eurocommunism

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eurocommunism

a term denoting the political changes that occurred in the Communist parties of Western Europe (particularly the French, Italian, Spanish and British Communist parties) during the 1970s, involving the development of national, liberal and democratic strategies for the achievement of socialism (Machin, 1983). In his book Eurocommunism and the State (1977), Santiago Carrillo, the Spanish Communist leader, rejected the Russian model of revolutionary socialist development as being inappropriate for advanced capitalist societies. The only way forward for Communist parties was ‘by the democratic, multi-party, parliamentary road’. Eurocommunists also asserted their independence from the Soviet government, which was criticized for its internal repression of dissidents and for the military occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. See also COMMUNISM, SOCIALISM. STATE SOCIALIST COUNTRIES.

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In How the Soviet Union Disappeared, Wisla Suraska proposes that the Eurocommunists and Western social scientists whose writings Gorbachev consumed in the Central Committee International Department's classified reprints had a distinctly damaging effect on his political judgment.

Gorbachev, a Glorious Failure

Unfortunately, the Eurocommunist conviction that the movement needed to be consistently democratic emerged only in the decades when communism's vitality and promise as an economic system was becoming exhausted.

Communism, democracy and the left: what lessons on democracy and politics can we learn from the history of communism?

In its final decade it was sinking into a civil war between conservative Muscovites and over-advanced Eurocommunists.

Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party

We understood some better than others, but we surveilled them all: Kremlin clods, Vietnamese warriors who could not make a revolution work, Maoist madmen cursing one-fifth of humanity to backwardness, African chieftains in ideological drag, angry Arabs turning to Moscow in quicksilver quest for Jerusalem, Italy's Moscow-shy Eurocommunists.

Reinventing foreign correspondence

After all, it shared some of the characteristics of its rightist rival (and of Greek parties generally, with the partial exception of the Eurocommunists), namely the lack of internal democratic procedures and their dependence in terms of organisational cohesion, electoral appeal and ideology upon their respective leaders.

Party elites and democratization in Greece

One of the best things for me has been finding older people who I have that kind of connection with, and these have often been the old 'Eurocommunists' through Soundings and Lawrence & Wishart.

Feminism and 'the S-word': a roundtable discussion on socialism and feminism with Mandy Merck, Hilary Wainwright, Nira Yuval-Davis and Deborah Grayson, chaired by Jo Littler

(26) The epithet of anti-communist in its negative sense was thus applied to rival or dissenting communists such as Trotskyists, Titoists, Maoists and Eurocommunists. (27) Thus the communists, who long held the monopoly on the subject, made their contribution to the variable geometry of the concept of anti-communism, which was always very extendable.

Reflections on writing the history of anti-communism

The recent Ninth Annual European Nuclear Disarmament (END) Convention in Helsinki, Finland, and Tallinn, Estonia, demostrated how the wide spectrum of nonaligned peace forces can still meet together in an effective alliance -- the Greens, Eurocommunists and Social Democrats, the feminist and Christian movements of the West, with many allies from the Third World and increasing numbers of (sometimes hesitant) allies from Eastern and Central Europe.

Break up the blocs in Europe

In the quest for respectability, many Western European Marxists, especially among the Eurocommunists, are attempting to confine the scope of Marxism to the formulation of a progressive political economic program.

A science of our own: Marxism and nature

But at the same time it has sought to challenge traditional left politics by claiming that a programme of the left never fully pre-exists independently of the movement --something which holds true whether we conceive the movement towards a different society in terms of a long process of evolutionary changes within capitalism, or in terms of a more condensed period of rupture with the capitalist system--or as something in between (intermediate 'ruptures' along the path to socialism, as left Eurocommunists used to argue).

Out of the mire: arguments from the Greek left: Syriza has given us not only a sophisticated analysis of the current crisis but also renewed hope for a revival of radical politics in Europe

They include an unusually wide cross-section of society: workers and intellectuals, former government officials as well as student leaders who used to oppose them, Marxist socialists, Eurocommunists, liberals and devout Christians, both Protestant and Catholic.

Prague's kamikaze icebreakers

The party also includes the mainstream "Eurocommunists" of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), along with the main faction of the dissident, pro-Albanian Communist Party of Brazil (PC do B).