France
The Left in danger
Michael Parrott
At the very moment when European socialist parties are arguing over the advisability of forming coalitions with the communists, a French social-democrat has caused a minor poltical sensation by publishing a withering attack on the Communist Party and all its works. In his new book La Tentation Totaiitaire Jean-Francois Revel bitterly criticises the French socialist leader, Francois Mitterand, for making a pact with the communists, and warns that the only winners in such an alliance will be the totalitarian bureaucrats guided from Moscow.
According to Revel, European socialists are making a fatal mistake in believing that , communist parties are becoming more liberal and are now ready to respect democratic principles. Whatever their tactics, the aims of these parties are always the same, so he claims: they want to establish a totalitarian one-party system in which the principles of social democracy will be destroyed. Revel is disturbed by the way in which European socialists are taken in by communist propaganda. Led to believe that their real enemy is capitalism rather than communism, socialists readily criticise the one, but are embarrassed to find fault with the other. Confronted by numerous examples of communist abuse of power from the 1937 trials to the concentration camps of today, they still persist in finding reasons why these are 'temporary' aberrations. The Soviet Union, Cuba, China, Chile and Portugal, one after another may disappoint their hopes, but they go on believing in the idealised communist society. Revel complains that it is now generally accepted by the left that change can only come about through completely abandoning the system rather than through reforming it and argues that all communist or leftist movements must eventually lead to totalitarianism. For the sake of a social justice which they will not even secure, the left is in danger of losing the freedoms and political rights that it still enjoys.
Such violent denunciation of the communists would cause little surprise if they came from the right. The French Minister of the Interior, Michel Poniatowski, upset Moscow not long ago when he described the French Communist Party as fascist and totalitarian. But what makes Revel's remarks interesting is that they come from a left-wing intellectual who has had ample opportunity to find out how French left-wingers think. Starting his political career as a Marxist, Revel became a member of Mitterand's socialist shadow cabinet in the 1960s. It was only when the socialists decided to revive the Popular Front coalition in 1972 that he became associated with Servan-Schreiber's reformist party, which is strongly anti-communist but cannot make up its mind whether to join President Valery Giscard d'Estaing's majority coalition. It was no coincidence that 1Servan-Schreiber's magazine L'Express should 'have devoted virtually an entire issue to extracts from Revel's book.
La Tentat ion Total itaire does not have the Power of a work like The New Class. For whereas Milovan Djilas recounts his disillusionment with the communist ideas in which he had once believed, an American-style democrat like Revel can only express exasperation with the gullibility of the drawing-room left. At times the author loses the sympathy of the reader through the vehemence of his anti-communist crusade, but he comes out with some home truths which must create a doubt in even the most revolutionary mind.
Revel raises some important questions which every socialist should try to answer. In view of the success rate of revolutions, is it really worth overturning the system rather than just reforming it? Is it really worth abandoning the capitalist system, with its admitted faults, for a state-run economy which is less effective or an idealised socialist system which has never been put into practice? On the basis of the past behaviour of communist parties in coalitions is it really worth risking the loss of political rights as a whole for the sake of short-term gains at the expense of the right? In poorer countries is it worth sacrificing democratic processes for totalitarian government?
No doubt the left would also have some questions to put to Revel. They might ask what alternative socialists have to linking up with communists when right-wing governments refuse reforms. All too often, the socialists have only won concessions because the right feared outright revolution. They might suggest that the left's reluctance to criticise the failings of the communist system was partly because right-wing parties all too often try to put socialists and communists in the same basket. They would ask how much the failings of communist regimes were due to their inherent faults rather than to the political circumstances which brought them into existence and express doubts as to whether Revel really had enough evidence to show that communists in one country behaved exactly as communists in another. Questions might also be raised as to how much Revel was confusing communism as a manifestation of the power of a totalitarian state like the Soviet Union and the ideology which appears to be adopting different forms according to the country in which it is implanted. But if Revel can be criticised for adopting a rather cold-war stance towards the communists, it is up to his opponents to disprove his case. Although the Gaullists, Independent Republicans and Centrists have exploited every opportunity to stir up divisions between the two parties, they have remained committed to their new strategy: Giscard d'Estaing is reputedly so keen to woo the socialists away from the communists that he is prepared to include them in his government but the socialists are confidently aiming for an election victory in the 1978 parliamentary elections.
While the socialists argue that it is safer to integrate the communists into French political life and point to the concessions made by their
partners, the communists are busily refurbishing their image. Within the last year the
Communist Party leader, George Marchais, has spoken out against Soviet concentration camps, asserted his party's independence of Moscow, promised to respect democratic principles, launched a campaign promoting individual liberties and even recommended abolishing the phrase 'dictatorship of the proletariat'.
But with communist parties playing an increasingly important role in Italy, Portugal and Spain, their role in European democracy has become a burning issue. At a recent conference of European socialist parties in Denmark, West German social democrats attacked the French socialists for their pact with the communists, while in Paris the French won the support of the Italian, Portuguese and Spanish socialist parties for their own position at another conference. Revel would argue that the behaviour of the communists in Portugal shoNks the dangers of bringing communists into a government, but the Portuguese socialists still favour communist representation in the cabinet.
If Revel is pessimistic about maintaining social democracy within the developed world, he seems to have given up all hope of maintaining democratic principles in third world countries. Of some 170 national states, about 140 were under totalitarian regimes last year, so he records. It would seem likely that this tendency for new countries to adopt totalitarian government whether communist or fascist is merely a phase linked to their breaking away from colonial powers and developing their economies, but Revel believes that it is a tendency inherent in the system of nation states: unless there is some form of world government, social democracy is doomed, so he believes.
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