From Stalinism to Eurocommunism

Ernest Mandel’s book is a study of Eurocommunism unlike any other. Written in the polemical tradition of Trotsky, its sweep extends well beyond the immediate prospects of the Communist Parties of Western Europe. Mandel traces the long historical process which has transformed the once embattled detachments of the Third International into the constitutionalist formations of “historic compromise” and “union of the people” today. He then goes on to argue that the national roads to socialism of contemporary Eurocommunism are the “bitter fruits of socialism in one country” in the USSR.

Mandel’s book contains trenchant and documented criticisms of the ideas of Santiago Carrillo in Spain, the economic policies of the PCI in Italy, and the PCF’s theories of the State in France. But it also sets these Western developments in the context of European politics as a whole—discussing the Russian response to Carrillo, the organizationa