Wyprowadzenie sztandaru - we Francji
Leszek Andrzej Kleczkowski
By Julian Coman in Paris
EUROPE'S last big Communist Party will finally admit this week that
the philosophy from which it takes its name has been a complete
failure.
France's Communists have shied away from introspection after the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In
Italy, the former Communist Party is now in government, having
dropped its old name and embraced the free market. The Communist
Party of Great Britain changed its name to Democratic Left, and
then abandoned being a political party altogether.
But the members of the Parti Communiste FrancŸaise (PCF) had
looked history in the eye and refused to concede defeat, despite a
plummeting share of the vote, the disintegration of the
Soviet empire and a crushing weight of evidence pointing to
Stalinist atrocities. However, the new millennium has brought a new
realism. During what is certain to be a raucous PCF congress
in Martigues this week, the party elite has decided to make a formal
admission of almost a century of political mistakes.
More than 200 delegates will be asked to vote in favour of an
extraordinary two-page condemnation of the party's 80-year
history. Entitled, "Has communism been a failure in the 20th
century?" the text goes on to answer its own question with a
resounding "yes". The document, which has caused uproar among party
stalwarts, states that communism "did not liberate humanity", but
led to the "oppression of the individual, a tendency to see
different opinions as deviation or betrayal, and practices which in
all too many cases bordered on the criminal".
French Communists were guilty of "preferring to keep quiet about
the suppressions of freedoms in the various socialist states", in
addition to failing to realise "the scale and the consequences" of
events in eastern Europe, including the Stalinist purges and the
suppression of liberal revolutions in satellite Soviet states such
as Czechoslovakia. Obsessed by the idea of revolution, comrades
from Paris to Marseille also failed to see the value of the
rule of law and democracy. These ideas were wrongly fought against
as "bourgeois concepts". Post-war party leaders were "blind,
error-ridden and behind the times".
They conclude that "the end can never justify the means", and that
if the party is to have any future in the 21st century, its
members must "move on completely from the old mentality". Georges
Barthélemy, a pensioner activist, said: "It's not the party that
needs to change, it's the rest of society."
But one member of the Paris party hierarchy, who did not wish to be
named, said: "It's time to move on and leave all those old ideas
behind. They didn't do us any good."
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Smart questions to stupid answers
Pisz z sensem - rob dwie spacje po kropce