Word: communistic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Members of Red Brigades "columns," rather like Communist cells, are urged to establish "a well-defined [false] identity, even in the smallest details." If, for example, a Brigatisto pretends to be an artisan, he "must leave home every day before 8 in the morning and not return before 12:30 in the afternoon, leave again at 2 p.m. and return home at 7 p.m. or later." As the manual puts it: "The role assumed must be carefully studied, so that any irregularities in one's behavior can be explained." Militants should never write down phone numbers, even in code...
Tanned from a post-election Algerian vacation, Communist Leader Georges Marchais was in an even more than normally combative mood as he took the podium at his party's Paris headquarters. The occasion: the first meeting of the 126-member central committee since the left's stunning election defeat last March. Did the blame for that lie with the Communists, who bickered endlessly with their Socialist allies during the campaign? Not to hear Marchais tell it. "We bear no responsibility," he said in a dukes-up, three-hour speech. The cause, he asserted, was purely the Socialists...
...lost, the accusations began to fly in earnest, and not merely over how the party had blown the election. Critics were angrier still over the autocratic attitude of their leaders at a time when the winds of democratic expression and dissent were blowing through the more liberal and independent Communist parties in Italy and Spain. When a party stalwart at one cell meeting in Paris started to pin the election disaster on the Socialists, a disbelieving listener suddenly rose to declare: "It is scandalous that comrades cannot express themselves here." That outburst triggered much more complaining about party policy...
...most telling J'accuse has been an analysis in Le Monde by Communist Historian Jean Elleinstein, deputy director of Paris' Center for Marxist Studies and the intellectual leader of the French party's "liberal" wing. He charged that the party's rule-from-the-top doctrine of "democratic centralism" is too central and insufficiently democratic. The party, he added, should loosen its ties to Moscow. "Socialism exists only in a very imperfect form in the Soviet Union," Elleinstein wrote, "and it is thus not a model but an antimodel...
Elleinstein's jabs were sharpest against Marchais. Instead of following a soak-the-rich line, he argued, the Communist chief should have done as his Italian counterpart, Enrico Berlinguer, is now doing, extending the party's embrace to include the middle class. Said Elleinstein: "Workers sometimes own their apartments, even a place in the country. They are not always at ease with the party's working class language...