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Mirroring the larger schisms within Communism, the individual parties have divided, subdivided and often split into opposing parties. The Australian and Israeli Communists are divided into two parties. The Swedes, Indians, and Greeks all are split three ways. Labedz has propounded a rule that Communist politics "are complicated in inverse proportion to the party's importance in the country"; thus the Ceylonese Communists, who number only 2,300, have proliferated into eight discernible factions.
The Four Variants
In the squabbling, all sense is turned upside down. By any measure, Yugoslavia is as "revisionist" as a Red state can be; yet China, keeper of the purist faith, is now making some indirect conciliatory gestures toward Tito. Even though China branded the Dubcek regime revisionist, it condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Out of the welter of crosscurrents, at least four principal variants of Communism are alive in the world today. They are 1) Soviet Communism, 2) Maoism, 3) Castroism and 4) reformist Communism as it occurs in two sub-variants: Western Communist parties out of power and ruling parties within the Red world.
> Soviet Communism is now among the world's most conservative systems. Its overriding theme is the preservation of the status quo within the Soviet sphere of influence. Watering down Leninist eschatology, Soviet Communism no longer believes in an inevitable violent clash with capitalism and has shown in practice that the worldwide revolution is the least of its concerns. Soviet Communism has long been called "bureaucratic dictatorship," and the description is apt. A party-controlled bureaucratic bossism pervades every area of life, with stultifying results. Art and literature must conform to the precepts of "socialist realism;" that means they must provide didactic uplift about Communism. There are few civil rights for individuals. Dissent from party and government is severely punished. Even so, a small band of dissenters continues to protest against the growing repression (see box, page 33).
On the economic front, limited innovation, such as the introduction of a form of the profit motive and expansion of managerial authority, is being attempted to improve output and efficiency. But Soviet-style Communists resist any thoroughgoing reform for fear that economic liberalization might spill over into social and political areas. Soviet Communism remains in command throughout most of Eastern Europe, constitutes the major influence on the French party, and controls a number of minor "pocket parties" such as the one in the U.S. and nearly all of the small Middle Eastern and Latin American parties.