CURRENT IN THE DANISH LEFT
(The elections to the Folketing in Denmark January 23 registered a shift to the right. The leftist parties, headed by the Social Democrats, lost their parliamentary majority, and Jens Otto Krag handed in his resignation as prime minister. The shift is shown by the following table: 1966 1968 Social Democrats 69 63 People's Socialist party 20 11 Radical Liberals 13 28 Agrarian Liberals 35 35 Liberal Center 4 fe) Conservatives 34 38
[In addition to the 175 seats listed above, the Faroe Islands and Greenland are each entitled to two deputies, making 179 in all.
(Various smaller parties ran candidates but did not succeed in winning any seats. The Communist party vote was 1% as compared with 0.8% in 1966. The newly formed Left Socialist party won 2%.
{The background to the election, as well as an explanation of the trends in Danish politics today, is provided by the following article, written on the eve of the election by a Danish correspondent of World Outlook. ]
Copenhagen
"The People's Socialist party has been split. The vote last night showed that in less than a decade the PSP has come under bourgeois influence to an extent reached by the Social Democrats only over the course of two or three decades.
"It also showed that the revival of healthy organizational forms in political work, which we expected from the PSP, has not been forthcoming and that the party has accepted the autocratic form of leadership which exists in the old parties.
“And finally, it showed that the left wing, which stayed in the party to guarantee such a revival, would no longer be tolerated."
These are the opening words of a statement issued December 19, 1967, to announce the formation of a new socialist party, the fourth workers' party on the Danish political scene. (The others are the Social Democratic, the Communist, and the People's Socialist parties.
The new party was founded by roughly half of the delegates to an extraordinary congress of the PSP. This move came in the wake of a decisive vote on December 18 that split the party irreconcilably down the middle. It was the culmination of a bitter struggle by the left wing of the PSP against the arrayed forces of the PSP right wing, the Social Democratic party as a whole, and the trade-union bureaucrats.
The ramifications of this struggle included, among other things, the collapse of the Social Democratic government on December 16 and the scheduling of an election January 23.
For a better understanding of the situation, a look at the history of the People's Socialist party is necessary.
The PSP was founded in 1958, thereby becoming one of the first "new left" currents in Europe to begin building its own political party. And it succeeded, in fact, in breaking the monopoly over working-class politics held by the Social Democrats and Communists.
The PSP example served as an inspiration for left socialist currents in other Scandinavian countries -- for the founding of the People's Socialist party in Norway; the de-Stalinization of the Swedish CP; and the development of a left wing in the Finnish Social Democracy.
In the first election in which the PSP took part, in 1960, it won all six of the previous Communist seats in parliament, and took another five away from the Social Democrats. This rapid success was attributable, in part, to the nature of the new party's leadership, which included wellknown politicians and trade-union leaders -- among them, Aksel Larsen, former head of the Danish CP, an excellent speaker and experienced debater. Nearly all the leading cadres were old Communists.
It is here also that the reason for the party's rapid degeneration is to be found. The CP in Denmark, like many other Communist parties, found itself isolated from the vanguard of the workers as a result of its Stalinist policies.
To break out of this isolation was the chief aim of Larsen and company. Unlike the young members of the PSP, he and most of the old Stalinists never understood that the root of the problem was Stalinism. Instead of settling accounts with this reactionary theory, they formulated a "new" political line for the PSP, which included hostility toward the workers' states and confinement to parliamentarianism at home.
The "parliamentary road to socialism" in reality became the road of transformation into a new Social Democratic party. As for the inner life of the PSP, the old Stalinists remained true to their traditions, using any and every means against any opposition.
During the first eight years of the PSP's existence, its narrow parliamentary orientation did not cancel out its positive features in the eyes of its supporters. The Social Democrats who dominated the government had no interest in the new party as far as parliamentary deals and maneuvers were concerned. They considered the PSP the same old Communist serpent, even though it had sloughed its skin. The Social Democrats preferred to base their governments on coalitions with bourgeois parties.
The result was a long row of neocapitalist ("welfare state") compromises, which placed on the backs of the workers the burden of keeping capitalist society functioning. Since the PSP did not participate in these compromises, it gained increasing sympathy from the workers.
In the general elections in Novenber 1966 the PSP won twenty seats, doubling the number won in 1964. In many working-class districts in Copenhagen it became the biggest party. The background to the voting at that time was a measure carried by the governing coalition a few months before, which "solved" the housing problem by a formidable rise in rents.
The PSP campaigned with the promise to repeal this measure and to fight against the imposition of a new ten percent sales tax on all goods, including food. They called on the electorate to put a "workers majority" in parliament.
When the vote was counted, it showed that the combined strength of the PSP and the Social Democrats would give them a one-seat majority. At a moment's notice the entire attitude of the Social Democrats toward the PSP changed. The day after the election the leaders of the two parties met to discuss forming a coalition government.
Such a coalition was blocked, however, by the rank and file of the PSP, who for the first time threatened an open revolt. Instead, the two parties worked out an agreement to collaborate in support of certain measures. These included a "tax reform," the first step of which would be to impose the very sales tax that the PSP had campaigned to prevent. ~
The cause of this about-face lay in the opportunism of the PSP leadership and in its senselessly exaggerated election propaganda. It had portrayed the establishment of a “workers majority" as
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a veritable coming of the millenniun.
The Social Democrats refused to
form a “workers majority" unless the
PSP agreed to their conditions. If the
PSP would not comply, the blame would
rest on PSP shoulders for not establish-
ing the millennium they had promised.
In Aksel Larsen the Social Demo-
crats found a willing instrument to carry
this message back to the PSP. However,
the left wing in the PSP failed to see
all the blessings of such a "workers
majority" government. The forces opposing
Larsen's line grew rapidly.
In April 1967 the left wing suc-
ceeded in having an extraordinary congress
of the party called. At the congress the
left wing dominated: it had an overwheln-
ing majority of seats on the executive
committee and held seven out of eight
seats on the secretariat. The eighth seat
was reserved for Larsen as head of the
party.
From this point on, the party in
fact had two leaderships: the executive
committee, dominated by the left wing;
and the parliamentary group, headed by
Larsen, who founded his own organ and
"party office" and claimed the right to
call a new extraordinary congress.
In the very bitter struggle that
now began, all means were used. Seconded
by sensational articles in the bourgeois
press, the old Stalinists charged the new
leadership with being under "foreign in-
fluence." A bourgeois member of parlia-
ment even demanded that the prime minister
give an account "of the influence of the
Fourth International on the policy of the
Danish government"!
The new executive committee of the
PSP immediately took measures to combat
this right-wing drive. They maintained
that the duty of the PSP could never be
to guarantee to Social Democrats the op-
portunity to carry out their antisocial-
ist policies. On the contrary, the task
of the “workers majority" should be to
carry out policies in the interests of
the workers and to prepare the road to
socialism through "anticapitalist struc-
tural reforms" -- a term ascribed to the
Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel.
If necessary, said the left, the
PSP should vote against the Social Demo-
cratic government, even if that meant its
fall.
It was not long before the new
strategy was put to a decisive test. In
connection with the devaluation of the
Danish currency, the krone, the govern-
ment proposed a law according to which
certain automatic cost-of-living wage in-
creases would be canceled.
This meant that the workers would again have to pay the main cost of averting an economic crisis. Furthermore, it meant interference in the contracts, and hence in the independence, of the trade unions beyond anything yet attempted by a bourgeois government in Denmark
The union bureaucrats gave their sanction to the proposal immediately, but the bourgeois parties, who saw a chance to topple the Social Democratic government, campaigned against it, craftily assuming the role of defenders of the workers rights.
The fate of the bill, as well as of the government, turned on the votes of the PSP.
The executive committee of the party instructed the parliamentary group to vote against the proposal. It worked out an alternate proposal and asked for negotiations with the Social Democrats. For one whole night, a 25-year-old student, not himself a member of parliament, negotiated with the skilled bureaucrats of the Social Democracy. But the Social Democrats were not interested in an agreement. They wanted to see the PSP destroyed.
Thus, the executive committee had no choice but to instruct the parliamentary group to vote against the bill. Fourteen members of the group, led by Larsen, refused to follow these instructions. But Kai Moltke and five younger members conplied.
Before the entire nation, which viewed the debate over television, the six left-wing spokesmen explained, one by one, why they could not support the reactionary policies of the Social Democrats and had to vote in a way that would mean the fall of the government. Their objective reasoning as well as their brave and honest attitude won respect in the population to an extent that could not have been foreseen.
Two days after this decisive vote in parliament came the extraordinary congress of the PSP. The report of the executive committee was rejected by a fourvote majority, and the left wing immedi-
FAMINE REPORTED
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