Eurocommunism

[Bee]

Despite knowing this is a notable branch of Western Marxism I have little understanding regarding eurocommunism so I'm asking anyone for book and article recommendations on this subject.


Thanks in advance! :)

[mushroompizza]

Eurocommunism was a trend in the 1970s and 1980s within various Western European communist parties to develop a theory and practice of social transformation that was more relevant for a Western European country and less aligned to the influence or control of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Outside Western Europe, it is sometimes referred to as "Neocommunism." This theory stresses greater independence.

Thats what wikipedia says, you could start by reading wikipedia.

[Comrade Jacob]

Despite knowing this is a notable branch of Western Marxism I have little understanding regarding eurocommunism so I'm asking anyone for book and article recommendations on this subject.


Thanks in advance! :)

I'm going to order Hoxha's book "Eurocommunism is anticommunism". I have not read it but many Marxists view is as a good book on this subject.
I'm sure Ismail can come in and provide important blocks of quotes from the book.

[ñángara]

I'm going to order Hoxha's book "Eurocommunism is anticommunism". I have not read it but many Marxists view is as a good book on this subject...
There is a review of Hoxha's book at https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ca.secondwave/hoxhareview.htm by Charles Gagnon, Secretary-General of the MLOC IN STRUGGLE!, August 15, 1980.

I couldn't find sound Marxist arguments in that text explaining "revisionism" :confused:

[Ismail]

Revisionism refers to attempts to distort Marxist theory and deprive it of its revolutionary and scientific content. Bernstein was the quintessential revisionist; Kautsky, Browder, Tito, Khrushchev, and others also qualify.

Eurocommunism was a variant of revisionism in the pro-Soviet revisionist CPs of the 1970s-80s that basically claimed that Lenin's doctrines were not really relevant to Western Europe and that socialism must be carried out peacefully in that region of the world, in accordance with "humanistic" doctrines and "new conditions" which supposedly showed that workers no longer had a leading role to play in the transformation of society. They attacked the Soviet revisionists from the right, accusing Khrushchev and Brezhnev of "dogmatism." They were big supporters of Dubček's "socialism with a human face" and the Solidarity trade union (which, especially in its first years, demagogically made claims to wanting "workers' control" over Polish industry.) Eurocommunism's predecessor was the "polycentrism" theory of Togliatti, the revisionist leader of the Italian "Communists," who reiterated the standard right-wing thesis that each country had its own "national road" to socialism which gave said countries a good excuse to drop the leading role of the working-class, negate the importance of class struggle, etc. because "that may apply in other countries, but our country is different."

The Soviet revisionists took issue with Eurocommunism because they didn't want to lose control over those parties with the potential to enter into bourgeois cabinets (such as in Italy, France and Spain.) They wanted these parties to continue to support Soviet social-imperialist aims rather than the aims of Western imperialism. The Soviet revisionists, however, did not confront Eurocommunism directly, they simply tried to paper over the differences between themselves and the Eurocommunists since the latter was an organic development of the former, both looked towards the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU for inspiration.

By the beginning of the 90s virtually all the Eurocommunists had abandoned lipservice to Marxism altogether and had become avowed social-democrats.

Hoxha's Eurocommunism is Anti-Communism can be read online here: http://enver-hoxha.net/content/content_english/books/books-eurocommunism_is_anti-communism.htm

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

Hoxha's book isn't worth reading and not very interesting. The main problem with Eurocommunism is the 'many antagonisms' crapola which turns class into one of many 'identities' and with that turns class-struggle into an undesirable coarse phenomenon. Without the centrality of class-struggle many of the fundamental strategic tenants of communism are lost, class-coalition becomes acceptable as well as taking over the existing institutions.

E.M. Wood's Retreat From Class is well-worth reading, though because of its polemical nature it is a bit dated, we are still dealing with the inheritance of the political shift from class politics that she addresses in her book.