Eurocommunism

In the 1970s, this political current particularly influenced the communist parties of Italy, Spain and France.  The aim here was to link a socialist economy with democratic politics. Eurocommunists positioned themselves in contrast to bureaucratic-authoritarian party-communism in socialist countries.

In the eyes of critics, however, it accelerated these parties’ “social democratisation” and integration into the existing bourgeois order.

Marxists that continued to hold steadfast to the principle of revolutionary social change, such as the Belgian Trotskyist Ernest Mandel, vehemently criticised Euro-Communism but that was also the case with regard to the party-communist orthodoxy under Moscow’s sphere of influence. Already in early 1980s -- before the collapse of the socialist states in the East and a reorientation and renaming of many Communist parties in the West -- this current lost its influence.