The Strange Death of Marxism by Paul Edward Gottfried

Author:Paul Edward Gottfried [Gottfried, Paul Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780826264930
Publisher: University of Missouri Press

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THE POST-MARXIST LEFT

Communist Disintegration

By the 1980s the stage was set for the rise of the Post-Marxist Left. The large working-class constituencies that had voted for the French and Italian Communist parties and had swelled their membership lists were shrinking rapidly. The workforce throughout Western Europe was changing occupationally and sociologically as countries were moving toward service economies. While French party membership in 1979 consisted of at least 45 percent industrial and farm workers, by 1997 that figure had gone down to 31 percent. Moreover, in 1994, despite the objections of older members, the PCF ceased to refer to itself as the “party of the working class.” By 1997 well over half the party members were white-collar employees and professionals.1

A related phenomenon that Scott Lash and John Urry discuss in their book The End of Organized Capitalism has been the disintegration of “organized capitalist relations” and its spatial and cultural dimensions. As production has been moved away from factory cities and become decentralized, the relations that once flowed out of a capitalist social system have dissolved. Workers in Europe no longer identify themselves as strongly as they once did as a class, while their neighborhoods and distinctive ways of life are in the process of vanishing. Lash and Urry see this working-class life as supplanted by a “postmodernist sensibility,” which finds expression in a pervasive pop culture.2 These changes and a rise in the general living standard have brought about a blurring of the social lines, which go back to the nineteenth century, between the industrial and financial bourgeoisie and what used to be the proletariat. Although not equally apparent in all countries, the working-class vote has shifted rightward in both France and Italy. A growing discontent with Third World immigration, thought to aggravate violent crime and to depress wages, has pushed French and Italian workers toward parties, almost invariably on the nationalist Right, that oppose further immigration. Parties on the left have been generally powerless to counteract this, because of their attempted alliance with Third World immigrants and their crusade against “racism.”3

The fall of the Soviet Union and of Eastern European Communist regimes by 1989 accelerated the weakening of Communist parties in Western Europe, which were tied internationally to the Soviet orbit. But it would be wrong to assign too much weight to this turning point. Communist membership in France and Italy was on the wane by the eighties, even before the Soviet implosion had taken place. Economic and demographic transformations had made the social confrontations on which Communism had thrived a thing of the past. Surveys of the PCF taken in 1997 indicate that support for the party as the vanguard of the working class and for the “accomplishments” of the by then collapsed Soviet republics in Eastern Europe was correlated to age. Those over sixty or those who had been members since before 1958 leaned heavily toward the once established views about Communists in power. Those under thirty had little interest in either position.4

But new social fissures had

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