Western Europe Communists: Being Left Without Ideology

The Communist parties in Western Europe stand at the threshold of events that may change the political balance in many countries. The crisis of communism in the East is destined to produce the agony of communism in the Western democracies. This is a widespread expectation in Rome, Madrid and other Western European capitals where the local Communist parties still command considerable political resources. Even in West Germany, Belgium, Holland and other nations where communism is almost non-existent, people speculate about changes that will modify the whole political configuration of the European Community.

In Italy, the Communist Party still commands nearly 10 million votes. The Spanish Communist Party has lost its grip on the electorate but is able to exert a considerable influence on the unions, as Socialist Prime Minister Felipe Gonzales recently experienced. In France, the Communists have been skillfully superseded by the Socialists--one of Francois Mitterand’s most successful operations--but they still have a place and a long tradition in the French political landscape. In West Germany, a large fraction of the Social Democratic Party, the major opposition group, plays a complicated game that seems to favor absorbing Western Communist parties--the Italian branch, in particular--into the Socialist International, thus giving them a patina of democracy and new respectability.

The core question is what can be expected at the end of the crucial period we are living through in Western as well as in Eastern Europe. Will the Communist parties in Western Europe disappear as a political force? Will they be able to reform and survive by changing the very names of their organizations? The Italian Communists are now considering just that. Should the traditional democratic parties do all they can to absorb the Communists, by denying their leaderships the success of what many believe to be a mere cosmetic operation?

In Western Europe the Communists want to show a new face. They have abandoned the old expressions--Marxism, Leninism, even communism--to focus on the misdeeds of Stalinism, now seen as the source of all evils.

The Italians have perhaps moved most rapidly. The late Palmiro Togliatti, a founder of the Italian Communist Party and a Stalinist, was sacrificed to this revision of ideology last year. On Aug. 21, 1988, the 25th anniversary of his death, the party newspaper dropped him from the pantheon of venerable figures in the history of Italian communism.

But dealing with ideology is one thing; addressing the real problems of everyday life is quite another. The Communist Party rank and file must be re-educated; members must be told why they have been indoctrinated for decades in the belief that free enterprise is evil and profit is its sinful product.

This is a colossal task, even as the Communists in Western Europe follow what is happening behind the former Iron Curtain. They learn that the prescription for the East is to free the productive potential of the population, attract investors, nurture new enterprises and close uneconomical ones. This, in turn, means that some factories will close, some wages will go down and some people will loose their jobs.

Consider the plight of Poland, for example. The first task of the new government is a radical transformation of the state-run economy and the promotion of freer enterprise. The non-Communist leadership will try to persuade Poles that, contrary to what they have been told for 40 years, hard work and individual initiative will generate profit which in turn--far from being execrable--means more money in their pockets and more things in the shops to buy with it.

This new teaching is exactly the opposite of what Marxism proclaimed and what Communist Party leaders preached up to now. But the majority of Communist leaders in Western Europe now celebrate the marvels of market economy, private entrepreneurship and individual profit, although they know this is the ideological patrimony of their adversaries: liberal, Christian Democratic and--enriched with a large doses of social-welfare policies--Social Democratic parties.

Rationally, it seems suicidal for a political party to emphasize the ideological values of its adversaries. The fact is that Communists have learned painful lessons: A modern state cannot be run by central planning; but they also know that without central planning the Communist Party will become irrelevant.

Italian Communists have cleverly guided the biggest Communist Party elected freely outside the Soviet sphere for more than 40 years. Yet now they and their counterparts in Western European democracies are trying to ride two ponies in opposite directions. Theirs is a fascinating, perilous, exceedingly difficult--and probably hopeless--endeavor.