Ferenc Feher & Agnes Heller (1981) The Fear of Power. The Genesis of Eurocommunism

The Fear of Power.
A Contribution
to the Genesis and Morphology of
Eurocommunism
FERENC FEHER and AGNES HELLER
All understanding of Eurocommunism has to start with a sketchy

typology of communism itself. If we are not playing games
with words and do not baptize as communism everything that has
anything to do with Marx, then we have to draw a sharp
line of demarcation between two political entities. One of
them is constituted by a wide range of socialist, social-
democratic and labour parties of the Second International
of which only the smaller part was Marxist in any vague
but still identifiable sense of the word (1). The genuine
cohesive force between these parties cementing them into the
Second International, was not a common ideology, rather a
social position shared in common. They were radical-
oppositional parties of a liberal-conservative parliamentary
system, part and parcel of the very system and they
intended to remain precisely this, In this capacity, they
achieved spectacular results. Hardly a socialist agitator,
Max Weber testified to the fact that the credit of gradually
transforming a far from democratic liberal regime into a
parliamentary (’formal’) democracy could be given solely
to the working class parties. The other side of the coin
was the usual paraphernalia of any normal parliamentary
machinery: factions, strife between them, the emergence of

a party (and trade-union) bureaucracy, often widespread
corruption, an increasingly opportunist attitude to the

theory whose ’purity’ the leaders publicly so vehemently
defended (2). For reasons which cannot be analyzed here,
the pre-World-War-I socialists had to maintain a false
consciousness of their own, an in itself legitimate
political identity which gradually waned among their post-
World-War-I colleagues, to disappear tracelessly after World
War II. As parliamentary parties, they were within the
system but pretended to be outside it. It was at this
point that a double opposition against ’social-democratic
opportunism’, ’bureaucracy’, ’degeneration’ came about.
The word ’double’ has some importance for, as a rule, it is
only the early communist, the pre-Bolshevik opposition which
is mentioned in the chronicles. However, it should not be
forgotten that the transformation of the parties of the
Second International from a conglomerate of outcast
political forces into that of ’respectable’ parliamentary
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parties generated a rightest radicalism as well. Michels’
classic theory of the ’iron law of party bureaucratization’
was the product of this transformation and this crisis to
the same extent as Luxemburg, or Lenin’s critique.
The countermovement against ’socialdemocratic degeneration’

had its ’dress rehearsal’ in the 1905 Russian Revolution
and this not only for the Russian revolutionaries, but also
for others (suffice it to mention Luxemburg’s ampromptu)(3).
The historical hour of the opposition struck with World War I,
with the Second International’s inability to prevent the ,
outbreak of war, with the Russian Revolutions of 1917.

Nowadays, under the impact of communist historiography, the
usual retrospective story of the opposition shows an
integral-homogeneous, even if internally stratified
movement, with, of course, Lenin’s full maturity and
clairvoyance on the summit. All others are on various
inferior levels of ’consciousness’, with various ’vestiges
of social-democracy’, following in his footsteps. This is
not only a distorted view of the opposition, it is a total
mystification. In actual fact, and even if we disregard
the early forerunners of the pre-Mussolinist rightist
radicalism, there was not one, but two different types of
opposition within the countermovement against the ’social-
democratism’ of the Second International. Perhaps the
names will give us guidance. Suffice it to mention
Luxemburg, the young Trotsky, Martov and many other leftist
Mensheviks who were, of course, all early communist
politicians. It was for this reason that ordinary social-
democrats never understood the real differences between the
strife-ridden Menshevik and Bolshevik factions. Further
we have to point to Landauer, Pannekoek, the leaders of the
Ordine Nuovo, Ervine Szabo, Levine and Lukgcs, from the
moment in which they joined political movements. One could
also find transitory types,the greatest among them obviously
Leo Jogiches, a strange mixture of the above group and
Lenin’s Bolshevism as far as organizational principles and
political morality was concerned. It is important to
separate those social-democrats, (leftist, centrist and even
sometimes rightist) from those who, under the shock of the
carnage of World War I, temporarily concluded pacts, made
alliances with them, and who later mostly returned to the
bosom of the parliamentarism pure and simple. This opposition
represented an early version of ’cultural revolution’ with
several elements of religious belief in coming redemption on
various levels of political experience and influence. All
terms in italics need some further qualification, and it has
to be stated immediately that not all terms characterize all
of them. The label of early ’cultural proletarian revolution’
means here firstly that they all recognized the ’bureaucratic
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degeneration’ in social-democracy but denied that this
would be an ’iron law’ of party development and wanted to
return to the‘movement’-character of political activity,
relying on the ’wisdom of masses’ (particularly of proletarian
masses) without being anarchistic and denying the need for
a minimum of organization. Secondly it means that they set
out to realize what was only self-delusion or false
promise on the part of social-democratic leaders: to live
’outside society’, to build up counter-institutions,
alternative ways of life. For them, integration into the
system in any form meant in itself degeneration. It was
certainly no accident that Rosa Luxemburg, this straight-
forward heir to the best traditions of Enlightenment in
every field, worked with a rationalist counterconcept of
Sorel’s mythology of general strike as the ultimate weapon
of the proletariat, neither was it chance that permanent
revolution,which was a shrewd practical strategical suggestion
with Parvus, started its mystical career with Trotsky already
in this period. Those of them who had political experience
at all, were not men of the apparatus but ’mass’ politicians,
as for instance Trotsky in 1905, later the Ordine Nuovo-
group for a short period. However, very characteristically

they could never consolidate their hold over the masses
whose wishes they articulated in the highlights of
revolutionary situations. All fruits of their brilliant
grasping the historical moment,.of their extraordinary
capacity to react instantaneously, of their seducing rhetoric
were put to use by the ’men of the apparatus’, with the sole
and well-known exception of Gramsci and his party. The
religious-messianic element in a theoretical sense was equally
not general among them. If it was originally, deeply and
totally alien from the ’this-worldly’ personality of Rosa
Luxemburg or from the much more ’dryly rationalistic’ spirit
of Ervin Szab6, it was ’culturally integrated’ into the whole
attitude of Gramsci, it was the feeding spirit of Lukdes’
revolutionary mysticism or Landauer’s Jewish-socialist
messianism (4). Even Trotsky, a philosophically mediocre
disciple of Plekhanov’s pedestrian materialism had, as a
reaction to his ethical nadir (- his debate with Kautsky in
1920 in which he declared Man a ’lazy animal’ -) a quasi-
religious belief in human self-creation, even in a kind of
’deification of man’ in his later years. However, the
question which is relevant here is not so much the
theoretical standpoint sensu stricto but a kind of messianism
and apocalyptic feeling stemming objectively from the
position of the zealots of ’cultural revolution’ within the
Second International. They articulated an apocalyptic
feeling about the end of the ’peaceful’ decay of liberal
capitalism and the advent of wars and catastrophes, a
feeling deprecated by social-democrats who sustained, despice
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the obvious presence of horrors, the possibility of
continuation of ’peaceful evolution ’ - and they proved
right. They prophesized the wholesale collapse of capitalism,
and there was a moment after the Russian revolutions when they
seemed to be right. They preached the necessity and inevitab-
ility of the coming of (various versions) of the ’new man’,
and in the bloodbaths of the trenches, in the brutally
suppressed and heroic anti-war actions and in revolutionary
terror they could see all their versions being materialized
(5). Finally, it has to be added that the opposition of the
’cultural revolution’ was a movement of leaving sometimes
even acaderrtically recognized intellectuals (for instance if
we go back as far as Labriola, which would not be an entirely
illegitimate ’quest of ancestors’), sometimes represented by

drop-outs and outcasts of the academy, as for instance with
Lukgcs or Bloch. But in all cases, even in the case of
those who nevef in their lives went near the academy and
were journalists and party functionaries, this opposition
had a theoretical output which only later (when they became
’respectable’ shadows of the past) became ’academic stuff’.
The second type of opposition found, of course, its
monumental representative in Lenin. It is not only a grossly
unfair, but also a petty representation by Solzhenytsin in
his Lenin in Zurich to portray a crucial type like Lenin who
was to decidg world history in this century as a frustrated
blunderer running from one random idea to another until he
’accidentally’ met the Russian revolution and its exploitable
opportunities. Lenin was perfectly aware of the implications
of his self-adopted description of the correct type of the
professional revolutionary (he called himself a Jacobin in
alliance with working class movements) on the level of
spontaneity. Since the latter would never of themselves
initiate a transcendence of capitalism, they needed the iron-
fisted guidance of a Jacobin minority. He gave thereby a
consciously Machiavellian twist to Kautsky’s ’toothless’
ideas of ’enlightening’ the workers, a notion for which
Lenin felt an increasing contempt. The oft-mentioned fact
that Lenin and his minions were nowhere when the masses were
gathering mom6ntum, that they seemingly missed their opportunity
twice within fifteen years, was not a ’mistake’ but was the
inevitable by-product of the pre-designed character of Lenin’s
type of organization. His opposition to the Second Inter-
national, just as vehement as that of the ’cultural
revolution’, was not aimed at ’triggering-off’ revolutions
(if such a thing is possible at all) or shaping their counter-
institutions into a network of plebeian power. Lenin like
Robespierre, was convinced that the peuple en masse
cannot govern itself. State and Revolution is either a
messianic outburst or one of the most inauthentic books of
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this century. Lenin’s preparations were aimed at
’confiscating the revolution’ on behalf of a dedicated
political elite which would allegedly bring rationality
into an irrational world, a rationality by definition
superior both to the capitalist order and of the masses’
mere ’sponeaneity’.
So whereas both types of were hostile to the
opposition
’parliamentary decadence’ of social-democracy, they trod
on different paths and had different inner tendencies. The
opposition of the ’cultural revolution’ aimed at dissolving
the party in the movement, the parliament in direct
democracy (undoubtedly without weighing conscientiously
sociological preconditions or their absence for such a
fundamental change, for instance the problems analysed by
the Webbs’ arguments). Lenin’s oppositiom, or at least its
inherent dynamic was heading for an elimination of political
pluralism in general, towards a monolithic society. And it
was at this point that he met half-way his arch-enemy, the
rightist radical (for instance, Michels in his progress

towards Mussolini). This is why it is not unfounded,
despite the author’s frantic d6menti, despite his Homage a
Lenine, to regard Sorel as a theoretical legitimiser of both
Lenin and Mussolini.
There was one single moment in history when the two types
co-existed and acted in relative harmony: during the Hungarian
Soviet revolution of 1919. Genesis and structure in this
revolution were such as to accord with both tendencies. It
was a coup (because it was arranged in confidential talks
between the previously competing party leaders) and it was at
the same time a mass action (since the two working class
parties in fact represented the actual will of the ’lower
classes’). It was a Leninist one-party system, but since
both parties preserved in the pseudo-merger their relative
independence and since the workers’ councils (especially the
Budapest workers’ council) did play an important, occasionally
even a decisive role, it was not a totalitarian system. It
had its dedicated Leninist group on the top of the leadership
(Be’1a Kun, Szamuelly, VAgo, Alpgri, Szgnto, Rudas, P6r,
Munnich, etc.) (6) These were ruthlessly Machiavellian men
of terror, the most spectacular of them Tibor Szamuelly and
his ’Lenin-guard’, a kind of mobile execution squad. The
other type the messianic communist of the ’cultural
was
revolution’. We can present as their classic specimen Ervin
Sinko, later the chronicler of 1919 (in his interesting novel,
The Optimists) who preached Dostoevsky’s ethic to captured
members of a failed counter-revolutionary coup and released
some of them - who were later to become the most sadistic
beasts and mass murderers of a reckless white terror. Lukics,
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with his sometimes Szamuelly-like behaviour in the Hungarian
Red Army, and with his ’ethic of conscience’ elaborated in
Tactic and Ethics was just as much a combination and a
personal union of both attitudes, as was the famous martyr
of the revolution, Otto Korvin, the head of the secret police
of the Hungarian revolution. In his last weeks in the prison
of the counter-revolution, while heroically defending his
cause, Korvin relapsed into the overtly religiaus character
of the ’cultural revolution’.
But for Lenin with his Machiavellian realism intact, the

miscarried Spartacist-attempt, Mtlnich, even the Hungarian
Soviet Republic, these messianic spells and heroic blunderings
were only ’infantile diseases’ which had to be cured if
communism was to survive. The cure suggested and carried out
was the famous (or rather ominous) ’Bolshevization’ of the
communist parties. This process is generally interpreted in
terms of transforming an autonomous, or rather, many autonomous
political trends, groups and parties with opinions of their
own into a mindlessly obedient tool of Russian power centres
plus imposing the Bolshevik inner-party discipline on them,

the latter called in a highly dialectical way ’democratic
centralism’. But this interpretation is at best a half
truth. First of all what can be called, paraphrasing
Trotsky, the ’primogeniture of the Soviet-Union’ was an
early and spontaneous feeling among communists of the first
generation. Let us mention one example which has no written
record but which we heard from a prime witness, Georg Lukdcs,
then a people’s commissary of the Hungarian Soviet Republic.
The Soviet Republic came about on the basis of a coalition
between the (majority of the )social-democrats and the far
smaller Hungarian Communist Party. The social-democrats’
calculation was that while they could not, their numerically
insignificant new ally most certainly would be able to intro-
duce an all-important power factor into the Eastern-European
battle-field: the Red Army of the Russian-Soviet Republic,
the only possible deterrent against Rumanian, Czech and even
possibly French counter-revolutionary anti-Hungarian armies
then being present in the area. This weighed enormously
for the social-democrats: when the hour struck and Russian
aid was in fact needed, the Council of the People’s
Commissaries of the Hungarian Soviet Republic (composed of
communists and social-democrats) officially and solemnly
turned to Soviet-Russia for help. But, as Lukdes told us,
at the same time as they signed this declaration, the ’hard-
core’ of Hungarian communism (including himself) met in the
privacy of Szamuelly’s armoured train which carried his
mobile squad, to draft and send a confidential letter to
Lenin to the effect that he should waste not a single soldier
in defence of Hungary, as the world revolution needed more
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than anything else the consolidation of Soviet-Russia.
This blatant breach of faith against their allies, which was
also a fanatical act of self-sacrifice, had no actual bearing
on the outcome of the events: Lenin in his own plight
could not anyhow have sent armies. It is only indicative of
the fact of the depth of unquestioning loyalty to Soviet-
Russia’s right to primogeniture in early communism. (Perhaps
the only exception was Rosa Luxemburg’s irreverent-
enlightened spirit.) And if we read the documents and also
the literary representations of the pioneering period of
European and Asian communism (Malraux*s portrayal of early
Chinese communism, accounts of Hungarian, German, Italian
communists’ heroic behaviour after the white terror’s or
fascism’s consolidation, bordering, in their contempt of
reality, on outright stupidity), one feels that unquestioning
obedience need not have been transplanted into non-Russian
communism from Russia; its religious antecedents were
already present.
The real achievement of ’Bolshevization’ can rather be
described in Weberian terms: Lenin, and especially Stalin,
succeeded in transforming sects into affiliations of the
ecclesia militans, of a conquering global Church. This
success has two basic constituents. The first is the
crushing of the morality-centered attitude of the sect on
behalf of the pragmatic-regulatory objectivity of the global
Church which demands submission, unquestioning humility
towards its own this-wordly authority and is deeply suspicious
of the mystical exaltation of the sects. Weber’s hostile
eyes correclty grasped the moral substance of the revolutionary
sect, and, as the reference to Dosteovsky shows, he formulated
it in an almost overt debate with his younger friend and
disciple Georg Luk5es, who was for him, then a ’seducer of a
generation’. ’The ethic of ultimate ends apparently must go
to pieces on the problem of the justification of means by
ends. As a matter of fact, logically it has only the
possibility of rejecting all action that employs morally
dangerous means - in theory! In the world of realities, as a
rule, we encounter the ever-renewed experience that the
adherent of an ethic of ultimate ends suddenly turns into a
chiliastic prophet. Those, for example, who have just
preached ’love against violence’ now call for the use of force
for the last violent deed, which would then lead to a state
of affairs in which all violence is annihilated The ...
proponent of an ethic of absolute ends cannot stand up under

the ethical irrationality of the world. He is a cosmic-
ethical ’rationalist’. Those of you who know Dostoievsky
will remember the scene of the ’Grand Inquisitor’ where the
problem is poignantly unfolded. If one makes any concessions
at all to the principle that the end justifies the means, it
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is not possible to bring an ethic of ultimate ends and an
ethic of responsibility under one roof or to decree ethically
which end should justify which means.’ (7) Lenin’s well-
known ethical pragmatism which established the indifference,
even hostility of communism towards the problem of morality,
was not a simple derivative of the bad philosophy he learned
and inherited from Plekhanov. It was also the practical
atheist’s wisdom of the Grand Inquisitor, the statesman of
the Church. Of course, he too upheld the ’ultimate end’ of
the coming world of communism as the universe exempt from
violence, as an ultimate legitimation of communist struggle
and communist violence. But until then no moral considerations,
no ’Marxist theology’ should meddle with practical politics.
For him considerations could be based only on usefulness
(where the criteria of utility are always determined by the
elite). Lenin ’instinctively’ understood that also the
obverse of liax Weber’s analysis holds true for the revolution-
ary sect based on the morality of ultimate ends. On that
ground, not only can love lapse into violence, also violence
into mercy, even love. Let us invoke once again the symbolic
Hungarian revolution of 1919, and our already quoted hero,
Ervin Sink6, in a situation where he was preaching precisely
Dostoievsky and the parable of the Grand Inquisitor to
counter-revolutionaries. He provoked a deeply characteristic
reaction from one of them: so I should perhaps kiss Bela Kun?
This was a perfectly reasonable question for Lenin too, who,
as his famous remark about the Apassionata testifies, also
felt the ’much too humane’ temptation of being tender to one’s
neighbours but suppressed this ’weakness’ in himself and
learned and taught how to be constantly hard ’in the interest
of others.’ Despite their scarcity and simplicity, his
remarks on ethical problems show ’Ilyitch’ to be indeed one
of the representative moral educators of this lamentable
century. In contrast to the rightist radicalism which
preached the dangerous, since too overt, course of an
(irrationally founded) immanence where there is no ’beyond’
only success ’here and now’, no values, only the ’right of
the stronger’, Lenin maintained a mortal transcendence
(which gave the actor the appearance and the good conscience
of moral good faith). But he insisted that there should be
no connection whatsoever between our pragmatic deeds and
this legitimising transcendence. All attempts at connecting
the two was ’bourgeois moralising’ for Lenin. It was thus
that he succeeded in crushing and moralising sects and
producing in hundreds of thousands those harsh pragmatists
who performed the ’necessary’ acts of violence, treachery,
Machiavellianism en masse without inner conflicts and
qualm of conscience in the service of the global Church.
Ironically from the viewpoint of such a vehement adversary
of morality, without this moral transformation, the communist
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world movement could not have come about (8).
The second act of crushing the sects and transforming their
membership into branches of the universal Church was
directly political in nature. Triggered by the above moral
considerations, the communist sect was offensive in
character, demanding immediate salvation, was adamant on
not having the slightest compromise, not even temporary
ones, with the despised institutions of the hated bourgeois
world order, rejected the slightest concessions towards the
’weaknesses’ or hesitations of the very class whose simple
tool (or ’vanguard’) it allegedly was, and intended to lead
the masses everywhere and immediately into direct
confrontation. Lenin, who himself spent a very short
period waiting for German, and subsequent revolutions in a
similar mood, understood this feeling perfectly, but
considered it to be dangerous, an ’infantile disease’ of
leftist communism. With his indefatigeable energies he
started to train his ’new men’, after the ebb of revolutions
had set in, to live for a longer time within the system to
be overthrown. Of course, this was a special training with
special policy objectives! Lenin needed no information from
the ’sectarian’ communists about the danger of ’social-
democratic degeneration’. He had been acutely aware of that
in all his mature political life. A model case of this
training is perhaps the communists’ relation to bourgeois
parliamentarism. Despite the fact that many a leading
’leftist’ communist with a greater practical weight than
Lukgcs, rejected participation in the ’world-historically
antiquated’ parliamentarism, none of them did with a more
uncompromising theoretical radicalism and impetus. Lenin
who elsewhere contemptuously refers to Luk~cs’ ’very bad and
very abstract’ Marxism but here does not mention him
directly almost certainly had Lukács in mind when he attacked
so mercilessly the sterility of anti-parliamentary opposition.
Lukacs, relying without references on Weber’s conception of

the sect and, self-consciously internalizing it, goes
straight to the point and makes it very clear: should the
communists even so much as try to live in the ’impure’ medium
of their enemy, they can achieve practical successes as the
social-democrats did, but they will lose their very revolution-
ary substance. Lenin’s counter-option reckoned with this
danger. If we disregard his overt argumentation which is
dry, apodictic in tone and mostly based on a logic of non-
sequitur, the ’hidden merit’ of his strategic and ’therapeutical’
suggestion reveals his highly problematical but undeniable
politican genius. Instead of the sect and the liberal-
parliamentary/social-democratic/party, he basically recommended
the communists to follow the ’Trojan Horse’-strategy and
build up an organization adequate to the task. The communist
135

parties of the industrialized liberal-capitalist regions,
whether small groups or large political forces with influential
parliamentary caucuses, learned to combine two absolutely
disparate ways of acting,
or organizing themselves, and the like
(9). On the hand, ’Bolshevized’ communist parties
one
appropriated all the dirty tricks of manipulation, fraudulent

promises to the voters, using corruption, etc. which since
Walpole, has been part and parcel of parliamentary politicking,
with an amazing swiftness. If one studies certain chapters of
French communism, the Barbusses’ recruiting ’intellectual
friends’ of the Soviet-Union mostly with Soviet money as
described in Sink6’s remarkable second book The Novel of a
Novel, we see this type of ’public’ politicking in all its
glamour. On the other hand, the communist parties of this

period always represented something else and more, something
’deeper’ and something more ’mysterious’ than the more or less
successful, more or less corrupt and corrupting political
parties. They always had a parliamentary organization of a
sort (which was especially well developed in German communism
of the Weimar-period) with a frightening resemblance to
Mussolini’s and Hitler’s shock-troops, a successfully concealed
intelligence organization of their own (which not only out-
smarted the then puerile methods of the political police of
liberal countries but which made it possible for a Duclos to
work for years in clandestinity under Nazi occupation, for the
Spanish communists to build up and continuously sustain their
underground party secretariat in Madrid under Franco, etc.)
They practically always had one or more parallel organizations
directly working for Soviet intelligence, they had uncontrolled
and uncontrollable secret funds catering for a numerous and
tolerably paid apparatus. But, more importantly, they could
achieve that which only their rivals and mortal enemies, the
Nazis could for a longer period of time, namely to educate
sometimes huge masses of people to behave in a schizophrenic
way. On the one hand the communists of parliamentary regimes
in the twenties were law-abiding citizens, very jealous of, and
indignant about the smallest infringement of their civic
liberties as citizens of a democracy, on the other they were
parts of a collective conspiracy to overthrow democracy and
transform it into a totalitarian dictatorship. (This double
standard became particularly strong and particularly repulsive
as a result of the long established practices in French
communism.) For twenty years subsequent to his death, Lenin’s

’Trohan Horse’ strategy made irresistible headway in ’parlia-
mentary’ communism and had been implemented by Stalin’s energ-
etic vigour. What Nettl has observed about 19th century German
social-democracy, that they represented a ’society within
society’, that whereas they behaved in an offensive, expansive
way, making social contacts, recruiting new groups of voters
and followers, at the same time as they were totally separated
136

from all believers of all other creeds, that they had their
own institutions, press, culture, ’language’, social habits -
all this became nearly pathological in ’Bolshevized’ communism
of the twenties and thirties. Ironically or perhaps
tragically, the most spectacular yield of this strategy was a
’joint success’. The Weimar Republic collapsed under the
battering of two - the Nazi and the communist - ’Trojan Horse’
mass organizations and for a while it seemed to be undecided
who would gain from this joint strategy; only the identity of
the victim was certain (10).
Carillo’s contention in Eurocommunism and the State, is that the

roots of the Eurocommunist turn are to be found in the famous
’Popular Front’ tactic or strategy of the Third International;
in other words, they have to be looked for within the period
now described. We believe this a false quest of ancestors or a
self-delusion. Here again space would not allow us even to
outline a history of the Popular Front politics. Of course,
we do not want to deny a socio-psychological fact. For many
communists, to travel beyond the self-erected walls of a
communist ghetto was a personally therapeutic effect which made
them later susceptible to at least considering objectively what
they would have rejected in religious consternation earlier.
But this collective experience, important and healing as it
was, does not provide sufficient grounds of explanation for the
great change we analyze and it most certainly does not account
for the mixed character of the Popular Front policy. The latter
(even if we offer the sketchiest possible typology) was a
mixture of at least three elements. Firstly, it was an
ideological cover for Stalin after the Nazi threat had emerged
to conclude any pact with foreign powers he deemed reasonable
from the national viewpoints and interests of survival of the
Soviet -Union. But since at a given point this could be
stretched into such a latitude as to encompass treaties of the
kind of a Molotov-Ribbentrop-pact (together with the criminal-
naive belief in co-ruling the world with the F§hrer),it could
hardly be regarded as the beginning of any positive turn in
radical socialism. More so because the honeymoon of the
Popular Front politics, of this allegedly ’democratic opening’
not only did not influence Soviet inner politics positively
but it exactly coincided with the worst raving of Stalin’s
mass terror. Secondly, Popular Front policy meant the frantic
efforts of those communist parties which lost to conservative .
or outright Fascist-Nazi dictatorships which were outlawed and
practically annihilated. They were ready to duck for cover

behind any camouflage organization, any slogan, any policy in
order to resurface again. Despite the pledge to ’reform their
ways’ they represented a wholly insincere continuation of the
’Trojan Horse’ policy: they used their eventual tactical allies
in the same way they earlier used the-parliamentary institutions.
137

~f anyone, Carillo most certainly could tell long and instruct-
ive stories about the moral and political authenticity of this
much advertised Popular Front-strategy, whose legitimate heir
was not Eurocommunism but Rgkosi’s ’salami tactic’ in Hungary
and the general annihilation of social-democracy in Eastern-
Europe under the slogan of ’working-class unity’ and the
’fusion’ of the working-class parties. Thirdly, there was one
constituent of this mixture, modest in its forms of manifest-
ation which at last in a vague way pointed towards Eurocommunism.
This was the first emergence of conflicts between the officially
professed parliamentary policy of the communist parties and the
electorate thereby gained and the doctrine of transformation of
democracy into a ’higher type of democracy’, namely the
dictatorship of proletariat. Since the problem of the
electorate will be fundamental to our whole thesis regarding
Eurocommunism, we shall come back to this problem. At this
stage, only the following should be mentioned. In certain
countries the lints of the electorate conquerable by the
communists were so clearly established for a longer period
(for instance, in France it hardly changed from the late
twenties onwards) that as a result, it became clear that
communists must share the electorate with the socialists or
the social-democrats and that at least certain pseudo-
concessions had to be made to the latter, especially in the
face of an offensive enemy, as in Spain immediately before and
during the Civil War. This did not lead to the sincere and
radical reconsideration of the ’Trojan Horse’-strategy, and
its theoretical yield was ludicrous. ’Victory has to be
achieved in a slower pace’ was the main slogan of this
Tartufferie which was combined with the more sincere practice
of summary executions in the cells of the Hotel Gayloxd in
Madrid, the physical liquidation of the anarchists and
Trotskyites. But even an insincere ’coexistence’ with the
electorate was indeed, at least for some, the incentive for a
new opening (11).
II
Strange as it may sound, Eurocommunism, this West-European

movement par 6xcellence was born in Eastern Europe. Without
entering here into the much discussed questions of whether or
not Stalin had a blueprint ready for East-European communist
parties in 1945, or whether it was ’wisdom’ on the part of the
French and Italian communist leaderships not to take the
collision course and gradually marginalize their proponents,
Secchia, Marty and others, or whether it was rather ’social-
democratic’ opportunism at work, one thing seems to be true.
Lenin’s policy of the ’Trojan Horse’ justified itself for the
first time in terms of practical success in the countries of
Eastern Europe. Of course, all this happened under the
138

vigilant tutelage and active interference of the occupying
Soviet army. Between 1945-1948 the communists were first
vigorously active as ’democratic-parliamentary’ parties,
collecting a sometimes wide electorate in popular actions
rolling on the top of the anti-Fascist, anti-conservative
momentum. At the same time in all countries in which they did
not abolish democracy formally from the beginning on, they
were ’secretly’ training and indoctrinating their party
membership to accept the situation as something transitory

and imperfect, until the advent of people’s democracy, this
’superior type of democracy’. In 1948, practically within one
year, they finalized and formalized the changes designed and
predicted by them earlier. They crushed all other parties and
introduced, accompanied by wholesale nationalization, the one-
party-system. The global Church with its realism after so
many bitter fiascos, seemed to be justified, against the
dreams of sectarian communism. Eastern Europe, despite the
Yugoslav schism, appeared as a powerful and seemingly irrevoc-
able self-confirmation of the Stalinist edition of Leninism.
The well-trained branches of the Church could win and, more
importantly, they could rule.
In a total surprise for some, and the realization of the latent

fear for others, the apparently solid East-European situation
exploded in the faces of the Western-European communists from
1953 onwards. Berlin in 1953 co.uld be somehow explained away.
It was (or seemed to be) rather a famine riot than a political
action, and anyhow, eight years after the war it was hard to
win sympathy in Europe for any action of a dissatisfied German
population. Poznan in 1956, another famine riot, was a far
more complex case (especially against the background of the
XXth Congress). But it remained isolated and the Polish
leadership showed unexpected tolerance after putting down the
riots, which, after all, could have happened with the American
National Guard in any city after a similarly clamorous outbreak
of the dissatisfaction of the blacks. However, there were
two events which the communist parties of Western Europe could
never really digest, which have widely spread the germs of
dissent and political change in them, even if this has remained
concealed for a longer time. One of them was the XXth Congress
and Krushchev’s ’secret speech’ which only remained secret for
the Soviet population but even for them only textually.
Whatever our opinion of Krushchev may now be, knowing as we
now do (after the Archipelago Gulag and a generation of the
’philologists of terror’) that his famous ’revelations’ were

very modest, well-groomed and severely edited stories of
exclusively communist (and mostly Stalinist) victims of a
communist regime, it was precisely that, coming as they did,
from the first secretary of the Soviet communist partly, and
not from a cold warrior, they stunned the average Western
’139

communist and left indelible marks on the membranes of
politicalconsciousness. The second event was Hungary, in
its continuous revolt from 1953 to the revolution of 1956.
Characteristically, Imre Nagy’s ’opening’ towards a liberalized
edition of the regime, his remarkably sincere speech in 1953
as newly appointed Prime Minister made, to our knowledge, just
as modest an impact as the Titoist efforts between 1949-53
to advertise their more liberal communism. Hungary exerted
influence on Western communists’ minds for the first time by
the horrible revelations regarding the torture and
execution of many leading communist militants, some of them
loyal to devotion and beyond. Sartre, for instance, accepted
as a fact the existence of police tortures only on the grounds
of the trial of Mihaly Farkas, the secretary of the Hungarian
CC responsible for ’administrative affairs’ and a multiple
murderer. Secondly, the scenes of the revolution, the sight of
a population which nearly unanimously rejected a tyranny could
later be termed ’counter-revolution’ but could never be
forgotten. In all interpretations it was just a stunning and
irrevocable refutation of the alleged Leninist-Stalinist
’realism’ as the 1948 ’victory’ seemed to be its corroboration.
And the epilogue, the cruel and bloodthirsty, also extremely
stupid Russian act of vengeance, Imre Nagy’s execution, only
accomplished the mythology. As we see his figure going to
the gallows full of resignation but also resolution, in a self-
chosen death for a socialism whose meaning he wanted to rescue
from the Leninist ’realists’, he emerges as the first martyr
on the calendar of a Eurocommunism then only in gestation.
Czechoslovakia in 1968 does not need many commentaries in this

regard since the whole series of events was overtly Eurocomm-
unist in character, in a double sense. Dubcek himself and his
leadership were fully aware that the rot did not set in through
some smaller or larger ’disproportion’ in the process of
’building socialism’. They were fully aware of the fact that

the Leninist (they probably would have said Stalinist) realism
turned out to be a nightmarish irrationality on which the
normal functioning of a political system could not be based.
Led by this insight, they were making attempts at structural
changes, and precisely for that reason they were swept away by
Soviet armed forces. On the other hand, and in a marked contrast
to the confused double talk or the aggressive complicity in
the Soviet intervention of the West-European communist press in
1956, in 1968 practically the whole of the West-European
communist community condemned the Soviet invasion. Eurocommunism
was thus formally born. Certain communist parties, for
instance the Spanish, repeatedly state that it was precisely
August 1968 from which they derive their new political
physiognomy.
140

There are two approaches, not one to understanding Euro-
communism, and we say this with a certain polemical edge. For
even in case of deeper attempts than the usual juurnalese
about the ’sincerity’ or ’insincerity’, for instance in the
excellent analysis of French communist development by Castor-
iadis, the arguments mostly remain on the level of interpreting
leadership and apparatus. No doubt, this is a very relevant
way of understanding a Leninist party in which there is no
democracy, even in the superficial way it exists in every
bureaucratized bourgeois party apparatus, but only ’democratic
centralism’. We also start at this point and simply state
that because of the vested interest of the communist apparatuses,
that which seemed to be profitable in the thirties turned out
to be suicidal after the long drawn power crisis of East-
European communism between 1953-1968 (a new phase of which was
opened by the ’Polish decade’ starting with 1970). The reasons
for this lucid understanding were simple enough. The members
of communist apparatuses as is richly documented regarding
French communism in a different but equally convincing way by
Annie Kriegel-Valrimont on the right, and Cornelius Castoriadis
on the left, have well-paid positions in the publicly recognized
party organization itself, they hold key municipal positions,

represent academic and literary lobbies, have special party
schools, publishing houses and shares in other channels of
publication, a developed system of non-moneta rized amenities for
functionaries and top militants,.a certain influence even ovcr
the hostile power centers of the ruling regime which, except for
very critical periods of the Cold War, have tackled communists
with gloved hands while their police simply beat up or framed
without reluctance non-organized dissenters. They also have a
wide influence in trade-unions and national cultural institutions
which feel it a duty to reward communist intellectuals time and
again. Of course, this is not enough for any oppositional party
(this is why it is oppositional), especially not for a
totalitarian party but it is actual, undeniable power. ’Fh(-
fear of power which increasingly replaced greedy and unrestrained
power-seeking in West-European communism and which, ironically,
was first located by the extreme left of communism (12), grcw
out of the objective basis of the actually possessed power of the

apparatus and its concern for losing it in an adventure. Haven if
it had different causes in 1968 and 1978 respectively, the fear
of power (of their own, actually possessed power) played an
enormous, if not forthright dominant role in the French Communist
Party’s contribution to the miscarriage of a popular movement and
an electoral victory. Similar considerations apply to the
defunct politics of compromesso storico which will, however,
return under new names.
The fear of power cuts both ways. One side of the coin is the
’Chile-complex’ which has been sincerely spelt out by Berlinguer.
141

In the face of the unquenched American (and conservative
West-European) hostility towards Eurocommunism (which is after
all ’still communism’), taking into consideration the constant
danger of
CIA-organized coups, not even the magic 51% is a
satisfactory guarantee against the abysmal perspective of a
conservative dictatorship in the place of parliamentary regime,
aftera short-term rule of a leftist government. This, of
course, would mean the total loss of all power now enjoyed
by communist apparatuses. And a Marchais, a Carillo, a
Berlinguer are sufficiently pragmatic to realize, even if
they were not ready to state it publicly, that without the
internal dissatisfaction caused by an originally leftist
government,no CIA-sponsored conspiracy, no military coup
cansucceed. Given the fruits of Leninist ’realism’, the
results of the ’Trojan Horse-policy’, given the fact that there
is no other result of socialist experiments, they are positive
that with a seizure of power they would only be heading for a
catastrophe. One can even wonder whether the whole phraseology
of compromesso storico is not simply a far more clever version
of communist reticence from power than Marchais’ spectacular
and inconsistent gestures of a sometimes offensive, sometimes
defensive policy, which is in actual fact far from being aimed
at conquering, or even sharing, governmental power, rather
influencing government policies from the outside.
On the other hand, communist zpparatuses have an equally strong
and just as iegitimate and substantial motivation to fear of
power. They simply do not want to share the fate and life-
conditions of their failed colleagues from the leaderships and
apparatuses of Eastern-Europe, of people who disappeared without
trace in Soviet Kolkhozes and countryside small towns, as for
instance, Zakhariadis or Rakosi did, of people who have no
addresses, who cannot even be referred to publicly without
prior permission. Only political dilettantes du not see, for
instance, the obvious policy differences in the last decade
between Berlinguer and his leading group and Luigi Longo, the
earlier general secretary, who despite his past in common with
Togliatti, this ’man of incognito’ of the Third International,
remained an old-time Bolshevik with half-hearted convictions
from the ’Trojan Horse’ period. However, Longo’s resignation
from the post of the general secretary, his gradual loss of
influence in his party means no humiliation, no public disgrace
or ’ideological internment’ but precisely the same situation
that every bourgeois statesman who lost influence in his party,
shares with him; a tolerable modicum of public respect for his
past merits, no say whatsoever in actual decisions (13). In a
way, communist apparatuses, which were most reluctant to learn
from the situation of the ’masses’ allegedly liberated by their
East-European colleagues, showed a remarkable awareness of the
fate of their own equivalents there.
142

Before we come the second approach of understanding
to
Eurocommunism, let us make one point absolutely clear. The
syndrome we call ’fear of power’ is not an altogether
negative phenomenon for us despite the contradictions inherent
in it which we are going to briefly analyze at a later stage
in this paper. The vehement objections to the effect that
Eurocommunism is a new edition of ’social-democratic
degeneration’ seem to be unfounded to us (despite our own
critical considerations), and the standard Trotskyite tirades
against them to be highly insincere and inauthentic given the
ever more dominant trend in Trotskyism to defend first and
foremost Trotsky’s murderers and exalt their ’emancipatory role’,
for instance in Afghanistan, or in Kampuchea with Vietnamese
hands. ’Fear of power’ put an end to the Leninist ’Trojan
Horse-strategy’ in Western-Europe, at least for the time being,
and the sooner this dead is buried, the better.
The second approach to Eurocommunism has to proceed through the

analysis of the masses of the party members and the electorate
(14). In spite of the undeniable relative weight of the first
component of the Eurocommunist turn analyzed just above, we
find problematic the understanding of structural changes
entirely, or even primarily, starting from the apparatus, and
totally misleading the other approach which departs from the
leaders’ personalities. Let us take the classic example: the
contrast between Carillo and Cunhal. Despite the fact that
Carillo defended himself against accusations regarding the
execution of Francoist prisoners of war and other compromising
allegations with vigour and with the skill of a political
routinier, the fact remains that he, as a very young militant,
already belonged, and for a short time as the police minister,
to the higher echelons of a regime whose human rights record
was far from unblemished even with the yardstick of a civil
war situation. On the other hand, Cunhal was mostly a heroic
victim of his unadulterated Stalinist devotion, and (despite
the obviously large amount of dirty tricks he must have pulled
in his party) he was not the hatchet-man of a nation. During
the first year after the Portuguese revolution he started to
behave as, for instance, his esteemed colleague, Hungary’s
fallen dictator, Rakosi did between 1945-1948, when he simply
confiscated the Portuguese socialist press through the
’spontaneous popular action’ of communist printers. But because
of the force of the circumstances he could not go beyond that
and ethically acts weigh as much as intentions. Nonetheless,
politically speaking, Cunhal is now with his lily-white
personal record - compared with Carillo - the only unreformed
Stalinist leader of the only more or less Stalinist communist
mass party in Europe who would defend everything the Soviet-
Union does, including a possible mass deportation of twenty
million ’disobedient’ Poles. At the same time, Carillo is, at
143

least verbally, the most resoulute Eurocommunist (15).
The remarkable phenomenon regarding party masses and electorate
had a crucial and two-fold impact on the emergence and
character of Eurocommunism. On the one hand, in all countries
of Europe where there were no conservative dictatorships, party
masses and electorate increased and separated from one another
at the same time. It is easy to account for the first phenomen-
on. The victory over Fascism in Europe was overwhelmingly
attributed to the Soviet-Union and not without good reasons;
and in many cases it seemed logically to be, without equally
good reasons, the achievement of a system that allegedly
functioned well, not of a huge nation that valiantly defended
itself against a brutal aggressor. As a result, many people
who would have never thought such a political position possible,
found themselves siding with communism in the years before the
Cold War. In certain countries, first of all in Italy, this
process of increase never stopped for thirty years. The
second aspect needs further elucidation. Firstly, a relative
separation between party membership and electorate was neither
a totally novel, post-World-War-II feature in communism, nor
was it absolutely alien to communist standards. For instance,
in the heydays of the ’Trojan Horse-strategy’ the German, later
the French communists had a party membership incomparable in
numbers to their huge electorate. In addition, as is well-
known, the Leninist parties regarded themselves vanguard, not a
general reservoir. In the twenties and thirties, they would
not even have admitted everyone who voted for them into the
’ranks of the party’, rather they preferred controlling and
indoctrinating these masses through the so-called ’transmission’
organizations. However, this situation changed after World
War II, probably on Soviet ’advice’, when first the communist
parties of Eastern Europe for obviously opportunist reasons,
and, then, following in their footsteps the Western parties as
well, started campaigns of mass recruiting with the clear
intention to draw close the huge number of voters to the
actual party members. The purpose is transparent: all this
happened in the hope of a coming seizure of power and with the
intention of closely controlling as many people as possible.
This succeeded completely in Eastern Europe (with the additional
result that these ’parties’ ceased to be political parties at
all). It failed, just as completely, in Western Europe where the
communist leaderships had to realize that they can have a
permanent mass support with relatively small fluctuation in
number (for instance, in France), even with an increase in
number (for instance in Italy) but without the voters’ willing-
ness to be subjected to party discipline and indoctrination.
Instead of being exclusively manipulated by the apparatus, the
communist voters started to behave in a ’parliamentary way’.
They partially reversed the relationship between them and the
144

apparatus and used the apparatus for their own purposes. The
novel feature contributing decisively to the emergence of
Eurocommunism consisted of the fact that at least some of the
communist parties to some extent accepted this new constellation
and tried to build up political, not simply ’command-and-obey’,
relationships between party apparatus and electorate. (Mean-
while the relation of the apparatus to the party membership has
not changed substantially.)
But the real problem, whose understanding will perhaps shed
satisfactory light on the emergence and characteristic features
of Eurocommunism, is perhaps the following. Why did the
electorate tolerate its manipulation by the apparatus in the
pre-war period, why did it reverse the relationship between them
to a considerable extent in the post-war period? In other words:
what are the characteristic features of the electorate of the
Eurocommunist parties?
Firstly, in a number of countries (Italy, France, Spain, Sweden,

etc.), a constituency has been created by historical (actual and
traditional) factors which gives its vote and continuous
political support to parties which are ’farther left’ than
social democracy, which are ’more radical’, which want to go
’beyond capitalism’. In the given cases, this constituency
is mostly strong enough to determine or co-determine the
political constellation of its country. The words ’farther
left’ and ’more radical’ were not accidentally put into
inverted commas since the slightest probing into the real
content of the demands of the electorate will show a very
wide and heterogeneous range of policy objectives, instead of
the once existing uniform, simplistic, messianic expectations.
In Sweden, the forte of the Eurocommunists stemmed in a period
from the fact that they were the only unceasing leftist
critics of the welfare state, this specifically social-
democratic creation who did not reject it. (And obviously,
the new situation in which social-democracy is in opposition
itself, created a radically different political climate.) In
Italy, the advocacy of a number of disparate, norze of them
specifically communist, demands (the problem of the South, the
critique of Italy’s ’general misgovernment’., the Italian
cultural renewai, defence of certain civil rights, such as, for
instance, divorce, in an arch-conservative country, and the like .
plus the happy situation that, in contrast to socialists and
social-democrats, they have never been part of a mostly
corrupted administration), creates a dynamic communist constit-
uency incessantly increasing up until the last year. In
France, partly because of the constant post-war crisis of
French social-democracy, partly because of the historically
conditioned fact that communist centralism appealed to a
considerable number of French voters favourably inclined
145

towards an ouvrierist Eurocommunism came
centralization,
about, a party and
electorate with the most unambiguous
an
class identity of all of them. In Spain, Eurocommunism became
one of the vehicles of the democratization of a country which
was until recently still a dictatorship. But since the ,
Spanish communists overemphasized their ’merely welfare’

intentions and since there are still here socialists without
the grim reputation of the communist past and with a far more
natural inclination for such a programme, they lost face and
are now undergoing a deep crisis including the shrinking of
their electorate. Taking into account all these most hetero-
geneous demands and policy objectives, once again, it has to
be emphasized that the underlying reason for this Mlange is
the electorate’s inner heterogeneity, and not simply the
theoretical confusion of the Eurocommunist ideologues. The
voters themselves combine the non-specifically communist
character of their political demands with the support of
Eurocommunist parties.
.
The second characteristic feature of the Eurocommunist elector-

ate is that, in contrast to the pre-World-War-II situation, the
elements of messianism, of the chiliastic wish of ’immediate
redemption’ disappeared from it. For a short period and in
certain countries, this was not only characteristic of small
communist sects. Germany in the twenties will serve as a
satisfactory illustration. Because of a combination of
several pressing and explosive factors (national humiliation, a
constantly imminent danger of the economic collapse of the
country, generalised mass poverty in the absence of elementary
welfare mechanisms), waiting for miracles and redeemers was
general both on the right and the left. This constellation
pushed the political leaderships, prepared to act in an
authoritarian way by themselves, towards chiliastic actions of
’saving’ classes or nations. We do not want to underestimate
the seriousness of any generation’s social problems: after
all, people in every age live their own problems, not problems
compared to previous ones. We simply describe a social sit-
uation when we emphasize the following. In result of a number
of factors, the masses supporting West-European communists
were and are £ull of oppositional energy, social resentment,
sometimes even hatred but not seized by the hysterical
exaltation and the ensuing demand of an immediate redemption.
They are even increasingly suspicious of any promise by
’prophets’ of an immediate redemption. The first reason is
the long period of capitalist prosperity, the increasing post-
war standards of living and an unbroken cycle of full employment
practically for a quarter of a century. The second reason is

that until Hitlerism (and Mussolinism) totalitarian tyranny
and national slavery were largely matters of theoretical
speculation in West-European states. But with Hitler and
146

Mussolini, the average West-European citizen learned the
reality of totalitarianism on his skin, and, whatever his
publicly professed political creed was, seemed to be most
reluctant to accept in practice any new dictatorship.
The third that the revelations of the Twentieth

reason was
Congress and the short-lived de-Stalinization process meant a

deep moral shock for the average communist mili tant (16).
Most certainly there was a vast number of communists
(especially of the older generation) who simply did not believe
the facts and - overtly or covertly - regarded Krushchev as a
traitor or at least as someone who caused ’damage to the
cause’. Another, perhaps equally significant, number of
communist voters simply ignored these facts and were distrust-
ful or at least sceptical towards the first accounts of Eastern
dissidents. But an increasing number of them started to
think about the causes of these horrors. In this regard it is
not the number but the process that counts: the process of
turning against the Leninist trend of alienating the
individual’s conscience and moral judgment into impersonal
apparatuses. This work has been started and nothing could
stop it. In addition, it did not remain on an exclusively
moral level. In this regard, it is the ’Polish decade’ that
has a special influence on West-European workers who are
jealously guarding their trade-union rights and who understand
the ’language of Gdansk’, of this already symbolic city of
proletarian struggle against oppression in the Soviet Empire,
without a need for interpreters.
The final constituent and shift in the potential electorate of

Eurocommunists is the appearance for the first time in fifty
years of a more ’far leftist’ competition (17). The complex
and heterogeneous formula which is usually called New Left
has been generated by the post-war transformations in world-
capitalism outlined above in a very sketchy way, and means
partly a competition, partly a stimulus for the Eurocommunists
in a triple sense. Firstly, they advocated an offensive policy
(while Eurocommunism in gestation was very much on the
defensive) for the simple reason that they did not seem them-
selves responsible in any sense for the past, its crimes and
miscarried hopes. Nor had they, of course, any share in any
actual power they should worry about. Among other things, 1968
showed that if the communists want to keep pace with them, and
first of all, if they want to recruit the constituency created
by the New Left, as prospective voters, they too have to
formulate their strategy in a genuinely offensive spirit.
Secondly, it remains the great and remaining merit of the New
Left that, sometimes even in a one-sided and exaggerated way,
it put new problems on the agenda emerging from the new stage
of capitalism: problems stemming from the rigidification of
147

the division of Zabour, self-management (for the first time
after nearly seventy years in socialist history), new styles
of-life, feminism, the programme of cultural revolution and
ecology. All these were declared to be pseudo-problems in the
period of ’Trojan Horse-strategy’ but, even if relegated
somewhat to the background by worries of the present crisis,
they will never again disappear from the socialist agenda.
Thirdly, despite the fact that it was not free theoretically
from dogmatic groups, part of which have even been ’re-Stalin-
ized’, the New Left originally counterposed an existential and
total gesture, its way of life (or rather ways of life), not
a simple wal.1 to power, to capitalist world order. This
circumstance was also a stimulus, after the relative ebb of
the movements, towards the Eurocommunist turn.
This has also been a source of new conflicts for the Euro-
communists, in a double sense. On the one hand, the New Left,
and not only its Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist part, has been
constantly unmasking the Eurocommunist strategy of self-
imposed standstill behind the offensive rhetorics, the
theoretical decline, the pragmatic indifference towards the
new problems of new ways of life, in brief: the timid and
conservative bureaucrat behind the verbal facade of a radical
innovator. Never up until now have the communists learned to
co-exist in a mutually stimulating way with this criticism.
Mostly they were contemptuous and forthrightly hostile (as for
instance the French leadership in 1968, even tnough it could
put to use the advantages created by the New Leftist revolt),
at best they were flexible without a deeper understanding of
the message. On the other hand, the decline of a considerable
part of the New Left, together with the degeneration of certain
groups into open Stalinism, of certain others into terrorism,
created a situation in which the apparently conservative
orthodox communist criticism is absolutely legitimate. It is
a strange and paradoxical situation for communist parties not
in power to be the parties of ’law and order’ but if it happens
in defence of democracy and against terrorists who intend to
provoke the emergence of a dictatorial state with their murders,
in order to prove their own thesis about ’bourgeois dictator-
ship’, then the communist critique is wholly apposite.
Obviously it is important to indicate which parties did not
become Eurocommunist and for what reasons. The most important
counter-example is Portuguese communism which has since 1974
been in a constant process of growth without even verbal con-
cessions to Eurocommunism. We think that the reason is
relatively simple. Portugal, its social structure, its rural
poverty and illiteracy, the burdens and vestiges of a
collapsed colonial empire represent together a kind of ’third-
world-enclave’ within the ’first’. The communist electorate is
148

overwhelmingly constituted by a stratum (poor, landless
peasantry) which is, perhaps Europe, mainly interested
alone in
in an agrarian revolution, which, equally alone in Europe, must
be full of chiliastic expectations and which has, finally,
no experience whatsoever about East-European reality, not even
through the media very scarcely present in their life. A

second important counter-example is provided by communist
parties of many small European countries, small themselves,
incessantly vacillating between ’Eurocommunist reform’ which
could perhaps emancipate them from their ghetto-like isolation
and relapses into the same ghetto. Here, of course, given the
small dimensions of the political force itself, Soviet
’subsidy’ obviously plays a direct role. (These dwarfs are
needed for Moscow to uphold the appearance of a ’world move-
ment’). But social processes are more complex even on small
o
scale than they could be expressed (or implemented) by

corruption alone. Let us quote two very insightful remarks of
Osip Flechtheim regarding the social causes of the collapse of
the Austrian Eurocommunism since they have general validity for
the small parties. The first is the following: ’In a small
party as is the CPA (at the end of 1973 it had 20,000 members)
both the mass of members and the functionaries feel as out-
siders (in society). Again and again, they abandon themselves
to the temptation to identify with the omnipotence, omniscience
and universal benevolence of the faraway Soviet-Union, expecially
since the Eurocommunist politics could not show any direct
successes.’ And here is the second, even more important remark:
’Apart from this, the CPA consists of old people: in 1973 49%
was 60 years of age, 20% between 50 and 60 years of age and
only 6.6% under 30. Their political socialization process has

been accomplished under Stalin when he fought against Hitler
and contributed to the liberation of Austria.’ (18) This
latter circumstance is most certainly decisive in the case of
at least half a dozen small communist parties resistance to
Eurocommunism. A third general factor can be a specific
crucial event in a nation’s history affecting vitally the given
nation’s communism. In Germany, it is the division of the
nation into two states that provides a specific and unresolvable
dilemma for West-German communism making it impossible that
socialist radicalism should develop in a Eurocommunist form.
West-German communists have constantly been confronted with
the following alternatives. Either they accepted the
existence of the East-German state, not legally: legally the
GDR is recognized by the West-German state as well, but as a
’deserved punishment’ for traditional German crimes, as a
’world-historical necessity’, as something ultimate for the
future of Europe in which case they practically excommunicated
themselves from the West-German national community. With this
policy they could not,and in fact cannot, be other but a
loudspeaker for the GDR and no Eurocommunist turn in the
149

world could lead them out of this isolation. Or, alternatively,
they can reject the ’theoretical necessity’ inherent in the
existence of GDR, the whole underlying ideology of a German
atonement for generations and call things by their proper name;
acknowledge the GDR as Stalin’s spoil from the war. In this
case, however, they would be more radically excommunicated
than any Spanish or Italian ’deviationist’ and would cease to
be Eurocommunism,. In the case of Greece, the division is to
be traced back to the Civil War and its assessment. There
can be hardly any doubt that those feeling resentment against
Stalin’s obvious perfidy (compared to which the perfidy of
the Brezhnev-era regarding the ’gentle treatment’ of the
colonels’ rule was a minor affair) touched off the ’Euro-
communist mutiny’ of the so-called ’internal’ party. The
fanatical zealots of the Soviet cause at the cost of their own
destruction, these antediluvian remnants of an earlier period
of communism, form the hard core of the so-called ’external’
party (19).
When speaking about the limits, the rivals and the enemies of
Eurocommunism, one cannot leave out of consideration Asian
communism. Here, however, a few methodological remarks are
necessary. Firstly, our selection of Asian (and not La tzn-
American or Diddle-East communism) is largely a pragmatical
consideration. We describe a geographical area, not a ’mode
of praduction’. At any rate, we share Perry Anderson’s
methodological doubt regarding the overgeneralized character
of the Marxian concept of ’Asiatic mode of production’ simply
serving as a means to describe everything which is not
European feudalism or capitalism (20). Secondly, we want to o
avoid the discussion of more highly complex social and

cultural factors in other areas. Such problems would be Moslem
culture and its impact on industrialism, capitalism and
communism in the Middle-East, the cryptic question of the
’missing feudal tradition’ in Latin-America where
statehood had been created by a Spanish feudal bureaucracy,
the dilemma of what the term ’communism’ can denote in Africa,
and the like. We hope that contrasting Asian to Eurocommunism
will make the necessary points clear enough.
The first feature of Asian communism worth mentioning is its

national. communist character. Strangely enough, the word has
been coined in Europe and was already catering for the needs of
certain European communist trends (Titoism, Hungarian and Polish
’revisionist’ aspirations in the mid-fifties), but with the
exception of Albania and to some extent, Rumania, it has only
been implemented in Asia. By national communism,we mean
independent, or at least not totally dependent, states with a
vigorous foreign policy of their own and with an unrestrained
totalitarian inner social order. These features can appear in
150

very strange combinations indeed, for instance, North-Korea
combines unadulterated Stalinism resembling the original
vintage with a not totally dependent status between the Soviet-
Union and China. National communist regimes may conclude
pacts with Eurocommunists because of tactical (that is, anti-
Moscow) considerations but mostly they are reciprocally hostile.
And even if the Eurocommunists, first of all the French, do
not lack chauvinism, national communism cannot be a functioning
model in an economic (namely the West-European) system which no
longer knows entirely self-sufficient units.
Secondly, the and the ’corrupting’ effects of a

advantages
parliamentary situation, its mutual influences between
electorate and apparatus has simply not been given almost
anywhere for Asian communism: if they are not the power itself,
they have no power at a11. (Perhaps the only exception is
India.) Either they live underground, the more than usually
cruel way of life of an outlawed party, mostly under martial
law and exposed to unlimited police terror (South Korea,
Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia) or they are fighting, sometimes
for decades, partisan and civil wars (Burma, the Phillipines,
Vietnam, and of course, until 1949, Chinese communism). The
example of Indonesia is highly instructive in this respect. For
nearly twenty years after the collapse of Japanese rule, a
system had existed which was called by the Indonesian leaders
’guided democracy’: certain forms of legality, certain elements
of parliamentary rules prevailed. Already in this period nearly
the whole apparatus of Indonesian communism (1948: 10,000 to
15,000 people) were massacred by an officer caste in a series
of coops and counter-coups in which it is practically impossible
to tell whose was the initiative. No wonder then that the
renewed communist party only learned Stalinist lessons from
the catastrophe and used the parliamentary facade exactly the
same way its East-European colleagues did. Their politics was
a classic case of the ’Trojan Horse-strategy’: infiltrating
government offices and certain army corps, training paramilitary
troops, storing weapons, gathering secret funds, collecting
intelligence data, unmistakably preparing for a new coup.
The upshot, the 1964 bloodbath which cost the life of hundreds
of thousands, is equally small wonder. (Something similar
happened, of course, at a much smaller scale, to Chinese
communism in its Shanghai-period.) And if one takes the only
country, Japan, which is geographically Asian, but politically
now something very different, in which parliamentary liberalism
became the accepted, even revered, framework of political life,
and officers’ castes and para-military forces have been
drastically reduced in power, we immediately can see a type of
communism which in its policies is very near Eurocommunism.
Thirdly and finally, Asian communism faces a deep contradiction
151

which its high percentage of whom are anything but
leaders, a
’dumb apparatchiks’
but rather shrewd, sometimes very
sophisticated politicians, are clearly aware of. This is the
contradiction between its power bases (which cannot relevantly
be called electorate) in the ’heroic period’ of the fight for
power and those established after having seized the power.
Mao’s famous ’fish’, the Asian communist party is swimming in a
sea of peasants. This was the main lesson of the Shanghai
catastrophe, equally of the Indonesian one: in Asian cities
communism is vulnerable. At the same time, this was the
source of the indestructibility of the Yenan-communism and the
North-Vietnames guerilla, this makes Asian communism, despite
verbose editorials about the ’correct proletarian line’, the
vehicle of a peasant revolution. Hence their impetus and their
brutality on mass scale. But the leaders know mostly in
advance that, should they win, they will have to run a
subsistence society struggling not so much with the task of a
gigantic industrialization, as the Russian did, but that of
survival and the elementary modernization. To that end, the
center of power, and with it, the power bases must be shifted
from villages to cities which inevitably means the dictatorship
of the city over the power basis of yesterday, the village.
That this shift and its social implications are generally
resented, even hated, is beyond the slightest doubt. But
very characteristically, and in a marked opposition to Eastern
Europe, this feeling of dissatisfaction did not explode into a
rebellion at all, or only in the secondary form of the Chinese
’proletarian cultural revolution’ when it was triggered and
partly guided by the system’s own power centers. This
situation stimulates many movements, generates various lessons
but it is no nurturing soil for any tendency even resembling
Eurocommunism.
III
The usual question put of Eurocommunists is the following: how

sincerely do they mean what they say? After a nearly endless
story of misusing nations’ and classes’ confidence, after a
propaganda in the best Goebbelsian style, after wholesale lies,
promises not taken seriously the moment they were given, after
thousands and hundreds of thousands (in Stalin’s case: millions)
trapped, used and thrown away into camps, prisons and execution
cells, after the self-conscious ethics of the pledge which is
not binding if given to the giaour, in other words, after the
story of Leninist-Stalinist communism when it ever had the
slightest amount of power, this question is anything but
unfounded. It is also unanswerable on the personal level of
leadership. Some communist leaders seem to have thought over
basic lessons of history, some others are no more convincing
personally than Laval was (remembering that even Hitler
152

remarked with an insightful contempt that he was a ’dirty
democratic politico’). More importantly, nations cannot base
their fundamental decisions on the shaky ground of ’probing
into incognitos’. On a deeper sociological level, many a
leftist denunciation of Eurocommunism points to two, hardly
deniable, negative facts. One of them is that, whatever the
actually given leadership’s intentions are, powerful pressure
groups within the party membership and apparatus may just as
easily stage-manage pro-Soviet coups against the leadership,
as, for instance, the leadership did against the party in
France when they with one gesture ’abolished’ the until then
sacrosanct doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Needless to say, in the knowledge of the 1948 events in
Eastern-Europe, there is much to fear of such impromptus,
should they happen in a time when a communist party holds at
least a hand in state power. Secondly, as some critics point
out, even if it may well be reasonably certain that the over-
whelming majority of the (Euro) communists do not want
dictatorship, so much remains of their Stalinist past that they
only accept the ’united’ front if they have the whip hand.
At least one of the possible motives of French communist
perfidy in 1977-78 is, these critics remark, that they had no
chance of having key positions within a possible Mitterand-
government which they expected despite their smaller electorate,
so they dumped rather than supported it.
Our is clear:
position we are not involved in the ’scrutiny of
incognito’ of Eurocommunist leaders, we simply emphasise

objective sociological points such as the vested interest of
the apparatus, the tension between electorate and apparatus,
the impact of the former on the latter, and the like. These
facts convince us that at least in a number of West-European
countries the period of the ’fear of power’, replacing the
’Trojan Horse-strategy’ has set in. There are, however, two
fundamental points in regard of which the Eurocommunists are
obviously insincere, and this judgment is based equally on
general sociological grounds. The first is precisely the
’fear of power’ itself: they will not admit - sometimes they even
make (especially Marchais) vehement statements to the contrary -
that they wage a ’no-win war’. The reason is obvious: this
would endanger their electorate, only now from a different
direction. Should people clearly realize what they instinctively
and impatiently sense already, namely the very existence of this
’no-win-strategy’, they would simply turn away from the Euro- ’
communists and build up any small sect they find into a mass
party. And even if we have not the slightest chiliastic
inclinations, we too find this strategy short-sighted and
dubious regarding its outcome. The constant suggestion of
compromessi storici may or may not force partial political
reforms on the liberal rival but they do not constitute an
153

independent political strategy. Obviously we do not recommend
the policy of ’return to the proletarian-revolutionary line’ as
for instance the re-Stalinized part of Trotskyism does, but
we do advocate an offensive strategy.
The second conspicuous, and for the Eurocommunists even more

dangerous, item of insincerity is inherent in their relation to
the Soviet-Union. The basis of hesitations, half-truths,
ambiguities and inconsistencies is, again, sociological in
nature. There are at least three basic factors here. The
first is a delicate one. Despite the contradicting versions
of this story (the communist parties in question deny the fact in
an offhand manner, their enemies magnify it into Bondian
dimensions) the fact of Soviet subsidies, at least in certain
Eurocommunist parties, in an amount varying from party to
party, seems to be at least strongly probable. A second, and
equally important cause is the resistance of a considerable part
of the membership (and perhaps even the electorate) to a complete
rupture with the Soviet-Union, for a variety of reasons. The
third, final, and in our opinion deepest cause is strategical
in nature. No party in the world gives up allies (not even
unreliable, insincere, dangerous and compromising ones) in
order not to gain others, and it is precisely this perspective
the Eurocommunists are confronted with. Whereas the Soviet-
Union is becoming more and more hostile towards them, the ’West’
(and we include into this abstraction liberals as well)
remains just’as distrustful of them as it was during their
Stalinist past. No doubt, this situation is a strategical
deadlock but a kind of which there is only one way out. This
can be paradoxically formulated this way: the Eurocommunists
have to break with Lenin, not with Brezhnev. It would be
foolish and dangerous for Eurocommunists to adopt the Chinese
strategy of an inflexible hostility towards the Soviet-Union
which in terms of West-European reality would simply amount to
attempts at the resuscitation of the Cold War. The Soviet-
Union is one of the two superpowers, dangerous and expansive, and
to the extent it pushes its imperialist policy objectives, it had
to be resisted with all means necessary. But its existence is an
undeniable fact which politicians have come to terms with _
preferably in a reasonable way. It would be simply ludicrous

if a social-democrat like Brandt could work out better relations
with Soviet leaders than the Eurocommunists. This is, however,
one problem and a radically different one is considering the
Soviet-Union to be any kind of socialism.
At this so doctrinaire discussion of

point, the allegedly
whether or system is ’state capitalism’,
not the Soviet
’degenerated workers’ state’ or pehaps ’something else’ whose
contours and nomenclature have not even appeared in terms of
the Marxian theory assumes a highly practical character in the
154

actual behaviour of the Eurocommunist parties. In a historically
ironical way, after forty years of bitter struggle against
Trotsky, the Eurocommunists objectively turn towards Trotsky’s
own standpoint and regard the Soviet-Union as a ’degenerated
workers’ state’. This of course brings unavoidable elements of
insincerity and confusion into their theoretical and practical
behaviour. Some of them still deem the Soviet intervention in
1956 in Hungary to be ’tragic but inescapable’ from which, for
instance, the Italian voters can draw reasonable conclusions
about what ’tragic but inescapable’ fate would await them
under Eurocommunist rule. Others make no secret about their
intention to fight if Soviet intervention eventuated. When it
comes either to repressions against dissidents or to conflicts
between groups of the population and the leading ’bureaucracy’,
Eurocommunists regularly preach a confused thesis of reconcil-
iation without any kind of clear strategy, being obviously at a
loss as to whose sides they should take, or they demand a kind
of ’democratic’ attitude from a state whose despotic foundations
they are fully acquainted with. We believe that all these
ambiguities can only begin to disappear if the Eurocommunists
learn to regard, even if in a friendly way and always as
reasonable mediators, the existence of the Soviet-Union as a
mere political fact, and no (perhaps only a negative) exemplific-
ation of what socialism means.
Do the Eurocommunists have a new theory? It is perhaps not

only the theorists’ ’vested interest’ at risk if we state
with regret that they do not. Their ’no-win-strategy’ and the
increasing disintegration of the theory in these parties are
two sides of the same coin (21). Their conception of democracy
is, at best, negative: the renunciation of ’squaring the circle’,
of realizing a ’higher type of democracy’ through a dictatorship.
But, after all, a rediscovery of the parliamentary system
cannot be an inspiring novelty, even if it is a relief after the
re-discovery of Ivan the Terible’s governmental methods. Their
economic strategy is either not new or else not consistent. It
is not new in the case of the French Eurocommunists who keep
pushing a policy of wholesale nationalization. This is perhaps
the most dangerous sign of their programme: exaggerated
nationalization without ’checks and balances’ inevitably leads
to a tyrannical supremacy of the state over the society. The
Spanish communists’ idea of a mixed economy may be viable under
certain conditions but (and this is not pejoratively meant) it
is the policy of the labour parties, it does not show again any
specific ’Eurocommunist’ profile; nor does the slogan of a
crusade against the ’multinationals’ nor the Italian communists’
long-range plans (in themselves sound) to solve the problem of
the South. In the field of social policy, these demands simply
represent the general objectives of a welfare state.
155

What are the alternative possibilities for Eurocommunism?
The answer to this question will also comprise our (overt)
evaluation and a (reluctant) forecast, together with certain
vague suggestions. The first alternative is that the Euro-
communists will turn into ordinary social-democrats. There
are tendencies unmistakably pointing toward this direction, and
one should not forget that precisely this happened with the
’first swallows’ of Eurocommunism, Larsen’s majority faction
which under the impact of the Hungarian 1956 left the
Danish Communist Party. We formulate this perspective without
’holy terror’. The social-democrats indeed did not transcend
capitalism wherever they governed, but in a positive way no one
did and they at least realized the welfare state or contributed
to its realization. In general, we can reiterate with
DSirrenmatt: every statue has a style it deserves, every world a
socialism it achieved for itself. If nonetheless we regard the
’social-democratization’ of Eurocommunism as a negative
perspective, this is for two reasons. Firstly because it will
not satisfy at least a part of their electorate which will
inevitably turn towards pro-Soviet, perhaps even forthright
Stalinist, splinter-parties and sects. (The appearance of
Lister’s party in Spain can equally be a ’first swallow’ of
this tendency.) Secondly, we deem the re-unification (no
matter whether under social-democratic or other aegis) of the
socialist forces into one mass party a problematical perspective
both for the parliamentary system (which then will be ruled by
two giants - a conservative and a socialist-leftist - in every
country) and for the left itself which should have a plurality
of ideas and strategic options within itself.
The second alternative is verbal re-Stalinization. This may

happen any time in one or more of the (majority of) Euro-
communist parties if they persist in the ’no-win-strategy’,
if the capitalist crisis deepens or lasts for an unbearably
long time, if one of the parties suffers a spectacular
electoral defeat or if even the ’Chile-situation’ (namely a
reactionary-military coup) happens: which is not a probability
but which, at least in the South of Europe, cannot be excluded.
We call it verbal re-Stalinization for the simple reason that
the practical attitude of these parties cannot be else but the
continuation of their policy of the late fifties. Of course, no
’proletarian revolution’ will follow and every attempt at
confiscating political pluralism in Western Europe by the Left
can only lead either to Chile or to global confrontation. In all
probability, this would also lead to a ’miniaturization’ of
these parties since a considerable part of their membership and
electorate would not tolerate an even verbal relapse into
Stalinism and would rather turn towards social-democracy.
When we very briefly draw up the third strategic option, we have
156

to make one preliminary remark.
We do not believe it either
possible or fertile to the dreams of the twenties
return to
about the ’movement party’ which would ’cover’ the whole
surface of its members lives: no revised edition of messianic
communism can help. As far as the party structure is conerned,
since it has to be one party among many, as long as the question
of general direct democracy can at least be raised (- not a
perspective of the near future -) there is only one structural
reform that seems to be important: the abolition of democratic
centralism. The real problem is, firstly, wltat type of relation
the new party works out with its electorate, and secondly,
which types of group pressure it will accept or at least
seriously consider. There are now already, and increasingly so,
pressure groups in the Eurocommunist parties’ membership and
electorate which could and would impose an offensive policy on
the party without relapsing into the advocacy of dictatorship.
Their strategy would be the radicalization of democracy based
on the consideration that the central question is the problem
of property which can be solved in an authoritarian way
concentrating all economic forces in the hand of the state, and
in a radical-democratic-anticapitalist way, through a difficult
but not impossible system of general self-managmeent. This,
however, would require a sincere and unconditional turn towards
the idea of a self-managing society which works with the
economically inevitable sector of state property but which
promotes and supports movements pf self-government and self-
management. This alone would mean a new type of democracy: a
combination of the representative system with direct democracy-
This society would not have one doctrinaire economic strategy
but will work out its specific solutions in a ’domination-free
communication’ of all heterogeneous social groups in which
process the parties of the left have their particular role and
tasks. This situation would evolve a new relationship between
party and movements as well.
After so much disillusionment, the authors of this article

would say with sceptical realism that the first two perspectives
have greater chance to prevail than the third. In the present
moment the Spanish Eurocommunists seem to tread on the path
of the first, the French on the second alternative, and it is
not excluded that the Italian will split. The only hope can
come from the region where Eurocommunism, according to this
analysis, was born: Eastern Europe. Since there the social

struggle of masses which are proletarian in an old-fashioned
way (despite the ideology that governs the minds of these
proletarians) nears a phase of detotalizing totalitarianism,
this may give a new impetus to the Eurocommunist attempt, now
at a standstill.
157

NOTES
1. That excellent historian of working class movements,

Georges Haupt, mentioned to us shortly before his untimely
death, his favourite plan to write a book on the ’geography
of Marxism’ in this period which would have shown a
surprisingly small area actually influenced by any
’scientific’ or ’popularized’ - version of Marx’s ideas.
2. If one follows Nettl’s excellent and detailed

closely
account ofBebel’s attitude during the ’revisionism debate’,
his meticulously designed choreography of steps between
Bernstein, Kautsky and the irreverent ’young Turks’ such as
Rosa Luxemburg, one will observe a modern type, a gigantic
Kádár:with total disinterest in the theory
a politician
itself, a shrewd assessment of political
but one with
handicaps and assets to be gained from the theory. See
J.P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (Oxford, 1977).
3. It is important to note that nearly all pre-Bolsheviks,

with a very few German and Dutch exceptions, either came
from Eastern Europe or shifted their activity to Eastern
Europe.
4. Just recently Michael Löwy analyzed Landauer’s as much
revolutionary as mystical-Jewish-apocalyptic vocabulary in
a study in manuscript, Le messianism juif, in which, to
show the complex character of the situation, he also
proved that a messianic phraseology was creeping into
Luxemburg’s terminilogy in her despair caused by World War I.
5. The overwhelming majority of early avant garde artists who

were leftist radical (while the remaining part rightist
radical) thrived on both the apocalyptic and messianic

elements of the opposition of ’cultural revolution’, prior
to and during the war - and revolutionary periods whereas
they found a difficult accommodation, if any at all, in
established communism.
6. Lenin’s adherents less conspicuous before the Bolshevik

were
coup of October in fact, they were hardly visible at
1917,
all, since they were not orators of great format, first
class intellectuals or ’secret heroes’ of the intellectual
life outside the academy. They were rather small fry:
ambitious third-rate party functionaries (such as Kun),
journalists up to their neck in the ’extortion racket’
(as Szamuelly), corrupted politicians sometimes from the
right, sometimes from the left of social democracy (as
Marcel Cachin or Radek), sentimental fanatics of the terror
as ’acting love’
such as Dzkerzinskij, often honest members
of the opposition of the war-politics of the social-
158

democracy, in fear of having a political judgment of their
own. But they existed everywhere in the recesses of the
Second International. Lenin’s guard, trained by the leader
(they were, typically again, the least known part of Russian
revolutionaries including Stalin up to the mid-twenties)
found them wherever they were and put them to use.
7. M. Weber: ’Politics as a Vocation’ From Max Weber ed. H.

Gerth - C.W. Mills, (New York 1946), p. 122. Weber knew
really well that what came later to be known as The Theory
of the Novel, was only one chapter (in actual fact, the only
accomplished one) of a book planned by Lukács on Dostoevsky
in the first months of World War I, a book in whose acme

the (SR) terrorist-revolutionary stood with his ’Russian
Idea’ of revolutionary redemption.
8. At this stage three remarks are necessary. Firstly: what

is called here ’good conscience’ is rather killing conscience
and alienating it into an impersonal apparatus. Secondly:
’pragmatic deeds’ and ’utilitarian considerations’ mean in
Lenin’s vocabulary deeds and considerations determined
exclusively by power interests. Thirdly: Stalin was not
only ’more cruel’ than Lenin, he transformed Leninist
(anti)-morality into something which is practically
indiscriminable from Nazi-Fascist ’ethos’ and for which, in
all objectivity, Lenin is no longer responsible. In the
Stalinist roster of virtues, there was no room for a
legitimizing future state of affairs (even if its ’necessary
advent’ was not denied), only for absolute subservience and
inner humility plus a faith in the person of the Fuehrer as
an ultimate criterion.
9. The reason for speaking only about the communism of the
liberal-capitalist sphere derives simply from our self-

selected goal. But we shall come to a brief contrasting of
Asian communism to the European-American type in order to
make the distinction between them very clear.
10. Here we are not pursuing Lenin-philology of any kind. But

since there is now a revived cult of Lenin, sometimes
directly contrasted to ’opportunist’ Eurocommunism, a few
examples of the ’Trojan Horse’-strategy in his activity
have to be mentioned. Lenin contemptuously rejected the
course of ’open diplomacy’ and ’no compromise’ advocated by
his ’leftist’ opponents regarding the Brest-Litovsk peace
treaty as childish delusions and demanded its immediate and
serious conclusion sans but he had just as little
façon
intention of observing any ofthe clauses of the treaty
as the North Vietnamese had regarding the Paris agreement.
He uninterruptedly maintained clandestine support for
159

Ukrainian Bolshevik underground and simply occupied the
Ukraine (in spite of the will of a considerable number, if
not the majority, of Ukrainians to the contrary) after the
German collapse. He fought against Luxemburg’s ’over-
radical’ views in the national question and urged communists
elsewhere to be the vanguard of national independence but
unhesitatingly launched war against Poland when he deemed
the situation to be ripe for the annexation of the country.
He had clashes with the adherents of the Marzaktion, the
March 1921 attempt of a communist coup in Germany but these
were tactical in nature (regarding opportunity, timing, the
stage of preparations and the like). In principle he had

constantly been planning a German coup, a pendant of the
October action of the Bolshevik party.
11. From Spriano to A. Davidson so many excellent historians

have analyzed the causes of the different development of
Italian communism under the impact of Gramsci that a short
reference will suffice here to indicate the slow but organic
character of the changes in the CPI.
12. One can perhaps regard André Marty, this strange mixture of
Stalin’s hatchet-man and a potential leader of popular
insurrections, as the first protester against the ’bourgeois-
ification’ of West-European communism within the apparatus.
13. Of course, even Italian communists are not always so

generous, and as is well-known from the Marty-Tillon-affair,
French communism has a totally different record. But in a
liberal system, despite all the dirt French communist press
started to throw immediately on its hero after the rupture
(and same thing was repeated in the Garaudy case in 1968),
despite all the pettiness of retaliation, on the one hand,
Marty and Tillon, on the other hand, Garaudy, according to
their respective ’market value’, remained public figures.
14. Unfortunately, in this world of universal survey-making

there is a remarkably small amount of surveys regarding
communist party membership and electorate motivations (or
opinion polls)which leaves enough room for speculation
through secondary signs but of course grants no certainties.
15. Failure to realize this caused great damage to Jorge
Semprun’s L’Autobiographie de Federico Sanchez, (translation
forthcoming in Harvester), this otherwise most interesting
document of an excellent novelist and an admirable communist
underground hero. Eurocommunism, or even its inconsistencies,
cannot be discredited through Semprun’s Carillo-complex, no
matter whether we accept or reject his account.
160

16. We do not speak, here of the likes of Maurice Thorez who
already in 1937 understood that the Soviet law which made
the execution of fourteen year-old children for ’political
crimes’ legal, was the recognition of the ’political
maturity’ of the Soviet youth on the part of their
government.
17. Of course, this statement needs some qualification in view

of Spanish anarchism, Spanish and Mexican pre-war, Ceylonese
and French post-war Trotskyism and the like.
18. Ossip K. Flechtheim, ’In Moskaus Fahrwasser Zickzackkurs

einer kommunistischen Partei’ Die Zeit, 8.8.80, No 32.
19. Finland, with its overwhelmingly pro-Soviet communism

remains a mystery.
20. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (NLB 1974)

pp. 462-549.
21. We do not want to preach any kind of Marxist ’orthodoxy’

which is a religious and hermeneutically untenable
position. Even less would we suggest the indirect theoret-
ical return to oldfashioned Leninist positions with a more
expanded academic vocabulary which still happens, mostly
through Althusser.
161

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The Fear of Power.

All understanding of Eurocommunism has to start with a sketchy

machinery: factions, strife between them, the emergence of

corruption, an increasingly opportunist attitude to the

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The countermovement against ’socialdemocratic degeneration’

outbreak of war, with the Russian Revolutions of 1917.

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group for a short period. However, very characteristically

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illegitimate ’quest of ancestors’), sometimes represented by

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rightist radical (for instance, Michels in his progress

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But for Lenin with his Machiavellian realism intact, the

plus imposing the Bolshevik inner-party discipline on them,

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proponent of an ethic of absolute ends cannot stand up under

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Lukacs, relying without references on Weber’s conception of

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appropriated all the dirty tricks of manipulation, fraudulent

glamour. On the other hand, the communist parties of this

communism.) For twenty years subsequent to his death, Lenin’s

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Carillo’s contention in Eurocommunism and the State, is that the

or outright Fascist-Nazi dictatorships which were outlawed and

practically annihilated. They were ready to duck for cover

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Strange as it may sound, Eurocommunism, this West-European

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membership to accept the situation as something transitory

In a total surprise for some, and the realization of the latent

’philologists of terror’) that his famous ’revelations’ were

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Czechoslovakia in 1968 does not need many commentaries in this

’building socialism’. They were fully aware of the fact that

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party organization itself, they hold key municipal positions,

out of the objective basis of the actually possessed power of the

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The second approach to Eurocommunism has to proceed through the

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Firstly, in a number of countries (Italy, France, Spain, Sweden,

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Spanish communists overemphasized their ’merely welfare’

The second characteristic feature of the Eurocommunist elector-

practically for a quarter of a century. The second reason is

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The third that the revelations of the Twentieth

Congress and the short-lived de-Stalinization process meant a

The final constituent and shift in the potential electorate of

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through the media very scarcely present in their life. A

scale than they could be expressed (or implemented) by

only 6.6% under 30. Their political socialization process has

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avoid the discussion of more highly complex social and

The first feature of Asian communism worth mentioning is its

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Ferenc Feher & Agnes Heller (1981) The Fear of Power. The Genesis of Eurocommunism

Ferenc Feher & Agnes Heller (1981) The Fear of Power. The Genesis of Eurocommunism