International Variations in Consciousness

Abstract

In France and Italy working-class organisations stand out in marked contrast to those of most other Western countries. Their largest working-class parties and trade-union federations (the C.G.T. in France, the C.G.I.L. in Italy) are Communist-led and are apparently dedicated to revolutionary ends, being resolutely opposed to reform from within capitalism. When we look closely at their conference resolutions and their propaganda, we find virulent anti-capitalism, elaborate programmes for nationalisation and centralised yet democratic planning and a close analysis of the ‘Workers’ Fatherland’, the Soviet Union. All this is bound together in metaphors of continual class struggle. The contrast with British and American industrial and political leaders is striking—the British will go so far as to talk about ‘the working class’, Americans only risk ‘the working man’. Neither discusses alternative societies. However, there is one notable hiatus in the French and Italian vision, namely a programme for the revolution itself. The method by which the workers are to reach socialism is left relatively vague, especially in France. There is consequently a flavour of unreality, of utopianism even, about the Communist movement’s aims.