In evaluating the significance of the conference of European CPs, it is necessary to steer clear of those issues which the bourgeoisie is assiduously pushing and to address ourselves to the very real problems which are of the deepest concern to the revolutionary working class movement.
In the first place, the very idea of convening a specifically European conference of Communist parties is an anomaly in the history of the Communist movement. Certainly there is no precedent for it during Lenin's time.
It is not objectionable on the grounds of geography, but of politics. Regional conferences of all sorts take place all over the world and they are a commonplace. But a conference of Communist parties, particularly one which has been delayed for such a long time, is something altogether different.
Communism not merely European
Communism is first of all a world movement. During Lenin's lifetime, the Communist International, especially at its first and second congresses, had relatively few other parties aside from the Europeans. But it never occurred to Lenin (certainly there is no evidence of it) to convene a specifically European conference of Communist parties.
The Communists of that time did not conceive of themselves as merely European and were far more cognizant of Communism as a worldwide revolutionary movement destined to overthrow imperialism and bring about the world socialist revolution. The Berlin conference dealt with such issues as detente (however one may view that term), "disarmament," support of national liberation struggles, and so on — all matters which have a world character and deeply affect workers and oppressed people throughout the whole world.
By convening a specifically European conference, the promoters of the meeting preempted the initiative and perhaps even the leadership of others in the movement.
This is not a minor matter but one that runs very deep in the current world situation. It also has historical as well as political significance, from the point of view of the rhythm of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and the oppressed.
Revolutionary center not in Europe
The center of revolutionary gravity today is not in Europe but on the vast continents of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and in the Middle East. This is not to underestimate the heroic resurgence of the Spanish working class, the pre-revolutionary situation in Italy, or the general surge of militancy in Britain. But these do not change the character of the overall world struggle.
During the early 1920s, and especially in the years immediately following the great October socialist revolution, Europe was a veritable revolutionary cauldron. Proletarian insurrections broke out in Germany, Hungary, Italy, Bulgaria, to some extent France, and later in Great Britain with its great general strike. Yet there seemed to have been no need for a specifically European conference. The very idea of such a conference tends to undercut the significance of the worldwide movement of the oppressed peoples in the struggle for liberation and proletarian revolution. It arrogates to itself the role of leadership and puts the others in the role of followers. And even if it was conceived of as the preliminary to a world conference, that still doesn't change anything.
Now of course regional conferences after a world conference are another matter. The Berlin conference was in effect a world congress with this difference: that all who did not attend, all who were not included, were ipso facto put in the position of either approving, disregarding, or opposing it. Above all, it deprived the others of participation and of deliberation on precisely those matters which were the subjects of this conference.
In the 19th century, the revolutionary center of gravity was at one time in France, at another time Germany; it was in Britain during the Chartist period, and later on passed to the Russian proletariat which achieved the great breakthrough in establishing the first successful proletarian revolution.
Aside from determining the center of revolutionary gravity from the point of view of struggle, there is also the theoretical and political center of revolutionary ideas, of the development of the strategic road to proletarian revolution and the advancement of revolutionary Marxist and Leninist theory in general.
By no stretch of the imagination could the European CP conference possibly lay claim to such leadership. On the contrary, if anything the conference was merely a referendum on reformism (revisionism). From the point of view of militancy and sheer ability to struggle, one would have to of necessity look elsewhere — to those continents where the struggle is actually being conducted and has been conducted ever since the Second World War.
This is not to lessen the significance of the European working class, not at all. But overlooking this can be the source of bitter antagonisms. And this is precisely what this conference did. In its presentation of the conference, the bourgeois press was merely concerned with discrediting the Soviet leadership. It is certainly not concerned with where and how best to effectuate a genuine revolutionary community of proletarian solidarity, in the light of the entire global class struggle.
As we said, convening a European conference after a world conference is one thing. Convening a European conference which is bound to have the objective effect of a world conference carries with it innumerable dangers, aside from its programmatic character. Those CP leaders who so loudly proclaimed their "independence from Moscow" are least of all concerned that they infringed upon the "independence," the really revolutionary independence, of others on the continents of the oppressed.
The conference was of course not a legislative body and didn't pass a single, solitary resolution on any of the current world problems. Despite all the florid language and platitudinous repetitions on detente and peace, there was nothing specifically denouncing the U.S.-Israeli aggression in the Middle East or the U.S.-encouraged Phalangist and Syrian war of annihilation against the Palestinian people — practically on the doorstep of Europe.
Role China might have played
Of course, this conference would never have taken place if the Chinese leadership had not surrendered its progressive struggle against revisionism in the first place. The struggle against Soviet revisionism and the attempt, in a limited way, to revive revolutionary Marxism was begun by the Chinese CP openly in well-known polemics such as the "Differences Between Comrade Togliatti and Us," and others.
But for all its progressive and revolutionary character, the attempt of the Chinese CP to carry out a world revolutionary line fell short of the requirements for its success. This is seen particularly clearly when one compares the way Lenin opened the guns against Kautsky in the days following the betrayal of the Social Democracy in the first imperialist world war, as compared with the way Mao began his struggle against Khrushchev.
In the first place, Mao missed the psychologically opportune moment: the CP Congress in 1956 when Khrushchev delivered his denunciation of Stalin and literally shook the Communist movement to its foundations. But Mao did not begin the struggle publicly until several years later. Nor did he attempt a reevaluation of the entire post-Lenin line of the Communist parties.
But aside from that, the Chinese leadership never seems to have seen fit to convene a world congress in the way Lenin fought for the convening of a new International. Even before the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution Lenin's congress had as one of its fundamental objectives the exposure of the betrayal by the Social Democracy and the need for a new world organization.
The Chinese leadership has confined itself to rallying those inspired by the Chinese Revolution or those who espouse Mao Tse-tung thought, which is an altogether different approach and indicates an unwillingness to come to grips with an all-out revolutionary struggle against reformism. Instead, the course taken by the Chinese leadership has led them on an altogether different path, one so far to the right in international affairs that it is scarcely believable. The course of the CCP leadership in the struggle against reformism ended up by actually facilitating the course of Soviet revisionism. It has made it possible for the Soviet leaders to convene this conference without worrying about the CCP at all. Moreover, the latest course of the CCP leadership in foreign policy has also contributed to the deepening reformism of the European CPs.
Soviet leaders' concern over Italy
An important political motivation behind the Soviet leadership's eagerness for the conference is their fear that some of the large CPs, most particularly the Communist Party of Italy (PCI), might either slip into the orbit of imperialism or, in the course of a possible struggle in Italy, the party leadership or at least a large section of it might be captured by the imperialist forces and turned into an instrument of anti-Sovietism. There's a thin line between the more or less ambiguous disavowal by the PCI at the conference of Soviet influence, and slipping into actual anti-Sovietism.
This is a cardinal fact in the calculations of the Soviet leadership and ranks first among the reasons why they really wanted the conference. For it has become plain and evident that the survival of European capitalism in a large measure depends on whether the forces of imperialist divisiveness can create on the continent of Europe a version of the Sino-Soviet split, with all the acrimony and bitterness, as well as blindness, that has accompanied the struggle between the Soviet and Chinese leaderships.
Undoubtedly the CIA and its European counterparts are feverishly working on it. Italy, of course, is center stage at the moment and no amount of special pleadings made by the PCI that it is "democratic, that it will not oppose NATO, that it opposed the so-called Brezhnev doctrine of limited sovereignty, etc. etc. have made any impression on Washington.
Chancellor Helmut Schmidt let the cat out of the bag when he said that France, Britain, Japan, and the U.S., at the recent so-called summit conference in Puerto Rico, agreed not to extend any financial or economic aid to Italy if a Communist is given an important post in the government. And Ford backed this statement up on July 20.
All this notwithstanding Sergio Segre the head of the International Department of the PCI in his authoritative article in this month's Foreign Affairs, published by the Rockefeller-controlled Council on Foreign Relations, went to the limit in the renunciation of Leninism by approvingly citing this quote from one of the PCI's top leaders, Giorgio Napolitano: "We are well aware of the fact that today we are asserting a conception of the relationship between democracy and socialism that cannot be identified with the one elaborated by Lenin."
It is not of course the leaders of the PCI whom Washington and Wall Street fear. They are all too accommodating. But their ascendancy to governmental authority would inevitably give a tremendous impetus to the working class movement in Italy. This in turn raises the possibility, as has frequently happened in European history, that the workers will be impelled to go far beyond the established boundaries of capitalist rule and usher in an era of its revolutionary breakdown and the beginning of genuine working class rule.
Index
Chapters 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
Last updated: 13 May 2018