, February 13, 1979) says Marchais.
As can be seen, in order to justify. their revisionist views Berlinguer, Carrillo, Marchais and others present very confused ideas about democracy and the state. Such reasoning, which is not based on the class relations that exist in bourgeois society, which is outside the connection between the capitalist economic base and superstructure, outside reality and any logic, has the aim of proving allegedly that genuine democracy is not that which the dictatorship of the proletariat establishes, the democracy of the great majority of the exploited masses over the minority of the capitalist exploiters, or their remnants, but democracy à la Marchais and Carrillo, that is, "democracy for all, where everyone lives in peace and class harmony". However, history has proved that there is not and cannot be bourgeois democracy without the bourgeois dictatorship, just as there cannot be socialist democracy without the dictatorship of the proletariat. The rights and duties of citizens are related directly to the domination of the class which is in power. Where the capitalist class rules, there are rights for the bourgeoisie, and restriction of rights, oppression and denigration of the masses, while where the working class rules, there are rights and freedoms for the workers, and restriction and compulsion for the minority of former rulers and exploiters, as well as for the enemies of socialism.
The Eurocommunists are not the first opportunists to deny the need for the revolution as the only basic means for the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of socialism. Before them, a similar thing was done by Proudhon, whom Marx exposed, and by Bernstein and company, who ended up openly defending the capitalist system.
Bernstein, for example, preached that by improving the labour legislation, by increasing the role and activity of trade-unions and cooperatives, by increasing the representation of the working class in parliament, all the economic, political and social problems of the proletariat could be solved peacefully and on the evolutionist course. He stated explicitly that the working class need win the simple majority in parliament, get 51 per cent of the votes, and it could achieve all its aims. Since the "will of the majority" rules in democracy, he said, the state loses its class character, is transformed from an organ of the class rule into an organ which stands above classes and represents the interests of the whole society. In such a state, he said, the working class and its party can and must collaborate with all the other classes and parties. Together, they must defend and strengthen this state against "reactionaries".
Bernstein preached that the road of the transformation of society was the road of partial and gradual reforms, the road of evolution, of the gradual integration of capitalism into socialism. Therefore, according to him, the party of the working class must be a party not of social revolution, but of social reforms. Lenin strongly criticized and pointed out the utter falsity of these views of Bernstein, which Kautsky and company took over later. The Great October Revolution gave the historic verdict in the great debate between the Marxists led by Lenin, who defended the idea of the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the revisionist opportunists, who were partisans of the peaceful, reformist road, of "pure" democracy, etc.
This revolution showed the proletariat and peoples of the world that the road to victory over imperialism and capitalism does not run through reforms and agreements with the bourgeoisie, but through violent revolution.
"Arguing" in support of their opposition to the Marxist-Leninist theory on the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Eurocommunists claim that Marx himself allegedly "only once mentioned this term"! However, it is known that the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat constitutes the fundamental question of the whole of Marx's doctrine on socialism. In 1852 Marx wrote,
"What I did that was new was to prove: 1) that the existence of classes is bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production; 2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society. ..."
Marx did not regard the dictatorship of the proletariat as a simple alternation of some people in the government, but as a qualitatively new state, which is built on the ruins of the old bourgeois state. He considered the smashing of the old bourgeois state machine with violence an essential for the triumph not only of the proltarian revolution, but of any genuine people's revolution led by the working class. Lenin called this conclusion, put forward by Marx in his outstanding work "The 18th Brumaire of Luis Bonaparte", a gigantic step forward. It is precisely this foundation stone of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine that all the old revisionists have attacked and denied, and which all the new Eurocommumst revisionists attack.
The stand of the Eurocommunists towards the question of. the revolution, the state and democracy coincides in essence with that of the Soviet revisionists, who have declared that now the "communist" party in the Soviet Union has allegedly been transformed into a "party of the entire people" and that the dictatorship of the proletariat has been replaced with the "state of the entire people". On the basis of these statements of the Soviet revisionists Marchais and Carrillo have the right to reason: "If you can allegedly transform the party and the state of the proletariat into a party and state of the entire people, why shouldn't we in the West have the right to carry out such a thing, but without violent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat? We are going to proceed in 'pluralism' and understanding with the bourgeoisie, by building up opinion for a 'genuine democracy', which has not been achieved in your country. It is in vain for you to claim the existence of democracy in your country while you are strengthening oppression."
In regard to the Titoites, they too are in difficulties with the Eurocommunists in connection with "democracy" and "pluralism". The Yugoslav revisionists speak about the unity of the ..non-aligned world., and with this formula -"elirninate" the class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat. They demand from imperialism and world capitalism only that the "non-aligned countries" "should remain within their present status quo and be assisted economically." In this direction the Titoites are of the same opinion as the Eurocommunists, with the one difference that, while the Yugoslavs speak about alleged "independence from superpowers and blocs", the Eurocommunists do not do this even formally.
Without attacking them directly, but through the ideas they express, the Eurocommunists tell the Yugoslav revisionists that the existence of only one party in Yugoslavia is not the road of genuine democracy, therefore the political system in Yugoslavia too must undergo changes.
While directly attacking Lenin and the whole Marxist-Leninist theory on the state and the revolution, Berlinguer, Marchals, Carrillo and company call on the Khrushcheevites to carry their betrayal through to the end, telling them that it is not only the "mistakes" of Stalin which is the problem for their filthy undertaking, but the socialist system itself, which, although it was an appropriate system after the October Revolution, is not right at the present time, because it allegedly denies democracy.
Without doubt, this thesis is not to the advantage of the Khrushchevites who, in order to conceal their betrayal and to pose as Marxist-Leninists, still maintain some allegedly Leninist forms.
In order to retain this disguise, from time to time the Brezhnev group makes some feeble criticism of the disobedient parties and advises them that they must allegedly safeguard the class principles of Lenin on the road and the forms of transition to socialism. However, the revisionist parties of the Western countries do not fail to reply to Brezhnev that they are doing nothing more than what the Soviet revisionists have done, that they are acting according to their conditions, which allegedly dictate the peaceful road, the road of democratic reforms, political and ideological pluralism, etc., etc. Berlinguer, Marchais and Carrillo, who have gone further than Togliatti, tell the Soviets: "Isn't it you who have spoken about peaceful coexistence? Then, come on, let us create this coexistence and carry it through to the end." And with whom are we to peacefully coexist? With the opponents of communism, that is, with the capitalist bourgeoisie, American imperialism, etc. However to achieve peaceful coexistence, they say first we must revise the "dogmas" in policy, in ideology, in the economy and in art, because the "dogmas" cannot be adapted to present-day society. Since the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin on the dictatorship of the proletariat, the. class struggle, and the seizure of power with violence are allegedly "dogmas", then they are not suitable, either, therefore power must be taken not through violence, but in the parliamentary way, through general elections, through the coming to power of the working class and removal of the bourgeoisie from power in democratic ways.
For the sake of demagogy, and to throw dust in the eyes of the masses, the Eurocommunists mutter in an undertone that the "third way", or "democratic socialism", is not social-democracy, because it "has not carried society beyond the logic of capitalism". ( The politics and the organization of the Italian communists, Rome 1979)
Nevertheless, they add immediately, we must unite with social-democracy and the other political forces, and together with them must exert influence on the state apparatus of the capitalist bourgeoisie, through propaganda, reforms, the church, culture, etc., and not destroy it, as the classics of Marxism-Leninism say, so that gradually this state power will assume a truly democratic form, so that it will serve the whole of the society and create the conditions to build "socialism" in a peaceful way. In other words, they advocate the creation of a bastardized social order which will have nothing in common with scientific socialism.
The theses of Togliatti and his supporters, the line of the Italian Communist Party, have become the ideal of all the Eurocommunist revisionists, to such an extent that they have aroused the envy of Carrillo and Marchais. Georges Marchais writes in "L'Humanité", "In 1956 we were slow to draw lessons from what had occurred in the Soviet Union, and work out the French road to socialism," that is, as Togliatti did. When Marchais or Carrillo say that the police are with the Italian Communist Party, and that in Rome they vote for this party, they are praising the efforts and achievements of Berlinguer in the direction of collaboration with social-democracy, the Christian Democrats, and the socialists on public questions, and also in the administration of the affairs the bourgeoisie.
The "successes" of Berlinguer in these directions, that is, in submission to Italian and world capitalism, serve the other revisionists as practical support for their opportunist politicaI theses. Berlinguer works with great zeal. He does not attack the bourgeois Constitution, does not attack the power of the bourgeoisie, does not even mention overthrowing this power and its apparatus, does not speak about destroying the Italian oppressive army, but on the contrary, signs statements together with the parties of reaction that the army must be strengthened, that the American bases must remain, that the power and funds of the police must be increased, that the police must have the right, outside the law, to check up on anything which is suspicious, even to bug telephone conversations and open private correspondence.
Now the program and activities of the Italian revisionists are ready and tested for the other revisionists too. In Italy, Spain and France, the integration of revisionism into capitalism, and not of capitalism into socialism, as the Eurocommunists preach in their programs and speeches, is developing and taking a concrete form.
The Italian, French and Spanish communist parties say nothing at all about the Chinese revisionists. Their whole struggle is spearheaded against Marx Engels, Lenin and Stalin, and for their own ends, sometimes against the Soviet revisionists, too. They are in accord with the Chinese revisionists on all fronts. The Chinese revisionists are struggling for an alliance with the United States of America, the developed capitalist countries and the ruling cliques in the neo-colonial countries.
Such an alliance is on the course of the Eurocommunist renegades. The fact is that the Chinese foreign policy conforms completely with the policy which the Eurocommunists preach about the unity of revisionist parties with the bourgeois-capitalist regimes in power. The Chinese revisionists and the Communist Party of China also are for pluralism in socialism. In China the parties of the bourgeoisie not only exist, but they participate in the state power and the leadership, together with the Communist Party, which cannot exist and run things without collaboration with them. On these fundamental questions the Chinese revisionists are in agreement with the European revisionists.
On the other hand, Chinese private enterprises, Chinese-foreign capital joint private enterprises, purely foreign private enterprises, cooperativist sectors, etc., exist alongside of the state capitalist sector in China. This conforms completely with the "third road", with the "socialism" which the Eurocommunists propagate.
Mao Zedong proclaimed his "theory" about the "blossoming of a hundred flowers and contention of a hundred schools". What does this mean? This means that all idealist, social-democratic, republican, religious and other ideas, are permitted and develop in China. "Let all the schools contend, this is dialectical," says Mao Zedong. But since pluralism allegedly becomes dialectical, a thing which the Eurocommunists preach, too, then it must be possible to go to socialism together and in unity with the bourgeoisie and its parties in peace and peaceful competition.
When bourgeois parties exist and take part in the leadership in China, along with the Communist Party, then the state cannot be the dictatorship of the proletariat, but must be a hybrid organism, which is a state of the dictatorship of the proletariat only in words, while in reality it is a bourgeois democracy.
The Chinese practice responds to the line of the Eurocommunists and serves as a "confirmation" of how the transition to socialism can be carried out without revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Someone may say: "But China went to socialism through the revolution", "China has a dictatorship of the proletariat, etc. This is not true. The truth is that China fought against the Japanese occupiers and the Kuomintang, but the dictatorship of the proletariat was never established and socialism was never built there. The state power in China was called the dictatorship of the proletariat, but its content was different, and now we are seeing that the disguises which the Communist Party of China and the Chinese state had put on, are falling off one after the other. Following the death of Mao Zedong, who was an eclectic, and of Zhou Enlai, who was a bourgeois democrat, we see that China is revealing its true features, emerging as a bourgeois republic and an imperialist state.
In regard to the contradictions the Eurocommunists have with the Soviet revisionists over the character of the state in socialism, these are not in the least of a principled nature. They attack the revisionist Soviet state, presenting it as a distortion which, as they put it, neither Marx nor Engels would approve, and indeed, even Lenin would not consider many things right. But this is a vulgar speculation. The present Soviet state is not a socialist state. It has been transformed into a dictatorship of the revisionist bourgeoisie which oppresses and exploits the working masses. With this speculation, the Eurocommunists want to prove that their pluralist line is the only "scientific Marxist" line, the only line suitable for the construction of true socialism. According to them, this line is a dialectical consequence of the materialist development of history, which allegedly Marx and Engels "did not foresee" and which allegedly "Lenin did not foresee", either. However, it has been allegedly discovered by Berlinguer, Marchais, Carrillo and the other revisionists of Western Europe who are beating their breasts and saying: "It is we who envisage the genuine transformation of society and who analyse the phenomena of the present-day world to their roots". In fact, they are opposed to any kind of revolutionary transformation. They want to preserve the present-day bourgeois "consumer" society, to preserve the domination of capitalism and the exploitation of the working people. This is their ideal and their aim. For this they are working and struggling. All the rest is just propaganda, demagogy, deception, means which the bourgeoisie uses to fight socialism and the revolution.
The struggle against imperialism in general, and its tools in every country is one of the fundamental. questions of the strategy of every communist party, and one of the decisive conditions for the triumph of any revolution, whether people's democratic, anti-imperialist or socialist. At the same time, its attitude to imperialism serves as a touchstone to evaluate the political and ideological position of every political force which operates either within the national framework of each country, or on an international scale. In other words, the stand towards imperialism has always been a line of demarcation which divides the genuine patriotic and democratic revolutionary forces, on the one hand, from the forces of reaction, counter-revolution and national betrayal, on the other hand. What is the stand of the Eurocommunists on this vital question of such major importance of principle?
Commencing from the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, when Khrushchev came out with the line of conciliation and rapprochement with American imperialism, and put this forward as a general line for the whole communist movement, the revisionist parties of the Western countries abandoned any anti-imperialist position, on both the theoretical and practical planes. It seemed as if they were liberated from their shackles to rush into conciliation with the big imperialist, colonialist and neocolonialist bourgeoisie. The new strategy which Khrushchev presented to the communist movement was that which the leaders of the Western communist parties had long desired, which they had begun to apply in practice, but which, you might say, had not yet received the seal of official approval.
Even before the 20th Congress of the CPSU, because of various vacillations and concessions, in France and Italy the struggle against NATO, against the revival and rearmament of German imperialism, against the interference of American capital and its military bases in Europe and so on, had begun to decline. If something was done at that time, it was only in the field of propaganda, without any action. On the Algerian question, the French Communist Party was in almost the same position as the bourgeois parties of the country. But its chauvinism and nationalism on this question, more and more softened its stand towards the big ally of the French bourgeoisie - American imperialism and its economic and political expansion. Since "French Algeria" had to be defended, "French Africa" had also to be defended, and a blind eye and a deaf ear turned to "British Asia" and "American America".
The Italian revisionists, who were trying in every way to convince the bourgeoisie of their sincerity and loyalty, tried to give the maximum proofs precisely in not opposing the foreign policy of the Christian Democrat government, which was a policy of unconditional alliance with American imperialism, total submission to NATO, the opening of doors to American big capital, and the transformation of the country into a big military base of the United States of America.
In regard to the Spanish revisionists, their sole preoccupation at that time was to achieve the legalization of the party and return to Spain. Thinking that the "democratization" of Spain could be done only through the pressure of the United States of America, which, according to them, was interested in removing the "obstacle" Franco, they did not even see the American policy of expansion and hegemony, let alone fight it.
"The national roads to socialism", which the revisionist parties of the countries of Western Europe adopted in the spirit of the 20th Congress of the CPSU, led to their submission, not only to the national bourgeoisie but also to the international bourgeoisie, first of all, to American imperialism. At the same time, it was natural that their abandonment of Marxism-Leninism, the revolution and socialism could not fail to be accompanied by their abandonment of the principles of proletarian internationalism, of aid to and support for the revolutionary and liberation movements.
Although the French, Italian and Spanish revisionist parties began gradually to keep a certain distance from the Soviet Union, to criticize Moscow over certain aspects of its internal and external policy, to disapprove of some of its actions in international relations, they never reached the point of describing and condemning the present-day Soviet Union as an imperialist country. True, they condemned its aggression in Czechoslovakia, for example, but on the other hand, they approved the Soviet intervention in Africa; true, they demanded the withdrawal of the Soviet fleet from the Mediterranean, but were silent about the dispatch of Soviet weapons to all parts of the world. According to the Eurocommunists, the Soviet policy within the country is anti-democratic, but abroad in general it is socialist and anti-imperialist. This stand has led and leads the Eurocommunist parties to support the hegemonic and expansionist policy of the Soviet Union in general, despite some opposition.
In this way, just as the revisionist parties of Western Europe became defenders of the bourgeois order within their own countries, they became no less ardent fighters for the preservation of the imperialist system on an international scale. The Eurocommunists became champions of the bourgeois imperialist status quo on all fronts.
If the Eurocommunists still retain some disguise, try to appear as opponents, though feeble ones, of the bourgeoisie and the capitalist order on internal problems, in relations between the revolution and international capitalism on a world scale, between the oppressed peoples and imperialism, between socialism and capitalism, they are openly against any change.
Today, the revisionist parties of Italy, France, Spain and the other parties of the Eurocommunist trend have been transformed into pro-imperialist political forces which, in their line and activities, are indistinguishable from the bourgeois parties of those countries. Let us take their stand towards NATO and the European Common Market, which represent two of the basic political, economic and military factors on which the domination of the European big bourgeoisie and the hegemony of American imperialism in Europe are founded and realized.
From the time it was created to this day, NATO has changed neither its nature, its aims nor its objectives. The agreements remain those which were signed in 1949. Everyone knows the purpose for which the Atlantic Pact was created and why it is maintained. Even if people did not know them, the Pentagon and the staff in Brussels remind them of this day by day. NATO was and still is a political and military alliance of American and European big capital, first of all to preserve the capitalist system and institutions in Europe, to prevent the revolution from breaking out and to strangle it violently if it begins to advance. On the other hand, this counterrevolutionary organization is an armed guard of neo-colonialism and the spheres of influence of imperialist powers, and a weapon for their political and economic expansion. To hope to achieve the transformation of West European capitalist society and the construction of socialism while having NATO and the American bases in the country, is to daydream. The attempts of the Eurocommunists to stress only the anti-Soviet function of NATO and to forget its mission of suppressing the revolution in Western Europe have the aim of deceiving the workers and preventing them from seeing the reality.
The Eurocommunists do not want to see the existence of a major national problem, the question of American domination in Western Europe and the need for liberation from it. From the end of the Second World War down to this day, American imperialism has bound this part of Europe with all kinds of political, economic, military, cultural and other chains. Without breaking these chains you cannot have socialism, or even that bourgeois democracy which the Eurocommunists praise to the skies. American capital has penetrated so deeply into Europe, is so closely combined with local capital that where one begins and the other finishes can no longer be distinguished. The European armies have been so completely integrated into NATO, in which the Americans dominate, that in practice they no longer exist as independent national forces. An ever greater integration is developing in the financial and monetary field, in technology, culture, etc.
It is true that between the European NATO member countries and the United States of America there are various contradictions. These are normal and inevitable between big capitalist groups and groupings, but it is a fact that on all the major world political and economic questions the NATO countries have always submitted to Washington. When it comes to choosing between class interests and national interests, the European big bourgeoisie, like the bourgeoisie of all other countries, always tends to sacrifice the latter. This is why the communists have always fought to defend the national interests, seeing them as closely linked with the cause of the revolution and socialism.
The Eurocommunists' denial of the existence of a national problem in their countries, concretely, the need to fight the American domination and dictate and to strengthen the national independence and sovereignty, is further proof of their political and ideological degeneration and their betrayal of the cause of the revolution. Today, the Italian revisionists not only insist that Italy must stay in NATO, but have become even greater supporters of the Atlantic Treaty than the Christian Democrats and the other pro-American bourgeois parties. "Italy must stay in the Atlantic Alliance," say the Italian revisionists, "because of the need to preserve the balance of power on which the preservation of peace in Europe and the world depends." (The politics and the organization of the italian communists, Rome 1979)
With this thesis, Berlinguer and company tell the workers: Don't oppose NATO, don't demand the withdrawal of the Americans from Naples and Caserta, don't condemn the stationing of atomic missiles near your homes, say nothing about the American aircraft which stand in the Italian airports ready to fly wherever the interests of the American imperialists are affected. Let the national interests of Italy be sacrificed for the sake of the hegemonic American policy, say the Italian revisionists; let Washington dictate who should govern Italy and how they should govern it, let Italy be consumed in an atomic holocaust, as long as the balance between the two superpowers is maintained.
The thesis about the balance between big powers as a factor or means for the preservation of peace is an old imperialist slogan with which the world, and Europe especially, are very well acquainted. It has always been used to justify the hegemonic policy of big imperialist powers and the right which they give themselves to interfere in the internal affairs of others and dominate them.
To accept the need for the existence and strengthening of imperialist blocs, allegedly as a means for the preservation of peace, as the revisionists do, also means to approve their policy. The imperialist military blocs exist not to preserve the peace and to defend the freedom, independence and sovereignty of their member countries, as the Eurocommunist revisionists proclaim, but to rob them of these things, to preserve the domination and hegemony of the superpowers in those countries. It is known that one of the main aims of American imperialism when it created NATO was to defend the interests of United States' capital in Europe politically, but also with arms, and to put down any revolution which might break out there with fire and steel. These are the objectives of NATO which the Eurocommunist revisionists support.
The policy of blocs is an aggressive policy of the superpowers. It results from their hegemonic and expansionist strategy, from their ambitions to establish their complete and undivided rule over the whole world. The Eurocommunists do not see or do not want to see this predatory nature of imperialism, because, according to their "theories", big capital, which is its foundation, is being "democratized", is becoming "people's" capital, because the big bourgeoisie is being "integrated into socialism". In regard to their loyalty to NATO, the French revisionists are no different from their Italian counterparts, but in order to be in unison with the Giscardians or the Gaullists, they too speak about the special position which France should have in these organizations. For its part, Carrillo's party is striving with all the means it possesses to seize the banner of the struggle to get Spain into NATO. In this way Franco's unrealized dream will be achieved.
For the Eurocommunists, the European Common Market and United Europe, this great combine of capitalist monopolies and multinational companies for the exploitation of the peoples and the working masses of Europe and the peoples of the world, are a "reality" which must be accepted.. But to accept this "reality" means to accept the elimination of the sovereignty, the cultural and spiritual traditions of each individual country of Europe in favour of the interests of the big monopolies, to accept the elimination of the individuality of the European peoples and their transformation into a mass oppressed by the multinational companies dominated by American big capital.
The Eurocommunists' slogans alleging that their participation in "the Parliament and other organs of the European Community will lead to their democratic transformation", to the creation of a "Europe of working people", are nothing but demagogy and deception. The speeches of the Eurocommunists and the propaganda meetings of the Parliament of United Europe can no more transform Europe into a socialist society than the "democratic road" can transform the capitalist society of each country into such a society. Therefore, the stand of the Eurocommunists towards the European Common Market and United Europe is a stand of opportunists and scabs, which results from their line of class conciliation and submission to the bourgeoisie. It is intended to bemuse the working masses, to break their militant drive in defence of their own class interests and the interests of the whole nation.
Their reformist ideology, submission to the bourgeoisie and capitulation to the imperialist pressure have transformed the Eurocommunist parties into parties which are not only anti-revolutionary but also anti-national. Even amongst the ranks of the bourgeoisie it is rare to find people who call themselves politicians and who accept the concept of "limited sovereignty", as Carrillo does. " ... we are conscious that this independence will always be relative...," he writes. In the "democratic and socialist" Spain, which he proposes in his program, " ... investments of foreign capital and the functioning of multinationals will not be prohibited...". "However," he adds, "for a very long time to come we must pay a tribute to foreign capital in the form of surplus value ... but this will serve the development of those sectors which correspond to the national interest." (S. carillo, "Eurocommunisme" et Etat, France 1977, pp.157-160)
With their stands in defence of the monopolies and the interests of imperialist powers, the Eurocommunists have, set themselves against the antiimperialist and democratic traditions of the French, Spanish and Italian workers. They have also set themselves against the patriotic traditions of the struggle which the workers and progressives of these countries have waged against NATO, the American bases in Europe and the interference and pressure of American imperialism. The Eurocommunists have abandoned these positions and gone over to the camp of reaction.
The idea of class conciliation and submission to foreign domination, which pervades the entire political and ideological line of the Eurocommunists, emerges clearly also in the stand which they take towards the anti-imperialist national liberation revolutionary movements. Not being for the revolution in their own countries, they are not for the revolution in other countries, either. They do not want the weakening of their imperialist and neo-colonialist bourgeoisie, therefore they can never see the revolution in the oppressed countries as a direct aid for the overthrow of the capitalist system. For them, the unified process of the revolution, the natural connection between its different currents, the indispensable reciprocal aid, do not exist.
Sometimes they say the odd propaganda word in favour of anti-imperialist movements, just for the sake of appearances. But this is only empty phraseology with no concrete content and, above all, not accompanied with political action. Their "support" is, at most, a slightly leftist pose, a way of appearing progressive and democratic.
Taken as a whole, in their stand towards the revolutionary liberation movements the Eurocommunists have embraced the ideology of non-alignment, which is extremely convenient for them in order to justify the subjugation of peoples to the domination of imperialist powers and to proclaim neo-colonialism as a way for the former colonial countries to emerge from poverty and develop. In the theses for their recent congress, the Italian revisionists wrote, "the struggle for the construction of a new international system and order in the economic field is a moment of more and more fundamental importance in the struggle for peace, for international co-operation and the policy of peaceful coexistence." (The politics and the organization of the Italian communists, Rome 1979)
They are consistent in their opportunist line. They think that the exploiting character of the international economic relations of the capitalist system can be changed with some reforms, in the same way as they seek to reform the capitalist order within the country. Carrillo also talks about a new world economic order, or how the Eurocommunists envisage it. Indeed, he puts the matter more clearly: "In any case we must proceed from an objective reality; although imperialism is no longer a unified world system, a world market always exists, regulated by the objective laws of the exchange of commodities, laws which, in the final analysis, are capitalist." (S. Carillo, "Eurocomunisme" et Etat, France 1077, p.159)
According to Carrillo, these objective capitalist "laws" cannot alter or be replaced even in the conditions of socialism. In order to "support" this thesis he quotes the example of the capitalist character of relations between revisionist countries in the economie field. In other words, according to Carrillo, it turns out that it is in vain for the peoples to rise in struggle against national and neo-colonialist oppression, against unequivalent exchanges between the developed capitalist countries and the undeveloped countries, which are expressed especially in the savage plunder of the raw materials of the latter. This is the international order which Carrillo wants to retain and to which Berlinguer wants to do some retouching, so that it looks shiny and new.
A line which is opposed to the genuine national interests of the country, a line which defends imperialist hegemony and expansion, which praises neo-colonialism and sanctifies foreign capitalist exploitation is doomed to failure. The objective laws of the development of history cannot alter. The new world order for which the proletariat and the peoples are fighting is not the imperialist order which the Eurocommunists advertise, but the socialist order to which the future belongs.
In recent years, the stand of the Italian, French and Spanish revisionist parties towards the Soviet Union and their relations with it have become a major object of discussion and interpretation by the whole international bourgeoisie. The attempt of the Eurocommunists to describe themselves "independent" of Moscow, "original" and even "opponents" of the Soviet Union appears to be made allegedly to deceive the bourgeoisie of their countries, but in reality it is made to deceive the proletariat of their own countries and the international proletariat. It is by no means impossible that this could be a manoeuvre on the part of the Soviet revisionists to create the impression of the existence of allegedly profound differences and contradictions of "principle" between them and the communist parties of Western Europe, especially with the Italian and French parties, with the aim of facilitating the participation of these parties in the bourgeois governments of the respective countries. If this could be achieved, this would be in the interests of Soviet social-imperialism, in the interests of its world domination, because it weakens its rivals while increasing its influence and hegemony in different countries. The Khrushchevite revisionists need this also to support their anti-Marxist thesis that "state power can be taken in a peaceful way", and thus "prove" what they failed to prove in Chile. Indeed, at the 25th Congress of the CPSU, Brezhnev said that the Chilean experience does not rule out the theory of taking power in parliamentary ways.
On the other hand, Eurocommunism is a kind of idea that suits the European big capitalist bourgeoisie which is encouraging and fanning up the contradictions between the Eurocommunists and Soviet social-imperialists in every way, because it is interested in weakening the revisionist ideological power and influence of the Soviet Union. It tries to present the Italian, Spanish, French and other revisionisms as an ideological bloc which is being created in Europe in opposition to the Soviet revisionist bloc. And since they are talking about an anti-Soviet ideological grouping, it is self-evident that the reactionary bourgeoisie of the industrialized countries of Europe has this Eurocommunism under its influence.
However, the Kremlin would not like Eurocommunism to break away completely from its influence. Therefore, the propaganda being spread in the West about Eurocommunism as an "independent" ideological current annoys Moscow.
This annoyance also stems from the fact that in this way the split, which has long existed between the revisionist parties of Western Europe and the revisionist party of the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe, is made public.
These parties have never had, do not have and never will have unity. However, it pleases the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to maintain a superficial appearance of unity amongst the revisionist parties not only of Europe, but of the whole world. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union tries to maintain its ideological hegemony over all the other revisionist parties of the world in disguised ways. It is eager to sign joint declarations and communiqués with them, in order to give the appearance of the existence of unity and the respect which these parties have for the Soviet leadership.
There have been splits and disagreements between the Italian Communist Party and the French Communist Party and the Khrushchevite revisionists since the time of Togliatti and Thorez, and these disagreements and differences have steadily increased and extended. However, they did not reach then such a degree of acuteness as they have reached today. Now the worsening of relations has come out openly. "Pravda" attacked Carrillo and condemned Eurocommunism. Carrillo replied just as sharply to Moscow. He dotted the i's of the revisionist ideological and political orientation of his party and broke off the connections of dependence on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Following "Pravda"'s criticism and Carrillo's reply, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia came out as an ardent defender of the Communist Party of Spain. The Yugoslav revisionists openly took Carrillo's side, because they have always been for the split, for the breaking away of revisionist parties from Moscow, and they have always struggled to bring this about.
In regard to the French and Italian revisionist parties they are somewhat more cautious in this polemic. Sometimes they raise it, sometimes they lower it and at other times they extinguish it altogether. This is explained not by any particular "moderation", but apparently by the existence of certain material and other links, which they want to preserve because they bring them profits. Precisely for the preservation of these threads linked with rubles, which have long existed between them and the Soviets, they want the tempers to be cooled a little so that the polemic with the Khrushchevites does not assume uncontrollable proportions. The visits of Berlinguer, Pajetta, etc., to Moscow were made for this purpose. The Italian revisionist leaders declared that they were going to Moscow to explain to the Soviet leaders that there should not be a bitter polemic and that Moscow did not have the right to meddle or interfere in the line of the communist party of another country, because each of them had the right to define its own strategy and line on the basis of the situation in the country, and allegedly also bearing in mind the experience of the world communist movement. Moscow is ready to put its signature to these theses, but in return demands recognition of its "socialism" and, above all, approval of the main direction of its foreign policy. When Marchais applauds the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and acclaims the expansionist policy of the Kremlin as the highest expression of "international solidarity", Brezhnev cannot fail to reward him by approving the "democratic road" so dear to the French revisionists, which is completely in accord with the theses of the Khrushchevites' 20th Congress.
Although they have an identical strategy today, the Italian, French and Spanish revisionist parties differ a little in their tactics, because of the specific features of the bourgeoisie in these three countries. The French bourgeoisie is strong - a bourgeoisie with long experience. It also has great political and ideological power, not to speak of its economic strength and the military and police power which it has at its disposal. The Italian bourgeoisie, however, is not so strong as the French one. Although it has power in its hands, it has many weak points. This has made it possible for the Italian revisionist party to enter into negotiations and to establish collaboration in many forms, indeed even in parliamentary forms, with other parties, not to mention their collaboration through the trade-unions with the Italian capitalist bourgeoisie, and first of all with its Christian Democratic Party.
This is why Berlinguer's party will try to move closer to the bourgeoisie, but at the same time try and play a policy "de bascule" between Moscow and the bourgeoisie of its country, the more so when the Italian bourgeoisie also has its own interests in regard to the Soviet Union.
We must not forget the large investments which the Italian bourgeoisie has made there.
The French bourgeoisie also, which knows what the revisionist Soviet Union is, does not proceed blindly in its policy, as the Chinese revisionists would like and advocate when they demand that France should take a hard line in its relations with the Soviet Union. Of course, the relations between these two countries are not all sweetness and honey, but neither are they as tense as the Chinese would like. Meanwhile, the French Communist Party, too, in its policy of agreement with the socialists, has in mind that it must not put itself in open and clear-cut opposition to Moscow, but should maintain a certain status quo with it at a time when it is moving towards lining up and unity with the French bourgeoisie.
With the Spanish bourgeoisie the situation is different. After Franco, the Suarez party, which is in power in collaboration with the other parties, is the representative of a bourgeoisie which has its own traditions, but which are mostly the traditions of the fascist dictatorship. It is a bourgeoisie which has experienced many disturbances, which have not allowed it to create that stability which the French bourgeoisie has created, and to a lesser extent, the Italian bourgeoisie. Now it is in the process of revival. Carrillo, with his revisionist ideology, has been included in this process, in the process of consolidation and strengthening of a capitalist regime which is closely linked with American imperialism and which is making efforts to join NATO, United Europe, etc. All these factors restrict the field of manoeuvre for both the bourgeoisie and the Spanish revisionist party, whose game with Moscow is lacking in amplitude.
The Communist Party of China too, likes Eurocommunism, both as an ideology and as a practical activity. It agrees with the name and with the content of the line of these three parties. China, as a state, and the party which defines the line and strategy of this state, proceed according to the world contingencies which alter every hour and minute. In the grouping called Eurocommunism the Communist Party of China sees an ideological opponent of the Soviet Union which it considers the number one enemy.
Therefore, just as it supports without the slightest hesitation, and assists without the slightest reserve every force (with the exception of genuine Marxist-Leninists and revolutionaries), which appears to be against the Soviet Union, China supports and approves Eurocommunism, too. The Communist Party of China long ago established relations with Carrillo, as it is doing now with Berlinguer, too. It took a step by sending the Chinese ambassador in Rome to attend the recent congress of the Italian Communist Party as the official representative of the Communist Party of China. Recently it welcomed Berlinguer to Beijing. There is no doubt that it will establish relations with the French revisionist party, too. These links will be gradually increased and strengthened. This cannot fail to happen in as much as they have identical strategies and similar tactics. The delay in establishing close links comes from China, which hesitates to go too far in the direction of the Eurocommunist parties in order to avoid angering the top circles of the bourgeoisie ruling those countries, especially the parties of the right, to which it gives priority and considers its closest allies.
The genuine Marxist-Leninist parties of Europe and of all continents are not misled by the tactics and manoeuvres of the Soviet revisionists who allegedly have entered into polemics and opposition with the so-called Eurocommunism. They do not think that they can find a breach here. In principle, there is no breach among the revisionists. They are tactically split in order to better achieve their strategy, which has the aim of the global domination of modern revisionism over the world proletariat. Therefore, the Marxist-Leninist parties expose and fight Soviet modern revisionism, Yugoslav, Chinese and Eurocommunist revisionism equally. They do not and must not have any illusions on this question.
* It couldn't be stated more openly. A more servile testimony of loyalty to the bourgeoisie could not be given. "Avoiding the damage to the democratic constitutional framework" means to avoid the overthrow of the existing bourgeois order, to avoid the revolution, to avoid socialism. What more could the bourgeoisie ask of the revisionists?