EURO-COMMUNISM
T he following discussion took place in New York in
1977
at the
Carnegie International Center.
William Phillips:
A story told in the thirties might be applicable
today. A cop was swinging his club at a woman who kept shouting
at him, "Officer, I am an anti-Communist!" " 1 don 't care what kind
of Communist you are," the cop answered.
The difficulty in defining Euro-communism, it seems
to
me, is
that while it appears to be a new movement, or a group of new
movements, it is actually an old movement claiming
to
be changing,
but only partially.
It
is not clear how much of the change is genuine,
how much is a sham, how much is a shift of tactics , how much a
basic transformation . Hence, Euro-communism is a political
mystery, and political detectives on the Right and on the Left, all
over the world, are bus y trying
to
solve the mystery . No one is sure
exactly what its aims or motives or precise nature is. This represents
a reversal of the famous statement by Marx and Engels in the
Communist Manifesto:
"The Communists disda in
to
conceal their
views and their aims," though we might note that the concealment
of their views and aims has been going on ever since Stalin came
to
power.
The main qu estion , of course, is whether the Communist parties
of Europe are independent of the Soviet Union, as they claim
to
be,
and whether, therefore, they are to be regarded as indigenous
national parties, or as arms of the international Communist move–
ment, with its center in Moscow. There are other important ques–
tions , too, which 1 shall try
to
formulate as neutrally as possible.
First, whether the European Communists have given up revolution
as a means of taking power, and have also given up the doctrine of
the dictatorship of the proletariat, as some of the parties, like the
French or English Communist parties, say they have. Two, whether
the claim of independence involves democratization of the parties.
Or whether both independence and democracy have been decreed
from above. We are told that there is a certain amount of disagree–
ment within the European Communist parties, but it is hard to tell
from here how much there is, and how open it is. Three, whether the
