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