If Euro-Communism, like Marxism itself, is in crisis, it is because we are in an experimental stage where parties are trying to work out this different type of strategy.
Nicos Poulantzas, 1979
Though the European radical left has not generally been of interest to mainstream political observers, it has nonetheless recently become the subject of significant media coverage. Such presentations have often fallen into two symmetrical pitfalls. On the one hand, left parties have sometimes been presented as completely new, with their historical development left unexamined. On the other hand, many editorialists and even academics have paid little attention to what is original about these organizations: some have seen them as a disagreeable avatar of the far left, others as a resurgent ‘traditional’ (and thus inoffensive) social democracy. In fact, the parties which have realized the most remarkable electoral gains certainly belong to a ‘new’ radical left,1 though their theoretical orientations and the strategic challenges they face find an echo in a historical sequence which is today largely forgotten: that of Eurocommunism.
Several recent developments invite a revisiting of this episode, which stretched from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. Firstly, we observe the same concentration in southern Europe of apparently resurgent left parties, raising high hopes among partisans of social transformation. Forty years ago, such people looked above all towards France, Italy and Spain, and to a lesser extent Portugal and Greece. Today, it is first and foremost Greece (with the coming to power of Syriza) and Spain (with the rise of Podemos) that command most attention, though Portugal is also significant given that the Bloco de Esquerda (Left Bloc) and the Coligação Democrática Unitária (an alliance between the Communist party and the Green party) support the government of Antonio Costa.
Secondly, in both periods, all these countries experienced both a structural crisis of capitalism and a political crisis. Stressing this backdrop, Fernando Claudin wrote in 1977 that what was at stake was ‘the outcome to the global crisis of capitalism’ as it was manifested ‘in each of these weak links of developed capitalism’.2 While the socio-political blocs supporting Italian Christian Democracy, French Gaullism and Spanish (post) Francoism eroded, the organizations of a socialist workers’ movement grew. Similarly, the party systems of southern Europe are currently being shaken not only by the radical left but also by the decline of the traditional governing parties, which have supported austerity and whose reputations have been stained by numerous corruption scandals.3 In Spain, the discourse of Podemos is even constructed around the diagnosis of a regime in crisis. The Constitution of 1978 – the fruit of a compromise between elites – rested on three pillars, which are either increasingly contested or in the process of collapsing: a parliamentary monarchy, a two-party system between centre-right and centre-left, and a territorial model characterized as ‘asymmetric federalism’.
Thirdly, both periods raised the concerns about the international consequences and possible knock-on effects of the coming to power of parties to the left of social democracy. Forty years ago, it could have altered the confrontation between the Western and Soviet blocs, as well as stimulating and radicalizing social democracy in the West and dissident socialists in the East. Today, this takes the form of a potential challenge to the German ‘ordoliberal’ conception of the European Union (EU), as well as increased pressure on the parties of the centre-left to abandon their collusion with the conservative and neoliberal right.
Certainly, the differences are many and crucial. Despite the renewal of the radical left in the Iberian states and Greece, this is not the case in France and Italy. The former underwent both late democratization and integration into an economic and monetary zone dominated by stronger competitors without the organization of sufficient mechanisms of convergence. As a result, the southern periphery of the eurozone they comprised has been especially hard hit by the crisis, undermining the legitimacy of the compromises established during the transitions of the 1970s-80s. The latter have not been ‘spared’ solely because they belong to the core of the historic project of constructing a European community. After all, Italy, like Greece, has undergone a change of government at the will of the European authorities, who have pushed for the establishment of technocratic regimes to supervise policy. This, in turn, led in both cases to the rise of an oppositional party that destabilized the equilibrium of the party system.4 Earlier however, the left had disintegrated after the choice of the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) to ‘social democratize’, thereby scuttling a good part of its intellectual and activist capital. As a result, no significant force was able to seize the window of opportunity opened by the crisis of 2008. France, on the other hand, showed enough resilience to avoid being swept away by the sovereign debt crisis, even if its relationship with Germany became clearly unbalanced in favour of the latter. The country has become ‘the middle child in a dysfunctional family’,5 for now resigned to aligning itself with the most powerful actors so as to discipline the periphery without going as far as a definitive break.
This leads us to stress that the considerable advances of European integration constitute another major difference with the Eurocommunist phase, forming a hostile strategic terrain for anti-austerity parties with socialist objectives. If the crisis of the eurozone is only one aspect of the structural crisis of capitalism, it certainly creates a specific skein of difficulties. Also, the nature of the current global crisis is not identical to that of the 1970s. The latter was the result of the exhaustion of the Fordist-Keynesian configuration of capitalist accumulation, while the organizations of the workers’ movement were perhaps at their apogee. This time, we have a neoliberal configuration that can no longer contain the disequilibria it has generated (between states, firms, social classes and so on). While no part of the globe is spared, the hypothesis of ‘secular stagnation’ and the threat of the development of even more predatory accumulation strategies is growing. Meanwhile, the ‘infrastructures of dissent’ capable of offering an alternative conception of civilization and human progress have been seriously weakened. Parallel to this, new forms of protest (like the occupation of public spaces) often reject conventional politics, which is increasingly unattractive to ordinary citizens as well as for those who wish to change the world.6
In spite of these differences, several strategic debates from the Euro-communist sequence are still relevant today. They concern the capacity of the radical left to escape both marginality and normalization; in other words, to approach power without its desires for transformation being absorbed or liquidated by existing institutions. In fact, the Eurocommunist legacy is rich with inspiration (the search for a middle way between social democracy and the far left) and potential assets (in defining a strategy adapted to current European societies and the multiplicity of dominations which run through them), but also with unresolved problems (concerning in particular the relationship to the capitalist state).
The historic genesis of the Eurocommunist phenomenon involves two dimensions. The first stems from the vicissitudes of international communism. Claudin described Eurocommunism as an ‘Occidental schism’ following the ‘Oriental schism’ previously brought about by the rupture with China.7 According to his interpretation, it represented the terminal stage of the contradictions of the Communist ‘world party’, or in other words the claims of the Soviet Union to orchestrate the action of the communist parties (CPs). The legitimacy that this state had acquired in the eyes of communists, thanks to the (initially) emancipatory breadth of the October revolution, had for a long time blocked comprehension of a regime which had in fact generated a new dominant class and destroyed any authentically democratic space. During the two periods when the Soviet state had allied itself with the liberal democracies (1934-38 and 1941-47), it had allowed the CPs to participate in pluralist popular fronts. However, on each occasion it had reaffirmed its leading role in the world communist movement, and ruled out the hypothesis of ‘national roads to socialism’. Above all, these periods of opening had fundamentally depended on strategic choices, which once reversed forced the fraternal parties to adopt the new line forged by the Kremlin, on the basis of its distinct interests.
In the Western countries, where Moscow disposed of less means of coercion than in the East, resistance to such subordination intensified, above all after 1956 (the crushing of the workers’ councils in Budapest) and 1968 (the crushing of the Prague Spring). The imperialism of the USSR and its contempt for the popular will were too evident not to be noticed in societies where the rejection of democratic values had become a one-way ticket to political marginality. In addition, the explosion of plural revolts (workers’ insubordination swamping trade union federations, student rebellion, feminist and ecological demands and so on), especially in France and Italy, also marked the upheaval of 1968. The broad mass of Western citizens had been won to the pluralism of representative regimes, while the increasing complexity of ‘class positions’ and the rise of hedonistic and anti-authoritarian values nurtured conflicts that could be thought through only with difficulty in the gnarled schemas of Marxism-Leninism. Consequently, the actions and the ideology of Soviet power proved increasingly to be a handicap in the competitive environment inhabited by the Western CPs. This situation increased the impetus to pursue an autonomous road to socialism. Gramsci’s proposition according to which revolutionary strategy in Western Europe should consist of a ‘war of position’ rather than ‘manoeuvre’ seemed more valid than ever.
Several successive stages then led to the formation of a so-called ‘Eurocommunist’ orientation – a term adopted only with reticence by the parties concerned. In 1969, during the third world conference of CPs, several delegations (in particular the Italians and Spanish) criticized democratic centralism within the Communist family. While the following years were marked by denunciations of the Soviet state’s attacks on liberties, the PCI signed two declarations with the Partido Comunista de España (PCE) and the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) (respectively in Livorno in July 1975 and in Rome in November 1975), which made official a shared conception of socialist transition that contradicted the path followed by the regimes in the East. The Rome Declaration included, for example, commitments to party pluralism, trade union independence, the development of democracy in the workplace, and the opening of state leadership to the working classes. In addition, the signatories specified that these resolutions arose from an ‘analysis of the specific historical and material conditions of their respective countries’, which was in effect a demand for autonomy.
Several striking declarations then followed, with Carillo (leader of the PCE) affirming that in 1976 ‘Moscow was no longer our Rome’, while Berlinguer (leader of the PCI) reacted to the inauguration of martial law in Poland in December 1981 by stating that ‘the propulsive force of the October revolution’ and ‘the capacity for renewal of the societies of Eastern Europe’ were exhausted. Meanwhile, even if the PCF returned to very orthodox positions, the Eurocommunist theses had spread well beyond southern Europe, leading journalists and researchers to attribute the ‘Eurocommunist’ label to the British, Swedish, Swiss and even Belgian CPs. Bilateral relations were organized with socialist or social democratic leaders, while communists increasingly expressed support for the non-aligned movements of the Third World. All these ups and downs witnessed to the search for a ‘third way’ capable of transcending the historic defeats and fractures of the workers’ movement.8
It is here that we observe the second dimension of the historic genesis of Eurocommunism, which concerns the contemporary radical left to a much greater degree. The Eurocommunist episode can be interpreted as one expression among others of a current of ideas and practices which has always been in a minority or defeated: a socialism which is anti-capitalist but liberal and pluralist, envisioning the transcendence of both the fetishes of the state and the commodity to allow human beings to democratically and consciously develop their social relations. In the past, social democracy had been the major expression of this current, which one can identify in the intellectual evolution of Jean Jaurès, in the Austro-Marxism of the inter war period, or in the guild socialism defined by certain contemporary Labour Party supporters.9 Several themes, whose implementation remains tricky, have characterized this current: the rejection of an over-rigid separation between action in the state and action at the point of production; the will to democratize institutional apparatuses; and the conception of socialism as a source of moral, and not only material, progress. From this viewpoint, Eurocommunism tried to respond, in the circumstances of its time, to the eternal challenge of democratic socialism: to trace a strategic path between on the one hand, the simple reformist management of capitalism, and on the other hand a violent conquest of state power that would lead to the formation of a new oligarchy hostile to individual freedoms.
During the 1960s and 1970s, other political forces also faced this challenge, either through new independent formations (for example the small Parti Socialiste Unifié in France, which gathered revolutionary as well as reformist groups sharing anti-Gaullist, anti-colonial and anti-Stalinist views), or within the ‘old’ social democratic parties. Inside the Labour Party, for example, Tony Benn argued for a socialism that rested on workers’ control, transparency of public decisions, methods of fighting bureaucracy, and the extension of political action beyond the parliamentary sphere. In the French Parti socialiste (PS) reborn in 1971 at Epinay, self-management was introduced among the objectives of an alternative to capitalism, alongside nationalization and democratic planning. Jean-Pierre Chevènement, then leader of the Centre d’études, de recherches et de réflexions socialistes (CERES, the main left-wing faction of the PS), affirmed that it was necessary to escape both the ‘stomping of boots’ of the barracks socialism of the East and the ‘scraping of slippers’ of Western social democracy. Another left-wing leader, Jean Poperen, had for a long time warned against the ‘social-technocratic’ illusion of those who claimed to transform society through skilled social engineering. In Sweden, the ideal of self-management was also taken up by a part of the social democratic and trade union left.10 The projects of these factions suffered from certain limits, but they nonetheless contributed to legitimizing democratic demands to which the workers’ movement had previously been too unreceptive.
One can say the same about Eurocommunism. The novelty of the Eurocommunist orientation resided in the will to integrate the emancipatory struggles that took place outside the sphere of strictly economic relations. This evolution remained timid at the level of political organizations (although somewhat less so in their left wings), but was developed further by intellectuals sensitive to such demands. For example, Christine Buci-Glucksman stressed the fact that socialism should deal with all forms of domination, whether of bureaucratic, sexual or technological origin. In her view, this ‘transversal conflict’ could only be expressed by a ‘democratic historic bloc’ which should think about politics ‘in relation to the state and not only in the state’. The other major innovation of Eurocommunism resided in a new effort to think through the initiation of socialist transition in terms of a dialectic between a ‘movement from above’ (in the institutions) and a ‘movement from below’ (in society). Among intellectuals, Nicos Poulantzas showed best the point to which the state was structurally biased to the disadvantage of anti-capitalist movements, without however being a simple instrument in the hands of the dominant class – hence the promotion of a dual strategy engaging with the existing centres of power while creating autonomous and alternative spaces for the organization of social life.11
The Eurocommunist episode thus nourished a stock of ideas from which contemporary radical left formations can still draw. The parties that have now broken through in southern Europe have succeeded (at least initially) in accompanying the dynamic of the social movements without claiming a vanguard role, but by asserting the will to conquer power. They have also attracted new generations of voters by espousing a progressive agenda on questions of gender, ecology, human rights and territorial autonomy. Finally, they have benefited from their externality to the state apparatuses, which they promised to open to citizens and put at the service of the people. As Luke March had already noted before the crisis, the parties of the radical left holding the most potential for development are those which belong to the ‘democratic-socialist’ branch of this family, rather than those who have preserved at any price their Communist identity.12 In a certain sense, the currently emergent radical left has taken up the torch of an alternative left which had attempted to break through from within the Communist tradition, and which one might have thought had been buried under the rubble of the latter. A discrete red thread certainly links the experiences of today and the Eurocommunist attempts of the 1970s (themselves close to other initiatives originating from social democracy).
For all that, Eurocommunism failed to initiate any transition towards socialism, as did the left wings of social democracy that explored similar strategic and ideological paths. On a European scale, no common strategy or structure really emerged. At the national level, the parties which concentrated most hopes revealed the meagre potential for social transformation: the PCI was not able to participate in government even though it muddled its identity through compromise; the PCE collapsed in elections, then divided without having encouraged popular mobilizations; and the PCF opted for an identitarian turn without profiting from the PS’s adaptation to neoliberalism. Other parties informed by the Eurocommunist theses found the resources to reconvert themselves after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but they remained minor actors in their party systems. The historic sequence that we are considering has then not bequeathed only inspiring elements to the contemporary radical left. It also appears as an alert. That is why it is important to consider the limits of Eurocommunism.
Some of these limits are located in the ambiguities of the relationship between Western CPs and the Soviet Union, as well as in the difficulty of going beyond an ideological and organizational matrix profoundly influenced by the past history of the workers’ movement.13 While sincerely wishing to free themselves of their subordination to Moscow, Eurocommunists for a long time nonetheless continued to characterize the Eastern regimes as ‘socialist’, contradicting the desire to identify socialism with effective democracy, or at least a more extended form of this than liberal representative democracy. But this contradiction is today a thing of the past. Of course, some adversaries have used the proximity of the contemporary parties of the radical left to some Latin American governments to challenge their democratic sincerity. However, most of the ‘national-popular’ (rather than strictly socialist) experiences in South America have not prevented the maintenance of pluralism and fundamental liberties. Moreover, no country or party in this region claims to be the centre of a world movement over which it holds power. The democratic commitment and national independence of the European radical left parties cannot be questioned with the same success as it was at the time of the Cold War.
Another problem, which finds more resonance today, concerns the organizational model of the Western CPs committed to Eurocommunism. By continuing to present themselves as the natural parties of the working class, they neglected the pluralism that they professed at the societal scale. Also, the internal structure of the CPs in fact left little room for a public and adversarial debate, the possibility of challenging the leadership, or the direct involvement of activists in the mechanisms of internal decisions. This inability to transcend the centralism falsely called ‘democratic’ undermined their attractiveness and the credibility of their discourse. The structures of contemporary radical left parties are more open, but there is nonetheless a risk that the famous ‘iron law of oligarchy’ will neutralize the activist rank and file and restrict ideological pluralism. The members of the left wing of Syriza have for example stressed how its transformation from a coalition to a single party served to strengthen the more moderate leaders.14 The institutionalization of Podemos has also generated tensions between partisans of a more vertical structure, and those who fear the marginalization of broader ‘circles’ and the excessive personalization of the organization.15
That said, it appears that contemporary radical left parties have greater room for manoeuvre than the CPs of the 1970s in adapting their structures to their message and their environment. The adoption of the Eurocommunist orientation in all its consequences meant challenging nearly all the basic principles of the CPs since their foundation. Accepting such an aggiornamento, meant endangering party unity, as illustrated by the splits in the PCE over 1983-85. Paradoxically, one could almost say that the disappearance of the USSR and the marginalization of the Soviet Communist reference point were crucial for the integration of the Eurocommunist orientation, or at least some of its basic principles, within the radical left.
Other limits of Eurocommunism can be found in the projects that were in competition in the Eurocommunist theoretical space. It is indeed impossible to speak of a comprehensive doctrine that would have unified the national trajectories regrouped under this label. Briefly stated, we could distinguish two opposite tendencies that polarized the Eurocommunist internal discussion. The first is what Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Göran Therborn have described as ‘liberal-governmental’. According to them, this tendency only allowed for a kind of ‘institutional rallying’ of the CPs, while failing to thoroughly rethink the dialectical relationship between the party, social movements and democratic subjects. Instead of inventing a road beyond Leninism and social democracy, Eurocommunism in its liberal-governmental variety consecrated existing forms of politics, enclosing its strategy in a classic conception of the gradualist conquest of state power. It also misanalysed the crisis of capitalism, and its remedies remained prisoners of a productivist and dirigiste conception of the economy.16 In the PCI, which was the party at the very forefront of the Eurocommunist phenomenon, Giorgio Amendola, leader of the party’s right wing, incarnated this trend well. Amendola gave wholehearted support to the austerity practiced by the Christian Democrats (DC), a move he framed as a ‘historic compromise’ that could ‘modernize’ Italian capitalism (and thus speed up the development of the productive forces) and reduce the mistrust of the popular electoral base of the DC.17 Concealed behind the liberal-governmental line was, in fact, the classic dilemma of young social democratic parties. The centrality of the electoral objective, perceived as the sole key for acquiring popular legitimacy and embarking on social transformation, tended to lead to the party’s programmatic moderation, bureaucratization, and the absorption of its desires for change within the limits of the capitalist state.18
Today, it is obvious that Tspiras’s choices as leader of Syriza, and then prime minister of Greece, can be criticized with the aid of this model. The last manifesto, sufficient to provoke a confrontation with Greece’s creditors, was already the result of watering down the demands of the party. The government then found it difficult to act in connection with the social movements, which were in retreat, and did not seek support from the sectors remobilized by the referendum against a new austerity programme.19 For its part, Podemos has also tended to moderate its economic proposals in the course of its short existence, to the point where they are now very close to a traditional social democratic agenda. A debate is also underway inside the party concerning the strategic balance between electoral politics on the one hand, and on the other the organization of a common political consciousness through longer-term militant and cultural action. The leadership of the party seems in any case to refuse the social movements significant autonomy, evidently viewing political legitimacy as the exclusive privilege of parliamentary representatives.20
It is useful to recall that there was, from the outset, a left Eurocommunism opposed to liberal-governmentalism. It was very attached to the struggle against ‘generalized domination’, leading to a much stronger proximity to the (new) social movements and the desire to combine representative democracy with other forms of citizen and worker self-government. Pietro Ingrao (who died in September 2015 at the age of 100) was the best representative of this tendency inside the PCI. For him, it was important to end the distinction between economic and political struggles, which divided the subaltern. The battles of the latter should take place across society as a whole, including both the state apparatuses and the places of production. However, it was not the time to invoke ‘workers’ councils’, which were struggles liable to provoke divisions among the subaltern. Instead, Ingrao considered it necessary to integrate all the people within enlarged modes of representation, which represented a continuation of the unfinished work of the bourgeoisie. Poulantzas confided in one of his last interviews that he felt close to this Italian leader. According to the Greek thinker, the difference between the right and left wings of Eurocommunism turned on the importance given to direct democracy and on the conviction that any socialist transformation of state and economy would necessarily end in a ‘moment of rupture’.21
Poulantzas remains the theorist of left Eurocommunism who posed with most rigour the following dilemma: a solely statist strategy reproduces the illusion of a neutral state (whereas it is generally ‘strategically selective’ in favour of the dominant classes); whereas a solely rank-and-file strategy conserves the illusion of escaping the grip of the state (which is in fact crucial to defining the terrain of struggle and the resources of the protagonists). However, despite many contentions as to how this contradiction is to be transcended, the question remains open. Indeed, left Eurocommunism has correctly been criticized for its strategic fuzziness, which could serve as the ‘vestibule’ to a liberal-governmental evolution. In particular, the most stimulating Trotskyist critics of Poulantzas, such as Colin Barker and Daniel Bensaïd, have reproached him for caricaturing the defeats of attempts to organize popular power, and inversely for having passed over too quickly the harmful implications of representative democracy (atomization of citizens, separation between their public life and their private activity).22
Unfortunately, the discussion is not at this level on the contemporary radical left, given the balance of forces after three decades of neoliberalism. That said, in the medium- to long-term, it seems certain that an exit from crisis on ecologically sustainable terms which would be favorable to the popular majority cannot take place on the basis of traditional Keynesian policies. On the contrary, this would demand a high level of social conflict, as the attack should be inflicted on capitalist logic, from the protection of ‘natural’ common goods, the extension of social ownership of financial and nonfinancial enterprises, the decarbonization of the global energy system, the contraction of the material production of the rich countries, a delinking of employment from profitability, a drastic levelling of wealth disparities, and so on.23 As such, these strategic debates on the radical left remain very relevant indeed.
Finally, it needs to be said that the limits of Eurocommunism do not solely reside in the non-completion of the organizational transformation of the CPs, or in their difficulty thinking through the socialist transition. They also stem from an absence of coordination between parties sharing the same positions. Although their countries were afflicted by global crises, they defended distinct national roads to the construction of socialism. In other words, their fight for emancipation from Moscow prevented them from restructuring internationalist bonds among Eurocommunist parties, which would have strengthened the credibility of their anti-capitalist commitments.
The difficulty of acting at the supranational level according to a common agenda is far from having disappeared today. On the contrary, European integration renders this dimension of political engagement indispensable, but hardly suppresses the obstacles to its effective realization. Indeed, European integration encourages political groupings with common characteristics, but whose raison d’être is derived from conflicts expressed principally at the national level. The problem is that identical economic or cultural orientations can be combined with different positions on the EU, whether pro-, alternative- or anti-integration. The stance adopted by different parties on the question of the EU depends on the geopolitical situation of the country, the opportunities for broader alliances for the radical left, and the concrete analysis of the EU (roughly said: is there any point in opposing its policies without opposing its institutions?).24
Currently, the radical left party bloc is one of the least homogeneous groupings in the European political system, although we should not exaggerate the coherence of competing political forces. The weak institutionalization of the radical left family is visible in the fact that some crucial issues, like the democratization of the EU and the single currency, are currently debated in bodies other than GUE/NGL (that is the confederal Group of the United European Left/Nordic Green Left in the European Parliament) or the PEL (that is the transnational Party of the European Left recognized and funded by the EU). Such is the case with the newly founded movement Diem25, launched by Yanis Varoufakis (former Greek Finance minister under Tsipras), as well as the summits of Plan B organized in Paris and Madrid in early 2016.25
The multiplicity of multilateral forums can certainly be viewed as progress in comparison with the essentially bilateral relations maintained between the Eurocommunist parties during their heyday. This has probably improved mutual understanding among contemporary radical left organizations. However, such forums remain loosely structured and do not have the capacity to exert substantial political influence either at the national or European level, electorally or otherwise. Although this can be partly explained by the institutional structure of the EU, the main factor is the limited convergence among the interests of the respective member states within which these radical left parties are attempting to gain the support of the electorate. In particular, the size of a country, its mode of growth and the specific nature of its insertion within the eurozone and global economy produce a specific structure of opportunities and constraints. The crux of the matter is that the matrix of power in the EU maximizes the interdependences between member states without providing instruments through which their different patterns of development can coalesce, nor permitting the possibility of ‘opting-out’ from EU legislation where this poses a threat on the basis of specifically national concerns.26 Consequently, common statements or proposals are necessarily vague and consensual.
We have indicated that the major parties of the contemporary radical left have already acted in accordance with the best intuitions of Eurocommunism. They have avoided both workerist and vanguardist pretensions while appearing as the most credible vehicles for demands against austerity, corrupt elites and the dismantling of popular sovereignty. At the same time, the factors that resulted in the lack of coordination, coherence and attractive power of Eurocommunism again come into play for the contemporary radical left. Obviously, many characteristics of the Western CPs and the environment in which they operated have changed. However, certain tensions of the earlier period are present again today, because they are those of democratic socialism confronted with the modern capitalist state. Nonetheless, it is always necessary to be on guard against the temptation to draw conclusions too hastily. The contrast between the current situation and that of forty years ago is not completely summed up by the deterioration of the balance of class forces. The defeats suffered by the dominated classes are also reflected in an alteration of the strategic terrain on which the radical left operates. This means that the unresolved questions of Eurocommunism continue to be relevant, but in a context very different from the 1960s and 1970s in relation to the role and nature of the state.
Before his death, Poulantzas had already hypothesized a lasting evolution towards ‘authoritarian statism’, which would conserve the formal institutions of representative democracy while emptying them of their substance. Offe had anticipated at the time the ‘cartelization’ of the dominant political parties, i.e. their transformation into state agencies of government to the detriment of their role of representation of popular demands.27 The degradation of representative structures in the advanced democracies cannot, however, be understood without accounting for supranational factors in the contemporary analyses of Eurocommunism. The state form typical of the post-Fordist phase of capitalist democracy is characterized not only by the reduction of pluralism internally, but also by the dispersion of state political authority, which it still manages despite no longer monopolizing. Indeed, state capacities to make and implement collectively binding decisions have been transferred to an unprecedented degree to international, transnational and private actors. In the same way that production chains have been fragmented at the global scale, so do nation states increasingly resemble internationalized complexes of authority, though the organization of democratic life remains confined within the same national spatial limits as before.28
The theorists of Eurocommunism had not (and probably could not have) anticipated such transformations. That is why Poulantzas’s thinking on the bias and strategic selectiveness of the modern state remains useful, providing it is updated. One way to do so is to insist that we cannot understand the sovereign debt crisis and its results if one envisages the EU as a structure simply added to existing states. In fact, we have witnessed a transnational restructuring of state apparatuses in such a way that the EU constitutes a ‘complex institutional matrix’ that neutralizes popular intervention. The authoritarian statism anticipated by Poulantzas certainly corresponds to a less inclusive phase of capitalism, but it is concretely reflected by the strategic displacement of the tasks of government on several spatio-temporal scales. For example, during the sovereign debt crisis, ‘national parliaments and the European Parliament have been increasingly bypassed and overrun by rapid decision-making processes between national executives made in the Council of the European Union and administrative bodies of the EU’.29
At the same time, this elitist supranational government contains but does not resolve the economic and monetary disequilibria internal to the zone: it undermines its own legitimacy in the eyes of citizens, whose tolerance threshold is unknown. In any event, this construction is unstable by nature, thus offering opportunities to alternative political forces. In Greece and in Spain, the unveiling of this complex mode of domination, and the denunciation of its anti-democratic character, have been at the heart of the arguments of the radical left. The way to overcome these issues poses many more problems.
Clearly, Syriza in office in Greece has faced the authoritarian statism – in defence of the euro and the EU – of an ultra-rigid economic and monetary order, locked down by treaties, institutions and dominant actors who are thoroughly determined to crush any pluralism threatening this ‘new gold standard’. Indeed, it seems that the EMU has the means to thwart any political alternative, and one can hypothesize that it would explode in the improbable event that a majority of member states attempted to force Germany and its allies to delink the Euro from its ordoliberal constitution. As these lines are written, a whole section of the Greek radical left is witnessing a kind of ‘normalization’ of Syriza in power, while Brussels has given them no chance to construct an ‘autonomous path’ of exit from crisis – without even speaking of socialism. One can wonder if the party leaders, exhausted by incessant negotiations with creditors and leading a shattered state, still have the temporal or even theoretical resources to face the situation.
Podemos is less affiliated with the legacy of Eurocommunism than Syriza (the Greek party partially originates from a Communist split along this political line). Other political references have informed the Spanish party, like the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe on populism, as well as the experiences of the Latin American left. That said, the reminiscences of Eurocommunist themes are quite clearly observable. For example, the party assumes the mobilization of citizens both by citizen participation on the ground and by electoral participation to send representatives to the institutions. The success of this ‘strategic dualism’, practiced through innovative use of media technology, distinguishes Podemos from other similar parties.30 Also, Gramsci is a common reference for both Laclau and Mouffe and the Eurocommunist intellectuals of the 1970s. Even if the relationship of these theorists to Marxism is not the same, both wish to open the left to the multiplicity of democratic demands, and go beyond the dual impasse of Leninism and traditional social democracy.31
In late June, Podemos chose to contract an electoral alliance with Izquierda Unida (IU, the United Left), whose main driving force remains the former Eurocommunist PCE. Of course, strategic concerns were strong incentives for such an alliance: whereas the combined share of the vote among IU and Podemos overtook that of PSOE in 2015, the characteristics of the Spanish proportional voting system prevented them from overtaking the Socialists in terms of seats in Parliament. Common lists were supposed to be the recipe for becoming the main opposition force after the June rerun of December’s inconclusive election, behind the right-wing Parti Popular but ahead of the PSOE. Eventually, the gamble was lost.32 However, it confirmed that Podemos and IU belong to the same political space or even radical left family. On one hand, the majority of Podemos leadership has admitted that populism is only a ‘thin ideology’,33 which needs to be anchored in a broader political culture that addresses a wider range of societal issues. On the other hand, the renewed leadership of IU has admitted that less traditional ways of mobilizing are needed to broaden the appeal of the radical left.34 It remains to be seen whether the recent disappointing electoral results will hinder these evolutions in a Spanish radical left that has never been so powerful since the post-Francoist transition.
In any case, Podemos’ strategy in relation to the EU does not appear to be qualitatively different from that of Syriza. A critique of existing European integration has been produced, but few lessons have been drawn. More exactly, the high level of strategic reflection of the leaders about conquering hegemony within society has no equivalent insofar as the analysis of the state form with which they will be confronted when they exercise power is concerned. The Portuguese Left Bloc, whose success is less striking, has worked more on the question of its relations with the EU, clearly affirming that limits exist to participation in the monetary union (and thus to its current support for the Socialist government of Antonio Costa). In France, the radical left candidate for the Presidency in 2012, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, makes a similar argument. More broadly, his will to ‘federate the people’ and give it the possibility to rewrite the Constitution rests on the conviction (nourished in his case by a radical Republican background) that the radical left must transform the strategic terrain to better promote (eco)socialist policies. Most of the other radical left parties in Northern or Central Europe (including Die Linke) seem to be less innovative.
What it is certain is that a reflection on the current complexity of state apparatuses will be unavoidable for the contemporary radical left if it wishes to democratize Europe at both the continental and national scale. In the weakest European countries – that is, where the left has the best electoral prospects – this work will be necessary even to obtain modest reforms. Today, as at the end of the 1970s, the difficulties experienced by the radical left in advanced capitalist countries are linked to an ‘experimental stage’ through which all attempts to end the austerity consensus necessarily will have to pass.
1Fabien Escalona and Mathieu Vieira, ‘The Radical Left in Europe – Thoughts about the Emergence of a Family’, Paris: Fondation Jean Jaurès, 19 November 2013.
2Fernando Claudin, L’eurocommunisme, Paris: François Maspéro, 1977, p. 27.
3Fabien Escalona, ‘Au-delà de l’Espagne, la crise bouscule les systèmes partisans d’Europe du Sud’, The Conversation, 23 December 2015.
4Susannah Verney and Anna Bosco, ‘Living Parallel Lives: Italy and Greece in an Age of Austerity’, South European Society and Politics, 18(4), 2013, pp. 397-426.
5Mark I. Vail, ‘Europe’s Middle Child: France, Statist Liberalism and the Conflicted Politics of the Euro’, in M. Matthijs and M. Blyth, eds., The Future of the Euro, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 136-60.
6See (among others) Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, ‘Capitalist Crises and the Crisis This Time’, in Leo Panitch, Greg Albo, and Vivek Chibber, eds., Socialist Register 2011: The Crisis This Time, 2010, pp. 1-20; Armin Schäfer and Wolfgang Streeck, eds., Politics in the Age of Austerity, Cambridge: Polity, 2013; Cédric Durand, Le capital fictif, Paris: Les Prairies ordinaires, 2014.
7Fernando Claudin, L’eurocommunisme, p. 9.
8Lilly Marcou, ‘La seconde chance de l’eurocommunisme’, Le Monde diplomatique, February 1989, p. 9.
9Jean-Paul Scot, Jaurès et le réformisme révolutionnaire, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2014; Norbert Leser, ‘Austro-Marxism: A Reappraisal’, Journal of Contemporary History, 11(2/3), 1976, pp. 133-48; Marc Stears, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State: Ideologies of Reform in the United States and Britain, 1906-1926, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
10Anthony W. Benn, ‘The New Politics: A Socialist Reconnaissance’, Fabian Tract 402, London: The Fabian Society, 1970; Jacques Mandrin, Socialisme ou social-médiocratie, Paris: Seuil, 1969; Jean Poperen, ‘Unification socialiste ou technocratie autoritaire’, Cahiers du Centre d’Etudes socialistes, Paris: Editions Maspéro, 1963; Bo Bernhardsson and Jan Kolk, Det nödvändiga uppbrottet. En debattbok om 80-talets socialdemokratiska politik, Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögrens, 1980.
11Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, London: Verso, 2014; Christine Buci-Glucksmann, ‘De la crise de l’Etat keynésien au nouveau socialisme? La politique audelà de l’Etat’, in C. Buci-Glucksmann, ed., La gauche, le pouvoir, le socialisme. Hommage à Nicos Poulantzas, Paris: PUF, 1983.
12Luke March, Radical Left Parties in Europe, London and New York: Routledge, 2011.
13Fernando Claudin, L’eurocommunisme, pp. 101-150.
14Stathis Kouvélakis, ‘Greece: Phase One’, Jacobin, 22 January 2015.
15Jeanne Moisand, ‘Espagne: de l’indignation à l’organisation’, La Vie des idées, 20 March 2015.
16Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Göran Therborn, Le défi social-démocrate, Paris: François Maspéro, 1981, pp. 39-76.
17Amendola, like Ingrao cited later, was interviewed by Henri Weber in Le Parti communiste italien: aux sources de l’eurocommunisme, Paris: François Maspéro, 1977. Weber, who was then a leader of the Trotskyist Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, very much opposed to the Amendola line and sceptical on the Ingrao line, ironically became a leader of the French PS and one of the most fervent supporters of the politics practiced by François Hollande.
18These processes were the subject of an early literature, notably in the work of Rosa Luxemburg and Robert Michels, but even Max Weber. These three authors are evoked in Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State, London: Hutchinson, 1984, pp. 183-8, where the latter writes: ‘no competitive party system so far has ever yielded a distribution of political power that would have been able to alter the logic of capital and the pattern of socio-economic power it generates. [We could] postulate the emergence of political parties capable of . . . leading to a challenge to class power through politically constituted power. I do not think that there are many promising indications of such a development, in spite of Euro-communist doctrines and strategies that have emerged in the Latin-European countries in the mid-1970s’ (pp. 187-188). We should cite also Fred Block, ‘Beyond Relative Autonomy: State Managers as Historical Subjects’, in Ralph Miliband and John Saville, eds., The Socialist Register 1980, London: Merlin Press, 1980, pp. 227-41.
19According to Paul Blackledge, in ‘Left reformism, the State and the Problem of Socialist Politics Today’, International Socialism, 130, 2013: ‘In Syriza’s case, there is a tension between the very positive and highly welcome political critique of austerity and their orientation towards capturing the existing state machine through parliamentary elections. It is their parliamentary statism, however mediated, that tends to trap left reformist parties like Syriza within capitalist relations in ways that pressure them to come into conflict with and, unless successfully challenged from the left, eventually undermine the radicalism of their own base.’
20Iñigo Errejón, ‘Podemos a mitad de camino’, CTXT, 23 April 2016; Emmanuel Rodríguez and Brais Fernández, ‘Todavía no somos suficientes populistas. En respuesta a Íñigo Errejón’, CTXT, 26 April 2016.
21Nicolas Poulantzas, Interview in Marxism Today, July 1979, pp. 194-201.
22Colin Barker, ‘A “New” Reformism? – A Critique of the Political Theory of Nicos Poulantzas’, International Socialism, 4, 1979; Daniel Bensaïd, ‘Eurocommunisme, austromarxisme et bolchevisme’, Critique communiste, 18-19, 1977.
23Michael Roberts, ‘The Global Crawl Continues’, International Socialism, 147, London, 2015; Daniel Tanuro, L’impossible capitalisme vert, Paris: La Découverte, 2012.
24Michael Holmes and Knut Roder, eds., The Left and the European Constitution, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012.
25Gaël Brustier, Corinne Deloy, Fabien Escalona, ‘Political families in the European elections May 2014: an assessment’, Brussels: Fondation Robert Schuman, 2014; Fabien Escalona, ‘Sur l’Europe, gauches radicales et droites nationalistes n’ont pas grand-chose en commun’, Slate, 9 March 2016.
26Fritz Scharpf, ‘After the Crash: A Perspective on Multilevel European Democracy’, MPIfG Discussion Paper 14/21, Cologne: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, 2014.
27Claus Offe, Contradictions, p. 191; Richard Katz and Peter Mair, ‘Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The Emergence of the Cartel Party’, Party Politics, 1(1), 1995, pp. 5-28.
28Stephan Leibfried, Evelyne Huber, Matthew Lange, Frank Nullmeier, Jonah D. Levy, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Transformations of the State, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
29Sune Sandbeck and Etienne Schneider, ‘From the Sovereign Debt Crisis to Authoritarian Statism: Contradictions of the European State Project’, New Political Economy, 19(6), 2014, p. 866.
30Alexandros Kioupkiolis, ‘Podemos: the Ambiguous Promises of Left-Wing Populism in Contemporary Spain’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 21(2), 2016, pp. 99-120.
31Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe [1985], Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso, 2013.
32Miguel-Anxo Murado, ‘What Happened to the Podemos Fairy Tale?’, The Guardian, 23 June 2016.
33Ben Stanley, ‘The Thin Ideology of Populism’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 13(1), 2008, pp. 95-110.
34Fabien Escalona, ‘Unidos Podemos: la véritable “belle alliance” de la gauche?’, Slate, 9 June 2016.