Without Marx or Stalin

Jean-Franc,ois Revel, an editor of the French newsweekly L'Express, is a self-proclaimed "man of the left" who likes to prick the balloons of current intellectual fashion. In 1971, when anti-Americanism was a favorite French salon game, Revel audaciously argued in Without Marx or Jesus that the U.S. was the last best hope for genuine world revolution. Now Revel is at it again. At a time when many non-Communist leftists in Europe are getting newly enthusiastic about coalitions with Communist parties, he insists in a new book called The Totalitarian Temptation that there is no Communism but Stalinism. Any alliance with it, says Revel, is political suicide.

Disillusioned Socialist. Revel's trenchant attack on Communism, although hardly original, comes at a critical moment for French leftists. Long slavishly subservient to Moscow dogma, the Communist Party in France has lately taken a cue from the heartening electoral successes of Italy's Communists (TIME, June 30). The Italian party has assumed impeccable democratic manners, has pledged to abide by parliamentary democracy and, if in power, to permit opposition, a free press and even a mixed economy. Striving to shed his party's doctrinaire image, French Communist Chief Georges Marchais went so far as to state on TV recently that the dictatorship of the proletariat is an outworn notion--a shocking bit of revisionism that brought a sharp, if predictable rebuke from Pravda. Marchais's new lip service to democratic principles has cheered French Socialists, who are allied with the Communists behind a joint platform of social goals known as the Programme Commun. As the taint of Moscow fades, they believe, the chances will grow for a leftist-coalition victory at the polls in 1978. Thus Revel's broadside, reviving all the old French fears about the true face of Communism, provoked immediate reaction from not only Communists but French Socialists as well.

Revel is a disillusioned Socialist who was once a Programme Commun candidate for the National Assembly. He defines his ideal of socialism broadly--"any evolution, reform or revolution" that tends to make an economy "function to the benefit of a larger number of men and [put it] a little more under their control." Such true socialism as exists in the world today, he argues, can survive only along with social justice and political democracy--that is, in the liberal democracies of the West. The two principal obstacles to socialism are Communism and nationalism, he contends. The combination of the two ideologies in the Soviet Union has created the strongest and least communicative nation in his tory, as well as an implacable enemy of true socialism. Once in power, Communism becomes despotism.

In Revel's view, Communism does not evolve; it only makes strategic adjustments. "Stalinism is the essence of Communism," he writes. "What changes is not the Stalinist system but the rigor with which it is applied." Since a regime cannot shoot or imprison every one year after year, a relaxation of repression or an increase in consumer goods may work better for a time. But "Khrushchev and Brezhnev are no less Stalinist than Stalin . . . They are merely less bloodthirsty."

Revel faults Western leftists for short memories. Those who discount the warnings of such dissidents as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov and concede only "unfortunate exceptions" to the Communist ideal are displaying the same false optimism as those who dismissed rumors of Soviet concentration camps two decades ago. "Many independents on the left," Revel charges, "are 'Finlandized' from within--willing to accept all manner of self-censorship on behalf of Stalinism." A case in point: the refusal of many Socialists to face up to the meaning of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Popular Front. Revel admits that Communists can effectively exploit the contradictions in capitalist societies to lure nations to disaster. They "destroy, in the name of socialism, political democracy and install systems that are neither democratic nor socialist and that are, to boot, economically and humanely very inferior to capitalism." One step on that road to destruction, Revel warns, is the popular front. Through it, Communists gain a respite in their struggle with the right when the right is too strong for direct confrontation; they also frustrate the building of a reformist bloc by splitting its potential members be tween one side or the other.

Revel feels that Socialists err in dismissing Western-style social democracy as a "class collaboration" that defuses the proletariat. Focusing on class struggle, he argues, serves "less to transform the condition of the working class than to prevent capitalism from functioning." For his part, Revel prefers the libertarian inequalities of modern capitalism to "an inequality in penury under the control of a dictatorship."

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