Throughout the bourgeois media the war in South East Asia is being heralded as a war between “communists.” How is it that countries that are supposedly socialist, who claim to operate on the basis of proletarian internationalism, who claim to represent a superior social system that does away with war, are spilling the blood of the workers and peasants on the very land that so many died on in the struggle against French and US imperialism? The bourgeois media is using this occasion to try to discredit communists and socialism. They are trying to paint a picture of socialism as worse and more barbaric then capitalism. They hope to turn the masses of people away from any aspirations to socialism and they hope to win support in their coming war against “communism.”
The genuine communists in the world know very well that this war has nothing to do with communism. We know that the so-called “Communist” parties in China, Russia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos are revisionist parties that long ago abandoned the principles of Marxism-Leninism, who long ago abandoned proletarian internationalism and have since marched under the banner of narrow bourgeois nationalist interest. We know that these parties only use Marxism-Leninism, socialism and communism as masks to deceive their own people, and the world’s peoples, into supporting them in building capitalism in their countries. The real communists know only too well that none of these so-called “communist” parties are leading socialist countries or are constructing socialism. We know that these countries are social-imperialist (socialist in words imperialist in deeds) or they are neo-colonies of social-imperialists.
The real communists know that when there is war among these so-called “communists” it is actually a war between imperialists and reactionaries, just like other imperialist wars.
This is the scientific and objective reality. But why is it that the bourgeoisie can so effectively carry out propaganda that this is a war between “communists”? Obviously it is because few proletarians and progressive people in the world know the scientific truth about these so-called “communists.” These modern revisionists were well onto the road of revisionism by the late 1940’s. Stalin began the struggle against them by struggling against Browder (head of the CPUSA) and against Tito and Yugoslav revisionism. This was the beginning of a campaign that would have no doubt culminated in purging out the revisionists from the CPSU(B) as well as many revisionists in the international communist movement. The revisionists did everything they could to sabotage this struggle. Their principal weapon was to take a “centrist” stand between Marxism-Leninism and revisionism. These centrists covered their own revisionism by appearing to be great opponents of the revisionism of Browder and Tito. Foster from the US party and Duclos from the French party tried to take the lead in the struggle against Browder. This served to conceal their own alliance with the bourgeoisie, an alliance that later moved from “secret” io open with such tragic results for the revolution in the US and France.
Khrushchev himself used centrist postures to rise to power in the Soviet Union. He pledged his undying support to the legacy of Stalin, but using this mask he organized bourgeois forces to seize power and transform the proud beacon of socialism into a capitalist and imperialist country.
The Chinese revisionists supported Khrushchev and tried to make a deal with him. But bourgeois nationalist contradictions came to the force in their relations and the Chinese revisionists took up the banner of Marxism-Leninism in the struggle against Soviet revisionists, but they did this in a centrist way which allowed them to pass off their own revisionism as Marxism-Leninism.
This is also true of Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese party, which managed to use the progressive nature of the Vietnamese national liberation struggle against imperialism as a cover for their revisionism. Mao Ze-dong, Ho Chi Minh, Kim II Sung and Pol Pot were all bourgeois nationalists who used Marxism-Leninism as a disguise to fool their own proletariat and the international communist movement.
It is time for the struggle against modern revisionism to expose all of the modern revisionists and this must be done the same way Lenin exposed and defeated the classical revisionists by aiming the main blow against the centrists, who allow revisionism to stay masked in one form or another.
The revisionists in countries like Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, Laos have never been decisively exposed. Even the revisionists in China have only begun to be exposed and the exposure of the Soviet revisionists is far from being completed. Centrism of various brands has managed to cover up, or retard the exposure of, all these revisionists.
The centrists all proclaim their loyalty to Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism. They all claim to oppose modern revisionism. But we must judge them by their deeds, not their words. It is their criminal betrayal of the principles of Marxism-Leninism that has allowed them to conciliate with one form of revisionism or another to the detriment of the international proletariat. The criminal cover up of revisionist betrayal by the centrists is directly responsible for creating the conditions that allow imperialism to portray the war in Indochina as a war between “communists.” This is of immeasurable service to imperialism because it allows for the deception of the international proletariat as to the true nature of Communism. Socialism and Marxism-Leninism.
When the true Communists carry out the decisive exposure of revisionism and centrism so that the revolutionary proletariat throughout the world understands the crime that has been committed against them, the revisionists and the centrists along with their imperialist masters will come face to face with their gravediggers and their days will indeed be numbered.