From Stalinism to Eurocommunism: The Bitter Fruits of 'Socialism in One Country'

by Ernest Mandel

Ernest Mandel’s book is a study of Eurocommunism unlike any other. Written in the polemical tradition of Trotsky, its sweep extends well beyond the immediate prospects of the Communist Parties of Western Europe. Mandel traces the long historical process which has transformed the once embattled detachments of the Third International into the constitutionalist formations of “historic compromise” and “union of the people” today. He then goes on to argue that the national roads to socialism of contemporary Eurocommunism are the “bitter fruits of socialism in one country” in the USSR.

Mandel’s book contains trenchant and documented criticisms of the ideas of Santiago Carrillo in Spain, the economic policies of the PCI in Italy, and the PCF’s theories of the State in France. But it also sets these Western developments in the context of European politics as a whole—discussing the Russian response to Carrillo, the organizational attitudes of the CPSU to the Western parties, and the emergence of major dissident currents in Eastern Germany sympathetic to Eurocommunism.

From Stalinism to Eurocommunism represents the first systematic and comprehensive critique from the Marxist Left of the new strategy of Western Communism. It can be read as a barometer of the storms ahead in the European labour movement.

Genres: Politics, History

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Ernest Ezra Mandel was a German born Belgian-Jewish Marxian economist and a Trotskyist activist and theorist. He fought in the underground resistance against the Nazis during the occupation of Belgium and he became a member of the Fourth International during his youth in Antwerp. Mandel is considered to be populariser of marxism.

Reviews

[Donald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mandel makes incisive criticisms about the conversion of Communist Parties in Western Europe into essentially social-democratic defenders of parliament. The book is too polemical and too focused on politicians of the 1970's for my interests but the basic points are important, especially given recent attempts to reboot democratic socialism with (hopefully) these lessons learned. Mandel also makes clear he understands why average workers would find Eurocommunist arguments plausible to some extent and focuses more on how the logic leads to austerity and disaster.

[Brian Bean · Rating 5 out of 5]

While the political tendency of Eurocommunism is perhaps less relevant to socialists in the US, Mandel’s arguments and critical take-down are directly relevant and applicable to gradualist/Neo-kautsyian currents in the US. At its core Mandel demonstrates how gradualism fails due to lack of understanding of relationship between capitalist crisis and the nature of the state. Standout essays were that on “The PCF and the state” that excellently picks apart reformists attempts to take hold of the state to carry out socialist transition and fantastic schemes like a symbiosis between council models and the borgeouis state. Rather, the prime argument is the need to prepare politicaly and organizationally for the head-on confrontation with the ruling class. The last essay—“the strategy of Eurocommunism.” Is a tour de force destruction of Kautsky’s “strategy of attrition.” Clear and sharp, the last essay makes the book and could be read as a stand-alone. The one thing that stands out a bit is that Mandel does strike me a overly optimistic about the immediate possibility which doesn’t detract from the general argument but feels off especially reading it over four decades after it was written.

[Neal · Rating 4 out of 5]

A useful collection of essays on the strategic ideas of the Italian and French Communist Parties in the 1970s. Mandel carefully traces the anti-internationalist and reformist ideas of Eurocommunism back to the policies of Stalin's Communist International. In particular, Stalin's conception of "socialism in one country" and the need to marshal communist parties around the world in defense of the USSR actually encouraged the development of "national roads" to socialism which eventually tore western communist parties away from the leadership of the Soviet Union. Mandel argues that what the Soviet leadership most despised and feared about Eurocommunism was the possibility that its defense of democratic freedoms and pluralism could take root in Eastern Europe and the USSR.

The best part of the book are the last three essays on the austerity strategy of the PCI, the transition strategy of the PCF, and a summary of Eurocommunist theses. Mandel convincingly shows how the historic compromise and embrace of austerity destroyed the PCI. He also demonstrates how the PCF's conception of an orderly socialist transition involving a long period of "advanced democracy" and structural reform without the breaking up of the state's repressive apparatus is based on fantasy. Eurocommunist strategists fail to account for how policies which undercut the rate of profit and are sure to provoke capital strikes could be sustained. They also fail to take seriously the episodic and radical nature of working-class mobilizations.

The most challenging part of the book comes with Mandel's defense of workers' councils and dual power, and his belief that these institutions must be centralized and eventually supplant the existing state legislative institutions. It's not clear whether or not councils can play a viable part in future revolutionary upsurges given the diffusion and disorganization of workers in post-Fordist economies.

On the PCI's strategy of a long siege of capitalist institutions (depicted as a "fortress"), Mandel has the best metaphorical rejoinder: "So long as the bourgeoisie commands political and economic power, the workers live and act under conditions of material dependence on the ruling class… Under these conditions, the notion that all the living forces of society can gradually be assembled for a long, perhaps even permanent, siege of the capitalist fortress is an idle dream. Capitalism commands innumerable machine-gun nests stationed around its fortress, within the very social body that is supposed to be besieging it."

[Nathaniel Flakin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ernest Mandel was the main leader of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, and one of the greatest Trotskyist thinkers after Trotsky's assassination. In the 1970s, the largest Communist Parties in Western Europe — in Italy, France, and Spain — broke with the Soviet Union and set off on their own path, which they called "Eurocommunism."

Mandel shows that the path of "Eurocommunism" is the exact same one taken by social democracy in the run up to the First World War. These formally "communist" parties adopted openly reformist views on the state, gave "critical" support to the NATO, and offered constructive suggestions for austerity programs, all to prove to their national bourgeoisies that they could be trusted with the reins of government. Their "communism" was limited to the hammer and sickle symbol.

This has a certain relevance for today. Modern reformism in the United States, represented by Jacobin and the majority leadership of the DSA, holds up not only Karl Kautsky of the SPD as a model, but also Enrico Berlinguer of the PCI. So it's important to remember that Berlinguer was not just in favor of government coalitions with conservative bourgeois parties, but actually argued in favor of "proletarian" austerity measures. This is another of many not-so-subtle hints of what neoreformism knows what it will offer if it ever attains government office: "socialist" austerity. This is, of course, exactly what Syriza and Podemos have offered.



Mandel's incisive critique unfortunately suffers from his inveterate optimism, which more and more became inveterate opportunism. He was convinced that the social democratization of the big Stalinist parties in Western Europe would introduce democratic and therefore revolutionary impulses into the Stalinist states. This prognosis, like all of Mandel's hopes about Stalinism's potential for self-reform, was a dead end. It is also rather melancholy to read Mandel's defense of the need for a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, knowing that within a decade he would revise his views and himself go through a certain process of social democratization.

[Soph Nova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Idk if I agree with Mandel’s conclusions but the way he writes is so clear it’s hard not to

[Ella Pia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Last few chapters are the best, good critique of left eurocommunism and the argument that we can fuse parliamentary democracy/universal suffrage with working class democracy.