C. Objection: The Communist Successes in Italy and France
The Logo of Partito Comunista Italiano, aka: Italian Communist Party.
But, someone will object, the successes of these tactics in Italy and France do not permit one to affirm that communism is retreating in the free world, or even that the smiling communism of today is progressing more slowly than the scowling communism of the Lenin and Stalin years.
In 1981, his manifesto titled, “What Does Self-Managing Socialism Mean for Communism: A Barrier? Or a Bridgehead?” drew worldwide repercussion. It is a critical analysis of French President Mitterrand’s self-managing socialism. Click picture to read or download it.
First of all, in answer to this, one must say that the general elections in Sweden, West Germany, and Finland, as well as the regional elections and the present instability of the Labor Government in Great Britain, attest to the inappetence of the great masses for socialist “paradises,” communist violence, and so on.1. There are expressive signs that the example of these countries has already begun to reverberate in those two great Catholic Latin nations of Western Europe, thus hindering the communist advance.
François Mitterrand, the President of France from 1981 – 1995 and he was First Secretary of the Socialist Party and the first left-wing politician to assume the presidency under the Fifth Republic.
But, in our opinion, it is necessary above all to question how authentically communist is the growing number of votes obtained by the Italian Communist party or the French Socialist party (of which we speak since the French Communist party is stagnant). Both parties are far from having benefited only from the votes of their own electorates. Certainly considerable Catholic support — whose real amplitude only history will one day reveal in its full extent — has created entirely exceptional illusions, weaknesses, apathies, and complicities around the Italian Communist party.
Enrico Berlinguer, leader of the Italian Communist Party and the driving force behind Eurocommunism for Italy, serving from 1972 – 1984. Despite the largest Communist support in Italy at the time, he lost an election in 1976 to Benigno Zaccagnini.
The electoral projection of these shocking and artificial circumstances explains, in large measure, the growth in the number of people voting for the Communist party, many of whom are by no means communist voters. Nor should we forget the direct or indirect influence of certain Croesuses upon the voting. Their frankly collaborationist attitude toward communism allows electoral maneuvers from which the Third Revolution draws an obvious profit. Analogous observations can be made in regard to the French Socialist party.
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution (York, Penn.: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, 1993), Part III, Chapter II, pg. 139-141.
1. This vast anti-socialist saturation in Western Europe, although fundamentally a reinvigoration of the center and not of the right, is of indisputable importance in the fight between the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution. For, to the extent that European socialism senses it is losing its rank and file, its leaders will have to display a distancing from and even a wariness of communism. In turn, the centrist currents, in order and not to be taken for socialists by their own electorates, will have to manifest an even more accentuated anticommunist position. And the right wing of the centrist parties will have to declare itself to be even militantly anti-socialist.
In other words, the leftist and centrist currents in favor of collaborating with communism will suffer what occurs to a train when the locomotive is suddenly braked. The car immediately behind it is hit with the shock and is pushed in a direction opposite the one it was traveling. In turn, this car transmits the shock to the second car with an analogous effect, and so on, down to the last car.
Could this present accentuating of the anti-socialist allergy be the first manifestation of a profound phenomenon destined to durably impoverish the revolutionary process? Or is it a mere ambiguous and passing spasm of common sense amid the contemporary chaos? What has occurred thus far does not yet provide grounds for an answer.
