The Communist Parties

Abstract

One of the defining characteristics of a communist state, it was suggested in Chapter 1, is the existence of a communist or Marxist-Leninist party exercising dominant political authority within the society in question. Not all the parties we shall consider in this chapter in fact call themselves communist. The Polish party, for instance, is called the Polish United Workers’ Party, and the Albanian party is called the Party of Labour of Albania (see Table 4.1). Nor are these parties necessarily the only parties that are permitted to exist in their respective societies; almost half of them, in fact, permit more than one party to exist, with seats in the legislature and a formally independent status (see Table 3.1). In none of these states, however, is any genuinely competitive political party permitted to exist, and the non-communist parties in these countries are generally of a more or less ‘puppet’ character, contesting elections together with the communist party on the basis of a common list of candidates and with a common manifesto. The dominant role of the communist party within the political system, and within the party of its central leadership, is indeed the essential characteristic of a communist state not just to political scientists but also so far as the communist party authorities themselves are concerned; it was to resist any challenge to that role that the Soviet Union and its allies intervened in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and appeared likely to do so again in Poland in 1980–81.