opposition between exploiters and exploited, capital and labour. In ‘state monopoly capitalism’, there is a new opposition between monopolistic forces, united and organized by the state, and the ‘people’ or ‘popular masses’. An absolutely crucial, indeed the central, principle of Eurocommunist strategy is the ‘popular alliance’, a cross-class alliance based on the assumption that a substantial majority of the population including the petty bourgeoisie and even elements of the bourgeoisie, not just the traditional working class, can be won over to the cause of socialism. It is precisely this new reality that makes possible a ‘peaceful and democratic’ transition to socialism. Communist parties, therefore, cannot be working-class parties in any ‘sectarian’ sense; they cannot even merely open themselves to alliances with, or concessions to, other parties or groups. They must themselves directly represent the multiple interests of the ‘people’.
The general strategy of Eurocommunism, then, seems at least implicitly to be built upon a conflict other than the direct opposition between capital and labour and a moving force other than class struggle. Its first object is to rally the ‘popular’ forces against ‘state monopoly capitalism’, to create the broadest possible mass alliance, and then to establish an ‘advanced democracy’ on the basis of this popular alliance, from which base some kind of socialism can be gradually constructed. The force that drives the movement forward is not the tension between capital and labour; in fact, the strategy appears to proceed from the necessity – and the possibility – of avoiding a confrontation between capital and labour. Insofar as the strategy is aimed at anti-capitalist goals, it cannot simply be guided by the interests of those who are directly exploited by capital but must take its direction from the varied and often contradictory ways in which different elements of the alliance are opposed to monopoly capitalism. It can be argued, then, that the movement need not, indeed cannot, in the first instance be motivated by specifically socialist objectives.
The doctrine of cross-class alliance proposed by Eurocommunism is, therefore, something more than simply an electoral strategy. It embodies a particular judgment about the source of the impulse for historical transformation. There are two ways of looking at the extension to other classes of the historic role formerly assigned to the working class. One is to stress the optimism of Eurocommunism, concerning the possibility of ‘democratizing’ the capitalist state. The other is to stress their pessimism, concerning the revolutionary potential of the working class. There can be little doubt that, however optimistic its claims, Eurocommunist strategy is ultimately grounded in the same historical reality that has so profoundly shaped Western Marxist theory and practice in general: the disinclination of the working class for revolutionary politics. It must be added that the Eurocommunist solution has been deeply affected by the experience of the Popular Front. And it is even possible that there is more in this political strategy than simply pessimism about the working class. For example, the strategy for transforming the capitalist state by a simple extension of the bourgeois-democratic forms, by the proliferation of representative institutions as against a system of direct council democracy, may reflect a more profound lack of interest in, or suspicion of, popular power.8 However the doctrine of popular alliances is conceived and explained, the effect is the same: it displaces the working class from its privileged role as the agent of revolutionary change and diminishes the function of class struggle as the principal motor of social transformation.
Here is the crux of Eurocommunism. We cannot get to the heart of the matter simply by equating Eurocommunism with social democracy. It is unhelpful merely to dismiss the professions of Eurocommunists that their objective is to transform, not to manage, capitalism. To do this is to avoid the real challenge of Eurocommunism. Nor can the issue be reduced simply to the choice of means – revolutionary insurrection versus constitutionalism, electoral politics, and the extension of bourgeois-democratic institutions. The critical question concerns the source and agency of revolutionary change. It is this question that, finally, determines not only the means of socialist strategy but also its ends; for to locate the impulse of socialist transformation is also and at the same time to define the character and limits of socialism itself and its promise of human emancipation.
III
Two aspects of Eurocommunist doctrine have figured most prominently in post-Althusserian theory: the conception of the transition to socialism as an extension of bourgeois-democratic forms and, more fundamentally, the doctrine of the cross-class ‘popular’ alliance. Accordingly, the chief theoretical innovations of this Marxism have occurred in the theory of the state and the theory of class, in which the question of ideology has assumed an increasingly pivotal role. In the process, there has occurred a fundamental reformulation of Marxist theoretical principles in general. In the final analysis, the doctrine of cross-class alliances and the political strategy of Eurocommunism have, it can be argued, demanded nothing less than a redefinition of class itself and of the whole conceptual apparatus on which the traditional Marxist theory of class and class struggle has rested, a redefinition of historical agency, a displacement of production relations and exploitation from the core of social structure and process, and much else besides. In particular, there has been a tendency increasingly to depart from Marxist ‘economism’ by establishing not only the autonomy but the dominance of the political, and then of ideology. The function of these theoretical devices in sustaining the strategy of popular alliances and ‘democratization’ should become evident as we examine some of the principal transformations in Marxist theories of the state and class at the hands of the post-Althusserians.
But the autonomy and dominance of politics and ideology has earlier roots in Maoism, which may help to explain the relative ease with which many of our new ‘true’ socialists travelled the route from Maoism to Eurocommunism and beyond, with the help of Althusser. To understand the logic of that journey and the ambiguous conception of democracy and popular struggle that informs it, something needs to be said about the attractions which the Maoist doctrines of ‘cultural revolution’, the ‘mass line’, and anti-economism have held for many people, especially students and intellectuals, in the European left, something that explains the unlikely transposition of these doctrines from China to the very different conditions of Western Europe.
Faced with the ‘backwardness’ of the Chinese people and an undeveloped working class, the CPC asserted the possibility of ‘great leaps forward’ in the absence of appropriate revolutionary conditions – i.e. class conditions – by dissociating revolution from class struggle in various ways. Not only did the masses – a more or less undifferentiated mass of workers and peasants – replace class as the transformative force, but the rejection of ‘economism’ meant specifically that the material conditions of production relations and class could be regarded as less significant in determining the possibilities of revolution. It became possible to conceive of political action and ideology as largely autonomous from material relations and class, and to shift the terrain of revolution to largely autonomous political and cultural struggles. The later Cultural Revolution was the ultimate expression of this view, and of the extreme voluntarism which necessarily followed from this auto-nomization of political action and ideological struggle.
This conception of revolution inevitably entailed an ambiguous relation to the masses and to democracy. On the one hand, there was an insistence upon the necessity of massive popular involvement; on the other hand, the Maoist revolution was necessarily conducted by party cadres for whom popular involvement meant not popular democratic organization but rather ‘keeping in touch’ with the masses and constructing the ‘mass line’ out of the ‘raw material’ of ideas and opinions emanating from them. The revolution was no longer conceived as emerging directly out of the struggles of a class guided and unified by its own class interests. Instead of a class with an identity, interests, and struggles of its own, the popular base of the revolution was a more or less shapeless mass (What identity do the ‘people’ or the ‘masses’ have? What would be the content of a revolution made by them ‘in their own name’?) to be harnessed by the party and deriving its unity, its direction, and its very identity from autonomous party
