Santiago Carrillo, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Spain, ranks as one of the most experienced counter-revolutionaries in the world. Forty years after playing a leading role in the defeat of the Spanish working class, he is now trying to make sure they do not rise again. This book is an important element in that attempt.
The question of the State, its nature and the relationship of the working class to it, is the pivotal point of Marxism. Marx himself believed that his discovery, ‘that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat,’ was his most important. Lenin, following Marx, argued, ‘only he is a Marxist who extends recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat.’ The implications of this position are perfectly obvious — a party can only lead the working class to power if it recognises the need to smash the bourgeois state and replace it with proletarian dictatorship.
Carrillo, of course, is more interested in the converse of this: if a party does not recognise the need to smash the bourgeois state it will not lead the working class to power. Eurocommunism and the State argues that the state need not, indeed must not, be smashed. It is Carrillo’s latest contribution to keeping the Spanish working class out of power. It is, moreover, an olive branch to the bourgeoisie, assuring them that the Stalinists can be trusted in any future power-sharing agreement. The Eurocommunists want to have their cake and eat it — to gain power on the backs of the workers, the better to sit on them thereafter.
Carrillo’s approach to the problem is characteristically sly. Unable and unwilling to shed the mantle of Marx and Lenin, he has instead to transform their writings into harmless relics of a bygone age. Thus we find, ‘The present day state… is still the instrument of class domination defined by Marx, Engels and Lenin, but its structures are far more complex, more contradictory than those known to the Marxist teachers, and its relations to society have quite different characteristics…’ (p22.) In case it is not altogether clear how the state can still be an instrument of class domination and nonetheless have quite different relations with society, Carrillo expands his point: ‘The state appears today, ever more clearly, as the director state in all spheres, particularly the economy. And since it is the director state, which no longer serves the interest of the whole of the bourgeoisie, but only of that part which controls the big monopolistic groups, economically fundamental but, humanly speaking, very small, it is now confronted, in its capacity as such a state, not only by the advanced proletariat but also directly by the broadest social classes, including part of the bourgeoisie, it is entering into direct conflict with the greater part of society.’ (p24 SC emphasis.)
How very reassuring this must be for the Spanish workers confronted as they are by an only slightly modified bourgeois state. ‘Never mind all that,’ says Carrillo, ‘never mind the fact that the most wealthy, the most powerful, most fundamental elements of the bourgeois still use the state to oppress you. Never mind that they can now use it to direct the economy more effectively in their own interests — after all, humanly speaking, there’s not many of them. Besides, on our side we’ve even got some of the non-fundamental ones!’
In underlining the point Carrillo also manages to do away with the class struggle in passing — ‘vast social common interests are created, impossible in other times, between consumer and retailer against price policies, between farmers and consumers and between the working class the forces of culture, the peasants and bourgeois sectors… the state is becoming less and less a state for all and more and more a state for a few.’ (p25, SC’s emphasis.)
Carrillo should at least acknowledge quotes, this last point originates in another polemic against Marxism — Kautsky’s The Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Replying to the original, Lenin argued, ‘if it [the State] is a power standing above society and increasingly alienating itself from it, then it is obvious that the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible not only without a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class and which is the embodiment of this “alienation”.’ (State and Revolution, p9, Lenin’s emphasis.) This is, of course, quite apart from the anti-Marxist, ahistorical idea that the state was ever ‘a state for all.’
One of the problems confronting any reviser of Marxism is that once one element has been distorted it becomes necessary to get rid of all the rest as well. Carrillo’s book is no exception to this. For example, in the course of arguing that the ideological superstructure of modern society can be turned against monopoly capitalism, Carrillo asserts that this is now the ‘key strategy’ for socialists — except, ‘in the case of war or economic catastrophe, difficult to imagine today in the developed countries.’ (p28, our emphasis.) So, somewhere along the way, and presumably since Lenin, capitalism has transformed itself into a system of economic stability in which national rivalries have disappeared.
In case anybody should get the idea that Carrillo is a man of little imagination, it should be pointed out that he does imagine that an element of the Spanish Catholic Church will be on the side of the revolutionary working class. On the side of Santiago Carrillo perhaps… Indeed, in the works of the Jesuit obscurantist Teilhard de Chardin, Carrillo sees, ‘a fundamental work of revision… to bridge the gulf which separated official Catholicism from science.’ (How these revisionists love one another!)
Further on Carrillo turns his attention to another problem for reformists — the special bodies of armed men, or as Carrillo genteely puts it, ‘the coercive apparatus of the State’. In Spain, more so than in many countries, there is a deep distrust of the para-military police and the army, a distrust rooted in the experience of the last fifty years. Carrillo recognises this but, far from developing this distrust into a concrete understanding of the need to abolish the standing army, he wishes to diffuse it, explain it away and thus neutralise it. His conclusion is that the left should oppose the state using the armed forces against its enemies — ‘The practice of the class struggle has led to a confrontation between the working people and those who make up its apparatuses. When there is a demonstration or a strike, it is not the managers of Banesto or Altos Hornos in Spain or the Banque de Paris in France, and so on in other countries, who go onto the streets and physically confront the strikers and demonstrators; it is the forces of order, the police, and in extreme cases the army. It is this role, which the state power of monopoly capitalism makes the armed forces play, that must be opposed.’ (p55.)
Thus, for Carrillo the army and police, far from being an integral part of the State, are entirely separate, presumably with no class base. So separate are they that the state has to force them to carry out its will against strikers and demonstrators. Incidentally, Carrillo goes on to explain that strikes should be seen as, ‘a matter for negotiation between employers’ and workers’ representatives. The preservation of order at demonstrations should be carried out by the demonstration organisers.’ No doubt the more far-sighted of the Spanish bourgeoisie will recognise what is being said here — that the Spanish CP undertakes to ensure that industrial disputes remain merely matters for negotiation and that order will be maintained on demonstrations.
Eurocommunism and the State is studded throughout with glaring revisions of the Marxist analysis of the State, every one of them rooted in dismissal of the idea of the class struggle and class analysis of society. It would be impossible, and unnecessary, to catalogue all of them here — they can be read in an evening. However, it is necessary to consider, even if briefly, the underlying significance of the book in terms of the developing current of ‘Eurocommunism’.
Trotsky argues that Stalinism and Social Democracy were not opposites but twins — both had betrayed the working class by rejecting Internationalism. However, where the Social Democrats lapsed into simple nationalism, defence of the fatherland in 1914, the Stalinists deserted the interests of the world working class in favour of those of the Stalin bureaucracy at the head of the Soviet State. The theory of Socialism in One Country allowed the development of national roads for each Stalinist party. Despite their supposed uniqueness to suit the specific conditions they worked in, all the Stalinist parties actually adopted the policy of the Popular Front — that is, collaboration with the bourgeoisie. Within this position lay a contradiction that is only now, with the development of ‘Eurocommunism’, fully asserting itself. The onset of a period of intense instability for the capitalist system allows the possibility of Stalinist parties gaining governmental power in several countries; their role in this is to act, once again, as the policemen of capital, entrusted with restricting the workers’ movement to manageable dimensions. As such their highest ‘ideal’ is the defence of the ‘national interest’ — that is to say, the interests of their bourgeoisie. Thus, at long last, the Stalinists have to confront the choice — ‘their’ national interest or that of the Soviet bureaucracy. Carrillo has no hesitation in siding with the Spanish bourgeoisie: ‘we Communists shall work for the strengthening, the advance of the country of our birth, so as to cooperate in that way in the progress of mankind and not in any way to subordinate our countries to others.’ That, in a nutshell, was the position of the Second International. Gone is all pretence at internationalism — the interests of the working class disappear in this plea for recognition from the enemies of our class.
In Carrillo’s case a particularly vile plea to the very people who murdered so many of his own comrades. Mention has to be made of the way in which Carrillo distances himself from the Soviet Union, if only because some have seen in it the influence of Trotsky’s analysis. For Carrillo, the degeneration in the Soviet Union was the product of many factors — underdevelopment, a hostile world environment, the particular personality of Stalin himself and so on. Of course no one could deny that this is true — simply because it is only a banal truism. The important point is that Carrillo never suggests that an alternative course was possible both within the Soviet Union itself and in the strategies of the Comintern, for instance in China or Germany. With regard to Spain, of course, he cannot say that the policy was correct even though it ended in disaster. The purpose of this ‘analysis’ is solely to convince his readers that he is a dyed in the wool democrat who will not challenge parliamentarianism, the freedom of the bourgeois press or infringe bourgeois legality. Only a Socialist Challenge reviewer could possibly see any connection between Carrillo and Trotsky on the question of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution.
The politics of ‘Eurocommunism’ and the state are, essentially, the politics of Social Democracy of the ‘Second International’. But this does not mean that the parties controlled by Carrillo and his ilk are now simply Social Democratic parties, that they have ceased to be Stalinist parties. As we have demonstrated, their programmes of class collaboration flow inexorably from the Stalinist theory of ‘Socialism in One Country’, from the postulate that victorious ‘socialism’ in the USSR and East Europe (albeit in an undemocratic form) makes possible the peaceful road to socialism in the capitalist countries. For this reason the PCE of Carrillo, the Italian and French CPs, remain Stalinist parties — their reformism and class collaboration proceeds from the Stalinist programme.
This does not mean that the parties of Carrillo, Berlinguer and Marchais cannot become Social Democratic parties pure and simple. If they were to declare finally that the USSR and East Europe were not socialist, that bourgeois democracy was a higher order of society than ‘totalitarian’ societies, if they were to side with their own bourgeois against the Soviet bureaucracy in a decisive conflict — then we could talk of the Stalinist parties having crossed that particular Rubicon. Until that time revolutionaries must distinguish between the Stalinists and their Social Democratic ‘twins’.
Because of their historical roots in the Bolshevik revolution and the organisational cohesiveness derived from the discipline of a democratic centralise model of the party, and despite their perversion of this tradition into its complete opposite, the Stalinist parties still organise and attract to their banner many of the most class-conscious and committed workers. This means that the leaders of the Eurocommunist parties, while they are well positioned to mislead and stifle the class, have also to try and justify their actions in terms of the aspirations of the day to day leadership of the class. It is at this obvious source of conflict within the Communist Parties that revolutionaries have to aim their propaganda.
