These parties have abjured open political repression by the state and are really social democratic parties.
But their strong showing is more than a folk memory of times when the cash nexus and commodity exchange was not the only thing holding society together. They are an assertion that production must take place with social foresight, and that commodity market exchange is only one part of a dynamic flux in which we create collective use values and reproduce ourselves.
The resilience of this tradition, even though qualified in many ways, and at times involving corruption and deals with nationalism, is an important influence on other parts of the world (directly now we can see in Germany where the electorate faces a sharp choice in the autumn).
It is a sign that just over ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and hence the eastern bloc of state centralist socialist states, in a wider sense the development of world socialism, and communism, is inevitable.
Chris Burford