The Articulation of Communist Utopia and Democratic Pluralism in the Communist Party of Spain (1988-2018): The Unstoppable Erosion of an Identity

The article analyzes the treatment that the Communist Party of Spain makes of the notion of democracy, and its relationship with those of socialism and communism, mainly through its congressional documentation from the three decades between the general secretariats of Julio Anguita and Jose Luis Centella; that is, between the XII Congress of 1988 and the second phase of the XX Congress in 2017. This reveals that, despite the formal abandonment of the previous Eurocommunist path, in the official discourse there survives an almost total identification between socialism or communism and democracy, the latter conceived above all in general terms as participation and acquisition of rights. Despite the apparent discursive radicalization at certain moments, with Anguita as general secretary and with the return to Leninism in 2017, this has as a paradoxical consequence the relativisation of the party's own Marxist and communist ideology.