Marxism in the Contemporary West by Charles F. Elliott

Author:Charles F. Elliott [Elliott, Charles F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, Political Science, General, Political Ideologies
ISBN: 9780429728037
Google: tbuZDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 51301664
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

II

We have emphasized how the inability of the Anarchists and Socialists to adapt effectively to changes in Spanish social structure and syndical legislation permitted the Communists to develop an important presence among the working class. Even while emphasizing the decisive importance of that sector to the realization of Spanish Communist objectives, however, PCE leaders tried always to avoid (not always successfully) that sectarian, ouvrièriste orientation which, it has so often been noted, has been the defining characteristic of its Portuguese neighbor. The Spanish Communist party may have preferred to rely on its working class base for support during the most difficult moments of the anti-Franco struggle, but it invariably sought to expand its audience beyond the confines of the proletariat and to court the middle classes.

With socialism not a near-term possibility for Spanish society, the party adopted as its own the Gramscian notion that revolutionary change in advanced industrial societies required that the forces of the Left not only destroy or radically transform those instruments of coercion and direct domination which make up the State but also (and this is a prior condition) break the ascendance or hegemony of 'bourgeois' ideology in society. The PCE saw the road to socialism in Spain as a long one. Only after the working class and its allies (joined in the alianza de las fuerzas del trabajo y de la cultura) had first broken the spiritual and cultural hegemony of the 'ruling' class could they go about assuming plenary powers and definitively establishing socialist relations of production.9

In line with this sort of thinking, the Spanish Communists saw the vulnerability of the presentday capitalist State as exploitable primarily by a strategy which emphasized reform over revolution. As Marxists, they continued to view the State as the instrument for the exercise of organized violence by one class over another and regarded its takeover as the core problem of the political process. Their stratagem for dealing with this problem differed from the traditional Leninist one, however. The Bolshevik leader had devised a rather simple and direct approach on this point, arguing that the bourgeois State had to be seized, violently destroyed, and a dictatorship of the proletariat established as a condition for the construction of socialism to begin. The Spanish Communists, by contrast, stressed the complexity of the relation of State to society in the latter part of the twentieth century and insisted it was no longer simply a matter of "destroying the State, but rather of eliminating those sectors in the (State) machine which are the expression, the instrument of monopolistic rule (the political police, top administrators, reactionary sectors in the army, finance and so on) and neutralizing and even winning over one part of the State machine by a democratic and even socialist transformation."10

PCE spokesmen rationalized their party's shift on the State and on the means to be employed in its transformation by pointing to changes in the role of the Spanish State and in the structure of Spanish society. The modern State, the argument

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