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The present theory of power of the French Communist Party

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Annie Kriegel
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Extract

From 1920 to 1939, under the Third Republic, and again from 1943 to 1947, under the Fourth, the French communists were able to present themselves as the harbingers of the future society. But this did not prevent them from improvising, according to circumstances and to the response they received, bold variations on the theme of their relations with the established power and society. The question which so many people are now asking: ‘Have the communists really changed ?’ can be reduced to asking whether, in the fifties although possibly in a confused way, it was not their doctrinal basis which changed; and therefore whether, after a long and victorious battle and with the revolution definitely a thing of the past, we cannot now speak of communist integration, Just as it took sixty years for the modern form of Catholicism to triumph, so perhaps a certain kind of socialist revisionism could now also triumph in similar conditions. To discover whether this is so is the object of the present enquiry.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , 01 January 1967 , pp. 253 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1967

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References

1 Editorial Note: The French Communist Party was slower than the Italian Communist Party to advocate a new form of multi‐partyism. Indeed it opposed for a couple of years the Italian line. The later was best expressed by Pietro Ingrao in 1964. Here are a few significant extracts from Ingrao's articles in Rinascita: It is our opinion that the socialist leadership of the new proletarian state can be achieved with more than one political force. What do these statements mean ? Do they mean that we are becoming pluralistic in the sense that the Catholics or the social democrats are ? Not at all. The critique of the division of society into antagonistic classes, into exploiters and exploited, is still a central clement in our action, and wc continue to struggle to overcome this division, which is caused by the structure of the society and which is the source of a whole process in which the human person is oppressed and broken. The basic reason for our being communists and the objective of all our action is to overcome this division. I should like to correct certain schematic interpretations which have been made of our doctrine and say that the creation of a unitarian structure of society does not mean reducing the whole of society to one single social organism (party totalitarianism) : this is what the independence of the trade unions, the freedom of cultural research and SO on would mean; in this way the ‘supremacy of politics would not mean the elimination of other elements but rather a kind of leadership, a form of synthesis; it would thus be the end result of a whole series of developments which are maturing within the society. This also means that it would be possible for the new socialist state to have a united political leadership in which there would be collaboration (which also means debate and the confrontation of ideas) between various socialist-oriented political forces. ‘The factor which in my opinion must be made explicit is that this means that we recognize and emphasize the class origins of the political formations (the parties) but we do not reduce every difference in the political formation to class differences: it is possible for there to be more than one party with its origins in the working class and the creation of a unitarian policy may spring from a dialectic between them.’

2 Just as the strategy of the Front populaire in 1934 was a ‘defensive–offensive’ riposte in a situation of world‐wide defeat ‐ in which the coming to power of the nazis was the most portentous event ‐ so the new strategy of cooperation and coalition is today, for this school of thought, the ‘defensive‐offensive’ riposte to another situation of world‐wide defeat, perhaps not so devastating, but just as clear, on the economic, ideological, technical and strategic fronts, which the ‘socialist camp’ suffered between 1948 and 1962.

3 This was one of the worst contradictions of the procedure of the 1936 electoral campaign because the first ballot‐plurality of the candidates of the Rassemblement populaire maintained, within the coalition, a competition which could only undo the links which had been forged.

4 In order to simplify, the analysis of the significant episode of the years 1921–2 is omitted. This was the first attempt at a rapprochement between the French communists and socialists, which delayed by as much as ten years the'bolshevizadon' of the French party. This episode showed retrospectively that the secession of 1920 had been deliberately imposed in order to create the type of party needed for the impending world revolution. On the contrary in 1921–2, on Lenin's personal and urgent intervention, there was no longer any question of preparing the impending revolution, but only of resisting the counter‐offensive of capitalism: this led, even then, to the idea of a ‘single proletarian front’ which amounted to casting aside the opposite doctrinal and political points of view on the ways and means of revolution (which was no longer so imminent) and to stressing the tasks common to the entire proletariat. The history of this episode has not yet been written or fully studied. In France there are Trotsky's texts on the French question, as it was then called, Frossard's memoirs, the archives of Rosmer, Souvarine and Humbert‐Droz (see L'oeil de Moscou a Paris, Paris, 1964). Elsewhere one can consult the minutes of the 3rd congress of the International, of the plenary meetings of the Executive Committee (December 1921, February‐March 1922), of the Berlin conference, of the 4th World Congress ‐ which are all documents of considerable importance.

5 The analysis of the biography of the candidates in the Paris elections of 1924 makes it possible to identify, before the ‘bolshevization’, the different elements which made up the young CP. See my study: La formation des élites communistes, to be published shortly, which deals with the subject of communist generations.

6 La Nouvelle Revue Socialiste, first year, No. 2, January 1926 (an enquiry into socialist and governmental participation).

7 Waldeck Rochet, Report to the Central Committee of 4 January 1966. (L'Humanité, 6 January 1966). The same expressions can be found under Waldeck Rochet's signature at the national conference of the French Communist Party, 2 February 1963, at the Central Committee of May 1963 ('There is no communist thesis of a single‐party', L'Humanité, 9 May 1963), in his report to the 17th congress in May 1964, and to the CC of 13 March 1966: ‘Our party rejects the thesis that the single party is a necessary condition for the transition to socialism.’ (Marxism and the Ways of the Future, p. 66.)

8 See Togliatti's well‐known Testament: ‘The question is to know how the working classes could conquer the leading positions within a state which has not altered its structure of a bourgeois state, and how to fight from within for the gradual trans‐formation of the nature of this bourgeois‐state.’

9 But the French position is not so clear. The international conference of May 26–9 at Choisy‐le‐Roi on the theme of ‘monopolistic state‐capitalism’ (see the special issue of the review Economie et politique which contains the reports and interventions of the French delegation) insisted on the aggravation of the class‐character of the state in the phase of ‘monopolistic state‐capitalism’. Paul Boccara in his introductory report, like Waldeck‐Rochet, in his concluding speech, recalled the, to them, basic definition contained in the Declaration of the 1960 conference of the 81 communist parties: 'By fastening the power of the monopolies in the national life, monopolistic state capitalism links the power of the monopolies with that of the state in a unique mechanism which is expected to save the capitalist regime and to increase to the maximum the benefits of the imperialistic bourgeoisie.' Yet in a text by Francette Lazard approved by Waldeck‐Rochet, one finds the strange sentence: 'The content of the intervention of the state, the forms through which it is brought about, result from the evolution of the balance of forces between the monopolistic bourgeoisie and the other social layers of the nation' (p. 119). Should one thus think that there is on the one hand an essence (the state) and on the other an existence (the intervention of the state) ?

10 To the question which Francois Bruel asked him during a television interview on 7 March 1966: ‘Will the parties which you do not consider to be democratic and which might have in their programme the abolition of communism be excluded?’ Waldeck‐Rochet answered: ‘This will depend entirely on the attitude of those parties. In the situation of which you are thinking, we think that the majority of the democratic parties will have the right to take the necessary steps to prevent the dispossessed classes from returning to power.’ This is a very unsatisfactory answer. It amounts to saying that the majority could tolerate only a non‐structural opposition. A few days later, Waldeck‐Rochet came back to the same question at greater length but the expressions he used still remained cryptic ‐ as, for instance: ‘This does not mean that the minority must be deprived of its rights ‐ this means that the law of the majority must be enforced by all.’

11 ‘Le marxisme et les chemins de l’avenir', loc. cit., p. 67.

12 Op. cit., p. 67.