434
PARTISAN I'l....EVIEW
munists were waiting in the wings to offer socialist activists an ideologi–
cal shot in the arm.
In
fact, however, the shot in the arm was finally ad–
ministered from within the socialist movement, first by the PSU and then
by the Epinay Congress. The rebirth of the Socialist Party in France was
thus accomplished by a return of the activists to the tradition that had
dominated French socialism for a century: the revolutionary Marxist tra–
dition. And the new Socialist Party reconquered the left by brandishing
the old slogans: class struggle, alliance with the Communist Party, na–
tionalization of the industrial and financial systems, a break with capital–
ism once and for all.
It
matters little here that tactical considerations entered into this
conception. The important thing is that the socialist and communist
ideologies, as they were perceived by leftwing activists in France (as op–
posed
to
public opinion as a whole, quite another matter) continued
until late in this century to have a great deal in common, since both had
emerged from the Jacobin and Marxist traditions. This could easily be
demonstrated by retracing the history of communist revisionism in
France, with its endless appeal, and it could also be illustrated and un–
derstood by comparing France and Germany.
In
Bad Godesberg, more
than thirty years ago, in 1958, our German socialist neighbors buried the
ideas of anticapitalism and revolution. They broke not only with Marx
but also with Kautsky and rallied to Bernstein. To be sure, they did not
have a powerful Communist Party on their left to worry about; their
concern was to solidify the foundations of German democracy. The
French went precisely in the opposite direction, the direction of the old
unalloyed and undiluted ideology, and for the electoral victors of 1981
this would raise fearsome problems of political and intellectual adapta–
tion. Obliged as they were to shift from the poetry of revolution
to
the
prose of administration, the socialists did a great deal to reduce French
politics to a rather dull and empty scene, with nothing very important at
stake. Indeed, this very featurelessness became for them, finally, a mode of
government.
But the main development took place elsewhere, in a far larger
context. When the socialists came to power the communist idea was al–
ready dying in France. At least since Khrushchev, it was already dead in
the communist countries, where Stalinism had left it moribund and all
the revisionisms, from Gomulka to Dubcek, had been unable to revive it.
By this time the Poland of Solidarity was pointing in another direction:
out. The French intellectual climate had changed: Solzhenitsyn's rise to
popularity with the left in the 1970s was the most revealing sign of it.
Since then, history has continued to lay bare the hopeless bankruptcy of
the communist regimes, culminating in the extraordinary events of 1989
when it presented, as if in honor of the French Revolution, an ironical
