A century of the cascading founding of communist parties
It is almost two years since the European Parliament overwhelmingly passed a resolution expressly condemning communism, equating it with Nazism, because "both regimes committed mass murder, genocide and deportation, and were responsible for a loss of human life and freedom on a scale never before seen in the history of mankind". It is therefore very striking that the PSOE has now refused to support a proposal to condemn fascism and communism in the Congress of Deputies.
This refusal coincides with the centenary of the founding of the Communist Party of Spain, which in November 1921 would culminate the cascade of new parties, almost all of them splitting off from the socialist parties of the time. They followed in the wake of the Communist Party of Russia, the new name adopted in 1918 from the old Social-Democratic Workers' Party of Russia, the driving force behind the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 under Lenin's leadership.
The new communist parties were born for the most part out of the break with social democrats, reformists, anarchists and especially with the socialists. Such was the case of the PCE in Spain, as well as the KPD in Germany, founded by the Spartacists in 1919; the PCF, which emerged in 1920 from the break at the Tours Congress of the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO), and the PCI, born as early as 1921 by Antonio Gramsci's self-styled "purists". In March of the same year, nine months earlier than in Spain, the PCP was born in Portugal. The expansion of that cascading movement would also spread to Latin America, where they gave birth to their communist parties almost parallel to those in Europe: Argentina in 1918; Mexico, 1919; Uruguay, 1920, Chile and Brazil in 1922, and Cuba in 1925. What is today the largest and most powerful Communist Party in the world, that of China, was to emerge in Shanghai on 23 July 1921.
They all adhered to the Third International, the famous Komintern, led with an iron fist from Moscow. The slogan was permanent activism, the establishment of workers' trade unions linked to the party, the constant disqualification of bourgeois power and capitalism, all with the goal of the conquest of power by the proletariat, with the force of arms if necessary. The physical elimination of anyone who opposed it would thus become a tragic custom.
First Lenin and then Stalin shaped an ideological dependence and absolute obedience of the parties to the line set by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), so that the first enemies to be eliminated were the socialists, but also all those who advocated a different interpretation of Marxism. Thus, not a few heroes of the first hour of the Revolution would be liquidated as "revisionists", "Trotskyists" or "bourgeois", as would happen to those who, despite perfectly disciplined obedience to orders and missions, retained the disastrous habit of thinking, analysing what they saw... and becoming disillusioned.
The fact that Stalin was part of the picture of the victors of the Second World War has put the crimes of communism, not only those committed during the thirty years of Stalinist terror but also those that would continue afterwards in the countries where the communist party in question came to power, under a thick cloak of silence.
The historians who, under the direction of French researcher Stéphane Courtois, produced the voluminous and well-documented Black Book of Communism in 1997, estimate the death toll at 100 million. To establish such a staggering figure, it was necessary to wait until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, with the subsequent opening of Moscow's secret archives, now closed again by President Vladimir Putin.
Long before that, the former Komintern parties had undergone major transformations. The most powerful of the European communist parties, the PCI was moving away from Moscow in the wake of the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the crushing of the so-called Prague Spring in 1968. Enrico Berlinguer, secretary general of the PCI between 1972 and 1984, conceived the so-called "Eurocommunism", also known as "communism with a human face", an orientation that the secretary general of the PCE, Santiago Carrillo, would join, the culmination of his radical evolution, which led him to become an unavoidable pillar of the Spanish transition from Franco's dictatorship to democracy. Carrillo would not collect in votes and seats what he considered deserved payment for having led, at the risk of death and imprisonment, the only real struggle against forty years of Francoism. Now, with the Minister of Consumer Affairs, Alberto Garzón, and the Minister of Labour, Yolanda Diez, the Spanish communists have returned to power for the first time since 1939, or if you like since 1947, if you take into account the governments in Republican exile.
The PCI could do no better than Carrillo. Berlinguer died suddenly in 1984, and the party, now in the hands of its last general secretary, Achille Occheto, was dissolved at the Rimini Congress in 1991. Today, Enrico Letta leads the transformed Democratic Party, a distant successor to the party that Gramsci, considered one of the most brilliant theoreticians of communism, gave birth to.
The other great European communist party, the PCF, always loyal to Moscow even after the uprisings in Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968, was the main opponent of General Charles De Gaulle in the Fifth Republic. The old socialist fox François Mitterrand defused him by means of a pact to unite the left, socialists, communists and left-wing radicals. His triumph, first in the 1978 legislative elections and then in the 1981 presidential elections, led him to implement the programme agreed with George Marchais in the first two years, only to abandon it as soon as the huge budget deficits and the dangerous ideological drift towards collectivism in disguise set off alarm bells within the then European Economic Community and in Washington's high political circles.
Like a fossilised dinosaur, the PCP of Portugal's Álvaro Cunhal brought the most stale and dictatorial version of communism from exile to Lisbon. The Carnation Revolution of 1974 could have made him the key player in a regime as opposed and pendulum-swingingly dictatorial as that of Oliveira Salazar. However, Cunhal's extremism enabled the socialist Mario Soares to enhance his stature as a moderate statesman, the embodiment of a centre-left backed by a Europe that, like Spain, would lift Portugal out of its isolation and consequent backwardness.
With the notorious exception of China, the countries where the Communist Party has been in power abhor an era of which they remember nothing but terror and poverty, as well as the collapse of myths such as its supposed respect for the environment.
China has sketched out a horizon of a new society that extends to 2050. It is already challenging the United States for world primacy, a fight that will have major consequences - of what kind and quality remains to be seen - for the whole world. The CCP has a leader, Xi Jinping, whose guidelines have been elevated to the status of thought, on a par with Mao Zedong.
Vietnam maintains a regime of its own with many similar traits to China's. It has boosted its prosperity through the use of the Chinese. It has boosted its prosperity by embracing a capitalist economy, but establishes the unchallenged power of the Communist Party, whose main basis of legitimisation is that it has managed to inflict the first major defeat on the mighty US war machine.
This is not the case in North Korea, the world's first communist hereditary monarchy, with three successive monarchs since Kim Il Sung. The temptation to appoint successors to offspring is a temptation that satraps and dictators in other parts of the world are trying to succumb to.
And finally, in Latin America, apart from the case of Cuba, communist parties are in the minority or have been transmuted into left-wing forces under other names. This trend led to an explosion of progressive governments after the liquidation of the military dictatorships. The excesses of Venezuelan Chavismo led to a wave of conservatism, which now points to another pendulum swing.