Eurocommunism Close to Home

The French Communist Party (FCP) has just seen its Eurocommunist vision of an electoral victory by the "left" alliance crumble at the polls.

Closer to home the Socialist Unity Party inspired stopwork-rallies to return a Labour Government in '78 have fizzled into non-events — several have been cancelled.

Both events received some of the shoddiest "analytical comment" the media has presented for some time. The French elections were passed off as a "defeat for the left" and then dropped from the headlines. The failure of the Auckland Trades Council stopworks was used to "show" that workers were not interested in politics. Both analyses would appear to be superficially correct — but any investigation at all would show them to be virtually opposite to the reality of each event.

The basic problem for the media in each case was their own creation - the "red bogey". If a party is willing to call itself "communist" or "socialist" then the media's willing to treat it as such. It is just not in the interests of a media still committed to red baiting to concede that "communism in French colours" is nearer blue than red and that the SUP's vague aim of "social control" is probably less radical than the National Party Superannuation scheme.

The real stories behind the two events mentioned at the start of the article are quite different to the media's attempts. Essentially they are both stories of failure, but not of the so-called "left" or of attempts to interest workers in politics, but of the rotten policies pushed by the leaders of the FCP and SUP — policies which are similar in nearly all respects.