From last October 29-30, in Athens, was held the first congress of the “Party of the European Left” (PIE). This international federation of parties had been formed in May of 2004 in Rome. The driving force behind the initiative was the Party of Communist Refoundation, the Italian organization whose secretary, Fausto Bertinotti, is the president of the new Party of the European Left. Around him have grouped a series of forces coming, essentially, from the crisis of international Stalinism: the French Communist Party, the Spanish Communist Party, the Greek Sinaspismos, and second in importance behind the Italian PRC, the German Party of Social Democracy (PDS), joined recently by the left sector of social democracy, led by the former minister Oskar Lafontaine, breathing new life into the new Party of the Left (Die Linke), which obtained good results in the last German elections. Around them, there are various minor parties, both from western Europe and the former deformed worker States (but none from Russia). Recently, two parties were also added, coming from the “extreme left”: the Portuguese “Left Block”, a federal structure which includes mainly the “Pabloists” and former local Maoists; and “Respect”, the popular front constituted in England by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) with petite-bourgeois and bourgeois Islamic sectors, and which has as its representative the left Catholic demagogue George Galloway.
The PIE is a product of the collapse of Stalinism. In Italy, the old Communist Party (PCI), expression of a particular situation, with deep roots in bourgeois society, had been transformed into the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS; afterwards, Left Democrats, DS) after 1989, concluding in this manner its conversion, after a long period of political and social transformation, into a bourgeois party, with peculiar characteristics, since it contains within it a social democrat current. In this framework, the most radical part of the left of the PCI founded the PRC, where the principal forces of the extreme left converged. In France and Spain, the two local Communist parties significantly lost their political space, abandoning the role they had played in the preceding phase. It is no coincidence that the three parties mentioned shared the experience of the so-called “Euro-Communism”, that is, the failed attempt at constructing a current midway between classic social democracy and Stalinism, without completely breaking ties with the bureaucracy of the Kremlin.
In a different historic situation, the forces of the PIE propose once again something similar to the Euro-Communist attempt (with the reformed inheritor of the old party of the East German Stalinist bureaucracy): they wish to represent an essentially social democratic reformism together with the defense of a “refounded communist movement.” But in the absence of the social reference which the Russian bureaucracy had in its time, the former is the dominant aspect.
The recent split with the German SPD by Oskar Lafontaine and the formation by sectors of the left of that party of the WASG, later fused with the PDS in the Party of the Left, gives an idea of the nature of the new formation.
This regroupment of a social democratic type has as its central political reference the Party of Communist Refoundation (PRC), of Fausto Bertinotti. The PRC has never formed part of a “center-left” government, but it supported, from 1996-1998, the parliamentary majority of the then government led by Romano Prodi. But today it participates fully in the center-left bourgeois coalition, led once again by Prodi, which is called the “Union”. It is expected to be the probable winer in the upcoming 2006 elections. In that way, the PRC would form part of the government. The PCF, in France, already participated with ministers of its own in the recent governments of the “plural left.” But the PRC is able still to combine a formal extremism (it was the PRC which developed a battle for all of the PIE to assume positions against the constitutional treaty, making, for example, the German PDS change its position, which was initially in favor of the European constitution), with an alliance with the bourgeois, liberal centrist and clerical forces. It is a point of reference for what is seen as a new demagogic and moderate social democracy, which at the same time presents itself as left-wing, in a center-left/center-right swing of the pendulum which is functional to, but contradictory with, the context of the European capitalist regime.
The programmatic document voted at the congress was a good reflection of the nature of the PIE. It is a text in which a purely pacifist and reformist perspective is to be seen, in which socialism does not exist, not even as a far horizon to reach after a long time. But the heart of the document is to be found the last chapter, titled “Build alliances.” In it, the following is affirmed: “Our task is to contribute to the birth of a popular majority, of the left and social, which is and should be broader than ourselves: with other political parties, with the European Social Forum and with social movements, with the feminists, the trade unions, the popular associations, etc. A popular majority will grow with alliances and convergences between all those who wish to build another Europe.” That is, a new “Popular Front” with which to drag the working class and the popular movements into the arms of the bourgeoisie.
The alternative to a Europe of capital and its crises will surely not arise from this new neo-social democratic, reformist and petite-bourgeois movementist political force, but will reach the old continent instead thanks to the revolutionary International of the proletariat, the refounded Fourth International.
