In November, 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson won the Presidential election with a landslide mandate to end U.S. intervention in Vietnam. However, several months before the election—and in the period between his election and inauguration—Johnson was already laying plans for escalating the war in Vietnam.
More than two years before the Gulf of Tonkin provocation of August, 1964—which Johnson instigated to “justify” his massive post-election escalation—the USSR was pressing for Soviet-Chinese unity to stop U.S. aggression in Indo-China. At that time, Mao Tse-tung had not yet defeated the opposition to his anti-Soviet policies within the leadership of the Communist Party of China. But he was already able to exert enough influence and power to compel rejection of every Soviet initiative—to spurn every call for Socialist, anti-imperialist unity against the escalating U.S. aggression in Vietnam and the expanding U.S. penetration in Africa.
By 1965, the overwhelming majority of the membership of the Communist Party of China had become aroused by the struggle within the leadership and opposed Mao’s brutal rejection of international solidarity. As the U.S. pressed ahead with its escalation of the war in Vietnam in 1965, the struggle mounted within the Communist Party of China to defeat Mao’s opposition to Sino-Soviet unity as the foundation for mobilizing worldwide support of the Vietnamese people. It was at this that Mao took new steps to crush all opposition to his policies.
As a prelude to the “cultural” counter-revolution, he began elimination of key Party, army, trade union and government figures who resisted the blocking of Sino-Soviet unity. This was followed by the “cultural revolution” itself, whose purpose was not only to complete elimination of opposition to Maoism in the leadership, but to smash all rank and file resistance—involving millions of people—in the Communist Party and trade unions.
Beginning with the removal of leaders of the People’s Liberation Army who supported joint action with the Soviet Union, Mao stepped up his plans to transform the army into an instrument of great power chauvinism. The next stage was the massive army-supported “Red Guard” assaults directly on the Communist Party and the trade unions.
It is only against this background of suppression of those who tried to restore anti-imperialist unity that one can explain the arrogant self-assurance with which three successive U.S. Administrations continued escalating the war—defying the great U.S. peace movement which reflected majority sentiment, and world-wide opposition. And from the very start of the war, U.S. imperialism was encouraged to keep on escalating its level of aggression because Maoism was escalating its level [of] violence against those in China who demanded a united strategy with the Soviet Union and the world peace forces. This assault against the opponents of Maoism in the Communist party, the army, the trade unions and all other people’s organizations paralleled the increasing U.S. aggression at every stage.
In fact, the rising violence against opponents of Maoist actually appeared to be synchronized with the successive escalations of U.S. genocide against the heroic Vietnamese. In 1968, for example, the Nixon escalation coincided with the Maoist escalation of violence against the resistance of all segments of the Chinese people and the oppressed non-Han minorities suffering under great power chauvinism—violence culminating in the “cultural revolution” that all but destroyed the Communist Party and the trade unions and fundamentally changed the character of the army. The record of Maoist betrayal of anti-imperialist unity is as long as the record of U.S. aggression in Vietnam. Pointing up this reality, James Chieh Hsiung, Associate Professor of Politics at New York University and Chairman of its Washington Square College East Asian Program Studies, reports:
The U.S. decision in 1965 to raise the level of hostilities had a number of repercussions. Soon afterward, the Soviet Union approached Peking for permission to ship military hardware to North Vietnam across Chinese territory, both by air and by rail. It even requested airport facilities in South China for staging flights into Vietnam. . . . The new request added fuel to the continuing controversy within China about relations with the USSR, Although the precise lineup on the airport issue is not clear, Lo Jui-Ch’ng, Chief of Staff of the PLA, is generally thought to have supported a more positive Chinese intervention in the Vietnam war and, hence, closer cooperation with the Soviet Union. Despite the esoteric language of his article “Commemorate the Victory over German fascism,” he appeared to compare those opposing cooperation with the USSR in a more active intervention in the war to Daladier and Chamberlain who had appeased Hitler at Munich. (Ideology and Practice, The Evolution of Chinese Communism, by James Chieh Hsiung. Praeger Publishers, New York, 1970. Pages 260-261.)
And Richard C. Thornton, Member of the Institute for Sino-Soviet Relations and Assistant Professor of History, George Washington University, relates that:
. . . in February, 1965, Kosygin visited Hanoi and Peking. He failed to negotiate a reconciliation with the Chinese . . . The offer of reconciliation had a galvanizing effect on the Peking leadership, touching off an extremely critical debate over China’s role in Vietnam. . . . (China and the Communist World, by Richard C. Thornton. Appearing in Communist China, 1946-1969. Edited by Frank N. Trager and William Henderson. Published for the American Asian Educational Exchange by the New York University Press, 1970. Page 274.)
Thornton then stated:
Although several leaders were involved in the debate, the principals were the Minister of Defense, Lin Pao, who represented the Mao group, and Chief of Staff Lo Jui-Ch’ing . . . In early May, Lo gave a speech in which he advanced a strong argument for reconciliation with the Soviet Union in order to afford the most effective aid to a fraternal ally, the Democratic Republic of North Viet-Nam . . . Lin Pao, on the other hand, took the Maoist line of independent action. . . .
In this debate, which lasted several months, the Mao group emerged victorious. Their victory and the rejection of Soviet offers for joint effort in Viet-Nam was signalled in November. Lo Jui-Ch’ing was removed from his position as Chief of Staff at this time, decisively altering the balance between the contending groups. By Spring, 1966, the Mao group had taken the offensive, and was in a position to administer the coup de grace at the eleventh Plenum in August 1966. It was a victory in that Mao obtained sufficient voting strength to carry out his policies in the Politburo, to keep China on the course of independent action, and to begin the process of extending his Politburo victory to the country as a whole. It was a setback in the sense that he was unable to achieve his objectives without recourse to violent, even armed, conflict—the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. (Ibid. Pages 274-275.)
In his exposure of the “cultural revolution” as a violent suppression of the vast movement in China for unity with the USSR, Professor Thornton comes as close to frankness as a historian dares in a period when U.S. imperialism has converted the universities into ideological and military research centers for its offensive against the freedom struggles of Africa, Asia and Latin America, and against the unity of the Socialist countries—the key to world anti-imperialist Solidarity.
Thornton is, however, neither frank nor accurate when he describes the Maoist victory as resulting in a “course of independent action,” when in fact it was but another stage of Maoist “leaning” to the side of imperialism—another step in the Maoist isolation of China from the world revolutionary movement.
Thornton is not alone in the academic world in writing about Maoism with at least an occasional gleam of accuracy. Another such writer, J. W. Strong, states:
The cultural Revolution established The Thought of Mao Tse-Tung as the guiding philosophy for China’s future, and Maoism has almost completely submerged the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. (The Communist States In Disarray. Edited by A. Bromke and T. R. Harmstore, University of Minnesota, 1972. Page 32.)
Both Strong’s and Thornton’s observations concerning the real nature and purposes of the “cultural revolution” are in sharp contradiction to the “revolutionary” image of Maoism promoted by the mass media and pseudo-radicals. In contrast to its “Marxist-Leninist” rhetoric, the “cultural revolution” was an attempt to accomplish through violence what “The Thought of Mao” had not succeeded in doing—eliminating the application of the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism in China. However, despite what Thornton calls the Maoists’ “coup de grace,” and the ensuing “cultural revolution,” the struggle within China to restore the principles of internationalism has not ended—and will not end.
The Maoist betrayal of anti-imperialist unity, so crucial in prolonging the U.S. war against the Vietnamese people, was accompanied by a closely related Maoist policy aimed at expanding the War to global proportions. One of the variety of pseudo-radicals involved with the Maoists in furthering this aim was Eldridge Cleaver.
At the time that the Soviet Union and the world peace forces were demanding an end to the war, Cleaver was urging its expansion into nuclear war. During a stopover in Moscow—en route to a Conference of Journalists in the Democratic Republic of Korea—Cleaver castigated the Soviet Union for “not using its nuclear arsenal to stop the killing of Asians and Africans.” While Cleaver’s statement is reminiscent of the racist U.S. Army Captain in Vietnam who, to a heap of burning ruins, told a news correspondent, “We had to destroy the village to save it,” there is one difference. Cleaver’s policy had greater dimension—he was ready to destroy the world to “save it.”
Cleaver’s views are not unlike those of other anti-Soviet “radicals,” including K. S. Karol, a notorious French Trotskyite writer and apologist for Maoism. In 1967, Karol stated:
. . . many well-meaning people thought that a solution to the Vietnamese war would be found within the framework of coexistence because the pressure of the USSR, of the pro-Soviet peace movements, and those of the emerging countries would be sufficient to make America withdraw. But it was a vain hope, quickly dashed by the arrogance of American power. . . . Now it is plain that polite and moderate pressure cannot prevent the growth of escalation and it is difficult to see how it can be stopped in the future. The absence of any decisive anti-American action on the Soviet Union’s part amounts, in the Chinese view, to complicity with the aggressor, therefore to treason. (China, the Other Communism. By K. S. Karol. Hill and Wang, New York, 1967. Page 325.)
In his book—written after several months spent in China interviewing key Maoist leaders—Karol inadvertently confirms that Maoist policies were the real reason for the “arrogance” of U.S. imperialism in prolonging and escalating its aggression in Vietnam. Years before Karol’s book appeared, U.S. imperialists were well aware of Maoism’s oft-expressed opposition to the policy of peaceful coexistence for “emerging countries.” And by rejecting joint action with the Soviet Union in the early sixties, the Maoists assured U.S. imperialism that their super-revolutionary rhetoric would be accompanied by only the most “polite and moderate pressure” to “prevent the growth of escalation,” that it need not worry about united Sino-Soviet support to the Vietnamese people. The Maoists made good on that assurance by creating almost insuperable obstacles to prevent the Soviet Union from even maintaining its line of supplies to the Vietnamese: miles of Maoist-dominated China, with people under a constant barrage of anti- Soviet propaganda, standing between the USSR and Vietnam.
Karol’s peculiar apology for Maoism is in itself proof of Maoist “complicity with the aggressor.” Karol’s position is revealing on still another score. When he states that in the Chinese view the USSR was guilty of “treason” because it had not taken “any decisive anti-American action,” he is simply saying that the only “support” the Maoists favored for Vietnam was Soviet nuclear action against the U.S.
That Mao’s aim was not to end the war but to expand it into a nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union is also confirmed by Karol when—still reflecting Maoist views—he wrote:
Taking up the American challenge, despite the desperate risks, offers the only possible chance of provoking a deep crisis within the American camp from which the workers’ movement has everything to gain. China is the only country to have made such a choice. The Soviet Union and the international Communist movement reject it. But this difference of attitude is not a product of chance; it simply confirms that the Chinese revolution is another communism, a communism which differs more and more from that of the bloc. (Ibid. Page 326.)
One can certainly agree that the differences between the international Communist movement and Maoism are “not a product of chance.” It is the difference between loyalty to Marxist-Leninist principles and Maoist repudiation of those principles. Maoism is not “another communism.” It is betrayal, not only of the Vietnamese people but of the entire human race—the Maoists advocated “desperate risks” for humanity while subverting the very policies that eventually brought victory to Vietnam, a victory that would have come much earlier but for Maoist treason to anti-imperialist unity.
At the International Conference of Journalists in 1969, Eldridge Cleaver declared that, “We do not believe in peaceful coexistence . . . it is necessary to hunt the monster down, drive it into a corner and annihilate it.” (Black Panther, October 25, 1969)
Like the Trotskyite Karol and the Maoists, it is Cleaver’s defeatist contention that the struggles in the U.S. against the monopolist oppressors, supported by the world Socialist, working class and liberation movements, cannot bring victory over U.S. imperialism. Instead, the Soviet Union must “hunt the monster down”—with nuclear weapons!
Defining his reasons for opposing peaceful coexistence, Cleaver went on to say, “The white supremacist imperialists in Washington do not believe in peaceful coexistence. Peace to them is only an interlude during which to prepare for war.” (Ibid.)
Strange logic indeed that would have us fight for what the imperialists believe in—not what we believe in!
Of course the imperialists “do not believe in peaceful coexistence” since they will never voluntarily relinquish their economic, political or military domination of “third world” countries. Like the Maoists, Cleaver is utterly blind to the relationship between the fight for the right of African, Asian and Latin American peoples to self-determination and the fight for peaceful coexistence.
Cleaver’s dismissal of peaceful coexistence as “Only an interlude during which the imperialists prepare for war” is the kind of “radical” thinking that appears time and again in the course of the peoples’ struggles—and it appears particularly when it is needed by the class enemy as a diversion at crucial moments of the struggle. It is ideologically related to the Trotskyites’ vehement opposition to the Vietnamese signing of the agreement to end the U.S. intervention in Vietnam.
Revolutionaries do not reject the winning of a peaceful “interlude” in Vietnam! Instead, they are fighting to raise the level of anti-imperialist struggle and solidarity with the Vietnamese people so that the “interlude” should not be brought to a brutal end by imperialist intervention—but will instead be transformed into an historic era of peace, self-determination and Socialist construction.
It is, in fact, during these “interludes” which Cleaver considers so irrelevant that the struggle for class and national liberation has made truly historic advances. The October Revolution ended imperialism on one-sixth of the globe, and through Lenin’s policy of peaceful coexistence won an “interlude” during which the foundation was built for bringing a permanent end to class exploitation and national oppression.
How much greater the advance toward liberation in Africa would have been had Patrice Lumumba gained an “interlude” of peaceful coexistence, of non-intervention by the imperialist powers! And what if Nkrumah had won a longer “interlude” to consolidate Ghana’s progress toward Socialism?
It was during one of these “interludes,” so arrogantly dismissed by Cleaver, that Cuba—supported by the Soviet policy of peaceful coexistence—defeated U.S. intervention at the Bay of Pigs. Since then the struggle in support of Cuba’s right to self-determination and peaceful coexistence has created and successfully consolidated the basis for it to coexist despite the pressures of the U.S. economic blockade. During this “interlude,” Cuba’s strides toward Socialism have placed it in the vanguard of anti-imperialism and liberation in all of Latin America.
It is in the interests of the liberation on every continent to intensify the fight to end the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba. Cuba will then not merely coexist 90 miles from the U.S., but U.S. imperialism will be forced to recognize Cuba’s right to the principles of peaceful coexistence and mutual trade. This would do more than prolong the “interlude” Cuba has gained since the Bay Of Pigs—it would give impetus to all the Latin American countries in their fight to oust Yankee imperialism.
The “interludes” Cleaver and other “radicals” are so quick to dismiss are in reality milestones on the path toward liberation. This is the revolutionary significance of the interconnection between struggles for national liberation and peaceful coexistence.
Next: SOUTH AFRICA: NEO-PAN-AFRICANISM AND MAOISM