New Party Game

Communists play J'accuse

Tanned from a post-election Algerian vacation, Communist Leader Georges Marchais was in an even more than normally combative mood as he took the podium at his party's Paris headquarters. The occasion: the first meeting of the 126-member central committee since the left's stunning election defeat last March. Did the blame for that lie with the Communists, who bickered endlessly with their Socialist allies during the campaign? Not to hear Marchais tell it. "We bear no responsibility," he said in a dukes-up, three-hour speech. The cause, he asserted, was purely the Socialists' "obstinacy." As for suggestions that the party bosses ought to tolerate more debate within the ranks, "we reject them clearly." More freedom? Marchais was disdainful: "One cannot initiate a sort of permanent discussion on everything and anything in the party and its press."

As Marchais well knew, there has been more soul-searching within the party than at any time since 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev delivered his watershed anti-Stalin speech and when Soviet troops invaded Hungary. The cause this time was the debacle in March. After all, before the election, opinion polls showed that the leftist parties had their strongest opportunity since the creation of the Fifth Republic in 1958 to push a left-wing coalition regime into power. What shook the Communists was not just the unexpected victory by the center-right coalition led by President Valery Giscard d'Estaing but also the weakness of their own performance. The party's share of the total vote (20.6%) slumped to a ten-year low, and that became even worse when gauged against the small increase gained by the Socialists, who emerged with 22.6% of the vote, thus confirming their position as the dominant party on the left.

The recriminations have been loud and, considering that the French Communists are among the most monolithic of the Western European parties, startlingly public. Indeed, there was audible grumbling within the ranks last fall, when Marchais began his public jousting with the Socialists. It was ostensibly over the extent to which French industry should be nationalized under the left's Common Program; many party members feared that feuding with the Socialists on this point might wreck the left's chances of winning power.

After the returns were in and the left had lost, the accusations began to fly in earnest, and not merely over how the party had blown the election. Critics were angrier still over the autocratic attitude of their leaders at a time when the winds of democratic expression and dissent were blowing through the more liberal and independent Communist parties in Italy and Spain. When a party stalwart at one cell meeting in Paris started to pin the election disaster on the Socialists, a disbelieving listener suddenly rose to declare: "It is scandalous that comrades cannot express themselves here." That outburst triggered much more complaining about party policy.

Though dissent is not welcome within the pages of L'Humanite, the party paper, critics have had little difficulty finding other forums. Six party intellectuals, writing collectively in Le Monde, charged that the central committee's "no responsibility" position was contrary to the "need for broad and profound reflection on what has happened." Jacques Fremontier, editor of the party magazine Action, penned an open letter of resignation to Marchais: "We made a mistake -on the Socialist Party, on power, on the Common Program, on the union of the left, on tactics."

The most telling J'accuse has been an analysis in Le Monde by Communist Historian Jean Elleinstein, deputy director of Paris' Center for Marxist Studies and the intellectual leader of the French party's "liberal" wing. He charged that the party's rule-from-the-top doctrine of "democratic centralism" is too central and insufficiently democratic. The party, he added, should loosen its ties to Moscow. "Socialism exists only in a very imperfect form in the Soviet Union," Elleinstein wrote, "and it is thus not a model but an antimodel."

Elleinstein's jabs were sharpest against Marchais. Instead of following a soak-the-rich line, he argued, the Communist chief should have done as his Italian counterpart, Enrico Berlinguer, is now doing, extending the party's embrace to include the middle class. Said Elleinstein: "Workers sometimes own their apartments, even a place in the country. They are not always at ease with the party's working class language."

Would all this dissent have much effect on the party leadership? Not immediately. Commenting on Marchais's speech, L 'Humanite insisted that the address proved that "serious, interesting and positive discussion is unfolding within our party." Marchais himself, when he first heard the rumblings within his ranks, magnanimously announced that "no heads would roll" because of it. That seems a safe bet in his own case, since no one expects any changes in the rigid party leadership any time soon. But if the party continues to learn nothing and forget nothing about the changing shape of France's ever more middle class electorate, it could well slip a few more points when the next election rolls around. qed

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