WORKERS, OPPRESSED NATIONS AND PEOPLE OF THE WORLD, UNITE!
NEWSPAPER OF THE CENTRAL ORGANIZATION OF U.S. MARXIST-LENINISTS
Volume 8, Number 8
August 21, 1978 25¢
P.O. BOX 11942 CHICAGO, IL. 60611
[Front page:
The Struggle of the Postal Workers Against Carter's " Voluntary" Wage-Price Controls;
THE "WAGE-PRICE SPIRAL" THEORY: A FRAUD TO JUSTIFY WAGE-CUTS;
HAIL THE FIVE YEARS OF RESISTANCE TO FASCIST DICTATORSHIP IN CHILE!--Five Years of Dictatorship, Five Years of Struggle;
DEFEND SOCIALIST ALBANIA!]
Table of Contents
Resist "Cost Containment" Campaign.............................. | 5 |
British Workers Oppose 5% Pay Policy........................... | 5 |
Seattle: Only Active Resistance Will Smash the State-Organized Fascist Movement........................................... | 3 |
Cleveland: Busing is not the issue.................................... | 3 |
Statement by West Indians on Crown Heights................. | 4 |
Wm. Z Foster Bookstore Will Never be Intimidated by Cowardly Police Attacks.................................................. | 4 |
For your ref.: Combat the Growing All-round Fascism of the Monopoly Capitalist Class..................................... | 2 |
Denounce Savage Repression in Venezuela..................... | 6 |
Ecuador: Condemn Sell-out of Nat'l Interests................. | 6 |
Armed Actions of Bolivian Patriots................................. | 6 |
Growing Armed Struggle in Brazil................................... | 6 |
Eritrea: 17 Years of Armed Struggle................................. | 16 |
Song: Eritrean People Will Surely Win!........................... | 16 |
Iranian People Against the Fascist Shah........................... | 16 |
Song: Albania, Our Beacon!............................................. | 10 |
Irish Delegation to Albania............................................... | 11 |
Report to the Workers on the Internationalist Rally (Drawing)................................................................ | 11 |
Communist Party of New Zealand Reaffirms Basic Line and Policy......................................................................... | 12 |
Revisionists and "Three Worlders" Defend Fascism Under Guise of Fighting the "Ultra-Right"...................... | 2 |
Election Campaign of the "Communist" Lawyers Party (CLP, USNA)................................................................... | 4 |
Why Did the "RCP,USA" Split Conclusion..................... | 14 |
Letter of the CC of the Party of Labor and the Government of Albania to the CC of the Communist Party and the Government of China (See centerfold insert)
The Hostile Act of the Chinese Government Against Socialist Albania has Aroused the Indignation of the World (See page 8)
The Struggle of the Postal Workers Against Carter's "Voluntary" Wage-Price Controls
THE "WAGE-PRICE SPIRAL" THEORY: A FRAUD TO JUSTIFY WAGE-CUTS
HAIL THE FIVE YEARS OF RESISTANCE TO FASCIST DICTATORSHIP IN CHILE!
For Your Reference:
COMBAT THE GROWING ALL-ROUND FASCISM OF THE MONOPOLY CAPITALIST CLASS
Busing Is Not the Issue! The Issue Is to Smash the Government's Racist "Anti-Busing" Movement!
Further Exposure of the Fascist Anti-Busing Movement
The William Z. Foster Bookstore Is Not Intimidated By The Cowardly Attacks Of The Police
STATEMENT BY WEST INDIANS ON THE RECENT MURDER AND ATTACKS IN CROWN HEIGHTS
Election Campaign of the "Communist" Lawyers Party (CLP, USNA)
Actively Resist the "Cost Containment" Campaign in the Health Care Industry
British Workers Oppose the Government's Five Per Cent Pay Policy
A Call to International Opinion to Denounce the Savage Repression in Venezuela
Armed Actions of Bolivian Patriots
The Growing Armed Struggle in the Rural Areas of Brazil
Appeal of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Chile
WE MUST FIGHT AGAINST THE FASCIST CLIQUE OF PINOCHET
Firm adherence to positions of Marxism-Leninism
Communist Party of New Zealand reaffirms basic line and policy
For Your Reference: Tentative Postal Agreement Is a Betrayal of the Demands of the Postal Workers
Eritrean People's 17 Years of Heroic Armed Struggle
The Eritrean People Will Surely Win!
The Iranian People Continue Their Heroic Struggle Against the Fascist Shah
The struggle of the 570,000 postal workers against their employer, the repressive state machine of the ruling monopoly capitalist class headed by those smiling "friends of labor", the "Democratic" Carter Administration, is continuing. The postal workers have already waged wildcat strikes in several places, centering in Jersey City, New Jersey and Richmond, California. In informal votes across the country they have rejected the sell-out tentative new contract negotiated by the government and the traitorous bureaucrats who lead the postal unions. Rejection of the pact in voting which ends next week is a virtual certainty. At that point the capitalists may once again face the prospect they dread: a militant countrywide postal strike, which will cripple industry and finance and deal a heavy blow to Carter's anti-working class program of "voluntary" wage-price controls.
The postal workers' struggle is a big test for Carter's "voluntary" wage-price controls, under which the bourgeoisie is cutting wages in the guise of "fighting inflation". The postal workers are the largest section of the proletariat whose union contracts are being negotiated this year. The Carter Administration has singled them out as an example to attack in its fascist offensive against the working class movement in order to shift the burden of the economic crisis onto the working class. Through its state, the bourgeoisie is attempting to impose a big wage cut on the postal workers and to force them to accept large scale unemployment as well as intensified labor under a program of rationalization (reorganization and automation) of the mailing process. On July 21 the labor bureaucrats and the government signed a new set of postal agreements, a tentative contract which totally betrays the workers' demands to resist the decline in their real wages due to inflation and to win increased job security and a lightening of their workloads. At the same time as the bourgeoisie promoted the political deception through the mouths of the labor traitors that the new pact was "an historic victory", it also ordered its courts to issue injunctions barring strikes by the postal workers and sent its armed police to forcefully attack and intimidate the militant wildcat strikers.
But the postal workers, like the rest of the proletariat, cannot be suppressed through violence or deception. In 1970 they waged a militant national wildcat strike, hitting a heavy blow at the Nixon Administration, which was forced to give in to some of their demands after calling out the National Guard to attempt to crush the strike. Today the postal workers are determinedly fighting the attacks of the Carter Administration. Their struggle against Carter's "voluntary" wage-price controls is a test of strength between the Carter Administration and the rising workers' movement, a battle to see how far the bourgeoisie can go in implementing its fascist wage controls, to see how mobilized and aroused the workers are to fight against them. In their struggle against the fascist offensive of the Carter Administration, the postal workers have the support of the entire U.S. proletariat and oppressed masses.
THE POSTAL WORKERS ARE THE SPECIAL TARGET OF THE "VOLUNTARY" WAGE-PRICE CONTROLS OF THE CARTERITE "FRIENDS OF LABOR"
The Carter Administration has singled out the postal workers as a special target in its anti-working class offensive which it has the gall to describe as a "fight against inflation". Under the Carter Administration's "anti-inflation fight", the smiling human rights preacher who represents the Wall Street robber barons has laid down a single, allegedly "voluntary", wage standard, facing the workers of all trades with the dictate that they accept a mere 5.1-5.6 per cent "raise" annually, a figure which actually amounts to a big wage cut in the face of the present 11 per cent-plus rate of inflationary price increases. It was this standard which the Carter Administration attempted unsuccessfully to impose on the fighting coal miners last winter. It was in the name of this dictate that the Carter Administration branded the demands of the pulp and paper workers for a 30 per cent raise over two years as "outsized and alarming". And now, citing the just demands of the postal workers for a wage increase of 14 per cent per year (under conditions of galloping inflation, at the hands of which the postal workers have suffered a loss of at least 1.5 per cent in real wages over the three-year period of the past contract), the Carter Administration has singled out the postal workers as a major target of its crusade "against inflation". The Carterite fascists have even raved that if the postal workers do not knuckle under to their arrogant command, they will impose compulsory wage controls -- open fascist suppression of the workers' struggles by the bourgeois state in the manner of Nixon -- on the entire working class!
Carter's entire wage-control program, and in particular its attacks on the postal workers, are alleged to be justified by a peculiar bourgeois theory known as the "wage-price spiral". According to this Hitlerite big lie, it is the supposedly "high" wages of the workers which are responsible for galloping inflation; in the case of the postal workers, well, their so-called "high" pay is blamed for the rise in the price of first-class stamps to 15 cents! This theory is a capitalist fraud. Inflationary price increases are actually caused by the huge deficits of the capitalist state and the frenzied financial speculation of the big financiers, together with the fixing of sky-high prices by the big monopolies; a raise in workers' wages has nothing to do with inflation but merely cuts the profits of the capitalists. The Postal Service, a semi-governmental institution, is essentially no different from any other capitalist enterprise, only here the bourgeois state is the workers' employer. It, too, sets its prices to maximize the profits of its investors and the capitalist class as a whole, and these prices have no direct connection to the wages of the postal workers. But under the banner of the theory of the "wage-price spiral", the Carter Administration is carrying out its offensive against the postal workers and entire working class.
The attacks of the Carter Administration on the postal workers, as on the coal miners, pulp and paper workers and other sections of the working class, expose Carter's "voluntary" wage-price controls as nothing but an instrument of the vicious fascist offensive of the bourgeoisie and its state against the working class movement, a means by which the capitalists intensify their exploitation of the workers. They have nothing to do with fighting inflation; they are aimed at preserving and increasing the profits of the monopoly capitalists by shifting the burden of the present grave economic crisis onto the backs of the workers. The smiling Carterite "Democratic" "friends of labor" are continuing to bare their fascist fangs.
THE CARTER ADMINISTRATION AND POSTAL SERVICE ARE RATIONALIZING THE MAILING PROCESS TO INCREASE THE EXPLOITATION OF THE POSTAL WORKERS UNDER THE BANNER OF "INCREASED POSTAL PRODUCTIVITY"
Intimately connected to the "anti-inflation" program of the Carter Administration, with its fascist controls on the workers' wages, is the productivity drive which the capitalists are carrying out against the workers. In the Postal Service, this productivity drive takes the form of rationalization of the mailing process. Like wage cuts; this too is a method of shifting the burden of the economic crisis onto the backs of the workers by stepping up their exploitation. Rationalization is the reorganization, modernization and automation of production in order to increase the productivity of the production process. Its inevitable result under capitalism is the elimination of jobs and the intensification of the labor of the remaining workers.
The capitalists' drive to rationalize the Postal Service is particularly vicious. Over the past two and one-half years the Postal Service has reduced the postal workforce by 59,000 workers through attrition and by harassing workers with split shifts, short work weeks, outright spying and other arbitrary measures and penalties for trivial "offenses" until they quit or retire. Not satisfied with this massive elimination of jobs, which they have carried out even with a no-layoff clause in the contracts, the Postal Service proposed when the recent negotiations began that the no-layoff clause be eliminated altogether. While thousands of jobs are being eliminated each year, automation and reorganization of the mailing process has been instituted on a wide scale. For example, a computerized mail sorting machine which reads zip codes can sort trays of first-class mail at three times the rate of the average mail handler. Many postal facilities have been consolidated and Area Mail Processing has been extended to increase worker productivity.
Not only has the rationalization of the Postal Service resulted in widespread elimination of jobs, but it has also meant increased workloads for the remaining workers. Reflecting this increased exploitation, in 1977 alone worker productivity increased 5.2 per cent, over two times the increase in the private sector of industry in the same year. Between 1971 and 1977 the number of employees declined by 10.2 per cent while the remaining employees sorted seven per cent more mail, resulting in a productivity increase of 15.8 per cent. But the bourgeoisie is not satisfied at this increased exploitation and greedily drools for still more blood to suck!
The rationalization drive of the semi-governmental Postal Service is no different from those being instituted by the capitalist monopolies in the steel and auto industries. In steel, where new processes such as continuous casting are being introduced and older, less efficient mills are being closed down (such as Youngstown Sheet and Tube) and production shifted to newer, more efficient facilities, the monopolists are investing huge sums of money to eliminate the jobs of thousands of steel workers and intensify the exploitation of the rest. The same is true of GM, Chrysler and Ford, which have in the past few years carried out programs to retool their plants in order to compete more successfully with their foreign capitalist rivals. This has led to permanent lay-offs for thousands of auto workers and to extreme speed-up for the rest. In the auto industry, for example, over 119,000 jobs were eliminated by rationalization and outright speed-up between 1973-76, while production remained at the same level.
The rationalization drive of the Postal Service is part of the anti-working class offensive which the bourgeois Carter Administration is carrying out in the guise of a "fight against inflation". No less than Carter's "voluntary" wage controls, rationalization of the mailing process is a big attack on the postal workers, the same as the attacks the monopoly capitalists are waging against the workers of many other trades. Consequently, it is against this rationalization drive, too, that the postal workers are directing their struggle.
AS PUBLIC SECTOR WORKERS, THE POSTAL WORKERS FACE THE DIRECT AND OPEN FASCIST SUPPRESSION OF THE BOURGEOIS STATE
The postal workers, as employees of the semi- governmental Postal Service, are waging their militant contract struggle directly against the repressive bourgeois state machine. The state of the rich has a whole arsenal of fascist anti-labor legislation which bans strikes by employees of the federal government as well as by employees of other, lower levels of the state. Government employees today comprise one out of every six workers. Today a vigorous strike movement is sweeping these public sector workers. The postal workers' struggle, which is a part of this strike movement, brings them up face-to-face with the fascist dictates of the repressive state.
This is clear from the course of the present postal workers' struggle. As soon as the postal workers refused to "voluntarily" accept a 5 per cent cut in their real wages and waged militant wildcat strikes and voiced their opposition to the sell-out contract, the infuriated capitalists unleashed the force of their state machine against the workers. Just prior to the settlement, Postmaster General Bolger sent a letter to postal employees threatening them with firing if they waged an illegal wildcat strike; once the New Jersey and California workers struck, the Postal Service immediately fired over 125 of them. Police, who together with the military are the main component of the armed bourgeois state, were immediately sent to the site of the wildcats to suppress the strikes and identify their leaders and participants. The courts brought injunctions against the strikers, providing the police and the Postal Service with the legal go-ahead to suppress the strikers. And then the courts of "democratic" U.S. imperialism issued an injunction forbidding the union even to conduct a vote on whether or not to strike!
On July 24th, when the wildcat strike at the New York Bulk and Foreign Mail Center in Jersey City was three days old and the day after a wildcat began at the North Jersey Facility in Kearny, a temporary restraining order was issued by the courts against any form of encouraging or engaging in a strike. A massive force of police equipped with four foot, leaded riot sticks was present at the gates of the Kearny facility to enforce the restraining order. A number of workers were subpoenaed to "show cause" for the strike and eighty workers were fired by the Postal Service for participating in the strike. On July 28th a preliminary injunction was issued against the strike vote planned by the New York Metro Area Postal Union. On July 31st a new injunction was issued against striking and taking a strike vote. Over 100 workers were forced to appear in court to hear the judge's lectures but were refused the right to speak. The judge told the workers that upon taking the loyalty oath required of federal employees they waived their right to strike. (Thus the judge revealed just what kind of "loyalty" the state demands of its slaves; loyalty to the bloodsucking capitalist class.) The following day, when two workers appeared in court facing charges of criminal contempt for violating the injunction, the judge announced that the court might proceed with criminal contempt charges against every worker who could be identified as having been present at the gates of the two facilities during the strike. Thus the state of the rich worked overtime to suppress the struggle of the postal workers.
The fascist attacks of the "Democratic" Carter Administration and the entire state machine which it commands, on the postal workers show that this so- called "friend of labor" is no better than the Republican Ford and Nixon Administrations before it. They show that no matter what party holds office, the state of the capitalists is the sworn enemy of the workers.
THE POSTAL UNION LABOR BUREAUCRATS BETRAY THE WORKERS' STRUGGLE AND ATTEMPT TO BIND THE WORKERS HAND AND FOOT TO THE BOURGEOIS STATE
The events of the present postal workers' struggle also illustrate the truth of the statement by the great proletarian leader, V.I. Lenin, who pointed out that opportunism is the principal enemy of the proletarian struggle. The labor traitors who head the postal unions are better defenders of the capitalists than the capitalists themselves. Their despicable activities to sell out the postal workers and prevent them from taking the mass action required to win victory must be exposed and defeated in order for the struggle to move forward.
Prior to the present sell-out tentative agreement, the postal labor traitors sowed the seeds for their betrayal, cautioning the workers against expecting "too much", as the collective bargaining process is "a give and take proposition"; advocating faith in their collaboration with the state rather than in the workers' own mass struggle and the weapon of a strike; voicing confidence in the government, calling the Postal Service authorities "responsible" while complaining about the unjust attacks of Bosworth, Strauss and Carter, who were allegedly merely interfering from the outside in an affair which was none of their business; prettifying the government as "fighting inflation" while asking, but why should the postal workers be the first to sacrifice?; promising a la the big labor traitor Meany, that if prices went down they would hold down wages; and thus preparing the ground for capitulation all along the line.
When the tentative contract was signed (see analysis in accompanying reference article), these characters declared that this sell-out was a historic victory. Once the wildcat strikes broke out, the national leadership of the postal unions viciously opposed them. But these traitorous activities aroused the anger of the postal workers, who recognized the sell-out character of the pact and threatened to walk out across the country in spite of the orders of the top labor traitors.
At this point the bourgeoisie mobilized its next line of defense, certain local labor traitors who still maintained some credibility with the workers. They took up the line of opposing the sell-out pact in words, but using delaying tactics in deeds -- all to prevent the outbreak of a militant countrywide strike. The line of some of the local bureaucrats was that the contract should be rejected but by an orderly vote which would take over three weeks, while in the meantime the workers should not strike in order to enforce their demands at the very moment when they were poised to do so, but should lie down and wait for things to go through established channels. This, however, did not satisfy the New York postal workers, who were in an especially militant mood as a result of the firings in nearby Jersey City and in California. Recognizing that the New York workers were about to strike in defiance of the labor bureaucrats, the bureaucrats used still another delaying tactic, that of calling a strike vote of the New York City local of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU). Moe Biller, president of the local, declared with great "militancy" that if New York went on strike, the rest of the country would follow, (a true statement of an eventuality he was dead-set to prevent). On the very day, July 31, set for this strike vote, a federal judge issued an injunction barring it and the Jersey City wildcat as well. Biller, who had just urged his membership to strike illegally, declared at the last minute that he would obey the court order and denounced the wildcat strikers as "misguided". The strike in New York, and with it the likely national strike, was averted. One might well say, with "friends" like this, do the workers need enemies?
The experience of the postal workers' wildcat in 1970, just as that of the coal miners' heroic national strike last winter and of the entire workers' movement, shows that the only way to fight the fascist wage controls of the Carter Administration is through mass action by the workers themselves, through strikes and other means of struggle in which the masses of proletarians vigorously participate. This, and only this, can defeat the class enemy and prepare the workers for the great class battles to come. And taking up this path requires a determined struggle against the Trojan Horse of the bourgeoisie in the workers' movement, the labor lieutenants of the capitalist class who head the major union, whose mission in life is to prevent the workers from fighting as a class in defense of their own vital interests and those of all downtrodden and oppressed masses.
SUPPORT THE JUST STRUGGLE OF THE POSTAL WORKERS AGAINST THE "VOLUNTARY" WAGE-PRICE CONTROLS OF THE CARTER ADMINISTRATION!
The militant struggle of the postal workers has already all but thrown the sell-out contract into the garbage heap. Though their wildcat strikes were suppressed, the postal workers' struggle is by no means over. When the results of the ratification vote are tabulated the issue of a strike will again become heated. Both the capitalists and the workers are looking at the postal workers' struggle as a big test for Carter's program of "voluntary" wage-price controls. While the postal workers are facing tremendous pressure from the state, their struggle has great power and has the support of the working class and all the oppressed masses. In order to win their demands the postal workers must wage a vigorous mass struggle against all the agencies of the capitalist state and against the traitors in their own midst. End.
The Carter administration attempts to justify its wage-control program with the theory of an inflationary "wage-price spiral". This hoax blames the workers for inflation by groundlessly asserting that the wage raises the workers win through their bitter struggle against the employers cause prices to rise. By this logic, inflation can be controlled only by cutting the workers' wages and the workers should give up their struggle, lie down and become wretched slaves. Cutting wages is precisely what the Carter administration, representing the capitalist exploiters, is trying to do (while, of course, it continues to inflate the currency). And in this anti-working class offensive, the capitalists have the support of the labor bureaucrats, who agree publicly to collaborate with Carter in restraining wages, provided only that the capitalists act a bit more reasonably in their price-gouging....
Karl Marx, who together with Frederick Engels founded communism, scientifically demolished the theory of the "wage-price spiral" over 100 years ago. Marx wrote: "... a general rise in wages can never produce a more or less general rise in the price of goods. Actually, if every industry employed the same number of workers in relation to fixed capital or to the instruments used, a general rise in wages would produce a general fall in profits and the current price of goods would undergo no alteration." (The Poverty of Philosophy, International Publishers, p. 167) Marx showed that a general rise in wages for all industries results in a tendency of prices to fall in industries which have a higher ratio of (constant) capital per worker than average, and a tendency of prices to rise in industries which have a lower ratio of capital per worker than average. For either type of industry, a general rise of wages causes a fall in profits, while averaged for all industry, it has no effect on prices. In Volume III of Capital Marx showed precisely how this takes place.
In any case, he concluded: "If wages fall, profits will rise; and if wages rise, profits will fall.... A general rise of wages would, therefore, result in a fall of the general rate of profit, but not affect values." (Wages, Price and Profit, Peking, p. 61)
These quotations from Marx sharply expose the falsity and class nature of the theory of "wage-price spiral". In order to increase their profits, the capitalists must cut wages. When they inflate the currency, resulting in a general rise in prices, the capitalists must prevent the workers from defending themselves against this rise in the cost of living by raising their wages. Hence the capitalists must enforce the wage-cuts by suppressing the workers' struggles. As the workers' movement develops in resistance to this robbery, the capitalists more and more resort to openly suppressing the workers through their repressive state. Such is Carter's wage-controls program, which today takes the form of "voluntary" wage-price controls while compulsory controls are being prepared.
The capitalists cut the wages of the workers in various trades by enforcing wage standards on them which fall behind the rate of inflation, as the Postal Service is presently attempting to do to the postal workers. The capitalists also collectively cut wages by means of inflation, which results in a general rise in price of the mass consumer goods which are the necessities of life of the workers. While the consumer goods sold by the capitalists rise in price (especially the vast majority, which are sold by the big monopolies), the workers are not in a position to raise the price of the only commodity they own -- their labor-power -- as readily. As a result, their real wages are cut. This reveals the class essence of inflation. It is a means of robbing the workers for the benefit of the capitalist money-bags. The capitalists, of course, love to hide this fact by presenting inflation as something which hurts everyone equally. These wage-cuts are then "justified" by the bourgeois theory of the "wage-price spiral" which blames the workers for inflation. This theory is the hysterical battle cry of the Carter administration in its fascist offensive to cut wages in the guise of "fighting inflation".
The real cause of the present galloping inflation is the drive of the monopoly capitalists to maximize their profits, which today assumes the form of frenziedly looking for a way out of their grave economic crisis by shifting its burden onto the workers and toiling masses and preparing for war. The United States is an aggressive imperialist superpower, a reactionary bourgeois state carrying out brutal exploitation and suppression of the proletariat, laboring people and oppressed nationalities at home and of other peoples abroad, as well as rivalry with the other imperialist gangsters for the same ends. The state is the main instrument of the bourgeoisie in its bloody aggression and exploitation. It hands over billions extorted from the masses to the big monopolies. The bourgeois state spends colossal amounts on military contracts for its armed apparatus, both military and police. Similarly it finances a bloated bureaucracy, bails out ailing enterprises, and in general redistributes the national income in favor of the monopoly capitalists.
Inflation is used to finance this bloodstained reaction and over-gorged robbery. Inflation proper, tint is, inflation of the currency, is caused by two means. One is the creation of massive governmental budget deficits. These deficits increase year after year, no matter how much the capitalist politicians swear to cut them. Both Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Republicans and alleged enemies of "big spending", ran up deficits which were records at the time. Jimmy Carter also swore to cut the deficit and is still running huge deficits today. The bourgeoisie even has specific theories claiming that the government budget deficits are absolutely necessary. These deficits are financed out of the masses' pockets. To do so, the bourgeois state resorts to inflation. It creates paper currency or its equivalent in increasing amounts which exceed the increase in the value of all commodities produced and circulated, resulting in inflation (depreciation) of the currency. The other means by which inflation is created is the wild speculation in stocks and bonds by the big monopoly financiers, which creates rapidly increasing paper values of finance capital independent of the actual level of production. These stocks and bonds also in large part circulate as money, so this vast increase in paper values also inflates the currency.
On the basis of this inflated currency, the capitalists, and especially the big monopolies, fix artificially high prices, driving up the cost of living and depressing the workers' real wages. While various factors cause prices to fluctuate above and below their value, today the constant and accelerating rise in the cost of living of the working masses is directly caused by the parasitic monopoly capitalist money-bags and their repressive bureaucratic state apparatus.
The fact that the workers' wages lag behind prices, not push them up (as the theory of a "wage-price spiral" asserts), can be seen by the example of two heavily monopolized industries, domestic oil and coal. These examples are taken from the energy industry, which has been jacking up its prices especially rapidly and has used its powerful position as supplier of energy to all of capitalist industry to push up prices throughout the economy. But the following tables show that this plunder can only be blamed on the monopoly capitalists who own the means of energy production in the U.S., not on their proletarian wage-slaves. The table below compares the wages of workers in domestic oil and gas extraction to the prices of crude petroleum, petroleum products and natural gas liquids for the 1970's:
|
Wages | Prices |
1970 | 3.57/hr. | 3.18/barrel |
1971 | 3.75 | 3.39 |
1972 | 4.00 | 3.39 |
1973 | 4.29 | 3.89 |
1974 | 4.82 | 6.74 |
1975 | 5.33 | 7.67 |
1976 | 5.76 | 8.18 |
1977 | 6.21 | 8.56 |
While wages did rise, prices rose far more rapidly, almost tripling. Thus the oil monopolists, not the workers, are the cause of soaring oil prices. The sharpest rise in prices took place between 1973 and 1974, at the time of the "energy crisis", but this rise took place in domestic oil. No amount of lying by the capitalists can blame foreign oil producers for it. Neither the American oil workers nor the Arab oil- producing countries are the cause of the sky-rocketing prices of domestic oil.
Take a second example, the U.S. coal industry. The The table below compares the wages of workers in coal mining in the U.S. with the price of bituminous coal and lignite for the period since 1965:
|
Wages | Prices |
1965 | 3.46/hr. | $4.44/s. ton |
1966 | 3.62 | 4.54 |
1967 | 3.72 | 4.62 |
1968 | 3.83 | 4.67 |
1969 | 4.20 | 4.99 |
1970 | 4.54 | 6.26 |
1971 | 4.80 | 7.07 |
1972 | 5.30 | 7.66 |
1973 | 5.70 | 8.53 |
1974 | 6.21 | 15.75 |
1975 | 7.19 | 19.23 |
1976 | 7.87 | 19.43 |
1977 | 8.41 | 19.98 |
Between 1965 and 1975, the price of coal more than quadrupled while wages only doubled. How could a doubling of wages "cause" prices to multiply more than four times?!
Thus the theory of "wage-price spiral" has no basis, neither in the laws which govern the economy, nor in fact. This theory is a self-serving lie by the monopoly capitalists, a desperate attempt to cover up the fact that it is they, not the workers, who are the cause of inflation.
While inflation increases the profits of the capitalists and shifts the burden of the crisis onto the masses, at the same time it is a symptom of the incurable sickness of the capitalist system. It complicates and aggravates the system's all-round crisis, throwing its monetary arrangements into a shambles and intensifying the economic crisis itself. The catastrophic fall of the U.S. dollar in the international money market, which is leading to still-greater price increases in the U.S., is causing the Carter administration and the whole bourgeoisie to shout still louder about bringing back Nixon's hated compulsory wage-price controls (Nixon was merely implementing the wage-price control plan passed previously in his administration by the "Democratic" "friends of Labor" in Congress).
The present raging inflation shows that monopoly capitalism is moribund, dying capitalism, that the rich have no solution to the crisis but to make the masses pay for it while hypocritically blaming the toilers for the malignant inflationary cancer caused by themselves. It also shows that the working class has no alternative but to resist the fascist offensive of the capitalist Carter administration on its wages with active mass struggle, expose the government's every deception such as the theory of "wage-price spiral" and prepare to overthrow monopoly capital and its state power and replace them with the rule of the proletariat and socialism, which alone can bring happiness and well-being to the oppressed and exploited people. End.
Five Years of Dictatorship, Five Years of Struggle
Five years ago on September 11, the armed forces of Chile organized a coup d'etat with the full backing of and in service to U.S. imperialism and the Chilean oligarchy. For the last five years the Chilean people have suffered under a fascist dictatorship. But from the very moment of the fascist coup, the Chilean people were never silenced, they did not submit and lie down to this brutal suppression. Instead they have risen up and hurled themselves into the struggle to overthrow the fascist junta and U.S. imperialist domination. With this powerful movement of the Chilean masses another glorious chapter of the world's people's anti-fascist struggles is unfolding.
All sections of the Chilean people --the workers, peasants, students, patriotic intellectuals, small businessmen, women -- have been organized by the People's Front to fight against the U.S.-backed Pinochet regime. Under the most severe forms of oppression the Resistance movement has continued to swell its ranks and move forward. In the factories of Santiago, among the miners of "El Teniente", in the universities, high schools, marketplaces, in the midst of the peasant villages and throughout the prisons and concentration camps, the slogans, DEATH TO FASCISM!, LIBERTY FOR THE PEOPLE! BREAD, LAND, WORK AND LIBERTY! and THE ARMED STRUGGLE WILL NEVER BE CRUSHED!, echo like thunder. The fascist junta that feels the heavy weight of the blows of the Chilean people, that has been condemned by the world's people, and that is suffering from internal contradictions, is on the brink of collapse and knows its days are numbered.
Since 1973, the people of Chile have organized massive protests. Strikes, work slowdowns, demonstrations in the factories, schools, streets, etc., have become the order of the day. The Chilean people have launched campaign after campaign against all aspects of the junta's oppression--the political, social, economic, cultural, military, etc. In 1973 the dock workers of Puerto Montt waged a powerful strike. By 1974, the SUMAR strike in Santiago and one at Curtiembre Etchepare showed the growing progress of the people's Resistance. Hunger strikes among the Puchuncarier prisoners and a series of armed struggles waged by the workers and peasants in 1975 and which intensified in 1976 -- chiefly among the Chiquicamata miners and the Puente Alto and Valledor paper workers, who all waged strike struggles-- again testified to the dauntless struggle waged by the Chilean masses. In 1977 the people's Resistance continued to intensify. On International Women's Day, hundreds of women held the first big demonstration at the High Court demanding an explanation for the over 500 "missing" persons. Among the students, a big movement developed in all the universities against the payment of registration fees. The strength of the students' demonstrations forced the fascist authorities to lower the proposed fees by more that 50 per cent and waive them altogether for a large number of students. In Santiago, the workers at Termokhon held a protest strike against massive layoffs. In Vina del Mar, the workers of Promar held a sit-down strike protesting the non-payment of their wages. Amongst the peasantry, struggles waged against the displacement of families, for the non-restitution of land to the landlords, for technical and financial assistance and for the implementation of genuine agrarian reform have grown very sharp. In 1978, protests erupted throughout the country against Pinochet's "referendum" farce. On May Day workers, students, women, etc., demonstrated in the streets in large numbers against the fascist junta. In July, hundreds of students demonstrated against the regime, demanding the release of thousands of patriots from the prisons and concentration camps of the Pinochet government.
The struggles waged by the Chilean people reflect the irreconcilable contradictions between them and the Pinochet regime which is backed by U.S. imperialism. The various strikes, demonstrations and protests by the masses of people have greatly weakened the junta. They have sharpened the internal contradiction among the present regime, and between it and U.S. imperialism, and have prevented the junta from consolidating itself. The Resistance being fought by the People's Front continues, and the revolutionary crisis is deepening.
The People's Front was born to organize the Resistance into one powerful force; it is the seed and backbone of the anti-fascist front of the Chilean people. The People's Front was initiated during the early months of the fascist junta. The task of the People's Front is to unite all the anti-fascist forces around its minimum program, to unite the masses around the call for the basic necessities of bread, work, land and liberty. It has reached out to the broadest sections of the Chilean people, organized and consolidated the various Resistance committees that have sprung up to oppose the Pinochet regime -- the clandestine trade unions, students', peasants', small businessmen's, teachers', women's organizations, etc. Standing in the forefront of the anti-fascist struggles of the Chilean people, the Front has led countless battles against the fascist junta. The People's Front takes as its starting point the lofty interests of the Chilean masses. Its program calls for the realization of a truly anti-fascist and united government, a government which does not accept any remnants of the fascists in any part of the state apparatus. Steeled through years of struggle against the military regime and U.S. imperialism, the Front holds as its position that only the armed struggle can defeat fascism and only the armed people can ensure that the anti-fascist government will be able to fulfill its mission.
The People's Front works in clandestinity under the most severe forms of oppression. To break through the silence about the people's Resistance that the fascist junta, U.S. imperialism and the revisionists and opportunists of all hues impose on the Chilean people, the People's Front has developed the underground press. The underground press plays the role of educator and teacher to the Chilean people and gives voice to the width and breath of the Resistance. Each Resistance committee prints its clandestine newspaper. Each factory publishes its own newspaper, be it one page, but for them, it is their underground newspaper which informs them about the demands that concern them directly. The Resistance, which is the newspaper of the People's Front, gives a national scope to the struggles waged by the masses.
The glorious Revolutionary Communist Party of Chile plays an active role in the development of the People's Front and the fight against the fascist dictatorship. The RCP raises the banner of Active Resistance for the overthrow of the fascist junta and for the establishment of a Democratic Government of Anti-Fascist Unity. The Party has worked with a passion and revolutionary determination to serve the cause of the masses and is the guarantor of the liberation of the Chilean people.
The Pinochet government is known the world over for its inhumanity and barbarity. Since the beginning of the coup, more than 30,000 Chileans have been massacred, untold thousands are listed as "missing", others languish in the regime's concentration camps and torture chambers, and a million Chilean citizens have been forced into exile. The physical terror of the regime is everywhere. The masses are subjected to searches at home and in the workplace. The regime has sent spies into the factories, universities and villages. All forms of democratic rights are denied the Chilean masses. The democratic organizations, trade unions, etc., have been outlawed. Strikes are prohibited. Free assembly is denied. University courses have been banned and suppressed. Revolutionary literature has been confiscated and burned. Fascist laws and decrees are daily being issued that continue the brutality of the fascist junta.
The economy of the country has been opened up for plunder to the imperialists, especially U.S. imperialism. In 1977 alone, the Pinochet government signed various agreements with foreign imperialists which were ejected to entail more than $1 billion in direct investments. The imperialists who are in a deep economic crisis are shifting the burden onto the Chilean people and are bleeding them white. The money-bags of Wall Street are extorting huge sums from the Chilean people, and the economy is becoming more ruined with each passing day. The Pinochet fascist junta has run up such a huge foreign debt to the imperialists that over the last two years it was forced to pay back debts of over $2 billion.
The super-exploitation of the Chilean masses by the imperialists has left them in dire poverty and want. Inflation is rampant. Unemployment is sky rocketing. Last year the junta's published figure for unemployment was 800,000 out of a total population of 10 million! But even this figure does not represent the extent of the unemployment in Chile. For instance, if a worker works one day a week, he is considered employed. Similarly, if he works two days in three weeks, he is not listed among the unemployed. In the factories the capitalists are using all means to squeeze out every penny of profit from the working class. They have extended the working day, refused to pay the workers benefits and rights previously won, such as workers' compensation, bonuses, etc. Workers are fired for the flimsiest of reasons, especially the most militant ones, in order to keep the workers' struggles suppressed.
In the countryside, the peasantry is living in the depths of misery. Under the fascist junta's "land reform" the arable land has been put into the hands of the rich landowners, and thousands of peasants are landless. The peasantry is forced now to work on the landowners' large estates and many times are not paid a wage. When they are "fortunate" enough to be paid, it is with some produce of the land. Thus the peasants have been reduced to the point of slaves.
Many other sections of the Chilean population have been brutally attacked. There has been tremendous repression against the students. Courses have been banned, revolutionary and patriotic students have been expelled and tuition has increased, forcing many students to give up their education and join the ranks of the unemployed. The Native Indians of Chile who had won some reforms under the Allende regime have had their reforms taken away and their living conditions are deteriorating under the fascist junta.
With every passing minute the masses of people are fashioning the rope and scaffolding which they will use to hang the military junta. To try to stave this off and prop themselves up by putting on a "humane" appearance, the regime has come up with various ''democratizations". These "democratizations" are a farce, a demagogic attempt to hide the regime's ugly fascism under pious sounding phrases and decrees. Two such attempts of Pinochet's "democratizations" were the "referendum" and the amnesty farces. The "referendum" was a desperate and adventuristic move by Pinochet to "prove" that his fascist government has the "support" of the Chilean people. Far from achieving Pinochet's goal, the "referendum" was denounced even by members of the ruling military junta. The masses gave their opinion of this charade by organizing demonstrations throughout the country against the "referendum". In spite of all the threats and pressures exerted by the military junta, more than half the Chileans who were eligible to vote in the "referendum" abstained from doing so. The "amnesty" farce proclaimed by Pinochet pardoned a mere 280 persons who were condemned by the military tribunals since 1973. The proclamation does not mention anything about abolishing these fascist tribunals themselves nor about the thousands of Chileans who have disappeared or remain condemned. The Carter administration hailed this so-called amnesty, calling it "a positive contribution by the government of Chile to the human rights situation in that country".
Using the fraud of "human rights", the Carter administration is preparing conditions to replace the outright fascist Pinochet regime with the "democratic" fascist Frei. While Carter uses his "human rights" campaign to demand that the fascist Pinochet regime put on a smiling face to hide its snarling one, the Carter administration knows that the junta is extremely isolated, unpopular and teetering over the edge. Therefore they have the "democratic" Frei waiting in the wings and plan to install him in an attempt to divert the people's struggles.
Frei is the leader of the Christian Democratic Party and a loyal servant of U.S. imperialism. The same leader of the same party is the one who ordered the massacre of the copper miners in 1956; the same ex-president who ordered the massacre at Puerto Montt and the butchery and repression at San Miguel and Puente Alto. The U.S. government installed Frei as president of Chile in 1964 through massive financing by the CIA, to implement U.S. imperialism's program in Chile, the "Alliance for Progress". The Frei regime was noted for aiding in the large-scale penetration of the U.S. imperialist corporations into the Chilean economy and the intensification of their profits in Chile. It was also infamous for its anti-people rule. During his reign, Frei resorted to violent repression of the people's struggles. Frei is also noted for being one of the criminals who supported the coup d'etat against Salvador Allende and helped organize the right-wing demonstrations against the people. He and his cohorts were the authors of the nefarious Gun-Control Act -- the law which opened the doors to fascism.
This is also the same Frei who went on national television after the coup to announce that fascist rule was a necessary condition "to get the country out of chaos". Today Frei claims he has changed. The U.S. imperialists are offering him as the only "democratic" alternative and the "only solution to the fascist junta". But the Chilean people have in the past waged many battles against this so-called democrat and have seen through his intrigues. The Carter administration's attempts to bring back this servile lackey are doomed to failure.
The modern revisionists both inside the country and those in Moscow hold a major responsibility for the reactionary coup and the massacres of the Chilean people. Pushing the view of the "peaceful road to socialism", they disarmed the working class and peasantry and set them up for the U.S. imperialist slaughter. Life has proven that the theory of the "peaceful road to socialism" is a line of class treason, of conciliation with imperialism and reaction, that has the most severe consequences for the people. The revisionists in Chile who came to power under the Allende government had dreams of becoming the new bourgeois masters, not of putting the nation on a socialist path. The Popular Unity coalition that Allende headed was a bourgeois reformist government. Under the Popular Unity, the Chilean state, the armed forces and oppressive apparatus, remained the state of the oligarchy and of U.S. imperialist domination. The Popular Unity government represented the interests of the most degenerate sections of the trade unions and parliamentary bureaucracy of the petty bourgeoisie. It was prepared to conciliate with any power which would guarantee it the realization of its plans. Its "peaceful path" to liberation proved to be an illusion, an impossibility. Following this path, the Allende government actually implemented Frei's infamous Gun-Control Act and left the masses defenseless against the fascist coup.
Today the revisionists continue their treachery. From the outset they have boycotted any participation in the struggle of the people. They defend the peaceful road. It is their view that the more you struggle against the junta, the more severe the junta's repression becomes. This is the attitude of class collaboration, of giving up the struggle of the masses and pleading for mercy at the feet of the fascists. It is the line of Pinochet and U.S. imperialism because it tells the people that they must accept the fascist dictatorship. On the other hand, the revisionists are colluding with Frei and the Christian Democrats. They have established an unholy alliance with imperialism in order to pick up a few crumbs that the bourgeoisie is dividing up. Their role in this pact is to pacify the masses and try to convince them that a certain section of the bourgeoisie that is tied to U.S. imperialism is "peaceful", "democratic" and "progressive" and is a "real alternative" to Pinochet.
The opportunists of the "theory of the three worlds" headquartered in Peking are also doing the dirty work for U.S. imperialism. They never hesitate to praise the fascist Pinochet as an "anti-hegemonist fighter". The Chinese revisionists give aid to the junta in order to better assist it in its suppression of the people. The utterly rotten anti-Leninist theory that they peddle calls on the people to give up their struggle against U.S. imperialism and internal reaction and instead unite with them in their struggle against Soviet social-imperialism. For the people to follow this course means certain disaster and suffering. The events in Chile are living proof that the "three worlders" are nothing but out-and-out agents of U.S. imperialism bent on extinguishing the flames of the people's Resistance.
Despite all the machinations of the revisionists and opportunists of all hues, despite the broadened and continued suppression of the people by the Pinochet government, despite the various maneuvers of the U.S. imperialists, the future is very bright for the Chilean people. The Chilean people have a deep love for freedom and democracy and have never once hesitated to wage battle after battle to achieve it.
The working class and oppressed people of the United States have a common interest and a close bond with the Chilean people. They face the same enemy, U.S. imperialism. The Resistance waged by the Chilean people assists the American people in their goal to overthrow U.S. imperialism. Therefore the American people give their wholehearted support to' the struggles of the Chilean people. It gives the American proletariat great pride to know that they are fighting side by side with such a valiant people. The Resistance of the Chilean people is a great inspiration to the American working class and oppressed people, and the masses in the United States swear to fulfill their proletarian internationalist duty to the Chilean people by wiping U.S. imperialism off the face of the earth and by aiding materially, politically, etc., the same struggle waged by the Chilean Resistance.
HAIL THE FIVE YEARS OF RESISTANCE TO FASCIST DICTATORSHIP IN CHILE!
UNITE TO RESIST THE U.S.-BACKED PINOCHET DICTATORSHIP!
OPPOSE CARTER'S "HUMAN RIGHTS" FRAUD -- TO REPLACE PINOCHET FASCISM WITH FREI'S "DEMOCRATIC" FASCISM!
SUPPORT THE PEOPLE'S FRONT!
GIVE AN HOUR'S PAY FOR THE UNDERGROUND PRESS! End.
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Editorial of The Workers' Advocate:
The Chinese revisionists have joined the counterrevolutionary imperialist-revisionist encirclement of socialist Albania. They have cut off aid to Albania, made public military secrets and issued lying and slanderous statements. All around the world, the proletariat and progressive people are condemning this act of hostility and betrayal. The Albanian Party,and Government have issued an important document, the "Letter of the CC of the Party of Labor and the Government of Albania to the CC of the Communist Party and Government of China (July 29, 1978)", which is reprinted in this issue of The Workers' Advocate. The National Executive Committee of the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists, speaking on behalf of the American proletariat, expressed its firm support for the just stand of the Albanian Party and people and branded the Chinese revisionists as a pack of traitors and renegades to the cause of world communism in a statement in the July 24th issue of The Workers' Advocate.The Workers' Advocate calls on the American proletariat and all oppressed and toiling masses to hold high the bright red banner of revolution. Raise your voices in condemnation of the Chinese revisionist traitors. Let everyone circulate and study the important documents of the Party of Labor of Albania.
Defense of socialism is the sacred responsibility of the American proletariat. Today there are two forces in the world, two big camps locked in mortal combat. On one side stand the forces of freedom and socialism, the camp of labor, consisting of the world proletarian movement, socialism and the national liberation movement. On the other side stand the forces of slavery, imperialism and reaction, the camp of counter-revolutionary capital. The American proletariat is part of the international proletariat, it is a contingent of the camp of labor. Socialist Albania is the great beacon of socialism and the reliable base area for the world proletarian revolution. In socialist Albania, the proletariat sees its future and its aspirations. Today the test of proletarian internationalism is support for the glorious socialist homeland, the invincible People's Socialist Republic of Albania.
Today it is socialism and socialist Albania which has friends all around the world. In the short time since China cut off aid to socialist Albania, a veritable flood of statements, telegrams and messages of support have been sent to Albania. All over the world, people are standing up in defense of Marxism-Leninism and revolution. The people know and feel that socialist Albania is on their side, is their true and infallible friend in the struggle for national liberation and socialism. And in this view they are not mistaken. Socialist Albania has always given absolute and unstinting support to the forces of world revolution, and thus it is no wonder that socialist Albania enjoys the support of all the world's revolutionary and progressive people.
The Chinese revisionists, on the contrary, are being more and more isolated, losing one friend after another, getting into one quarrel after another. The entire world proletariat has nothing but the deepest disgust for the despicable treachery of the Chinese revisionists and their all-round collaboration with imperialism. The Chinese revisionists only find favor and sympathy with the Carter's, Brzezinski's, Helmut Schmidt's, Valery Giscard d'Estaing's, and these worthy gentlemen are eyeing China for investment and exploitation. And this isolation of the Chinese revisionists is only to be expected. The Chinese revisionist clique has been betraying the struggle of one people after another, writing off the proletariat and the Marxist-Leninist parties, and allying with the worst blood-stained reactionaries. So it is only natural that the world proletariat and all progressive people are turning away from the Chinese revisionists with disgust and indignation.
The hostile acts of the Chinese revisionists toward valiant socialist Albania are not an accident, nor are they mere "mistakes". They come from betrayal of Marxism-Leninism and from negation of the struggle against revisionism. They spring from and are the proof of the bankruptcy of the notorious theory of "three worlds". This pseudo-theory is a total negation of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism. It is a theory of reconciliation and rapprochement with world imperialism and all its lackeys. It is a theory that has not just "forgotten" socialism, that is not just "neutral" on socialism, but which actively fights socialism tooth and nail. The despicable blackmail of the Chinese revisionists proves that they find in socialism their most deadly enemy and the constant reminder of their betrayals.
The theory of "three worlds" is also seen in practice to be a theory to promote and prettify the hegemonism and big-power chauvinism of the Chinese revisionists. Under the banner of support for small countries, of anti-hegemonism, "non-alignment", and of being part of the "third world", the Chinese revisionists are trying to carve out their own spheres of influence. At the same time the Chinese revisionists are opening wide their borders to imperialist investment, exploitation, subversion and control.
The hostile acts of the Chinese revisionists are an exact Repetition of the brutal blackmail and bullying tactics of Khrushchov. It was the arch-revisionist Khrushchov who extended ideological disagreements to state relations. It was Khrushchov who betrayed the proletarian revolution and the national liberation movement in favor of all-round collaboration with imperialism. It was Khrushchov who rehabilitated the Titoite revisionists. Today the exact same activities by the Chinese revisionists are concretely proving that the theory of "three worlds" is only a new painted-up version of modern Khrushchovite revisionism. It is the Chinese revisionists who are the deadly enemies of the Communist Party of China, the assassins of the genuine Chinese Marxist-Leninists, and who have betrayed the Chinese revolution for which the great Chinese people shed so much blood. They are agents of capitalist restoration at home and a cheering squad for imperialist aggression abroad.
The betrayal of the Chinese revisionists and the rise of the theory of "three worlds" put on the agenda the careful study and re-evaluation of the whole struggle against modern revisionism. Great Lenin pointed out: "... the fight against imperialism is a sham and a humbug unless it is inseparably bound up with the fight against opportunism." In order to advance the world proletarian socialist revolution, it is absolutely essential to carry the struggle against modern revisionism through to the end. The slightest vacillation on this point is fraught with the most dangerous consequences. In our times, to come under the revolutionary authority of the international communist movement means to resolutely struggle against all forms of revisionism and opportunism. There is no "third road" in the struggle between Marxism-Leninism and revisionism.
The American proletariat is a fighting proletariat. It is rising up against the shifting of the burden of the economic crisis onto its back and it is preparing itself for proletarian revolution. It has as its great duty to uphold its historic mission and to defend Albania, the world base of socialism. The American proletariat has never lost faith in Marxism. It has rejected the revisionism of the class traitors and is irresistibly giving rise to the reconstitution of the Marxist-Leninist Party. It firmly supports socialist Albania against the entire old world of imperialism and revisionism. The American proletariat condemns the Khrushchovite blackmail, subversion and hegemonism of the Chinese revisionists!
DENOUNCE THE CHINESE REVISIONISTS FOR BECOMING PART OF THE IMPERIALIST- REVISIONIST ENCIRCLEMENT OF SOCIALIST ALBANIA!
CARRY THE STRUGGLE AGAINST MODERN REVISIONISM THROUGH TO THE END!
DOWN WITH THE ANTI-LENINIST AND PRO-IMPERIALIST THEORY OF "THREE WORLDS"!
GLORY TO SOCIALIST ALBANIA, BEACON OF SOCIALISM AND BASTION OF REVOLUTION FOR THE ENTIRE WORLD'S PEOPLE! End.
Public Meetings In Defense of Socialist Albania
BOSTON
Place: Arlington St. Church,
corner of Arlington and Boylston Time: 7:30 p.m.
CHICAGO
Place: 301 N. Mayfield Time: 7:00 p.m.
SPONSORED BY:
CENTRAL ORGANIZATION OF U.S. MARXIST-LENINISTS
Sounding the alarm to the "ultra-Right danger" and the "fascist threat", the modern revisionists of the "C'PUSA and their offspring, the "three worlders" of the OL have launched a new campaign of class collaboration and revisionist betrayal. The modern revisionists of the Gus Hall clique and Michael Klonsky's social-chauvinists are sermonizing to the working class and people that the danger facing them does not come from the monopoly capitalist class and its state power with the Carter administration at its head. The danger facing the working masses, they allege, is a "new coalition of big business interests" (OL), a "new ultra-Right" (Gus Hall), which they claim is "on the offensive" against both the Carter administration and the working masses alike. Thus, in this "dangerous situation", according to the revisionists and social-chauvinists, the only salvation for the working people lies in a joint struggle with the chieftains of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class in a common class collaborationist alliance.
Developing fascism is the program and policy of the entire U.S. imperialist big bourgeoisie. However, the "fight" of the revisionists and "three worlders" against the "ultra-Right" is not a struggle against this growing fascism but is in direct service to it. The monopoly capitalists are fascizing their state apparatus and all aspects of life. They are developing fascism against the rising revolt of the proletariat, to make the people bear the burden of the economic crisis and to prepare for aggressive war. The monopoly capitalist dictators have installed the deceptive Carter administration, which uses the mask of "human rights" and an army of sold-out labor bureaucrats, in order to conceal and step up this growing fascism. Under the guise of "reforms" and even in the name of "labor and the minorities", the Democratic Carter administration has been introducing one fascist measure after the other against the proletariat, the working masses and the oppressed nationalities. For their part, the revisionists and "three worlders" have become enthusiastic apologists for the actual growing fascism of the bourgeoisie which is taking place under the smiles of the fascist "human rights" demagogue Carter. They are part of the campaign of deception to hide and serve the fascism of the bourgeois state, telling the people that Carter's smile is genuine and not false and that the "fascist menace" lies somewhere else, anywhere else. The revisionists and social-chauvinists are, in fact, anti-fascist only in words but are social-fascist boosters of Carter's "human rights" fraud and the monopoly capitalists' growing fascism in deeds.
In the July 17 and July 31 issues of the social-chauvinist rag, The Call, the OL "three worlders", in their typical hysteria-mongering fashion, raise the specter of "the growing menace of fascism". The source of this looming "fascist threat", they elaborate, is not to be found in the monopoly capitalist system itself but in "a recently-formed coalition of some of the most reactionary, fascist-minded sections of the monopoly capitalists". The OL scribblers write: "According to some Washington insiders, this reactionary campaign appears to be engineered by a newly- formed coalition of monopolists and other businessmen. Its aim, in the words of some of its leaders, is to 'bring back big business to its rightful role' in running the country".
By way of "proof" of this ridiculous fairy-tale meant to scare little children, The Call articles then attempt to explain how each and every evil in the U.S. society is but "another example of the power of this coalition". Everything -- from the Bakke Decision, the nazi gangs, the campaign for mandatory wage controls, the blocking of the ERA, "the defeat of every important piece of pro-labor legislation" (including a list of half a dozen or so of Carter's fascist anti-working class "reforms") -- to the "re- emergence on the political scene of Richard Nixon", are all supposedly "sign(s) of the growing initiative of this coalition."
While the headline reads "Big Business Launches New War Against the People", the OL social-chauvinists make it perfectly clear that it is, in fact, the Carter administration itself which is under attack from "big business interests". Allegedly "there is a growing rift within the ruling class over tactics". However, this is no ordinary "rift" among the blood-soaked monopoly capitalist dictators but one with the Carter administration being supposedly for ever more "concessions" to the working people, fighting the "new coalition" which is instead in favor of "attacks on the people". According to The Call: "One target of this new coalition of monopolist interests seems to be President Carter's money-guzzling, bureaucratic programs", "some powerful financial interests are critical of Carter for going too far in the past trend of making minimal concessions to labor and civil rights", "Some of Carter's own men... such as Michael Blumenthal, ex-president of the Bendix Corp., and Charles Schultze, Carter's chief economic adviser, have been critical of numerous Carter policies lately. Both advisers have opposed recent restrictions on big business during the present crisis. " (Just imagine that -- the big capitalists in the Carter administration are critical of "Carter's policies... of restriction on big business during the present crisis"!)
Of course, the Klonskyites do not describe Carter as all sweetness and light. While crusading for "concessions to labor and civil rights" and bravely taming the nasty lion of "big business", Carter nevertheless has his weak points. They explain that the Carter administration cannot win the struggle alone, as the so-called "liberal reformers" such as Carter have proved to be weak-kneed in the face of the "fascist-minded financiers" and thus "cannot show us the way out". Furthermore, the reader is reminded that despite everything he has just read in The Call's articles, one should not forget that Carter still has certain ties to "big business": "It should not be thought that the liberal politicians such as Carter have nothing to do with this coalition... As Fortune puts it, the presidents of the biggest corporations frequently meet with the President."
Thus, according to the Klonskyites, there is a split in the ruling class, with a "reactionary offensive" by the "fascist-minded section" against both the Carter administration, the so-called "liberal section", and against the people. In this way, the OL social-chauvinists have placed one section of the monopoly capitalist class, including its chief representatives, on the same side of the barricades as the proletariat and working masses against the "growing fascist menace" allegedly posed by another section of monopoly capital.
This is not the first time the OL leaders have called on the working masses to ally with the capitalist ruling class under the pretext of supporting one section of monopoly capital against the other allegedly to "stop fascism". In 1973, during the Watergate crisis, when the reactionary and decadent nature of the entire monopoly capitalist politics was becoming increasingly exposed, the OL issued the slogan "Dump Nixon -- Stop the Fascist Tide!" and thus called on the people to support the so-called "liberal" big bourgeoisie in its dogfight with Nixon. They explained: "The real issue is the stemming of the fascist offensive which Nixon has launched against the working and oppressed people as well as his own capitalist political opponents", of course, by this the OL neo-revisionists meant that "the real issue" was supporting Nixon's "capitalist political opponents", the so-called "liberal" chieftains of U.S. imperialism in Congress, etc. Hence the Klonskyites' notorious complaint that Congress stood "paralyzed" in the face of Nixon's "fascist threat". After the monopoly capitalists implemented the OL's slogan "Dump Nixon", all talk of a "fascist tide" disappeared from the pages of The Call, not to reappear until recent months.
Now, on the say-so of a pack of neo-revisionist "three worlders" who heard it from "Washington insiders" about a "new coalition" posing a new "fascist threat", the OL leaders are again demanding that the proletariat join hands with imperialism under the pretext of taking sides in the inter-capitalist conflicts. In effect, the OL social-chauvinists are calling on the working class to rush to the defense of the arch-imperialist and fascist Carter administration, to the support of the monopoly capitalist party in power, thus completely betraying the proletariat's own class interests, its historic mission and betraying the international proletariat and oppressed people as well.
The OL "three worlders" did not cook up this gross class collaborationist line of betrayal on their own, but it is a line shared in common with their partners in revisionist treachery, the Khrushchovite revisionists of the "C"PUSA.
The July issue of the revisionist journal Political Affairs carries two major articles entitled "Economic Struggles -- the Decisive Arena" and "Crisis of U.S. Capitalism -- Struggle for Disarmament" by the arch-revisionist jackals Gus Hall and Victor Perlo respectively. In these articles, an identical analysis is given as that given by the Klonskyites -- there is a "new ultra-Right" which is on the offensive against both the "moderates" of the Carter administration as well as against "labor" and "the minorities". The revisionists Gus Hall and Victor Perlo describe at length "the emergence... of a very active and aggressive, reactionary, cold war, Right-wing bloc", "The 'new' ultra-Right and its growing threat arise from... the backing it is receiving from a much larger segment of the big business community... (it is) no longer limited to 'kooks' or 'crazies' ".
Applying their notorious thesis of "two power centers in Washington", the revisionists have now concocted "two centers" within the Carter administration itself. Allegedly, "within the administration there is an ongoing struggle between the most aggressive, adventurist, militarist, rabidly anti-communist circles, and the more sensible capitalists and politicians". The Carter administration, the revisionists claim, is split between the "ultra-Right" and the "moderates", while Carter, with "his basic opportunism and lack of principle", tries to "keep this antagonistic grouping together...by trying to move in two directions at the same time".
Thus, according to the Gus Hall revisionist clique, there is on the one hand "the hard-liners, the cold- warriors, the military-industrial complex, the most reactionary circles", and on the other hand there are the "moderate" chieftains of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class, who "accept reality", are for "concessions" and a "sensible policy". "However", the revisionist quacks pontificate, "the latter group in no way gives up its hostility to socialism and the working class. It will not consistently resist the hardliners". Hence the inevitable conclusion, a call for an alliance of the working class with the "moderate" group of imperialists against the "hard-liners". The revisionists lecture the people "not to tail ideologically behind the more reasonable Establishment faction" (no self-respecting revisionist traitor would ever consider such a thing!) while at the same time "we must on occasion even be in de facto alliance with the Vances and Warnkes (the "reasonable faction" -- ed.) in the Administration"!
Clearly, the Klonskyite "three worlders" hysteria-mongering about a "new big business coalition" and the modern revisionists' hysteria about a "new ultra-Right" are indistinguishable in content. Their class collaborationist conclusions are identical as well. One might recall the OL social-chauvinists' not-so-secret love for such war-mongering fascists as Henry Jackson and Ronald Reagan, of the so-called "anti-appeasement forces" of U.S. imperialism, as well as their well-known distaste for the so-called "appeasers", arch-imperialist war-criminals such as Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance, etc. Gus Hall, to the contrary, has quite different likes and dislikes, considering his enemies the "anti-detente forces" and his imperialist friends the "pro-detente forces". However, such "differences" between the "three worlders" and the modern revisionists only confirms their identity of views as lackeys of world imperialism. They are both giving a line based on the same revisionist ideology of class collaboration and betrayal and based on the same revisionist fallacy of the alleged "two aspects of the state".
According to this pseudo-theory of the "two aspects of the state", the state is not the principal instrument of the savage and bloodthirsty dictatorship of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class for the violent suppression of the proletariat and working people. According to this "theory" it is not the monopoly capitalist class, as a class, through its state power, which is developing fascism in order to crush the proletariat, to make the people pay for the economic crisis and head for imperialist war. Instead, the state has "two aspects", a "pro-people" aspect reflecting the aspirations of the people and an "anti-people aspect reflecting the interests of "big business". As the Klonskyite "theoreticians" put it so well: within the ruling circles there is the "growing influence" of "fascist-minded businessmen" as one aspect of the state, and the other aspect of the state, the pro-people aspect, which imposes "restrictions on big business during the recent crisis".
The revisionists.and "three worlders" try to pretend that with such nonsense they are only "taking advantage of contradictions in the capitalists' ranks", utilizing the "rifts within the ruling class" and so on and so forth. They consider it quite innocent to differentiate between "fascist-minded businessmen" and "liberal reformers" within the leading circles of the monopoly capitalist state. They will even swear that they are against the "whole system" and "will not rely on the liberals" or "tail behind the reasonable Establishment faction". But with such balderdash they completely repudiate the proletarian revolution, the class struggle including the struggle against fascism and the Marxist-Leninist teachings on the state in particular.
These ideological concepts of Gus Hall and Michael Klonsky come directly from their mentor, the arch-renegade and traitor to communism Earl Browder, the first theoretician of modern revisionism. Browder too, did not consider the monopoly capitalist class as the source of fascism and reaction, but considered this man-eating decadent class a "healthy" force for "progress", while fascism and reaction were only a product of a "lunatic fringe". As Browder taught in his revisionist classic Teheran, Our Path in War and Peace: "There is a growing volume of evidence that there are such men of vision and understanding in the ranks of big capital. Their number will grow, and their initiative and leadership will become stronger... We must learn to welcome their appearance... Nothing can be more fatal... than an attitude of uniform and undifferentiated hostility to the ranks of big capital... That only drives the intelligent capitalists back into the arms of their most reactionary fellows and unites the most powerful group in American society solidly against all progress". (International Publishers, p. 74)
Browder's concepts of "men of vision and understanding in the ranks of big capital" are identical with the Khrushchovite revisionist concepts of the alleged "reasonableness" of the chieftains of U.S. led imperialism -- the cornerstone of the Khrushchovite revisionist doctrine of "peaceful transition, peaceful coexistence and peaceful competition". At the 16th National Convention of the CPUSA in 1956, the revisionist leadership of the party formally adopted Khrushchovite revisionism. After doing extensive self-criticism for "over-estimating" the fascist, war-like and decadent nature of the U.S. monopoly capitalist system, the convention resolved: "We... have already discarded as obsolete Lenin's thesis that war is inevitable under imperialism. We have long since rejected as incorrect Stalin's thesis of the alleged law of inevitable violent proletarian revolution. Likewise, we are making important modifications in the theory of the state, as evidenced in our advocacy of the peaceful, constitutional path to socialism."
Thus, the present call of the modern revisionist leaders of the "C'PUSA for "de facto alliance" with the "reasonable Establishment faction" against the "ultra-Right" is simply a continuation of their revisionist class treason and betrayal. It is nothing more than a further renunciation of the class struggle and the violent proletarian revolution which the revisionists long ago openly rejected.
For their part, the OL "three worlders" are the "theoreticians" of the most reactionary social-chauvinist and class collaborationist line of "directing the main blow at Soviet social-imperialism", thus calling for an alliance of the U.S. proletariat with U.S. imperialism against the Soviet social-imperialists and the workers and oppressed people of the world. Nevertheless, the neo-revisionist "three worlders" continue to flaunt their alleged "Marxist-Leninist" orthodoxy. But all this is sham. The Klonskyites' hysteria campaign about the "fascist threat" confronting the "liberal" Carter regime further demonstrates the falseness of their "anti-revisionist" pretenses, that their "orthodoxy" is that of Browder, the revisionist 16th National Convention of the "C'PUSA and of Gus Hall. They too have rejected the Marxist-Leninist teachings on the struggle against fascism, the class character of the state and the violent proletarian socialist revolution. It shows that the opportunist trend based on "three worlds" is nothing but a new current of modern revisionism, albeit revisionism and class betrayal in its most hideous and grotesque form.
Comrade Enver Hoxha pointed out at the Seventh Congress of the Party of Labor of Albania:
"The evil, the danger, is that by way of disguise, the modern revisionists, whether in power or not, continue to utilize these formulae that are the guiding essence of our doctrine, depriving them entirely of their force for leadership and organization. The revisionists not only apply these formulae in practice in the opposite sense, but they also distort and deform them in a cunning and sophisticated way. The whole aim of the modern revisionists is, by preserving some formulations, to distort the entire Marxist-Leninist doctrine, to build a set of other anti-Marxist theories meant to disorganize the proletariat of a given country or the world,, to extend the life of the capitalist bourgeoisie, to put off the proletarian revolution, if not to suppress it altogether, be it in a single country in which the conditions are ripe for it or in several countries simultaneously." (p.237)
The modern revisionists and "three worlders" have preserved the Marxist-Leninist formulae on the anti-fascist struggle, only to apply them in the opposite sense. The revisionists and opportunists are mouthing anti-fascist phrases in order to deprive them of any mobilizing and organizing force, to disorient the proletariat in the face of the growing fascism of the bourgeoisie.
As Marxism-Leninism teaches, for the anti-fascist proletarian socialist revolution to triumph, for the proletariat to successfully overthrow the entire U.S. monopoly capitalist class and smash its state power, it is necessary to wage an unyielding struggle against the betrayal of modern revisionism, "three worlds-ism" and opportunism of all hues. End.
The U.S. monopoly capitalist class is a dying class. In its death-bed struggle, it is becoming ever more vicious and Hitlerite. It is rapidly fascizing the state apparatus and all aspects of society.
Fascism is the program and policy of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class. The entire state machine is involved in preparing and implementing a fascist, capitalist offensive against the proletariat and the toiling and oppressed masses as a whole. This offensive is intended to shift the burden of the crisis onto the backs of the working masses, to smash the revolutionary proletarian movement, and to prepare a quiet home front for wars of aggression.
This capitalist offensive is being carried out by the entire monopoly capitalist class. Both the "liberal" (concealed fascist) and the open fascist political representatives of finance capital cooperate in this program. Never before has such a barrage of political deception and fascist demagogy been unleashed on the people as today, as the capitalist class rules not just by open force but also by deception. The Democratic Party specializes in strike-breaking and segregation under the banner of being the party of "the workers and the minorities". The theory of "two aspects" to the state, one pro-people and one anti-people, of "two power centers" in Washington, or of an "ultra-right lunatic fringe", is designed to lull the masses to sleep in the face of fascism and to mobilize them behind one faction or other of the exploiters.
The masses of people are rising up to fight this growing fascism. Millions upon millions of people are being drawn into new life, into the strike movement, into the anti-fascist movement, into the movements for defense of the vital interests of the people. There is only one answer to the growing fascism of the monopoly capitalists: active resistance!
The following outline indicates various fronts on which the capitalists are organizing fascist attacks on the masses, shows the wide-scale use of political deception and briefly comments on the state of the resistance movement. It is taken from a report on the Afro-American anti-fascist movement, so it concentrates on the Afro-American people's movement. But its comprehensive nature shows the all-round nature of the fascization of society and the falsity of the revisionist and "three worlders" conception of a "liberal democratic" society threatened by the "ultra-right". The issue is the class struggle of all the oppressed masses, led by the most revolutionary class in history, the modern proletariat, against the decadent and fascist monopoly capitalist class, a class committing untold crimes to stave off its impending doom.
I. Fronts on which the bourgeoisie is organizing fascist movements, consolidating repressive measures, and attacking the Afro-American people and other oppressed nationalities.
A. ATTACKS ON THE WORKERS' MOVEMENT
The proletariat stands at the center of the resistance of all the working and oppressed masses to all exploitation, oppression and reaction. It is the proletarian movement which is the central movement of the coming revolutionary storms. The main aim of the monopoly capitalists in organizing fascism is to smash the proletarian revolutionary movement -- in order to derail the revolution and to have the working class bear the brunt of the economic crisis.
Thus, while the main way the monopoly capitalists are today attempting to organize counter-revolutionary mass movements is through attacks on the Afro-American and other oppressed nationalities, it must never be forgotten that the aim of fascism is first and foremost to smash and enslave the entire proletariat and destroy the proletarian movement.
All the fronts of fascization are thus in essence aimed at the proletariat. A number of fascist attacks are being developed specifically on the workers' movement. These include the following:
--the productivity drive to work the workers to death, impose the most stringent arbitrary rules and regulations, and fascize the places of work to the maximum;
--the campaign to further strengthen the fascist labor laws, such as the Labor Law Reform Act, which would ban wildcat strikes, further outlaw mass picketing and legalize labor spies on the pretext of helping to organize the working class. Carter's proposed "reforms" on immigration law and welfare law are also designed to undermine the position of the proletariat as a whole.
--the development of labor-management councils, a form taken up in imitation of Mussolini "corporate state" fascism. Buffalo, New York, is the first city to have a city-wide "labor-management" council, started in 1976.
--Carter's campaign to enforce "voluntary" wage controls (called for sake of deception "wage-price controls") and to prepare conditions for compulsory wage controls.
--the attacks on the public sector workers, comprising 1 out of every 6 workers, including Carter's proposed "civil service" reform, the capitalist "property tax revolt" movement, various CETA and Humphrey-Hawkins style bills, as well as a national movement of "welfare reforms" that provides for replacing public sector workers with slave labor.
B. THE FASCIST ANTI-BUSING MOVEMENT
Since the mid 60's the bourgeoisie has been attempting in various cities to organize this segregationist movement, e.g., Boston, Buffalo, Chicago and Cleveland. But it is only since 1974 that it has been organized in a massive way in the Northern cities with the use of deliberately disruptive court orders. The state has concentrated on one major center at a time while using the media and drawn-out court cases in other cities to spread the racist public opinion and confuse people.
The anti-busing movement is the opening campaign of the bourgeoisie in its drive to get revenge against the Afro-American people and push them back to full Jim Crow, and the attacks on the Afro-American people and other oppressed nationalities are the cutting edge of the attempts to organize fascist mass movements.
With "anti-government" demagogy, the state's organizers of the fascist anti-busing movement seek to mobilize a section of white working masses to launch violent racist attacks on the Afro-American people. The state also seeks to consolidate hard core racist, fascist gangs and fascist political organizations which serve as an "opposition" from the right, as part of the state's drive against Afro-American people and for fascism generally. The fascist anti-busing movement also serves as a pretext for increasing the repressive apparatus of the state.
In its initial stages the fascist anti-busing movement tries to present itself as not racist but "anti-government"; this demagogy can influence large sections of white masses and many Afro-Americans. But as soon as the fascist anti-busing movement is actually launched, its racist and fascist nature is quickly revealed, the Afro-American people's resistance develops and the white working masses dissociate themselves from the fascist movement, including even those who may still be against "busing".
The resistance of the Afro-American and anti-fascist people has been such in Boston and especially Louisville that the bourgeoisie has been unable to withdraw the school integration that has taken place. In Dayton when the courts withdrew the busing plan only 5% of the students applied to return to their "neighborhood" schools. This has been a testimony to the strength of the resistance of the Afro-American people and the anti-fascist sentiment of the masses. Nevertheless one should not get overly optimistic and think that final victory has been won.
While the fascist anti-busing movement has been defeated as a mass movement in Louisville and Boston, it has consolidated fascist political organizations and gangs which are used for further attacks (both military and propaganda) as well as certain segregationist public opinion has been created nationally.
It is only where the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists has concentrated the spirit of resistance of the masses and carried the struggle through in a revolutionary manner, beating the dog in the water, that the fascists have been forced into their holes. Elsewhere the battle has ended in a draw and no decisive workers' victory is won.
While the fascist anti-busing movement is the opening shot and cannot forever remain the bourgeoisie's focal point in the fascist drive, nevertheless the bourgeoisie is summing up its experience and developing more sophisticated means of organizing the fascist anti-busing movement:
a) Anti-busing movement without busing -- that is, only token integration into areas where fascists are strong (Buffalo and Chicago). In Cleveland they are experimenting with developing the fascist anti-busing movement without any busing whatsoever -- that is they are trying to scapegoat the Afro-American people by way of "busing" for the imminent financial collapse of the schools. A special levy for the schools timed with the announcement of "busing" plans for the fall has been organized.
b) Strengthening opportunists in the Afro-American community and promoting cultural nationalism like that of Booker T. Washington that sees the "advantages" of segregation. This campaign was launched nationally with Roots.
c) Strengthening the deception that the "state will protect you" -- "reforming" police departments, elaborate plans for police "protection" in new busing plans, etc. In Buffalo, the Mayoral elections with Black "liberal" Arthur Eve, were used to float this deception at the time the bourgeoisie tried to launch the fascist anti-busing movement.
Nevertheless the bourgeoisie has still been unable to establish a third national center for the fascist anti-busing movement. They were hoping for Chicago. But the rapid development of Afro-American resistance took the wind out of the sails of the fascist anti-busing movement as a mass movement.
In Buffalo no mass movement could be created but fascist gangs and police were set in motion to attack Afro-American people and Puerto Rican people.
C. STATE-ORGANIZED RACIST AND NAZI GANGS
The past year has seen a marked increase in the promotion of racist and fascist gangs such as the KKK, Nazis, etc. They have launched racist and terrorist attacks in Boston, Louisville, San Diego, Chicago and Buffalo, etc. The Nazis and KKK have held open publicity rallies in Chicago; Plains, Ga; and Columbus, Ohio. The KKK "border patrol" was widely promoted. In most cases the open fascists have used the fascist anti-busing movement as a cover to come out into the light of day.
The U.S. imperialist state uses the open fascists to create public opinion for its fascist programs against the Afro-American people and other oppressed nationalities and the whole working class. For instance the KKK launched the "border patrol" while Carter was discussing his fascist immigration "reform". The KKK and Nazis held rallies at the time Carter released his brief in support of Bakke.
D. "REVERSE DISCRIMINATION" LIE
Accompanying the escalation of activity and promotion of the open fascists is a campaign on "reverse discrimination", which is intensifying. The lie that the state apparatus, the enforcer of lynch law and the occupier of the ghettos, is allegedly "reverse discriminating" in favor of the oppressed peoples is rapidly becoming the key ideological basis of all the racist and segregationist movements. The goals of this racist campaign are:
a) To drive the Afro-American people out of all the spheres of life and employment they have entered since the 60's back to Jim Crow segregation.
b) To scapegoat the Afro-American people for the crimes of the rich and the inherent evils of capitalism such as unemployment, cutbacks in education, high taxes, etc.
c) To do massive propaganda for the racist line that the Afro-Americans when all is said and done really are inferior.
The propaganda for this campaign goes like this: "Affirmative action" programs designed to make up for "past" discrimination, discriminate against whites who are more "qualified" than Afro-Americans and other national minorities. The "liberals" echo the open racists by denying the present segregation, prettifying the state apparatus, and presenting the issue as one of a dispute over "compensation" for "past" injustice.
"Reverse discrimination" as a national issue was first raised in June and July, 1977, and propaganda has intensified with the Carter Administration's stand in September and the Supreme Court hearing on the Bakke case in October. In November the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of a white worker who claimed that an apprentice program to train Blacks was a form of "reverse discrimination". In this way, in five southern states the courts have given the go ahead for tremendous escalation of racial discrimination. And on June 28, 1978 the Supreme Court ruled that "reverse discrimination" exists and gave an open signal for organizing the segregationist movement nationwide under the slogan of "fighting reverse discrimination".
The phenomenon of directly scapegoating the Afro- American people and other oppressed nationalities for the crimes of the rich and the incurable diseases of capitalism is more pronounced. Besides the "reverse discrimination" lie, there is also the hysterical propaganda about "illegal aliens". And in Buffalo and Cleveland the state is attempting to scapegoat the Afro-American people and the demand for school integration for cutbacks and the financial crisis of the schools.
E. IMMIGRANTS, ESPECIALLY MEXICAN AND LATIN AMERICAN IMMIGRANTS ("ILLEGAL ALIENS" CAMPAIGNS)
The U.S. state carries out a fascist immigration program that deprives immigrants of all rights, forcing them to serve as a pool of semi-slave laborers. The Carter Administration has introduced legislation to intensify repressive measures against immigrants, the features of which have been covered in the Oct. 1, 1977 Workers' Advocate. (Also see the pamphlet Carter Bares His Fascist Fangs) In addition the Carter Administration through the Labor Department is escalating propaganda that "illegal aliens" cause unemployment especially among Afro-Americans.
FASCIST CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE YOUTH
The state of the U.S. imperialists, in an all-round way blocks the youth, decimates them spiritually and uses fascist violence to suppress them.
a) Youth crime hysteria: In the summer of 1976, the bourgeois state launched a campaign in Detroit against youth crime, mainly that of Black youth. This campaign was designed to promote an anti-Black racist hysteria and to isolate the Black youth, the most volatile section of the Black community, from the older Black workers and people and create divisions in the Black community. Further, this campaign was used to create public opinion for increased police infiltration of the Black community.
In Louisville over the last year a similar campaign has been launched. This campaign was first organized in the Black community by the Black opportunists and cultural nationalists, with the Black Muslims organizing their own police organization. Now the Black crime hysteria is being taken up by the fascist anti-busing organizations and promoted as a general campaign.
The youth crime campaign has also been launched in Cleveland and Chicago, with the aim of isolating youth from their parents and attacking them. The state has enacted further repressive laws against youth such as vandalism laws and has beefed up juvenile units in several cities to harass and attack the youth, (e.g., Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit).
b) The state of the U.S. imperialists is also escalating its attacks on the front of education. On one hand the quality of the bourgeois education the youth receive is rapidly deteriorating. Since 1967 the number of hours of instruction received by the average high school student has decreased by 100. There are numerous reports from state officials and educational "experts" that much further cutbacks will take place in the next 10 years. This is resulting in an increase in illiteracy. On the other hand the state seeks to blame the youth themselves for this and drive the proletarian youth, especially the Black proletarian youth, out of the schools.
In 27 states, measures have been adopted or introduced to provide year by year competency tests which students would be required to pass in order to pass to the next grade level or to graduate. Fascist Ohio Congressman Ron Mottl (D. Parma) has introduced legislation in Congress to establish national year by year competency tests. (Mottl is the author of the "Anti-Busing" Constitutional Amendment.) All this of course is being done at a time when the state is taking measures to insure that the "competency" of the youth, especially the working-class youth, is decreasing.
But this is only part of the attack on youth in the field of education. While the bourgeoisie is blocking large sections of the youth from learning even the basics of science and literacy, it also is fascizing the schools in form and content.
1) The fascist anti-busing movement is used as a pretext for introducing large numbers of police into the schools. (Boston, Chicago and Buffalo)
2) The fascist anti-busing organization in Louisville, when they could no longer organize school boycotts, etc., to straightforward prevent physical integration, began organizing an anti-Black, anti-youth campaign for "discipline in the schools", which means brutal repression of the resistance of the Black youth to racial discrimination as well as fascist discipline for all the youth.
Nationally the campaign for discipline in the schools is organized by HEW which claims schools are the most unsafe place for the youth and which has paid Jesse Jackson $45,000 to tour the country preaching that the reason Black youth, can't learn in the schools is that they are "lazy and undisciplined".
3) In several cities, especially as part of busing programs, "traditional schools" have been introduced which specialize in teaching the three R's, the fascist ideology of loyalty to U.S. imperialism, and fascist discipline.
The traditional schools are designed to inculcate fascist ideology into the more intellectual youth and those from families with education. They do not appear intended for general introduction but as "model" private schools in the public school system.
For the vast majority of the youth the bourgeoisie has in mind fascist repression, the minimum of even the basic elements of bourgeois education, and forcing them out of school at an early age.
G. FASCIZATION AND STRENGTHENING OF POLICE DEPARTMENTS
Local police departments are being beefed up in numbers, streamlined and are increasing their surveillance of the masses under the following guises:
a) "Protection" from the fascist anti-busing movement which is used to introduce large numbers of police into the schools.
b) Reform of police departments notorious for brutality such as Buffalo, Cleveland, Philadelphia. This is used as a cover for further centralizing the police, training them more professionally in methods of "counter-insurgency". All the "liberals" who call for police reform admit that their aim is to make the police more effective.
The City of Cleveland's "radical" racist mayor Kucinich hired a new police chief, R. Hongistu of San Francisco's International Hotel eviction fight notoriety. He was promoted as a big "liberal" after years of police,chiefs who were open racists. Before he was fired, he acted to increase police patrols and reduce office staff, substituting "para-police" for this, to initiate training of police to deal with busing (i. e. how to repress resistance to the fascist anti-busing movement) to send detectives to spy on the meetings of "peaceful integration groups", and to entourage patrolmen to be more aggressive in investigating crimes and catching criminals. Hongistu was then fired by Kucinich, who took care to inflame reactionary sentiment in the police to the maximum.
c) Social crime hysteria -- which is used to justify more police (uniformed and plainclothes) and to organize auxiliary police in various communities but now especially concentrated in the Black community.
H. THE ANTI-TERRORISM HYSTERIA
Concurrent with "anti-terrorist" hysteria organized in Europe and in particular West Germany, the bourgeoisie in U.S. began discussion of terrorism and calling for more repressive "anti-terrorist" measures.
In January 9, 1978 the New York Times reported that the U.S. state was reorganizing its "anti-terrorist" system and replacing a cabinet-level consultative group on terrorism established in 1972 by Nixon with a 26-agency "Working Group on Terrorism" headed by Keyword Isham of the State Department and Larry Gibson of the Justice Department.
At the same time the New York Times reported that the "specialists" say that "forcefulness and effectiveness of the U.S. response to terrorism will soon be tested by substantial actions mounted from outside the country."
This is an indication that the state is planning an anti-terrorist hysteria a la West Germany in the not-too-distant future. This will be directed against the Marxist-Leninists and probably the Arabs living in the U.S. and the Puerto Ricans. End.
(Taken from a Statement by the Seattle Branch of the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists, dated July 13, 1978.)
In Seattle the Carter Administration has not given up its attempt to launch a fascist movement against the working class and the Afro-American people. The state of the rich has organized and floated the racist groups "MERIT" and "CIVIC" in a feverish attempt to mobilize the white masses to attack the Afro-American people. Publicly, these organizations are attempting to pass racist laws and obtain court decisions to further segregate and discriminate against Afro-Americans. This public propaganda work serves to screen and develop their secret activity. Behind the scenes, these collections of CIA agents, police and other fascists, are preparing gangs to launch violent racist attacks on Afro-Americans.
While this is taking place, Mayor Royer and other "liberal" capitalist politicians are calling on the Afro- American people to be "peaceful" and not to resist racist and fascist attacks. The Black lackeys of the bourgeoisie are also telling the people to have faith in the police and the government in general, who supposedly will protect the people. Meanwhile, in actuality, Mayor Royer has given the Seattle Police Department extraordinary powers of arrest, while the fascist police themselves are attempting to have a municipal law passed giving them more legal rights to shoot down and kill the masses in cold blood.
This fascist offensive is being pushed by the entire monopoly capitalist class in a united, planned and coordinated fashion. For instance, every day the bourgeois newspapers in Seattle give extensive coverage to the activities of the fascist organizations and attempt to create a racist climate of hysteria against the Afro-American people.
These activities of the monopoly capitalist class in Seattle are part of the growing fascism in every aspect of American society. The cutting edge of the attempts of the ruling class to organize a fascist mass movement lies in attacks on the oppressed nationalities. The capitalists are trying to force the working masses to bear the burden of the economic crisis, and they both attack the workers' movement as a whole and single out many different sections of the workers and oppressed masses for particular oppression. The attacks on the Afro-American people are also attacks on the entire working class. The capitalist ruling class is racist to the core and is seeking revenge for the glorious Afro-American revolutionary movements of the last two decades. The Carter Administration was installed by the capitalists in order to lead this fascist offensive under a thin mask of political deception. President Carter, that segregationist "human rights" preacher, is implementing Nixonite fascism without Nixon.
The Carter Administration has pushed the Bakke "reverse discrimination" case in an attempt to blame the Afro-American people for the unemployment and other problems facing the masses. According to the fascists, the Afro-Americans now enjoy "special privileges" which should be taken away so that white people are not "discriminated" against in favor of Blacks. Under the slogan "reverse discrimination" the rich money-bags are trying to organize a fascist mass movement to attack the Black people, throw them and other oppressed nationalities wholesale out of colleges and industry and other work places. The capitalists wish to further segregate society and split the working class movement in order to maintain the capitalist system of slavery and exploitation of the masses.
In Seattle, this fascist movement is represented by MERIT ("Movement to End Racial Injustice and Tyranny"). It consists of a motley crew of state agents, police, experts in apartheid racism from southern Africa, and other dregs of this earth. MERIT has big ambitions and vows to make Seattle one of its strongholds in its nationwide organizing efforts. In a recently issued leaflet entitled, "White Males Need Not Apply", they state: "Discrimination against white males is now required by Federal law through affirmative action 'goals and timetables', which have the effect of establishing quotas favoring women and 'minorities' in hiring, promotion and college admissions. " In another leaflet they state: "For hundreds of thousands of white males in every sector of American society... MERIT is a ray of hope."
According to these champs of Jim Crow segregation, there has been no racial discrimination since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it seems, but instead "reverse discrimination" against whites since that time. According to this "theory", the state of the rich has been "reformed" and no longer discriminates against the minority nationalities. Instead, the rich and their state "reverse discriminates" in their favor. Even the Central Area Motivation Program (CAMP), a cosmetic poverty program in the Black community, is characterized in the bourgeois press as a massive rip-off by various Afro-Americans, because several thousand dollars were embezzled. It is no accident that this propaganda was blaring at the same time as the Bakke "reverse discrimination" fraud was at its height in the press. But the really massive tax rip-offs of the monopoly capitalist class for war preparations, and billion dollar handouts to the big corporations, the constantly rising prices and record profits of the bourgeoisie, make the actual rip-offs that do occur in these poverty programs amount to less than a hill of beans. This so-called "reverse discrimination" consists in reality of such "benefits" for Blacks as shorter lifespans, at least double the unemployment, wretched ghettoes, intense violent police repression, massive bureaucratic harassment, and outright starvation, etc. (For example, Governor Ray's recent criminal cuts in welfare and unemployment compensation should be noted, which affect a disproportionate number of Afro-Americans and are a brutal attack on the entire working class.)
MERIT is currently riding the crest of the Supreme Court decision on the Bakke case. This decision gave official sanction to the myth of "reverse discrimination" against whites and "special privileges" for minority nationalities. This decision is a signal by the bourgeoisie of its intentions to single out the Black people for more intense super-exploitation, and to maintain them as a reserve of unemployed workers and as cannon fodder for imperialist wars.
In Seattle, the capitalist state has also launched the fascist "anti-busing" movement with the intention of further segregating the schools. David Moberly, school superintendent and "former" agent of the U.S. State Department, was sent to Seattle to organize the fascist "anti-busing" movement. For over a year he yelled for "voluntary busing" and tried to create hysteria against 'forced,busing". Then, out of the blue in December, 1977, he himself highhandedly presented the Seattle Plan of "forced busing"! This was an obvious set-up.
Moberly and the government of the rich are not interested in the slightest in integrating the schools, but only in creating a racist movement of hysteria against Black people under slogans about "busing". Moberly on the one hand presents himself as being in favor of school integration, while with the other hand is actually mobilizing sentiment against it. This is a political swindle. The real "Seattle Plan" is not integration of the schools, but increased racist and fascist attacks on the Black people. It is through this swindle that Moberly brought into being the organization named CIVIC ("Citizens for Voluntary Integration Committee"). This racist group consists of a sordid gang of off-duty police and other racists just as does MERIT. It is also based on the same twisted racist logic as MERIT. CIVIC has consistently argued that "forced busing" deprives whites of "freedom of choice". They don't speak to the fact that Black children have no "freedom of choice" today except to attend the worse ghetto schools. CIVIC claims that whites are denied the "due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th amendment to the Constitution", the same legal argument that MERIT advances. It is ironic that MERIT is presenting its racist logic while wrapping itself in the 14th amendment to the Constitution. The 14th amendment was a legal outcome of the Civil War, a revolution which violently overthrew the Slave System, a revolution in which the Black slaves fought with an unstoppable fury for emancipation and equality.
The "anti-busing" movement also promotes the fraud of "reverse discrimination" too, and has grabbed onto this phrase following the Bakke decision. This is an indication that these two racist movements are finding a common ground from which to launch their racist attacks. It should also be noted that while both CIVIC and MERIT are organized by the government and staffed with police agents, they both falsely present themselves as fighters "against" the government! In one case, they are against the government's "forced busing"; in the other case, the government's "reverse discrimination". This is how the rich fascists attempt to gain the confidence of white workers who are seething with indignation against the ruling class.
Naturally, any democratic-minded person, to say nothing of communist, is in support of any integration that may occur because of the government's Seattle Plan for busing. But any such integration that does occur is against the will of the capitalist state which is systematically increasing segregation and the oppression of the minority nationalities. It is the masses, not the fascist U.S. "authorities", who are enthusiastic for integration, and have a burning hatred for the state-organized provocations.
MERIT and CIVIC are organizing in public mainly through legal channels. MERIT is proposing lawsuits against affirmative action programs particularly those involving quotas. (One intention of the Supreme Court in making the Bakke ruling was to give rise to the maximum number of spin-off court cases in order to stir up continual racist agitation against "reverse discrimination".) CIVIC is trying to have Initiative 350 passed which would further segregate the schools. Behind all of this noise and smokescreen of legal activity is their secret efforts to organize racist gangs to conduct violent racist and fascist attacks on Afro- Americans.
But the Afro-American people's struggle against racial discrimination and violent repression is steadily growing. The resistance of the workers of all nationalities to the fascist "anti-busing" movement has the ruling class extremely worried. For this reason the rich money-bags have brought out all sorts of opportunists, including "liberal" government officials to ~disrupted Oppose the movement of resistance to fascism. Black misleaders such as Benjamin Hooks, head of the NAACP, are urging the Black people to "have faith in the system", to believe that "the government is a friend of the Black people", etc. A network of agents has been set up in the Black community to promote "racial harmony". This is the "harmony" of being dashed to the ground by the enemy, or of being segregated and attacked in more "peaceful" ways. Other opportunists have been running around begging the state to "Ban CIVIC", which is like asking the government to ban itself. They call CIVIC "KKK", "Nazis", etc., but hide the fact that it is state-organized. They do this in order to promote the illusionary reformism of the state outlawing them, and thus try to keep the people passively waiting for their enemy to actually become their savior.
All of the propaganda of the monopoly capitalist "liberals" is designed to oppose the active resistance of the masses to racist and fascist attacks. In this way they work hand in hand with the open reactionaries to organize the fascist mass movement. For example, Mayor Royer has set up the Peaceful School Desegregation Task Force and called on the Afro-Americans to rely on it to maintain peace and prevent violent attacks. In reality, the Task Force has been created to protect the fascists and to attack any anti-fascist struggle waged by the masses and the Marxist-Leninists. The heart of this Task Force is the police. Suffice it to mention the savage police attack against the COUSML militants and progressive people at an "anti-busing" meeting of CIVIC on January 26th in Rainier Valley. Through this event and in the subsequent trial, the comrades exposed the full-blown police activity in the "anti-busing" organization and in the planning of its activities. This blows the cover off Royer's "neutral" police task force which is to be brought out into action when the schools open in September. The police have actually been given extraordinary powers of arrest on and around school property in the fall, as well as increased spying and harassment powers.
To back up the "anti-busing" and "reverse discrimination" movements, the Seattle Police Guild is campaigning for expanded legal authority to terrorize the masses and shoot them down in cold blood. This is being done through Initiative 15 which is being pushed under hysteria about "crime". This concretely shows that the police are an instrument to violently suppress the masses, the domestic armed wing of the state, its unfailing support.
The democratic and progressive people of all nationalities must be keenly aware of the prevailing dangers represented in the state-organized fascist movements. A vigorous anti-fascist movement to actively resist growing fascism in Seattle must be organized.
There are only two paths open to the struggling masses. One is the path of reformism, of compromise with the government, of non-violent passive resistance to the reactionary violence of the state. The other path is that of revolutionary struggle against the government, of active resistance to racial discrimination and violent repression, waging a determined tit-for-tat struggle against the enemies of the working class and oppressed people. The only path to defeat growing fascism is the path of active resistance, such as that displayed by the COUSML militants on January 26th and afterwards against the violent and "legal" attacks of the state.
The precious gains of the unprecedented Afro- American people's movements of the 60's were the experience and development of the revolutionary struggle, and the great moral authority that this struggle gave to the revolutionary ranks. The movement of the oppressed nationalities retains its great power to once again rock U.S. imperialism to its very foundations. With Carter's fascist offensive and the racist attacks, the monopoly capitalist dictators are only lifting a rock to drop it on their own feet.
DOWN WITH THE FASCIST FRAUD OF "REVERSE DISCRIMINATION"!
DOWN WITH THE FASCIST "ANTI-BUSING" MOVEMENT!
DEFEND THE AFRO-AMERICAN PEOPLE'S MOVEMENT AGAINST RACIAL DISCRIMINATION AND VIOLENT REPRESSION AND FOR COMPLETE EMANCIPATION!
PROLETARIANS, UNITE!
WAGE REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE AGAINST RACIST ATTACKS! End.
On a daily basis for the last two and one-half years the capitalist news media has been trying to whip up hysteria about busing in Cleveland. But busing is not the problem. The problem is that the rich and their government are trying to organize a violent racist and fascist "anti-busing" movement to attack the right of the Black people to attend integrated schools. The government is launching this movement right at a time when the resistance movement of the working class and people to the attempts of the rich to make them pay for the capitalist economic crisis is growing. The rich hope to disrupt the unity of the working class and suppress the revolutionary struggle against the rich and their government by singling out the Black people for attack. The "anti-busing" movement is part of the program of the government to consolidate the fascist rule of the rich by first attacking Black people. In this way the U.S. government follows in the steps of Hitler, who consolidated fascism over the German people by first attacking the Jews.
The leaders of the "anti-busing" movement like Denerell of CORK try to present themselves as leaders of a popular democratic movement opposed to "judicial tyranny", "big government pushing people around", etc. The government in the U.S. at all levels is the dictatorship of the rich, and on a daily basis it forces the workers and people to submit to exploitation by the rich and forces the working masses to pay huge sums in taxes to finance this huge military-bureaucratic apparatus and subsidize the various adventures of the monopoly capitalists. How is it then that the leaders of the "anti-busing" movement, with all the things that big government daily forces down people's throats, have suddenly come forward as knights in shining armor to fight "big government" on the question of busing? The reason is that these fine gentlemen (most of whom are already government officials riding on people's backs or aspiring to become such officials) are not opposed to the government which is the dictatorship of the rich but are simply using demagogy against the government which everybody hates, to cover over the racist nature of the movement they are organizing--a movement which actually strengthens this government. Denerell, Parenti and other leaders of the "anti-busing" movement realize that if they came out openly with their racist program of violent attacks on the Black people, they could not get any support from the white working masses who are opposed to racism. So instead they start out with lots of anti-government demagogy to draw people in initially, while planning to develop their full racist program of violent attacks on Black people and open nazi terrorism later. These are the same tactics used by the leaders of the "anti-busing" movement in Boston and Louisville, where the "anti-busing" movement was known for its violent attacks on Black people and progressive whites.
All the leaders of the "anti-busing" movement constantly rail against Judge Battisti as a "judicial tyrant" while the liberals and opportunists in the Black community praise him as a champion of civil rights, a protector of the Black people. But the fact is that Battisti, with advice of the U.S. Justice Department, is directing the show in organizing the "anti-busing" movement. For two and one-half years he has been doing everything possible to present school integration in the worst light, to present it as an evil which he is going to force down people's throats because "it's the law". For instance, why is it that in May 1977 Battisti delayed integration of the schools for a year on the excuse that the Cleveland school system had not obtained any buses and that he wanted to be assured of a "safe and efficient transportation system", but now in July of 1978, when he still hasn't got a single bus, not a single bus route planned, he is saying that he is going ahead with busing in the fall? This can only be a deliberate attempt to create maximum confusion and maximum inconvenience for people, so as to create an "anti-busing" hysteria. Or, for another example, why is it that when the school levy failed, Battisti threatened to increase taxes anyhow? Is this not an attempt to equate school integration not only with inconvenience but with higher taxes? The "anti-busing" leaders couldn't ask for a better move. (If the government really wanted to integrate the schools, if it really wanted to improve the quality of the schools -- as far as numbers of teachers, textbooks, etc. --it could certainly find the money out of all the taxes that are already extorted from the working masses at the state, local and federal levels. But the government does not want to do this.)
The point is that Battisti is not organizing busing, but opposition to his own busing plan. For all their protests against Battisti, the leaders of the "anti-busing" movement are united with him in the government's real program of attacking the Black people and the working class.
The government is not now and never has been for integration. Over the past 80 years in Cleveland and other northern cities, as well as in the South, the rich and their government have carried out a program of forcibly segregating the Black people, confining them to live in certain neighborhoods and to go to only certain schools, and excluding them from certain jobs. The capitalists and their government segregate Black people for two reasons: 1) to keep Black people in an inferior position; 2) to disrupt the unity of the working class by physically separating the Black workers and people from the rest and attacking them. The rich have not given up this policy but instead they are launching an offensive to take revenge for the heroic revolutionary movement of the Afro-American people in the 1960's. The "anti-busing" movement is part of this reactionary offensive of the rich and their government to drive the Black people back to the barbaric system of Jim Crow segregation and crush the revolutionary movement of the working class.
The government not only organizes the "anti-busing" movement, but it also has a program to disorganize resistance to the "anti-busing" movement. Numerous liberal professors and opportunist leaders of the Black community have been sent from meeting to meeting to tell the Afro-American people and white workers and people who already support integration that they should not fight the "anti-busing" movement but should instead put their faith in promises by various government officials of "peaceful desegregation", that they should be non-violent and not resist violent attacks by racist gangs organized by the "anti-busing" groups and the police but should have faith that the police will protect them. These opportunists are not only setting the Afro-American people up for attack, they are also protecting the "anti-busing" movement. Where the "anti-busing" movement has been confronted and its reactionary violence militantly resisted, as in Louis- ' ville, it has quickly lost its mass support and been exposed as the racist anti-working class movement that it is.
The issue facing the Afro-American people and the workers of all nationalities is to fight and smash up the "anti-busing" movement and all the racist and fascist attacks launched by the government of the rich. This task must be taken up with the same vigor and courage shown in the heroic revolutionary movement and rebellions of the 1960's. Smashing the "anti-busing" movement will greatly strengthen, unify and inspire the revolutionary movement of the working class and oppressed people to overthrow the monopoly capitalist dictators.
Issued by:
Cleveland Branch, Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists
July 27, 1978 End.
Now it is out for everyone to see -- the "anti-busing" movement is a racist, anti-working class movement organized by and protected by the government! Milt Schulman, that rich arch-racist slumlord and lawyer who slanders Afro-Americans as "animals" and Puerto Ricans and poor white workers as "pimps", is the leading spokesman of this racist movement. The "anti-government" mask of this racist and fascist movement is fast being dropped. Judge Frank Battisti has come out to give the racists his blessing, and the police have come out to protect the racists and attack those who fight the racists.
For years the "anti-busing" leaders have been crying about "judicial tyranny", calling Battisti a "dictator", etc. But now it comes out that they are working together with Battisti to organize the "anti-busing" movement to attack the Afro-American people and split and suppress the entire working class. On August 9, Milt Schulman organized a racist "anti-busing" rally at Lincoln West High School. Because of the tremendous indignation of the masses of people in Cleveland against this arch-racist, the Cleveland Board of Education was forced to make a show of preventing Schulman from using this building paid for out of the taxes extorted from the working people of Cleveland. But Judge Frank Battisti declared that fascist Schulman had the "right" to hold his meeting at Lincoln West. He openly protected the "right" of racists and fascists to insult and organize attacks on the Afro-American people. On Friday August 11, the Cleveland Police were sent to protect Schulman and attack the anti-fascist masses who wanted to punish this vile racist anti-working class scum. If the government upholds the "rights" of racists to organize to attack the rights of Afro-American people to attend integrated schools, then obviously it considers that the Afro-Americans and other oppressed people have no real rights which the government respects.
The COUSML has long been pointing out that the "anti-busing" movement is part of a racist and fascist offensive of the government of the rich to attack Afro-American people and split and suppress the working class. Now Battisti's blessing for Schulman and the police protection have proved what we have been saying all along -- that Battisti and the government are not organizing busing but are in fact doing everything to help the "anti-busing" movement get organized.
Workers and Afro-Americans: the rich and their government are trying to get out of the economic and political crises wracking this country by pushing the burden onto the backs of the working masses and consolidating the fascist dictatorship of the rich. In their fascist offensive the rich and their government single out the Afro-American people and other oppressed nationalities for first attack just like Hitler first attacked the Jews in his drive to consolidate fascist dictatorship over the German people. It is a vital necessity for the whole working class to smash the government's fascist "anti-busing" movement and actively combat this growing fascism with revolutionary struggle.
The resistance to the "anti-busing" movement is already beginning. On Wednesday night when Schulman held his racist "anti-busing" meeting, anti-fascist Puerto Rican youth and workers courageously denounced and harassed the racists and fascists throughout their meeting. Even though the anti-fascist youth were outnumbered by the racists and even though the racists were protected by numerous plainclothes police, the resistance of the young anti-fascists scared the racists to death!
On Friday, August 11th, over 100 Puerto Rican, white and Afro-American people demonstrated in front of Schulman's law office to denounce Schulman. When racist Schulman showed his face he was loudly denounced by the masses, and a Puerto Rican youth punished this fascist for his racist insults. When the Cleveland Police arrested the brave young defender of the dignity of the Puerto Rican community, dozens of people gathered to denounce the racist police and demand the youth's release. The police had to get reinforcements. All glory to the anti-fascist youth and workers who are fighting the racism and fascism of the rich and their state!
Afro-Americans and Puerto Ricans and workers of all nationalities must take it into their own hands to resist and smash the "anti-busing" movement, for it is clear that the rich and their government are protecting and organizing it. Smashing the "anti-busing" movement will be a powerful impetus to uniting and advancing the revolutionary struggle of the working class and people to overthrow the monopoly capitalist dictators who daily exploit and humiliate the working masses.
(The above is a leaflet issued by the Cleveland Branch of the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists, August 12, 1978.) End.
In recent weeks, the William Z. Foster Bookstore, a progressive bookstore which disseminates the Marxist-Leninist politics of the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists and provides Marxist-Leninist and revolutionary literature to the progressive forces in the Boston area, has again been subject to reactionary police attacks. The first attack took place on July 31 in broad daylight when the bookstore was closed. According to witnesses in the neighborhood, a man was seen throwing something at the door which momentarily ignited gasoline on the ground. A five-gallon gasoline can and a dog dish, allegedly full of gasoline, were on the doorstep but didn't ignite. As the gasoline burned itself out, the man was seen just walking away from the bookstore as if he were on an afternoon stroll. Meanwhile, two police detectives just happened to appear on the scene, then a police cruiser and a fire truck arrived.
Two weeks after this very suspicious "arson attempt", a second attack was reported. Again there was a gas can with a wick, but this time with no fire. Instead a note was attached saying something to the effect that this was the "final warning".
This very strange business is clearly part of the recently stepped-up campaign of harassment of the bookstore by the police. It is a crude and vicious attempt to shut the bookstore down, to suppress the revolutionary literature and the Marxist-Leninist politics of the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists. They have already succeeded in panicking the landlord with the fear of the loss-of his property. The reactionaries are openly trying to scare the comrades running the bookstore and the many residents of the building and the people of the community with the gangster technique of a threatened "torching". The Boston Herald American clearly spelled out the reactionaries terms. Under the headline, "Tragedy Averted", this bourgeois newspaper egresses great "concern" about "a possible tragedy... when a Molotov cocktail failed to ignite a five-gallon can of gasoline", thus deliberately hiding the fact that it was clearly just a set-up to scare people which didn't even damage the door. The article stresses the fact that there is a "Communist hammer and sickle symbol above the door", implying that such "tragedies" as arson attacks are simply bound to happen to communist bookstores. And, just to make sure, the article provides the name and address of the landlord for the convenience of every assorted fascist in the area to further the campaign of intimidation.
This is the second time in the four years the William Z. Foster Bookstore has been at 91 River Street that it has been threatened with arson. The first was in March of 1974 when a fire-bomb was thrown into the store. That attempt to suppress the revolutionary political work of the bookstore failed miserably, but the reactionaries have not given up.
These latest attacks on the bookstore are only the most recent of a long series of systematic provocations and harassment by the police. Undercover and uniformed police maintain a constant surveillance over the bookstore. Provocateurs are sent in who have no business there and who attempt to provoke a fight with the comrades in the store with fascist and anti-communist remarks, are shown the way to the door, and they immediately reappear with the police who use the "incident" to threaten and harass the comrades. Recently there have been incidents where the police have gone so fast as to attempt to suppress the workers in the bookstore from putting up revolutionary posters on their own bookstore wall! While the reactionaries try to claim that it is the ordinary working people who supposedly have some contradiction with the communists and are the source of the attacks on the bookstore, the entire four-year history of police harassment as well as the extremely suspicious police activity during the latest arson threats, show the opposite; that it is the fascist police goons of the reactionary bourgeoisie who attack the communists, the progressive and democratic masses, the working class and people as a whole. At the same time, the working people in the community, on a straightforward democratic basis, fully support the bookstore against the attacks of the police and correctly assess these attacks as threats to their own basic interests. The community backs the stand of the comrades not to be intimidated by reactionaries and to actively resist fascism.
The fascist police-reactionaries in Boston are well acquainted with the Marxist-Leninists' stand of refusing to capitulate in the face of the attacks of reactionaries. This past April, the South Boston Marshals -- a government organized gang of racists of the fascist "anti-busing" movement -- received a good thrashing by the COUSML militants who put this line into practice. Fifteen Marshals came to a downtown hotel to smash up a public meeting that was organized there by COUSML for the historic Internationalist Rally of nineteen Marxist-Leninist communist parties and organizations which was successfully held in Montreal on April 30th. But the puffed-up and cocky Marshals received the shock of their lives when the Marxist-Leninists stopped them from getting even one inch into the meeting room. Within a few short minutes of fighting the fascist thugs were running for their miserable lives, dragging off their injured and leaving some of their jackets, shoes, clumps of hair and blood behind. As soon as the Marshals (who boasted that five of their gang were off-duty police) had fled, uniformed thugs quickly appeared to suppress the mobilizing for the Internationalist Rally. But the Marxist-Leninists stood firm and went right on with their plans.
In the same way, the recent reactionary attacks on the bookstore will not intimidate the progressive people nor suppress its revolutionary work. While the bookstore has the support of the masses, who take the stand of refusing to bow down before threats and intimidation, the gangsters and gun thugs of the bourgeoisie are extremely isolated and are thoroughgoing cowards. Just as the reactionary attacks on the William Z. Foster Bookstore have failed in the past, they will fail today. End.
Over the past weeks we have witnessed the savage murder of Arthur Miller and a number of attacks on Black and Hispanic youths by the police and gangs of fascists around the community.
On Wednesday June 14, 1978, Arthur Miller, a Black resident of Crown Heights, was savagely beaten to death by dozens of policemen and his brother Samuel was beaten and arrested on criminal charges; two days later on June 16th, Victor Rhodes, a black youth, was beaten into a coma by over fifty (50) fascist thugs from the racist vigilante group called the "Hassidim Patrol". This fascist vigilante squad is legally armed, trained by New York City police, financed by city funds and has radio contact with the police precincts around the Crown Heights area; and recently Shorty Bonilla was beaten in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn.
The media has cunningly attempted to mystify the circumstances around Arthur Miller's murder saying that he attacked and provoked gangs of policemen and "died" in the course of a "scuffle". Various eyewitnesses have clearly pointed out that he was murdered by the policemen who jumped him when he came to his brother's (Samuel) assistance and called on the policemen to talk it over peacefully. The policemen were engaged in their common practice of harassment of our youth. They were roughing up Samuel under the pretext of checking on his driver's license, auto insurance and unpaid summonses.
Brothers and Sisters, these attacks by gangs of fascists backed by the state, and by the police force, are not new to us. The slaying of Claude Reese, Clifford Glover, Randy Evans and many other of our youth by the state, has left its mark in our memories. Our people in the oppressed communities have a long history of vigorously resisting these attacks-- likewise, around the recent murder of Arthur Miller and the savage beatings of Black and Hispanic youth, the people again showed deep hatred for this vicious system of monopoly capitalism which has in its service, the police and fascist gangs whose job it is to intimidate, harass and murder our people to defend the rich big boys in this country. All around, people are asking, "what can we do?" Many people have come out to show their determination to resist these attacks by attending the many meetings and demonstrations around Arthur Miller's murder, which were organized by certain elements in the community. Still many, fed up with the meaningless repeating cycles that these events are always guided through, sat back to see the various traitors and poverty pimps in the Black community siphon off the deeply rooted sentiment for resistance, along the path of "militant" begging, compromises, appeals and legal rigmarole. All designed to exhaust our energy, frustrate more of our people and stamp out our militancy, many politicians came to use the issue to get us to vote for them.
LET US LEARN WELL FROM OUR PAST EXPERIENCE
We must draw the lessons from our past experiences on this question of fascist and racist attacks on our people, in order that our struggle move ahead and is not held back, it is important that we examine this critically.
The working class and oppressed people have a right to ask of everyone swearing in its name --Who are you? Where do you come from? What path do you propose for our struggle? Where does this path lead us?
Now, let us learn from the events after Arthur Miller's murder and the countless examples before this, to see how the gentlemen who took leadership of things, answer these questions. These gentlemen were the Black politicians, reactionary elements who call themselves nationalists, various other "revolutionaries" and certain preachers. They had control of things, just as in the past, and just as in the past, they did their dirty work --"militantly".
These elements "militantly" demanded a meeting with the police commissioner and the mayor "to determine the facts surrounding the death of Arthur Miller" and called on them to "identify and suspend" the police officers who initially responded to the radio call (10133 - officer in distress), and they further "demanded" the removal of the 77th precinct from the New York Police Department. "There must be no longer a 77th precinct", they shouted -we imagine that the other police precincts are just fine. They said that the problem of these attacks on our people would be solved by having more Black policemen on the police force. These are very dangerous ideas, brothers and sisters. It is intended to spread confusion as to who is to blame for these attacks on our people. The mayor, commissioner of police, the police themselves represent and defend the interests of the rich rulers of this country. The actions of policemen are no mystery -- this is what they are trained to do. But these leaders do not point this out - they hope that by getting us to attack individual policemen and precincts, they can make these murders and vicious attacks seem accidental and therefore, salvage the entire rotten system that gave rise to this. In fact, they are desperately trying to build our faith in this system and its direct agents, Mayor Koch and the Police Commissioner.
These gentlemen presented the issue as if the problem is just individual racists or insane cops. Some advanced more militant sounding slogans such as "STOP KILLER COPS". In this way, they mystify the reason for police murder and brutality -- in that they want us to make believe that the murder of our brothers and sisters is simply due to certain accidentally evil or insane cops. As if a few "mad men" snuck into the police force one foggy night, and corrupted these decent gentlemen whose only purpose is really to direct traffic and cross old ladies across the street. With this criminal lie they call for "the immediate administration of psychological and or psychiatric tests for all members of the department to establish and evaluate their emotional and mental stability and fitness to serve the public."-- Black News. Brothers and sisters, the brutality of the police is no accident. This is what they are trained to do. They are not here to defend everybody or every class--they are there to defend the rulers of this wicked system of exploitation and oppression.
CAST AWAY ILLUSIONS
The oppressors in this country have not gone to all lengths to establish an extensive police service, FBI, national guard, etc. to defend us. No! It is to protect their class that they spend billions of dollars every year on grooming these legal "hit-men". It is for these reasons that no amount of "Civilian Review Boards" or "Community Control Boards" could "control" the brutality of the police. These boards have always proven to be a sham, to close our eyes -- to put us to sleep. The "leaders" who come to us with this are simply the agents of the rich in this country, disguised as militants. They have a definite role--to douse the flames of rebellion.
Our own experiences on the job and in the community teaches us that the police, national guards, etc., are there to defend the exploiters. When we go on strike at the work place -- whose side do they come out on behalf of, with their riot sticks, guns, tear gas ? -- to defend the property and lives of the bosses who exploit the workers. When we organize to get services in the community such as decent housing -- whose side do they come on behalf of--the landlord barons. This is our daily experience. The entire police force, Black as well as white, defends the oppressors from our people. But no, the various traitors in the community are trying to close our eyes to our own experience. In fact, the reactionary nationalists in the group that calls itself EAST brought out a special edition of their newspaper -- Black News. They sang the following pitiful psalm --"There must come a day when young black children will look with respect and confidence at a black policeman because they see him respecting their mothers, cleaning up the community and above all, defending the community." (emphasis ours). They then laid out a list of demands begging for more Black police, "Civilian Review Boards" to control the police, and proposed training and tests which will "ensure" that the police are "fit" to "serve the public!'. This is an example of the utter servility, the unprincipled, dog-like slavishness of these elements to the monopoly capitalist class, the rulers and their government, courts, police, etc. Then, to top it all, the EAST proposes that "the people must decide to answer for the death of Miller" by involving ourselves in "registering and voting, organizing block associations,.... " And in order to give such vile treachery of Black people some credibility, they place a quote from Malcolm X next to such rubbish.
The EAST has even outdone the bourgeois black politicians, the black faces in high places, whom people have long ago labelled "poverty pimps." They are the vote-catchers for these poverty pimps.
WE MUST NOT RELY ON THE STATE AND ITS AGENTS. WE CAN EXPECT NO CURES FROM THE GODS OF PLAGUE.
The various opportunists are trying to revive our faith in the rich rulers of this country. It was their state that murdered Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, George Jackson and Martin Luther King. It is the state with its various arms that carried out a systematic campaign to violently crush the heroic uprisings of the Afro-American people in the 1960's. They resorted to lies, slanders; passed repressive laws; backed fascist groups such as the KKK, the Nazis and the Jewish Defence League; they tried, imprisoned, beat, murdered and tortured our heroic brothers and sisters, parading them through their courts like ordinary criminals. They devised big plans of surveillance, conspiracy, wire tapping and harassment against the oppressed people. It is they who spread all kinds of racist slanders and slurs against Black and other oppressed minorities. It is they that funded the fascist "expert" Shockley who "proved" that black people were genetically inferior to whites.
The experience of workers and oppressed people the world over teaches us, and our own experience verifies that the exploiters wear two faces conveniently, one of the hangman, the other of the priest. When they could not wipe out the struggles solely by force and bloodshed, they passed various reforms and established various programs, manned by their hand- picked agents and lackeys in our communities, to put us to sleep.
Yet today, various forces are pimping off the issue of the savage murder of Arthur Miller, to revive our faith in the same legal courts, government and police. They come wearing many disguises. We must rip off their every mask. The opportunists are doing a good job for the black bourgeois politicians, who are trying to cash in on some votes, to get up higher in the United States senate, congress, etc. These gentlemen want to ride our backs to accomplish their own ends.
These elements, along with the news media, are together carrying out a plan to confuse what the real issue is around these fascist attacks. The media carries big reports about "RACIAL TENSIONS", and therefore makes our just resistance to these state organized fascist attacks seem to be racist. It is the rich and their state which is racist to the core -- not the people.
Brothers and sisters, let us organize to fight these attacks -- blow for blow. Let us block the path of the traitors in the community, expose their true alliance with the state, denounce and expose their wild schemes to confuse and frustrate our struggle. Let us rip the mask off the hideous face of the ruling class in this country. Wherever you are --in the tenants associations, block associations, community groups, steel-band yards, the factories, shipyards, nursing homes -- give the line of ACTIVE RESISTENCE TO THESE FASCIST ATTACKS BY THE STATE AND ITS AGENTS. Give the line, SELF-DEFENSE IS THE ONLY WAY. THIS IS THE CALL THAT WE GIVE. End.
The "Communist" Labor Party of the United States of North America ("C"LP, USNA) is an infamous sectarian revisionist grouping that is now trying to unite with the official revisionists of the "C"PUSA and to join the "left" wing of the Democratic Party. What is the social basis for such blatant opportunism? Comrade Lenin teaches: "...that objectively the opportunists are a section of the petty bourgeoisie and a certain strata of the working class who have been bribed out of imperialist super-profits and converted into watchdogs of capitalism and corrupters of the labor movement." ("Imperialism and the Split in Socialism") The "C"LP, USNA's recent electoral campaign provides a vivid confirmation of the truth of Lenin's statement.
In early August, the "C"LP completed one of its big campaigns that has gone on for over a year now. The campaign was to run a candidate, General Baker, in the Democratic Party primary for the 9th district seat in the Michigan House of Representatives. After losing the primary, the "C"LP complained that "None of the 'official organizations', the Democratic Party or the UAW, endorsed General Baker." But if it is any consolation to the disgruntled losers, it is clear that the content of the "C"LP's campaign was every bit as bankrupt as that of the UAW trade union bureaucrats and the Democratic Party hacks with whom the "C"LP is trying to merge. Essentially, the political content of the "C"LP*s campaign was to give a "communist" sugar-coating to the politics of the Democratic Party and of the labor aristocracy. This fact was easily recognized by a group of lawyers, who themselves are highly-trained professionals in the use of legal double-talk and unprincipled sophistry to keep every struggle of the workers in the bounds of capitalist legality and plea-bargaining capitulation. The lawyers formed the "Lawyers for Baker" which actively campaigned for the "C"LP candidate. This support from the lawyers --and "C"LP's open pride about these supporters -- is further evidence that the social base of the opportunists of the "CLP is not the working class, but rather the petty-bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy. In fact, the state chairman, Ron Glotta, of the "CLP proudly identified himself on campaign literature as an attorney.
The politics advocated by the "C"LP candidate in this campaign were all that of a bourgeois labor lawyer. Like the typical good lawyer, the "C"LP proved itself to be a faithful lackey of bourgeois law and parliamentary cretinism. According to the lawyers themselves who campaigned for Baker: "A voice like General Baker's in the legislature will defend and expand the rights of the poor, disabled, and accused -- working people in general, women and minorities in particular."
Thus, according to these lawyers, the "rights" of the "working people" can be "defend(ed) and expand(ed)" "in the legislature". The lawyers prettify the laws of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the role of the legislature precisely at the time that these laws are being fascized to the utmost. They say that the path forward for the workers is the path of begging the state for better laws. Besides obscuring the class nature of the law, the lawyers also ignore the fact that the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat is not based on law, but on force through the army, police, etc.
You can't blame a lawyer for being a lawyer. But just look at the following campaign propaganda of the "C"LP in the election campaign: "...the future of the labor movement is dependent upon the organization of the South. But, with the repressive anti-labor legislation that we face, organizing the South is a difficult thing. Thus, the Labor Reform Bill is a good thing. But it is not enough. Some laws cannot be reformed; they must be repealed. Employers will use the Taft-Hartley to undermine the Labor Reform Bill."
The "C"LP maintains, like the good lawyers they are, that "the future of the labor movement is dependent upon" whether or not the Labor Reform Bill is passed or the Taft-Hartley repealed. In their view, the fate of the workers hangs on the philanthropy of the capitalist Congress, and all the workers can do is hire a good lawyer, that is, elect a "C"LP candidate, to humbly plead their case, hat in hand, before the government. Behind this charade, the "C"LP is supporting the political deception practiced by the Democratic Party, which presents each attack on the workers and the oppressed nationalities as a "victory" for or a "concession" to "labor and the minorities". The "C"LP is campaigning for the Labor Reform Act, which is a fascist bill designed to strengthen the Taft-Hartley Act, smash strikes, further ban wildcat strikes and roving pickets, legalize labor spies and suppress the coal miners' movement, (see The Workers' Advocate. January 9, 1978) With a typical lawyer's cynical double-talk, the "C"LP says that the Labor Reform Act is a "good" thing, but that the Taft-Hartley Act is so bad it "cannot be reformed" but must be repealed. Unfortunately for the "CLP, the Labor Reform Act is precisely a series of amendments, a "reform", to the Taft-Hartley Act. But that's politics among the case-hardened labor bureaucrats and labor lawyers. When they want to praise the capitalist state and keep the workers under the control of the "law" which allegedly stands above classes, they talk about the "National Labor Relations Act" and sing praises to the Wagner Act of 1935. When they want to sound militant and keep credibility among the workers, they fiercely denounce the Taft-Hartley -- or at least Section 14-b. They always keep mum about the fact that the present NLRA is precisely Title I of the fascist Taft-Hartley Act, that the NLRA and the Taft-Hartley Act have been precisely one and the same ever since the Taft-Hartley Act was passed in 1947.
It is not surprising then to see that the "C"LP election propaganda brags about all the labor hacks, government bureaucrats, lawyers and professors that supported their candidate. The social base of the "C"LP is precisely the labor aristocracy and the petty-bourgeoisie. While it is the revisionist and social-democratic politics of the labor traitors to have the world-view of a bourgeois lawyer and to take part in the growing fascism of the U.S. bourgeoisie (especially as represented by the "Democratic" Party), it is the politics of the proletariat to actively resist the fascist attacks of the monopoly capitalist class on the road to smashing up the state and overthrowing the monopoly capitalist system. It was the idealist phrase-mongers of the "C"LP who made a career out of denouncing the American working class as "bribed", but the facts show just the opposite to be true. While the revolutionary U.S. proletariat is increasingly smashing through the chains of bourgeois legality in the rising working class movement, it is the "C"LP that represents the bribed strata of U.S. imperialism, and is thus down on its knees worshipping before the Democratic Party and the bourgeois legislatures. End.
DENOUNCE THE HOSPITAL'S CRIMINAL ASSAULT ON JEANNETTE WITKOWSKI!
(The following leaflet was issued at a hospital)
Last Saturday, Jeanette Witkowski, a worker in the dietary department, was severely burned by scalding water while working on the conveyor belt preparing food trays for the floors. The section of the main kitchen where the conveyor belt is located is extremely hot and crowded. Often-times, the temperature will rise well over 100 degrees in this area, with the steam used to heat food creating muggy and slippery conditions. The dietary aides working the conveyor belt are crammed into a small space in the corner of the kitchen, surrounded on two sides by the stove and oven and on the other sides by walls. The aisles leading to the conveyor are often cluttered with the carts needed to take food to the floors because there is no other space for them. Jeanette was working at this conveyor belt when boiling water tipped over and engulfed her body from the waist down, causing third degree burns. She had to be rushed to the emergency room of a nearby hospital where she is still being treated.
This serious injury suffered by a hospital worker is no "accident". It is a criminal assault for which the hospital administration is directly responsible -- an inevitable result of their "cost containment" program which they have consciously planned and organized to viciously attack the hospital workers. In fact, "cost containment" is the national policy of the big capitalists and their government -- the Carter administration -- for attacking all the hospital workers in the U.S. (and patients) in order to maximize the profits of the health capitalists and financiers such as Blue Cross-Blue Shield. According to the bourgeoisie, health care costs are so high because there are "too many" workers "loafing around the corridors of hospitals" and "collecting big pay checks", and so hospital costs must be "contained" by laying-off masses of workers (Blue Cross financiers recommend 20% on a national scale!) and over-working those who remain while driving down their wages. Of course, also according to the bourgeoisie, the huge profits of the health capitalists and financiers -- the real parasites in this society -- having nothing to do with the skyrocketing cost of medical care. Befitting its reputation as an institute of "advanced science and progress", the hospital administration has been implementing this cost containment program of the big capitalists and their government for some time now -- as every worker at the hospital knows, the tremendous over-work and speed-up allows for "no loafing", and over the past four years the "fat" has been decidedly "trimmed" from the workers' pay checks. In recent months, the hospital has escalated its cost containment attacks on the workers and patients in order to further enrich the Blue Cross money-bags by forcing even more work out of the staff and charging even higher rates of the patients.
The recent changes in the dietary department are a part of this "cost containment" attack of the bourgeoisie. Since the summer of 1977, numbers of dietary workers have been laid off or transferred, resulting in over-work of those remaining on the dietary staff. All floor kitchens have been closed down and the dietary workers crowded into the already crowded main kitchen area. Further, the administration has introduced a new dishwasher and a conveyor system for the food trays -- further crowding the dietary workers, increasing the most oppressive heat in the kitchen -- and making for especially unsafe working conditions.
All along the dietary workers have resisted these "cost containment" attacks, most notably organizing a walkout last May to protest the tremendous heat in the kitchen. This struggle forced the administration to grant certain concessions to the dietary workers -- giving way to their long-standing demand to have their wages upgraded and installing a fan to provide "better ventilation" (!). However, the dietary workers were not satisfied with these sops thrown their way by the administration to stop their resistance to "cost containment" and particularly to suppress their struggle against unsafe working conditions. Now that a dietary worker has very nearly been killed by the administrations' "cost containment" program, the dietary workers are more determined than ever to continue their fight against "cost containment" and the steadily worsening working conditions which are a part of this program.
The issue facing the dietary workers, and all workers in the hospital and hospitals throughout the U.S., is to actively resist the "cost containment" program of the Carter administration. The "cost containment" attacks on the hospital workers take different forms -- including worsening conditions, overwork, wage cuts, etc. -- and the forms for resisting it must necessarily vary according to the conditions. But one thing is certain, one thing is a basic principle: that the workers themselves must take up active resistance to these attacks, waging one struggle after another to resist the "cost containment" program of the bourgeoisie.
DENOUNCE THE HOSPITAL'S CRIMINAL ASSAULT ON JEANETTE WITKOWSKI!
DOWN WITH THE "COST CONTAINMENT" PROGRAM OF CARTER AND THE U.S. BOURGEOISIE!
ACTIVE MASS RESISTANCE IS THE ONLY WAY TO DEFEND THE WORKERS' BASIC INTERESTS! End.
(The following article is reprinted from Workers' Weekly, newsweekly of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist), of August 5, 1978, under the title "Oppose the Government's Five Per Cent Pay Policy! Oppose All Attempts to Make the Workers Pay for the Crisis!")
The "Labor" government pushed its 5% pay policy through parliament on July 25. The policy imposes a fourth year of "wage restraint", cutting wage increases from 10% per annum to only 5% over the next 12 months. This is a further stepping up of the government's policy of making the workers pay for the capitalist economic crisis and is certain to meet with still further resistance.
The Government "justified" this further attack on the workers with its usual lying propaganda that "wage increases cause price increases", that further "wage restraint" is needed to "curb inflation". However on the contrary, in the last four years, while the workers' wages have been held down under successive "wage restraint" measures, prices have continued to soar as inflation continued unabated. The result has been a savage cut in the real wages, in the standard of life of the working class; for example last year real wages declined by 8%. The aim of wage restraint is not to "curb inflation" at all, but to maintain and increase the monopoly capitalists' profits at the expense of the workers. Corresponding to the impoverishment of the workers, the big monopoly capitalist firms have made record profits in the course of the crisis. The government's policies are aimed at shifting the burden of the crisis onto the workers' backs.
The government's assertion that "if earnings increases are not held well below those of last year there is a danger of prices and incomes spiralling upwards again" is complete hypocrisy. This was illustrated by the recent massive increases in the salaries of "top people", i.e., of monopoly capitalists and their servants, the 40% increase for the police and other agents of the state's machinery of suppression, and the large increases for various privileged strata. The government's "restraint" is imposed only on the working class.
Inflation provides a most suitable means for the British monopoly capitalists to shift their crisis onto the workers of this and other countries. Hence inflation persists year after year throughout the crisis, just as it does in the other capitalist and revisionist countries. Under this inflation, price rises go on in an unrestrained fashion despite the fraudulent "price control" which does not prevent but simply legalizes the price rises, rises which moreover affect particularly the necessities comprising the greater part of workers' expenditure. The combination of the increase of prices through inflation with the holding down of wages has become one of the main methods used by the monopoly capitalists to maintain and increase their profits. This inflation is increased due to the chronic deficits caused by huge subsidies to monopoly capitalist firms, by the vast expenditure on war preparations and on the fascization of the state whereby the monopoly capitalist class suppresses the workers' struggles, and by other factors. Since inflation arises from the nature of capitalism and the needs of the monopoly capitalist class, all the programs instituted by that class for "curbing inflation" etc. are necessarily fraudulent. The "anti-inflation" measures such as the government's "pay policy" are simply measures to insure that inflation affects the working class and not the monopoly capitalist class. The only solution for the working class is to step up its struggles against the monopoly capitalist class and its government to maintain its real wages and defeat the "wage restraint" schemes.
The government relies on the labor aristocrats of the TUC (Trade Unions Congress) in order to impose its policies of wage restraint. For two years the trade union leaders agreed to the "social contract". With the rising workers' struggles against it, the formula of "social contract" was replaced by agreement of the TUC chieftains to the "10% pay policy guidelines" last year; while giving verbal "opposition", they viciously attacked the struggles of any sections of workers against these "guidelines", such as the miners and the firemen. This year they are following the same procedure. Whilst hypocritically voicing "opposition" to "the method" in the hope of deceiving the workers, they immediately issued a joint policy document with the government which tacitly accepted the 5% limit.
The labor aristocrats of the TUC preach class collaboration, calling on the workers to dampen down their struggles for higher wages. For this they use a variety of pretexts, such as "not harming Labor's election chances", etc., as if the last four years had not shown that the Labor and Conservative Parties are equally the enemies of the working class, the executives of the monopoly capitalist class. The trade union chieftains in fact uphold all the same basic lies as the government. For example they assert that "the only real way to run industry is through co-operation, NOT confrontation", a statement designed to dupe the workers into giving up their economic and other struggles while leaving the capitalists free to launch their economic and other attacks on the working class. They also say that "NOBODY benefits from inflation running at 20-30 per cent; we know that fact in the trade unions, and we won't forget that when we are bargaining". This is similarly designed to cover up the fact that inflation is precisely a method for benefiting the monopoly capitalists at the expense of the workers, and to persuade the workers to hold down their struggles. The labor aristocrats, while pretending to "oppose" further wage restraint, in reality act in close collusion with the government to induce the workers not to fight against the government's wage restraint measures.
However, just as the "social contract" went bankrupt in the face of the workers' determined struggles, so also the present wage restraint strategy of the Labor government and the TUC leaders will be defeated. The only path for the working class and its Marxist-Leninist party is the path of all-out struggle against the monopoly capitalist class to oppose all attempts to make the workers pay for the crisis. End.
The Committee for the Struggles of the People (CLP) addresses itself to international public opinion to denounce the repressive escalation that the bourgeois government of Carlos Andres Perez is launching in our country, trying to subdue the struggles of the people by actively developing the electoral farce of 1978, that every five years the dominant classes use to change representatives and in this way consolidate their domination over the Venezuelan people.
The third of June, the DISIP, the political police of the bourgeois state, detained the leading revolutionary Eder Puerta Aponte, in the city Maracay in the state of Aragua. They also detained Alejandro Rada, a 23 year-old student of agronomy at the Central University of Venezuela; Carmen Aranguren, a 53 year-old nationalized Basque teacher; Mirtha Marin, a 23 year-old teacher and Aura Penaz Del Vallo who is pregnant. For two days, the DISIP denied the detention of these people, making us fear for their lives and assume that they were subjected to tortures as this is the practice of the government which outside the country puts on itself the banner of greatest defender of human rights. On July 7, the DISIP admitted its detention of these people as a result of the denunciation by their friends and by the mobilization of the revolutionary forces. Carlos Andres Perez and his government are recognized representatives of American imperialism in our country who together with Carter are waging on a world scale a phoney campaign in defense of human rights that is unmasked by these very deeds that are occurring in Venezuela.
This repressive escalation has been developing for approximately a year and has recently been intensified throughout the country, in particular in the eastern region as part of the political military blockade implemented in this region with the fundamental objective of impeding the growing links that exist between the revolutionary movement and the broad masses, in this way guaranteeing Carlos Andre's Perez and his government a tranquil atmosphere for the "normal" unfolding and development of the election fraud and capitalist exploitation.
Up to July 7, there has been a total of 50 detainees in addition to those just mentioned, among whom are Margarita Oviedo, Carmen de Ocuna, savagely tortured and threatened with rape by 30 police thugs, Sixto Antonio Malave, Atilio Tirado, Jesus Tirado and others. It is apparent that Manuel Tirado Tirado, Marco Tulio Croquer, Ermenegildo Rojas, Domingo Antonio-Bello and Benigno Rodriguez participated in the tortures. These individuals, ex-revolutionaries who betrayed their principals and the people, have converted themselves into police functionaries who by informing to the repressive groups, have enabled them to detain members of various revolutionary Venezuelan organizations.
Of equal importance, on June 27, Ali del Carmen Torres, ex-fugitive of the prison La Pica, who escaped this past August 14, was detained. He joined the group of traitors just mentioned, informing on Carlos Araque Caroamo also an ex-fugitive of the San Carlos prison in January 1975.
This situation will be broadened and developed as Carlos Andre's Perez, in his last new year message said that he will make "the country clean of guerrillas and subversives". That is to say that it is all an orchestrated repressive campaign that has as its objective to try to control the struggles of the people, and by means of all these repressive measures, make stronger the bourgeois domination over the people and by means of all these repressive measures, make stronger the bourgeois domination over the people, looking to perpetuate this with the implementation of the election fraud by which the Venezuelan people are obligated to elect their next hangmen.
In the face of this situation, we make a call to the democratic, revolutionary, progressive organizations, to trade union organizations, etc., of the world to develop the denunciation and mobilize against the repression as they are able and unmask the violation of human rights and democracy in Venezuela that with great boasting Sr. Carlos Andres Perez claims in the international organizations he defends, while in our country these rights are continually denied.
HONOR THE LIVES OF:
Eder Puerta Aponte
Carmen Aranguren
Mirtha Marin
Alejandro Rada
Aura Perez Del Vallo
IN VENEZUELA HUMAN RIGHTS ARE VIOLATED!
IN VENEZUELA THE DEATH PENALTY IS APPLIED!
STOP THE MILITARY BLOCKADE IN THE PEASANT REGIONS OF THE EAST OF THE COUNTRY!
LIBERTY FOR ALL PRISONERS!
National Coordinating Committee of the Committee for the Struggles of the People
Armando Diaz, Eduardo Solorzano, Maria Jose Parada, Jose David Capielo, Domingo Rivero, Pedro Gonzalez Heredia, Argelia Silva, Jose Tomas Loreto.
Caracas, Venezuela, July 1978 End.
In Bolivia, the struggle of the proletariat and people against the savage ruling oligarchy and its foreign imperialist masters is being intensified. According to reports on July 28, armed Bolivian patriots recently carried out a powerful armed action against the forces of the fascist military dictatorship in an area sixty kilometers northeast of the capital, La Paz. The military junta has sent out a unit of police and soldiers on a punitive mission against the people of the area. The armed patriots ambushed the fascist forces, killing four fascist troops and wounding others. It was reported that similar armed actions are being carried out by patriots in other regions of the country as well.
These armed-actions are being carried out at a time when the broad masses of the workers and peasants of Bolivia are seething with hatred for the fascist military junta imposed on the people by U.S. imperialism and with hatred for the U.S. imperialists, themselves. In recent months in Bolivia there have been repeated waves of strikes, demonstrations and other mass actions to resist the savage exploitation and oppression of the local reactionaries and the foreign imperialists.
In an attempt to pacify the broad revolt of the Bolivian working class and people, the military junta took up the demagogic campaign of U.S. imperialist chieftain Jimmy Carter. An elections farce was staged to create the impression that the situation of savage exploitation and brutal oppression could be changed without the proletariat and people taking the initiative. This election was such a fraud, however, that rather than quelling the revolt of the masses of people, it only served as fresh kindling for the burning indignation of the people.
Thus, within a few days, the ruling oligarchy and the U.S. imperialists were forced to put aside their masks of "democratization" and human rights and to bare their fangs. Tanks rolled into the cities and a military coup instigated by the U.S. imperialists was launched against the fascist Banzer dictatorship by a rival military faction. The new dictator promptly announced that severe measures would be taken to suppress all resistance of the working class and people to the rule of the fascist oligarchy and the imperialists. The Bolivian workers and working people are intensifying their struggle and preparing themselves against any offensive that the new fascist dictatorship launches against the people. End.
The following article is reprinted from the July 24, 1978 issue of Albanian Telegraphic Agency.
In one of its recent issues the newspaper En Marcha, central, organ of the Communist Party of Ecuador (M-L) condemns the penetration of U.S. capital in Ecuador, as well as the policy of the Ecuadorian bourgeoisie which sells out the interests and the riches of the country, thus becoming a loyal servant of yankee imperialism.
Since 1969 till 1975 the foreign investments in Ecuador have increased 21.8 per cent yearly, but, the newspaper stresses, imperialism does not increase the investments lest they bring it huge profits. The statements that the foreign investments "assist" the development of the country, because they allegedly constitute "a great contribution and are capital" are false, because the foreign investments are nothing else but the presence of the big capitalist enterprises in the national economy. The great thirst for profits as well as their notorious activity are well known to all.
The representatives of the native bourgeoisie, the top officials, who have sold out the interests of the homeland, be they ministers of finance, industry or other officials -- servants of imperialism, all these puppets which constitute the basis upon which imperialism lies, have dished out countless rules and decrees which allow the multinational companies to plunder Ecuador.
Favored by the native bourgeoisie, which is linked with U.S. imperialism, besides 465 native companies, there operate also 197 foreign companies as well as 72 branches of foreign companies. But, the newspaper emphasizes, the foreign companies be they with fully foreign and mixed capital or foreign branches, though they are less in number than the native ones, draw larger profits than the local ones.
It follows from all this that it can be spoken only of a small, very dependent, deformed local industry, which is limited only in some branches of production.
In conclusion the newspaper En Marcha writes that "It is only the uninterrupted condemnation of yankee plunder, its constant exposure, the unity and the struggle against imperialism which will make possible the expulsion from our country of the main enemy of our country once and forever". End.
(The following article is reprinted from the Albanian Telegraphic Agency, July 23, 1978)
It is some years now that the actions in the countryside are gradually increasing writes A Classe Operaria, organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Brazil. The peasants' armed actions are spread throughout Brazil.
The article cites numerous cases of armed clashes between the peasants and the local and foreign exploiters in various areas of the country such as in Pontes and Lacerda, Mato Grosso, in Gleba Uniap, in Paragonimas, etc. A Classe Operaria stresses further on that besides these there are other areas of tension and powerful struggle, especially in San Francisco, Bahia and even on the coast of Rio de Jeneros. The clashes between the peasants and the landowners have assumed great proportions in this decade in the valley of Araguaia River. The partisan war in this region has led the peasant movement to a higher level.
Further on the article points out that today in Brazil only 46 big land properties possess as much land as two million and six hundred and seventeen thousand small owners. The dictatorship is leading the country towards sesmarias ( the division of the country into big areas administrated by rich families) This is the fruit of the policy dictated by the class interests of the local landowners, the bourgeoisie, the foreign capitalist groups and trusts which are penetrating deeper and deeper in agriculture as well.
The polarization and antagonism between those who do not posses land and the big landowners is increasing more and more, the process of the impoverishment and of the proletarization of peasantry is stepped up. In this way, the increase of tension in the countryside is inevitable. The struggle against the landowners will bring about new, broader clashes, interlacing them with the anti-imperialist struggle (especially in the plundered or occupied areas by the foreign monopolists), against the capitalist exploitation, against the military dictator ship, police and the army of the reaction. Fourteen years have elapsed, A Classe Operaria writes in conclusion, since the generals have been sowing the wind all over the country, but they will harvest the storm. End.
(The following article is reprinted from the Albanian Telegraphic Agency, August 3, 1978)
The newspaper El Pueblo, organ of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Chile, recently published an appeal of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Chile, in which it calls on the working class and the entire working people of Chile, to organize themselves, to take into their own hands their destiny and hurl themselves into the offensive against the reactionary fascist clique of Pinochet, against the boss of this clique, U.S. imperialism, and against its supporters of all shades.
Emphasizing that it is precisely the struggle of the proletariat and the other working masses that scares the bloodthirsty and despicable regime of Pinochet, the appeal says that "the dictatorship, ever since its advent to power, is intimidated from and knows that the outburst of the struggle of the working people, organized and led in a correct manner, will end with its overthrow. Having this in mind and in order to bind the working people hand and foot, it issued the decree 198 which prohibits and suppresses the free development of the activity of the trade unions"
Making an analysis of the events, the appeal emphasizes that "fascism did this because our trade union organization has always been in compliance with the laws enacted by the patrons, has been incorporated within the bourgeois legality and is led by the bosses'' who implement and respect these laws".
Our organizations must be independent, the appeal emphasizes, they must not depend on the laws and the other opportunist sectors which represent the exploiters.
The more the time passes, the appeal of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Chile concludes, the greater becomes the struggle, the more the dictatorship weakens. This shows that what we want to achieve is fully attainable. End.
The following are a few of the flood of messages and statements from around the world in support of socialist Albania. Each has been transcribed from the broadcasts of Radio Tirana, unless otherwise noted.
MESSAGE OF THE NATIONAL EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF CANADA (MARXIST-LENINIST).
In its letter, the National Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) says:
"With profound hatred and indignation, we learned of the hostile action taken by the government of the People's Republic of China against the glorious Party of Labor of Albania, the People's Socialist Republic of Albania and the entire Albanian people. It; violates every principle of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism and is an outright attack against the entire international proletariat and revolutionary forces. The Canadian proletariat stands firmly beside the Albanian Party, people and state for refusing to bow down to pressure and blackmail. The Party of Labor of Albania, under the farsighted leadership of Comrade Enver Hoxha, was the first to recognize Khrushchov revisionism, identify its features and wage courageous struggle against it and has carried a mighty and courageous struggle against all great power chauvinist attempts to bring Albania to her knees. Defense of Socialist Albania, liberated homeland of the international proletariat, is out sacred duty. We pledge to double our efforts in defense of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism and resolutely oppose revisionism and opportunism of all hues, especially the new opportunist trend based on the anti-Leninist theory of 'three worlds'."
STATEMENT OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE WORKERS' AND PEASANTS' COMMUNIST PARTY OF IRAN
The statement of the Central Committee of the Workers' and Peasants' Communist Party of Iran reads in part:
"We learned that the Chinese government has arbitrarily and unilaterally stopped its economic relations with the government of Socialist Albania. It is clear to us that under the leadership of the Party of Labor of Albania with Comrade Enver Hoxha at the head, Socialist Albania has fought and is fighting for the defense of Marxism-Leninism. It has never agreed to barter any of its Marxist-Leninist principles. Closely united with the people, the Party of Labor of Albania has upheld the glorious banner of Marxism-Leninism. In fact, the recent economic blockade against Albania has the same character as the one imposed by Khrushchov. The proletarians of the entire world sincerely sympathize with the Albanian people and the Party of Labor of Albania, which is holding aloft the banner of Marxism- Leninism and powerfully support them."
COMMUNIQUE OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF ITALY (MARXIST-LENINIST)
(In its issue dated Tuesday, August 1, 1978, Nuova Unita, Central Organ of the Communist Part) of Italy (Marxist-Leninist), carries the text of the following communique issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Italy (Marxist-Leninist), translated from the original Italian by the People's Canada Daily News:)
STRENGTHEN THE UNITY OF THE FRATERNAL PARTIES ON THE BASIS OF MARXISM-LENINISM AND PROLETARAIN INTERNATIONALISM
UPHOLD THE CORRECT POSITIONS OF THE PARTY OF LABOR OF ALBANIA
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Italy (Marxist-Leninist), meeting during these days to discuss the developments of the class struggle in the international field, took up for examination the decision of the Chinese leaders to sever the agreements with Albania for economic and military aid and to recall all technicians. The Central Committee resolutely condemns this serious action, which is contrary to all Marxist-Leninist and internationalist principles and contrary to all freely established norms between parties. It is a vicious repressive measure put into effect by the Chinese leaders after seeing that pressure and blackmail failed to make Albania adhere to their anti-Marxist politics based on the "theory of three worlds".
The "theory of three worlds", a new variant of modern revisionism, has the same essential component in common with the other revisionist theories-- Khrushchovite, Titoite, Eurocommunist, etc.: the negation of the class analysis based on the basic contractions of our epoch, as analyzed by Lenin an Stalin; the liquidation of the leading role of the proletariat and the strategy of proletarian revolution; the liquidation of the role of the Communist Party which is the conscious and organized vanguard of the proletariat; the liquidation of the anti-imperialist struggle for the liberation of the peoples, led by the working class; the liquidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat; the liquidation of the International Communist Movement; the replacement of proletarian internationalism by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalism.
The Communist Party of Italy (Marxist-Leninist), facing the pressures and blackmail of the Chinese leading group, has from the start rejected the "theory of three worlds", whose application in Europe would mean basically to support the political, economic and military power of the monopoly bourgeoisie in the sphere of the EEC and NATO, support the presence of U.S. imperialism on this continent, renounce the struggle for national independence and socialism. For the proletariat in Europe to follow the "theory of three worlds" would mean to allow the monopoly bourgeoisie to intensify its exploitation and repression; it would mean to straightforwardly capitulate to imperialism, become cannon fodder in the bourgeois and imperialist armies; it would mean to become accomplice of the European imperialist bourgeoisie in their exploitation of the peoples of Africa, Latin America and Asia.
The Communist Party of Italy (Marxist-Leninist), which has already denounced amongst the Italian working masses the reactionary nature of the politics of the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, based on the "theory of three worlds", today denounces their unilateral and arbitrary action against Albania. Such an act shows with particular clarity that the anti-social- imperialist and anti-revisionist posture of the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party is nothing but a camouflage: in their confrontation with Socialist Albania, they have taken recourse to typically Khrushchovite methods, and while they seek to sabotage the construction of socialism in Albania, they support the Yugoslav "socialism of self-management", feeding the work of sabotage and confusion against socialism instigated by Titoite revisionism, in the service of world capitalism.
Such an act is carried out in the context of the chauvinist politics that the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, while they are advocating bourgeois restoration internally, are pushing on the international front to transform China into a superpower. They are uniting with the reactionary forces the world over, supporting colonialist-type operations and the governments which are at the beck of the imperialists, opposing the struggles of the oppressed and exploited. This politics, which goes against the very interests of the Chinese proletariat and people, will arouse the opposition of the genuine communists and will lead to the sharpening of the class contradictions in China.
This politics constitutes a threat for the peoples and increases the danger of imperialist war.
The Communist Party of Italy (Marxist-Leninist) pledges to intensify and develop the struggle against modern revisionism, today in particular against the opportunism based on the "theory of three worlds". The Party resolutely fights against all imperialist interference in the internal life of the countries, upholds the self determination of the peoples and the liberation snuggles. The Party is pledged to strengthen the unity of the fraternal parties on the basis of Marxism- Leninism and proletarian internationalism.
The Communist Party of Italy (Marxist-Leninist) stands firmly beside the Party of Labor of Albania which, led by its Central Committee with Comrade Enver Hoxha at the head, fights on the front line for the victory of Marxism-Leninism, the consolidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of the International Communist Movement, developing an international policy of support for the forces of revolution and liberation; it is right beside Albania, bastion of socialism in the world. The Communist Party of Italy (Marxist-Leninist) calls on the working class and popular masses, on all the revolutionary and anti-imperialist forces to repudiate the campaign being waged by certain organs of the press to deform the Albanian reality, and calls on them to express their support for Albania, the country which in the bitter and all-round class struggle on the world scale, constitutes the genuine bastion of revolution and of the liberation struggle of the peoples.
The Central Committee
THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF SPAIN (MARXIST-LENINIST)
In one of its articles, the newspaper Vanguardia Obrera, organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Spain (Marxist-Leninist), writes:
"The stand of the Chinese leadership is a typically social chauvinist stand, which shows its aspirations to become a new superpower. It is the logical culmination of the course it has chosen which openly places it in the camp of the enemies of Marxism-Leninism, in the camp of the enemies of the revolution, the proletariat and peoples of the world. The Chinese government brutally breached agreements with socialist Albania at a time when it is increasing economic, political and even military aid to such reactionary and savagely anti-people regimes as those of Mobutu, Pinochet, etc.
"With this act, the Chinese leadership has simply imitated and applied the same methods Khrushchov used against Albania. But these criminal acts will fall on the heads of their authors, as occurred with Khrushchov. The glorious Party of Labor of Albania, led by Comrade Enver Hoxha, has demonstrated, during its whole history, that there is no pressure, no blackmail or threat which can subjugate it. On the contrary, the Albanian communists closely linked with their people, have always known how to conduct themselves in the face of difficulties, and courageously relying on their own forces, they have overcome them. They have known, in the most difficult moments, how to carry forward the construction of socialism and destroy all their enemies, one after the other. For this courage and principled stand, for the courage with which it has upheld this stand, the Party of Labor of Albania has won the sympathy and admiration of the peoples of the world. At these moments, when the ideological struggle has sharpened on the world scale, we express our firm solidarity and identity of views with the glorious Party of Labor of Albania. In these moments we tighten our ranks, more than ever before, with the Party of Labor and all the genuine Marxist-Leninists and raise the red banners of struggle against reactionary revisionism of every shade even higher."
LOK AWAZ, NEWSPAPER OF THE EAST INDIAN COMMUNITY
(The following article is reprinted from Lok Awaz, newspaper of the East Indian community, July 16, 1978.)
Lok Awaz has received the news with deep anger and hatred that "on July 7, 1978, in a note handed into the Embassy of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania in Peking, the government of the People's Republic of China announced its decision to immediately sever all aid and payment of civil and military credits to Albania, to leave a number of very important projects uncompleted and to withdraw all Chinese specialists working in Albania." This hostile act of the Chinese government against the People's Socialist Republic of Albania is the natural outcome of the anti-Marxist and revisionist course of disaster the present leaders of the Chinese government have charted for themselves. It is the course of collaboration with imperialism, conciliation with revisionism and of the withdrawal of support to all revolutionary and national liberation forces. It is the reversal of the correct verdict of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which resolutely upheld the correct line of resolute opposition to imperialism, resolute opposition to revisionism, and more support to the revolutionary and national liberation forces.
By attacking the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, the present revisionist leadership in China has lifted a big rock only to drop it on its own feet. The People's Socialist Republic of Albania, the Party of Labor of Albania and the great Marxist-Leninist leader Comrade Enver Hoxha have won world-wide recognition for the principled stand of safeguarding their independence and sovereignty and territorial integrity and of not tolerating any interference in their internal affairs and of resolutely carrying on along the socialist road, providing full support to the revolutionary and national liberation forces and firmly opposing imperialism, revisionism and opportunism of all hues. This recognition by the people of the world will not be altered by the dastardly attacks of the revisionists in China on the PSRA, the PLA and Comrade Enver Hoxha. On the contrary, it will expose for all to see the true nature of the fascist gangsters who took over China in October 1976 through a military coup d'etat.
Lok Awaz stands firmly on the side of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania and resolutely denounces the hostile activities of the Chinese government against the PSRA. Lok Awaz is absolutely convinced that the people of the world who love freedom and cherish independence and progress and carry the brilliant torch of revolution and fight for socialism will never forgive the Chinese government for it£ hostile activities against the People's Socialist Republic of Albania.
LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE'S SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF ALBANIA!
DOWN WITH THE HOSTILE ACTS OF THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT AGAINST THE PSRA!
VENEZUELAN NEWSPAPER ¿QUE HACER?
(Translated from the Venezuelan newspaper ¿Que Hacer? by The Workers' Advocate staff.)
It would seem that history continually repeats itself, without making qualitative leaps in the class struggle at the international level, but this is not the way it is.
In 1961, the Soviet revisionists headed by Khrushchov, in the face of the firm, principled position of the Party of Labor of Albania and its defense of proletarian internationalism, withdrew all its technicians, as well as its contracts and military aid.
Today we see once again that the People's (Socialist Republic of Albania is being pressured to submit by the aid being withdrawn, with the purpose of forcing Albania to approve opportunist theories such as the "theory of the three worlds", to promote a strengthened situation for the revisionists, headed today by Brezhnev, Tito and Teng Hsiao-ping. But history isn't lineal and the class struggle accordingly sharpens, and mounts.
Albania, its people and its Party, at the present time, are not in the same situation as in 1961, when the Russians cut off all aid to it, trying to leave Albania at the mercy of yankee imperialism. Today the Albanian people, wisely guided by their Party are more consolidated, better prepared with Marxism-Leninism and have the full support of all the genuine Marxist-Leninists in the world.
Neither the pressure, nor the intrigues, nor the threats have managed or will manage to weaken the unity between the people and the Albanian Party, nor will it hinder the masses' continuing to win new victories in the construction of socialism in Albania.
In the face of the withdrawal of all Chinese technicians and all their aid for socialist Albania, it is not possible to adopt an eclectic, opportunist position, refusing to admit the deeds or pretending there are no contradictions; the Venezuelan Marxist-Leninists give all our combative support to socialist Albania and to its glorious Party; the recognition of Albania as beacon of socialism in the world is at the present time the dividing line between the genuine Marxist-Leninists and the opportunists of all hues.
We are sure that socialist Albania will come forth triumphant in this new battle against the revisionist forces and will continue advancing in the forward trench of the struggle for the defense of Marxism-Leninism and the revolution.
LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE'S SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF ALBANIA!
LONG LIVE PROLETARIAN INTERNATIONALISM!
THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF GREECE (MARXIST-LENINIST)
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece (Marxist-Leninist), in a message sent to the Central Committee of the Party of Labor of Albania, says, among other things:
"The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece (Marxist-Leninist) resolutely condemns the unilateral and arbitrary cessation of economic and military aid to socialist Albania by the Chinese leaders. Our Party considers this act as an open and brutal violation of the principles of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism. This act has the aim of undermining and poisoning the friendly ties between the peoples of Albania and China, an act which aids the efforts of the imperialist-revisionist encirclement against heroic Albania. With this action the leadership of China acts with the logic of a great power. This reveals its utter weakness to contend in the ideological field, and it transferred the ideological conflict to the field of relations between two countries, according to the treacherous revisionist practice implemented for the first time by Khrushchov and Brezhnev."
"Our Party", continues the message,"actively stands on the side of the heroic Party of Labor of Albania, shoulder-to-shoulder with socialist Albania, with its courageous people. We hail the courageous and principled stand of your Party, a revolutionary Party, which thinks, decides and acts relying on its own forces, in conformity with the lofty interests of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism, with the interests of the revolution."
ORGANIZATION FOR THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF FRANCE
The second meeting of cadres for the preparation of the First Congress of the Party, of the Organization for the Reconstruction of the Communist Party of France, has sent a message condemning the decision of the Chinese government to cut off all aid to the People's Socialist Republic of Albania. The message reads:
"This unilateral act is a foul blow dealt to the development of the Albanian socialist economy, the defense potential of Socialist Albania, and encourages imperialism in its attacks against the People's Socialist Republic of Albania. This pressure and blackmail are characteristic of a social-imperialist, arrogant and chauvinistic policy. In attacking Socialist Albania and its Party, the entire Internationalist Communist Movement, the working class and the peoples of the world are also attacked. " The message continues, "the proletariat and the people, with their Marxist-Leninist parties at the head, are rising in revolutionary struggle, confidently and proudly looking to Socialist Albania, the beacon of socialism, the living example of the ideal for which they are fighting. Therefore, they will not leave her on her own without working powerfully if she is attacked. In France, we do not have as yet a communist party to prepare and lead the revolution and fight against the flames of war of imperialism. However, the communists have again gathered together to work for the construction of this indispensable instrument as soon as possible. We know full well that our main contribution in France to the defense of Socialist Albania is to reconstruct a true communist party, capable of leading the working class and the masses cf the people towards the socialist revolution, which is the only road to their liberation; a communist party able to educate the proletariat of our country in the spirit of proletarian internationalism. At the second meeting of our cadres to prepare the First Congress, we have spoken about the love which we hold for Socialist Albania, its Party of Labor and its people: we also held discussions about the need for further developing friendship with Socialist Albania and support for it among the masses of the people in our country."
THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF PORTUGAL (RECONSTRUCTED)
The newspaper Bandiera Vermelha, central organ of the Communist Party of Portugal (Reconstructed) carries an article entitled: "The Chinese Leaders Try to Silence Socialist Albania". The article reads in part:
"The Chinese leaders have taken an unprincipled, grave step against Socialist Albania. The cancelling of agreements with Albania places them on the same front as the Khrushchov revisionists. When, in 1961, differences with Khrushchov deepened, they took the same measures in an attempt to subdue Albania and turn it away from its principled Marxist-Leninist positions. But in spite of the difficulties they caused the Albanian economy, they failed to subdue the brave Albanians who, united as one man around the Party of Labor of Albania, with Comrade Enver Hoxha at the head, upheld the banner of Marxism-Leninism and became an example for all the other communists. The same fate lies in store for the Chinese leaders too, who following the road of alliance with U.S. imperialism and the bourgeoisie, are being isolated by the working class and progressive people of the entire world." The article continues, " the PLA is supported by the true Marxist-Leninist parties, including the Communist Party of Portugal (Reconstructed), which, upholding the immortal banner of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, will emerge victorious in the struggle against revisionism. Implementing proletarian internationalism, which finds its concrete embodiment in support for Socialist Albania and the Party of Labor of Albania, today, we are living in a situation far more favorable than in 1961. With these criminal measures, the Chinese leaders, like the Russian revisionists, will never be able to raise insurmountable obstacles to the Albanian people or destroy the construction of socialism in the People's Republic of Albania, The new revisionists will not be able to achieve their aims through economic blackmail."
WORKERS' COMMUNIST LEAGUE OF NORWAY
The Committee for Foreign Relations of the Workers' Communist League of Norway has sent a letter in which it condemns the Chinese act as an expression of big-power chauvinism, and alien to Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism. "The Workers' Communist League of Norway," the letter states, "expresses its resolute solidarity and support for the Albanian people, in regard to the cessation of aid and credits and the recalling of specialists by China." "The Albanian people," it continues, "under the leadership of the Party of Labor of Albania have achieved brilliant victories in the construction of socialism and the consolidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Albania. The working class of the world has full confidence in you, Albanian communists, in your unceasing struggle against all the forms of revisionism, and your consistent defense of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Party of Labor of of Albania has the resolute solidarity of the Workers' Communist League of Norway, and in the future, we will do everything to disseminate the truth of the policy of Socialist Albania.
HOLLAND-ALBANIA FRIENDSHIP ASSOCIATION
In a telegram sent by the Holland-Albania Friendship Association, it is said: "The Albanian people can rest assured of our eternal support and sympathy."
DENMARK-ALBANIA FRIENDSHIP ASSOCIATION
During these last few days, many telegrams have been received by the PLA from different institutions and organizations of the masses from countries all over the world.
"The Denmark-Albania Friendship Association," says a telegram from the Chairman of the Denmark-Albania Friendship Association, "would like to convey its full support for the correct stand of the PSRA in the face of the unilateral decision of the Chinese government, to sever all economic, civil and military aid and to withdraw specialists from Albania, We heartedly condemn this hostile, reactionary and anti-Albania act of the Chinese government. After learning the facts, the sympathy and solidarity of the Danish people will most certainly lie with small, courageous Albania, and the heroic Albanian people, who in the past too have always resisted the aggressive attacks of enemies of national freedom and socialism. We are sure that Socialist Albania will continue its triumphant march on the course of socialism, relying on its own forces, under the correct leadership of the PLA, with Comrade Enver Hoxha at the head. More than ever, Socialist Albania is shining brilliantly as the fearless beacon of socialism in the world. "
SWEDEN-ALBANIA FRIENDSHIP ASSOCIATION
"As representatives of the Sweden-Albania Friendship Association and as true friends of the PSRA," says the telegram sent by a group of Swedish friends who are at present in Albania, "we felt deep indignation when we learnt that the government of the People's Republic of China had taken the decision to immediately cease civil and military aid and credits to Albania. We are convinced that such acts, as the cessation of aid and the withdrawal of specialists and so on, which the Albanian people had experienced previously with the Khrushchovite revisionists, will not be successful in Albania. The pressure and blackmail, no matter from what front it has been exercised, to subjugate the PLA and the Albanian people, has never been and will never be successful. And," the telegram says, "we fully support the PSRA."
CANADIAN WORKERS' ASSOCIATION
Central Council
Albanian Trade Unions
Tirana, Albania
Comrades,
It is with profound contempt and class hatred that the Canadian Workers' Association heard of the news that "on July 7, 1978 in a note handed in to the Embassy of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania in Peking, the government of the People's Republic of China announced its decision to immediately sever all aid and payment of civil and military credits to Albania, to leave a number of very important projects uncompleted and to withdraw all Chinese specialists working in Albania."
This hostile action on the part of the government of China is intended to cause grave damage to the economic development and to the military potential of Albania and the cause of socialist revolution and socialist construction. It is an attack against the international proletariat and the revolutionary forces of the entire world. But we are convinced that the Albanian people, united as one man around their Party, the Party of Labor of Albania, will never bow down to the pressure and blackmail of the imperialists and the revisionists. Albania is a state of the dictatorship of the proletariat where it is the armed proletariat which decides the destiny of the motherland, not the imperialists and the revisionists. We are certain that just as the ATU have united the working class around the Party to surmount all the extreme difficulties imposed on the people as a result of the imperialist-revisionist blockade, so today they will double their efforts to realize the objectives of the Sixth Five-Year Plan and implement the decisions of the historic Seventh Congress of the PLA. The ATU can count on the full support of the CWA and the Canadian working class. We pledge to escalate our work against our common enemies and carry out our work to MAKE THE RICH PAY! right here in Canada, as well as intensify the struggle against revisionism and opportunism of all hues, especially the new opportunist trend based on the anti-Leninist "theory of three worlds" being used by the Chinese government to justify their hostile action against Albania.
LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE'S SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF ALBANIA!
LONG LIVE THE HEROIC ALBANIAN WORKING CLASS AND ENTIRE PEOPLE!
Revolutionary greetings, Canadian Workers' Association
COMMUNIST PARTY OF ENGLAND (MARXIST-LENINIST)
(The following article is reprinted from Workers' Weekly, newsweekly of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist), August 5, 1978.)
On July 7 the new revisionists in China announced their immediate termination of all aid and credits to the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, with the interruption of projects and withdrawal of all Chinese specialists. The statement of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania is reprinted below. Workers' Weekly firmly denounces this hostile action of the Chinese new revisionists against socialist Albania, considering it as exactly on a par with the similar action of the Soviet modern revisionists against the People's Republic of China at the beginning of the sixties. This action which tramples underfoot the principles of proletarian internationalism and of fraternal assistance is further evidence that the new leaders in China are on the road of anti-Marxism and collaboration with imperialism, social-imperialism and all reaction, against the revolutionary forces in the world with socialist Albania in the van. Like Khrushchov before them, the theoreticians of "three worlds" find everything good to say of the renegade Tito; they are firmest friends with butchers like Mobutu, Reza Pahlavi and their ilk, and line up with U.S. imperialism, British imperialism and their allies in their contention with Soviet social-imperialism. At the same time they take such hostile actions against socialist Albania.
Workers' Weekly has complete contempt for the Chinese new revisionists' lies that "starting from the Seventh Congress of the Albanian Party of Labor in November 1976, the Albanian leaders began to make venomous public attacks on the Chinese people's great leader Chairman Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, seriously hurting their feelings" and that "the Albanian leadership has decided to pursue the anti-China course". It is precisely the new revisionists themselves who have trampled on the Marxist-Leninist line and who through restoring capitalism in China and pursuing the path of "great power" chauvinism are pursuing the "anti-China course" as well as a course against the People's Socialist Republic of Albania and the proletariat and oppressed nations and peoples of the whole world.
Workers' Weekly hails the principled stand and heroic resistance of the Party of Labor of Albania led by Comrade Enver Hoxha against blackmail and pressure by the new revisionists in China and in support of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism. This struggle is a continuation of their heroic and protracted struggle against the activities of the Titoite and the Khrushchovite revisionists.
LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE'S SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF ALBANIA!
DOWN WITH THE COWARDLY ATTACKS OF THE CHINESE NEW REVISIONISTS AGAINST SOCIALIST ALBANIA!
LONG LIVE MARXISM-LENINISM AND PROLETARIAN INTERNATIONALISM!
COMMUNIST PARTY OF GERMANY (MARXIST-LENINIST)
The Chairman of the Communist Party of Germany (Marxist-Leninist), Ernst Aust, who paid a friendly visit to Albania on the invitation of the Central Committee of the PLA, granted an interview to Albania Radio/Television, condemning the arbitrary act of the Chinese government of stopping short economic and military aid to and withdrawing the Chinese specialists from Albania. He said: "On behalf of our Party, its Central Committee and the Political Bureau, I am authorized to declare; The Communist Party of Germany (Marxist-Leninist) indignantly condemns this hostile act of the Chinese leadership. In this case, it has shown the entire world that in its great-power, chauvinistic ambitions it does not give up blackmail and the use of imperialist methods, consciously violating the principles of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism. It is certain that this base act against Albania will be condemned by all the progressive-minded people of the world.
"The Communist Party of Germany (Marxist- Leninist) assures the Albanian people, the Albanian working class, its revolutionary vanguard Party, the PLA, with Comrade Enver Hoxha at the head, of its unbreakable solidarity and friendship. It will remain loyal and unflinching, despite difficulties, in the defense of the principles of Marxism-Leninism and defense of Socialist Albania. Even in the past, with their consistent Marxist-Leninist stand, Albania, the PLA, have been a brake on and obstacle to the Chinese leadership. Nevertheless, they have not halted the Chinese counter-revolutionary evolution. Today, the Chinese leaders are instigating war quite openly. In the war from which they want to emerge as the winner, and when Europe and entire regions of Asia have been reduced to rubble and tens of thousands of millions of working people have shed their blood, they want to erect imperialist domination on this rubble." In concluding this interview, Comrade Ernst Aust said: "Albania is the bastion of Marxism-Leninism. It is not the last bastion, it is the first bastion from which the Marxist-Leninist movement, revived from the treachery of the revisionists of all hues, gives new impulses. The Communist Party of Germany (Marxist-Leninist) will always fulfill its internationalist proletarian task towards the sister Party of Albania, the PLA."
MISSION OF THE PEOPLE'S SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF ALBANIA AT THE UNO GETS LETTERS:
(FROM USA)
The Mission of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania at the United Nations Organization, has received letters and telegrams from organizations of Albanians from the Albanian community in the U.S.A.
ALBANIAN WOMEN'S ASSOCIATION (NEW YORK)
In the telegram of the Albanian Women's Association sent to Comrade Enver Hoxha, the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party of Labor of Albania, it was said among other things: "The Albanian Women's Union in New York condemns this in human act and flagrant opposition to international rules of the government of the People's Republic of China to cease economic aid to Albania without any grounds, with profound anger and disgust."
NAIM FRASHERI BRANCH OF THE FREE ALBANIA ORGANIZATION IN NEW YORK
In the telegram sent by the Chairman of the Naim Frasheri Branch to Comrade Enver Hoxha, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party of Labor of Albania, he says among other things: "The Naim Frasheri Branch of the Free Albania Organization in New York and all honest patriots contemptuously condemn the arbitrary and unjust act of the People's Republic of China in its cessation of aid to Albania. We are sure that the Albanian people, under your leadership, will overcome every difficulty and will march always, successfully fulfilling all envisaged plans."
COMMUNIST PARTY OF BRAZIL
The message of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Brazil, sent to Comrade Enver Hoxha, First Secretary of the Central Committee of The Party of Labor of Albania, and to the Central Committee of the PLA, reads in part:
"For a long time we have been witnessing with revolutionary concern the disparaging stand of the Chinese leaders towards the forces which are truly defending socialism and the revolution and their arrogant and overbearing stand towards the Marxist-Leninists who are fighting against modern revisionism, imperialism, and world reaction. When they are acting in such a manner, they embrace the opportunists and renegades from the proletarian cause, such as Tito, and welcome such people as Nixon like old friends and with great ceremony. Now, they have gone so far as to commit the base act of attacking economically a socialist country like Albania, which is admired and respected on account of its consistent loyalty to principles, on account of its militant spirit and revolutionary honesty, in an effort to weaken its economy and national defense. This is an unjustifiable attack spearheaded against socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, which affects, with its counter-revolutionary content, the peoples of all countries fighting for their national and social liberation. With such an act, the Chinese leaders do nothing but repeat the hated stance of the Soviet revisionists when they attacked Albania and China, using the same methods, in an attempt to suppress their voice, which criticized their betrayal of socialism. At that time, this fact clearly showed that Khrushchov and his gang had abandoned the socialist road. Doesn't the stand of the Chinese leaders prove the same thing? Where is the proletarian internationalism in this? In words they call themselves Marxists and internationalists; in practice, in everything, they act like a great power, asking others to submit unconditionally to their nationalist line and policy.
"At a time when China halts the construction of socialist projects in Albania, and denies it military equipment", the message reads, "Chinese planes fly in groups to Zaire, to carry weapons and ammunition to Mobutu, the executioner of the people of Zaire, and lackey of imperialism. This reactionary is provided with instructors and technicians he needs from China, who have been charged with the task of rendering him all possible aid. It is regretful to observe reactionaries and fascists, murders of patriots and revolutionaries, sworn enemies of the working class all over the world, receiving generous aid from the Chinese leadership, which it now denies to a socialist country. Geisel, Vidella and Pinochet, to mention just these three typical hangmen of the people in Latin America, enjoy all blessings coming from the Chinese government, which never tires of offering them favorable trade. It is clear that it is no longer the revolutionary people and the governments loyal to the socialist ideas which enjoy the friendship and support of the Chinese leaders. Their friends and allies are different now, they are the reactionary rulers of the so-called 'third world', the imperialists of Europe and Asia, and especially the U.S. monopolists. On the pretext of the fight against social-imperialism, China unites with all oppressors and exploiters. Big nation concepts lead to the behavior of a great lord in relations with smaller countries. This is how the tsar of old Russia acted, this is what Brezhnev and his clique are doing; that is how the imperialists of the USA, Britain, Germany, and Japan acted and are acting. Unfortunately this is how the Chinese leaders are behaving today, thereby compromising the interests and future of an intelligent and industrious people. The same as Khrushchov, the Chinese leaders are so presumptuous as to think of "bringing little Albania to its knees." They are grossly mistaken. The Albanians are forging ahead on the road of socialism, led by a bold, truly Marxist-Leninist party. This instills in them inexhaustible energy, boundless confidence in their own forces. They have been winners in worse conditions. Though small in size, Albania is very correct as to the ideas it defends, the example it sets and the cause it defends. We, the Brazilian communists, irreconcilable enemies of revisionism, feel happy to be beside glorious Albania, the intrepid champion of the proletariat and its scientific doctrine, beside Comrade Enver Hoxha, the fiercest Marxist-Leninist, the genuine leader of the working class, in the struggle against moribund capitalism." The message continues: "We express our internationalist solidarity with the brave Albanian people and their vanguard party, in these moments when the sham friends, the allies of reaction, are frenziedly attacking it, in order to damage and sabotage the construction of socialism in Albania." The telegram concludes, "Opportunists come and go; the revolution continues in Albania and throughout the world until the final victory of communism."
MESSAGE OF THE AD-HOC COMMITTEE TO FORM THE PROGRESSIVE WOMEN'S ASSOCIATION OF CANADA
Ad-Hoc Committee to Form the Progressive Women's Association of Canada
P.O. Box 666, Station "C"
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
August 10, 1978
Comrade Vito Kapo
President
Women's Union of Albania,
Tirana, Albania
Dear Comrade Vito Kapo;
Dear Comrades of the Women's Union of Albania;
It is with the utmost anger and indignation that the Ad-Hoc Committee to Form the Progressive Women's Association of Canada received the news of the hostile actions of the government of the People's Republic of China in immediately severing all aid and payment of civil and military credits to Albania, in leaving a number of very important projects incompleted and in withdrawing all Chinese specialists working in Albania. This arbitrary and hostile act,which violates every principle of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism, is an attack, not only on the glorious Party of Labor of Albania, the People's Socialist Republic of Albania and the entire Albanian people, but on the international proletariat and the revolutionary forces of the entire world. In pursuing this treacherous, big-power chauvinist course, the revisionists in China have taken up common cause with imperialism and all reaction.
The Ad-Hoc Committee to Form the Progressive Women's Association of Canada condemns, with the deepest class hatred, this hostile action of the Chinese government, and resolutely supports the heroic and correct stand of socialist Albania, expressed in the letter of July 29, sent by the Central Committee of the Party of Labor of Albania and the government of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the government of the People's Republic of China, in firmly refusing to submit to economic and military blackmail.
The glorious Party of Labor of Albania, under the correct and farsighted leadership of Comrade Enver Hoxha, was the first to recognize the reactionary and treacherous features of Khrushchov revisionism and to carry out bold and relentless struggle against it and has unceasingly struggled against and courageously foiled every attempt of the great power chauvinists to bring socialist Albania to her knees. We are fully confident that, relying on her own forces, firmly implementing the Marxist-Leninist principle of self-reliance, socialist Albania, with the unflinching support of all the genuine revolutionary forces, will insure that the latest attack by the Chinese revisionists will definitely meet the same fate.
We pledge, under the leadership of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) and alongside the revolutionary forces the world over, to resolutely defend socialist Albania, homeland of the international proletariat, to hold high the bright red banner of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism and to wage relentless struggle against revisionism and opportunism of all hues, particularly the new opportunist trend based on the anti-Leninist theory of "three worlds".
With sincere revolutionary greetings,
the Ad-Hoc Committee to Form the Progressive Women's Association of Canada
COMMUNIST PARTY OF COLOMBIA (MARXIST-LENINIST)
The letter sent by the delegation of the Communist Party of Colombia (Marxist-Leninist) concerning the cessation of credits and economic aid to Albania, and immediate withdrawal of the Chinese specialists by the Chinese government says, among other things, "We reject with contempt this hostile anti-socialist and counter-revolutionary act, with its chauvinistic content, of the Chinese government towards the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, the Albanian people and the Party of Labor of Albania. We consider these acts not only as separate acts but as a reflection of the whole anti-Marxist-Leninist concept and policy which the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party and state have continually increased. In reality, this act may cause some difficulties in some directions in the construction of your country, but these difficulties will be partial and temporary, and undoubtedly surmountable by you, because in the revolution and the construction of socialism, Albania has always relied mainly on its own forces." "During its whole existence, Albania has coped with numerous aggressions, blackmails and boycotting, as well as with the all-round encirclement. However, your people have always known how to hold aloft and pure the banners of national dignity and the defense of the homeland, have never been intimidated by the enemies and never kneeled down, and have stood proudly on their feet, continuing the struggle for independence, freedom and sovereignty until complete victory. These countless struggles waged through the centuries have rendered the Albanian people resolute, unflinching and strong in the face of all kinds of enemies, no matter how strong they have been. Albania is not alone; with it, and in favor of the progressive cause it defends, is the proletariat, are all the revolutionary people of the world, the genuine Marxist-Leninist parties and forces to which the freedom and independence of the peoples are dear. It is the others and not Albania which will be isolated more and more with each passing day. Albania represents today the highest expression of the revolutionary devotion of progressive mankind, and for this reason it enjoys its full support and aid. Such a thing cannot be said for and cannot be hoped by those who defend a miserable cause and who are linked for this purpose with the decaying forces of capitalist and revisionist reaction, to fulfill, sooner or later, the same role, that of hindering the revolution and the role of the furious enemies of socialism." The letter says in conclusion, "we wish to express to the entire Albanian people our conviction in the present and future of the PSRA that they are building with their own forces, under the correct leadership of the Party of Labor of Albania, with Comrade Enver Hoxha at the head, to express our profound conviction that despite the present difficulties and those which might follow, the construction of socialism in Albania and its uninterrupted march towards new and greater victories are certainly in their own hands. We express our full support in the common struggle against U.S. imperialism, Soviet social-imperialism, the other imperialists, revisionism, opportunism of all shades and other world reaction, and for the victory of the liberation struggles of the peoples, the proletarian revolution and the construction of socialism and communism in all countries. The Communist Party of Colombia (Marxist-Leninist) has been and will continue to be with Socialist Albania, with its just Party of Labor of Albania, the working class and the heroic and militant people of Albania."
BANDERA ROJA (VENEZUELA)
A delegation of the Bandera Roja Party, Marxist-Leninist vanguard of the Venezuelan proletariat, which was in our country recently, sent a letter to the Central Committee of the Party of Labor of Albania in the name of its Party, which reads:
"To the glorious Party of Labor of Albania, the government of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, the heroic and exemplary Albanian people we extend our most fraternal and revolutionary support and active solidarity, based on the principles of proletarian internationalism, in these moments when Albania is once again faced with the hostile activity of the Chinese leadership. The stand of the Chinese leaders is characterized from beginning to end by the distortion of Marxism-Leninism. With this stand they expose themselves and at the same time reveal their blackmail against the struggle of the genuine revolutionaries and Marxist-Leninist parties. Our duty is to unflinchingly expose their anti-Marxist stand, to fight in theory and practice against their big-state measures and positions which characterize such a power, to treat them as sworn enemies of Marxism- Leninism, as enemies of the unity of the International Communist Movement, because they are demonstrating before the world, before the communists and working masses that they have renounced the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism. More and more each day, the Chinese leadership is drawing nearer to imperialism and the road of class capitulation, adopting the line of the renunciation of the revolutionary struggle, the road of the liquidation of Marxism-Leninism and the completing of alliances with the bourgeoisie and imperialism. We are against the theory of 'three worlds' and are resolutely fighting it because it aims at disarming the proletariat of the countries of the world, calling for the strengthening of the military and economic blocs, which are the instruments of imperialism for the suppression and exploitation of the people. We are against this theory because it denies the contradiction between socialism and capitalism, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. It extinguishes the contradiction between the oppressed peoples and nations and imperialism, which exploits them, and appeals for the creation of a front in which the peoples must submit to their reactionary government and imperialism. Albania, tiny but truly socialist, has blazed its trail determinedly, unflinching ideologically, under the leadership of the Party of Labor of Albania, loyal to Marxism-Leninism, which holds aloft the banners of socialist construction, facing up to the attacks of capitalist-revisionist encirclement. Our fraternal unity and ties are based on Marxist-Leninist principles, on the strategy and tactics of the International Marxist-Leninist Movement, in struggle against imperialists, revisionists and anti- Marxist opportunists. Through the Central Committee of the Party of Labor of Albania, we convey to the Albanian government and people the support of the Bandera Roja Party of Venezuela, of all the exploited people and proletarians of Venezuela. Today, we must steel our unity in defense of proletarian internationalism, based on the principles of Marxism-Leninism and on cooperation between Marxist-Leninist parties, to develop an International Communist Movement capable of carrying out the duty of the triumph of the revolution in their countries, to face up to revisionism, opportunism, and social-chauvinism in all its forms."
COMMUNIST PARTY OF JAPAN (LEFT)
"The attack of the Chinese leadership against socialist Albania serves the counter-revolutionary and anti-socialist aims of imperialism, the international bourgeoisie and the reactionary forces. It is an attack directed against the world proletariat, against socialism, against the Marxist-Leninist parties of the world, against all the people who are fighting for revolution, freedom, independence and social progress", says in part, the telegram sent to the Central Committee of the Party of Labor of Albania by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Japan (Left). "The letter of the Party of Labor of Albania and the government of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania addressed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government, which was published in the last few days, sheds light on the road of betrayal of the Chinese leadership. It is another weapon in the hands of the revolutionaries the world over. We express ardent support for the publication of this letter and evaluate it as an important contribution to the International Communist Movement."
CANADA-ALBANIA FRIENDSHIP ASSOCIATION
(The following is reprinted from the newspaper Socialist Albania, Bulletin of the Canada-Albania Friendship Association, which published an article entitled "No Force on Earth Can Suffocate the Voice of Socialist Albania, or Rob the People of Albania of Their Precious Freedom and Independence Won with Their Own Blood, Nor Compel Them to Abandon the Socialist Road", which says among other things:)
"The Ad-Hoc Committee to Establish the Canada-Albania Friendship Association together with the revolutionary and democratic forces in Canada express our utmost contempt and enmity towards the despicable and hostile actions of the Chinese government against the People's Socialist Republic of Albania and the Albanian people. We consider the decision of the government of the People's Republic of China, to sever all economic, civil and military aid to Albania and the withdrawal of all Chinese specialists from Albania, to be a malicious and disgusting action on the part of the Chinese leaders which justly deserves to be condemned by all the genuine friends of Albania, the revolutionaries and freedom-loving', democratic forces the world over. Let no one think that sugar coated words, hypocritical smiles, diabolical slanders, political pressures, blackmail or economic blockades can isolate Albania from her genuine friends nor bring the heroic people of Albania, led by the Party of Labor of Albania, to their knees and compel them to renounce their stated principles for building sincere and genuine friendship with various peoples and countries of the world. No force on earth can suffocate the voice of socialist Albania! No force on earth can rob the people of Albania of their precious freedom and independence won with their own blood, nor compel them to abandon the socialist road!"
[Graphic.]
[Zeri i Popullit masthead.]
The following is a summary of an editorial of Zeri i Popullit, organ of the Central Committee of the Party of Labor of Albania, as broadcast by Radio Tirana and transcribed by the staff of People's Canada Daily News.
The communists and all the working people of Albania, writes the editorial, condemn with profound indignation the arbitrary act of the Chinese government to sever civil and military aid, and the withdrawal of Chinese specialists from Albania as a perfidious anti-Marxist and anti-Albanian act from the positions of a big power, designed to hit and damage the economy and defense potential of our country, to sabotage the cause of the revolution and socialism in Albania, and to undermine the fraternal friendship between the Albanian and Chinese peoples.
Through facts and documents, the letter of the Central Committee of the Party of Labor and the government of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania refutes the efforts of the Chinese leadership to justify this perfidious, hostile and chauvinist act. The so-called "reasons" and "facts" presented in the Chinese note are groundless. They are nothing else but so many hopeless attempts to cover up the real causes of the anti-Albanian stand of the Chinese leaders by raising various economic and practical problems, and these too are scrupulously refuted. The letter refutes the chauvinist megalomania of the Chinese leadership which presumes that the aid China has granted Albania is the decisive factor in the development of our country, and that construction, industry, agriculture and everything which has been done in Albania is provided by the Chinese specialists. The Albanian people, the Party of Labor of Albania and the government of our country have always highly evaluated the aid which was given to Socialist Albania, considering it as internationalist aid of the Chinese people, in the service of the general cause of the revolution and socialism in the world. But says the letter, this aid has never been and could never have been the decisive factor for the development of our country. This decisive factor has always been and remains the unflinching, consistent and self-sacrificing work and struggle of the Albanian people, under the leadership of the Party of Labor of Albania, for the construction of socialism according to the great Marxist-Leninist principle of self-reliance.
Further on, the editorial reads: The Central Committee of the Party of Labor of Albania and the government of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, in the letter addressed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government, shed full light on the real reasons which induced the Chinese leadership to such perfidious and hostile acts against Socialist Albania, which are a repetition, in content and form, of the savage, chauvinist actions which the Yugoslav and Soviet revisionist renegades once resorted to against our country and people. These reasons lie in the fact that the Chinese leaders have abandoned Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism, have adopted the chauvinist big power cause, thus following the course of collaboration and union with imperialism and reactionary forces in the international arena. It is precisely this anti-Marxist, counter-revolutionary and anti-socialist line that the Chinese leadership has striven to impose on our Party by all manner of means. Apart from the economic and ideological pressure, it has also tried to impose the line which should be followed in the case of aggression against Albania from abroad -- the implementation of the practice of partisan warfare in our country and the concluding of a military alliance with Yugoslavia and Rumania -- criminally interfering in the internal affairs of Albania. Our Party resolutely condemns these hostile actions and chauvinist acts as part of a reactionary attempt on the part of the Chinese leadership to ensnare Socialist Albania in the trap of warmongering conspiracies through military alliances, with the final aim of transforming the Balkan area into a powder keg, as the Soviet social-imperialists and U.S. imperialists are trying to do. It is this anti-Marxist and chauvinist policy of a big power, implemented by the Chinese leadership, and the resolute refusal of our Party and socialist state to submit to the Chinese dictates or to take up its counterrevolutionary course which are the real reasons which led the Chinese leadership to carry out hostile acts against Socialist Albania and to cease civil and military aid to it, at a time when China receives aid and credits from U.S. imperialism and world capitalism, and when it grants aid and credits to their agents, such as Mobutu and his ilk. This cessation of aid exposes the falsity of the Chinese line -- the line which the current leadership is trying to peddle to the peoples of the so-called "third world", which has as its aim to subjugate and enslave them.
In the letter of our Party and Government, the great efforts of our Party on the Marxist-Leninist road stand out clearly. On the one hand, it has criticized in a comradely manner, through letters, seeking the solution of disagreements through comradely discussion; on the other hand, it has tirelessly supported China on fundamental issues where our views coincided, particularly at crucial moments for China; whereas the Chinese leadership has been systematically opposed to the solution of these disagreements, it has refused to answer letters, it has not accepted to send delegations to the Congresses of the Party of Labor or to accept Albanian Party and government delegations in China to deal with these problems. The Chinese leaders wanted only one thing: that our Party and government obey their conductor's baton.
But the Chinese leaders, writes Zeri i Popullit, have gone haywire in their chauvinist reckonings. Never, either in the past or today, have the PLA and the Albanian people allowed the Chinese leaders or anyone else to impose an anti-Marxist and treacherous line on them. Nor will we allow this in the future. The unyielding line of the PLA and the Albanian people under its leadership has always been and will remain the line of unflinching revolutionary struggles and victories, the construction and defense of socialism in Albania, the line of unsparing internationalist support for the revolutionary and liberation struggles of the proletariat and the freedom-loving peoples in all the countries; the line of tit-for-tat struggle against international imperialism and in particular the two superpowers, U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism, and reaction; the line of principled and uncompromising struggle against modern revisionism of all shades, for the defense of the purity of the revolutionary doctrine of Marxism-Leninism. Our Party has never bowed in the face of the savage pressure of the Khrushchovite revisionists; on the contrary, it chose the route of carrying out principled struggles for the exposure of these renegades. But the logic of the Chinese leaders, clouded by anti-Marxist concepts and the chauvinism of a big power, hinders them from drawing lessons from the past. The entire responsibility for their anti-Marxist and anti-Albanian stand falls on them.
The evil-intentioned and hostile acts of the Chinese government against Albania will cause several difficulties in the construction and completion of some of the projects contracted with the People's Republic of China. But no difficulty, pressure or blockade is capable of curbing the march of our homeland on the road to the complete construction of socialism. Now our people, too, have everything needed to overcome all the obstacles and difficulties caused by the Chinese leadership and to score new victories in the complete construction of socialism, by relying on their own efforts. The guarantee for this is the leadership of the PLA, with Comrade Enver Hoxha at the head; its correct and unyielding Marxist-Leninist line; the steel-like fighting unity of the people around the Party. Thanks to the consistent implementation of the great principle of self-reliance, today our country has a modern socialist economy, developed and stable, capable of advancing on its own feet, ensuring the extended socialist reproduction, the raising of the well being of the people, and national independence and sovereignty.
In our country, the entire army is prepared for advances. The defense of the country has attained a high level of consolidation, and the armed forces of our country, which always serve the people, under the leadership of the Party, are capable of smashing and wiping out any aggressor which would dare to undertake any military adventure against the PSRA. At the same time, the correct and unflinching struggle of our people, under the leadership of their Party of Labor, for the construction and defense of socialism in Albania as well as for the great cause of the revolution and liberation of the peoples, enjoys the sympathy, solidarity and support of the freedom-loving people and all the revolutionary forces in the world. Our country is a fortress of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Under the tested leadership of the PLA and advancing unwaveringly on the road which guides them, concludes the editorial of Zeri i Popullit, the Albanian people will fulfill their historic task honorably, through to the end, to prove again, before the proletariat and the peoples of the world, the inexhaustible vitality of the revolutionary ideas of Marxism-Leninism, which enable even a small country in the conditions of a multifold imperialist-revisionist encirclement, to be completely capable of building socialism successfully, relying on its own forces, and defending and carrying it forward, smashing blockades and surmounting all obstacles. End.
[Graphic: No Force on Earth Can Suffocate the Voice of Socialist Albania, or Rob the People of Albania of Their Precious Freedom and Independence Won with Their Own Blood, Nor Compel Them to Abandon the Socialist Road]
JULY 29, 1978
On July 7, 1978 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China handed an official n6te to the Embassy of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania in Peking, whereby it announces the decision of the Chinese Government "to stop its economic and military aid and its aid payments to Albania and bring back its economic and military experts" working in Albania up till that date.
With this perfidious and hostile act towards socialist Albania, you unscrupulously scrapped the agreements officially concluded between the two countries, brutally and arbitrarily violated elementary international rules and norms and extended ideological disagreements to state relations with Albania.
Taking this hostile step against socialist Albania, you seek to hit at, and damage, the economy and defence capacity of our country, to sabotage the cause of the revolution and socialism in Albania. At the same time, you gravely undermine the fraternal friendship between the Albanian and Chinese peoples. Wishing ill to a socialist country, such as the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, you give satisfaction to the enemies of socialism and the revolution. The responsibility for this reactionary and anti-Albanian act, as well as its consequences, lies completely with the Chinese side.
The Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania and the Albanian Government denounce the brutal cessation of aid and loans to socialist Albania before all world public opinion as a reactionary act from great power positions, an act which is a repetition, in content and form, of the savage and chauvinistic methods of Tito, Khrushchev and Brezhnev which China, also, once condemned.
The Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania and the Albanian Government reject the attempts made in the Chinese note to blame Albania, to groundlessly accuse the Albanian leadership of allegedly being ungrateful for China's aid and of allegedly having tried to sabotage the economic and military cooperation between the two countries. To any normal person it is unbelievable and preposterous that Albania, a small country, which is fighting against the imperialist-revisionist encirclement and blockade and which has set to large-scale and all-round work for the rapid economic and cultural development of its country, which is working tirelessly for the strengthening of the defence capacity of its socialist Homeland, should cause and seek cessation of economic cooperation with China, refuse its civil and military loans and aid.
Inspired by the teachings of Marxism-Leninism and the principles of proletarian internationalism, the Albanian people, their Party and Government have sincerely and consistently fought for the strengthening of friendship, fraternal cooperation and mutual aid between Albania and China. They have always highly appreciated China's aid to Albania, considering it an internationalist aid of the Chinese people, an aid serving the general cause of the revolution and socialism in the world, an aid coming from a country which was called socialist. Now, as in the past, the Albanian people, their Party and Government stick to their assessments of this aid and its role, among other external factors, in the development of our country.
Socialist Albania has never considered its friendship with the peoples of other countries a means of economic profit. At the same time, it has permitted nobody to consider economic aid and cooperation an investment whereby political and ideological views, which run counter to Marxism-Leninism and socialism, are dictated to, and imposed on, our country. The People's Socialist Republic of Albania has never sold out its principles, it has never traded on them.
When the Party of Labour of Albania defended the Communist Party of China from the attack of the Khrushchevite revisionists at the Bucharest and Moscow Meetings of the Communist and Workers' Parties in 1960, it did so in full consciousness in order to defend the principles of Marxism-Leninism, and not to be given some factories and some tractors by China in return. When socialist Albania, for many years on end, defended the rights of People's China at the UNO against the US plot, it was not doing so for material interests, but for the defence of a just and principled cause. When the Party of Labour of Albania and our working class supported the strategic aims of the Cultural Revolution in China, they were not doing so for the sake of compensation, but out of their will to assist the working class, the communists and people of China to save their country from the capitalist elements who had usurped power in China.
In order to justify its cessation of aid to Albania, the Chinese Government, out of necessity, has limited itself to economic and technical "arguments" of simple common practice in interstate relations. You are doing this in order to cover up the true motives which have impelled you to take this hostile action against socialist Albania.
The cessation of aid and loans to Albania cannot be motivated with the 8 "facts" listed in the Chinese note that allegedly "the Vice-minister of Industry and Mining of Albania... refused further consultations... and brazenly terminated the talks"; that the Albanian experts "ignored the technical guidance of the Chinese experts" in the oil refinery; that the Chinese design for a military project proved unsuccessful because of "the belated discovery of seeping karst caves overlooked through poor geological survey by the Albanian side" and that the Albanian side "changed its mind by taking the work upon itself and terminated Chinese aid for this project"; that the Albanian side "created various pretexts and in violation of agreements, refused to sign notes on the starting of operations of projects"; that the Albanian side "suddenly refused to accept the 25 invoices totalling nearly 100 million yuan Renminbi"; "that due to the Albanian side's disregard for the technical advice of Chinese experts, a scaffold was formed in the blast-furnace", and the Albanian specialists eliminated this defect without waiting for experts to come from China; that "the Albanian Ambassador to China refused to accept the Chinese note of June 7, 1978".
These "arguments" and the "facts" brought forth by the Chinese Government, are not only fabricated and distorted, but even if they were not so, they could never serve as a moral and juridical basis whereupon a state could rely to justify its one-sided and brutal cessation of economic and military aid to another state, with which it has been in close alliance for a long time.
The true motives for the cessation of aid and loans to Albania have not an exclusively technical character, as the note of the Chinese Government makes out, on the contrary they have a deep political and ideological character. In their letter the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania and the Albanian Government will throw full light on these political and ideological motives. But first we will stop to prove that the "arguments" the Chinese side resorts to in its note do not respond at all to reality.
I
The Government of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania will acquaint world opinion with the truth on economic relations between China and Albania and, in particular, on the questions the Chinese note takes up, by publishing the full text of the notes exchanged on these questions between the governments of the two countries. Herein we will clarify some "facts" mentioned in the Chinese note.
Tendentiously listing a series of figures about China's aid to Albania, the Chinese note of July 7 reflects the desire of the Chinese leadership to boast before the world. It is acting in the same way as the Soviet revisionist leadership, which with the boastfulness of the great state, constantly advertizes the "aid" it has once granted to Albania.
We are compelled to remind the Chinese leaders that their boasting is in utter opposition to the official declarations once made by the Chinese Government itself.
The solemn Statement on the 8 principles of the aid of the Chinese Government to other states reads: "The Chinese Government always bases itself on the principles of equality and mutual benefit in giving aid to other countries. It never considers such an aid one-sided alms, but something reciprocal". When visiting 14 countries in 1964 Chou En-lai stressed that "... in case we were to boast of our aid to others this would be great state chauvinism".
The Albanian people, Party and Government have never denied the aid of the People's Republic of China and its role in the economic development of our country. They have acknowledged and appreciated this aid, proceeding from their sincere feelings and thinking that it came from a friendly state and was given in the spirit of the principles of socialism.
Yet, while making an exaggerated and embellished description of the Chinese economic and military aid to Albania, the Chinese note has no word about the fact that Albania, too, has aided China, as the Chinese leaders themselves have declared time and again, previously.
Appreciating the aid Albania has given China, Mao Tsetung said: "First of all, we must thank you, because you stand in the forefront, because you are in very difficult situations and persistently fight to defend Marxism-Leninism. This is a very valuable thing, this is most valuable" (From minutes of a meeting with an Albanian delegation, June 29, 1962).
On his part, Chou En-lai stated: "The Albanian comrades frequently mention China's support for, and aid to, Albania. I would like to stress here in the first place, that Albania has given us great aid and support.
".. .The Chinese people will never forget that at the time when the modern revisionists slandered against and attacked the Communist Party of China frenziedly, assuming a correct stand, regardless of all pressures, difficulties and dangers, the Party of Labour of Albania, courageously faced up to this opposite trend, exposed and mercilessly hit at the anti-Chinese plots of modern revisionism" ("Zeri i popullit", January 9, 1964, speech at the Tirana rally).
On another occasion Chou En-lai said: "We are doing our internationalist duty and it will be betrayal if we do not help you... As the bastion of socialism in Europe, you are fighting against imperialism, revisionism and all reaction. If we do not help you, we would not be internationalist communists, but traitors. Support and assistance between us, between China and Albania, are mutual. You are a radiant beacon in Europe, and you are fighting unflinchingly and intrepidly. This is of great aid to, and support for, us and for all the peoples of the worlds" (From minutes of a meeting with an Albanian delegation, Peking, August 29, 1971).
A similar statement has been made also by Kang Sheng: "I have often told the comrades and I again stress that the Albanian comrades are giving us a great, colossal help. We must not consider only the nitrate ammonium plant, the thermopower station, the various plants and factories we give you, they are nothing compared to the great support the Albanian comrades are giving us and the world communist movement" (From the speech at the dinner in honour of the Chinese delegation on November 13, 1966, in Tirana).
We are embarrassed when we have to mention the help Albania has given China, because what the Albanian Party and people have done for China and the Chinese people has been done with a communist sense of duty and inspired by fraternal and internationalist feelings. But you forced us to mention it, because following in the footsteps of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, you began to count the yuans and fens you have given Albania!
In its note, the Chinese Government tries to create the impression, in the public opinion, that if Albania has had any success in its economic development, this, allegedly, is due to Chinese aid. For this purpose and in order to impress the internal and international public opinion, the figures mentioned in the Chinese note are purposely inflated and fabricated. It says that the "implementation of the agreements concluded between China and Albania calls for an outlay by the Chinese Government of more than ten billion yuan Renminbi". This is an arbitrary figure which does not correspond to the truth.
First of all, it must be said that what the Chinese Government considers aid is in reality credits, obligations deriving from agreements concluded between the two governments in conformity with the desires and interests of the two sides and common international practice in the relations between sovereign states, which involve bilateral obligations. Thus, here we have nothing to do with alms or Christian charity.
On the other hand, from documents in possession of the Albanian side, it follows that from December 1954 up to July 1975, 17 government agreements on granting credits to Albania by People's China, besides agreements on military aid, have been signed between People's China and Albania. Among these 17 agreements, there are some in which the aid in credits is reckoned in old rubles, then in new rubles, later in British pounds, finally in internal yuans, or in commercial yuans or US dollars. From the conversion of the various currencies mentioned in these agreements into "commercial" yuans according to the Chinese official exchange rate fixed by the China Bank in the respective periods, it follows that the total value of Chinese economic aid in credits accorded to Albania from 1954 up to 1975, when the last agreement was signed, does not "exceed 10 billion yuans", as claimed in the Chinese note, but amounts only to 3 billion and 53 million commercial yuans. Until July 1978 Albania has utilized about 75 per cent of this sum, reckoning the value of integral projects and general materials at the prices unilaterally set by the Chinese side. But here it must be stressed that the values included in the invoices of the China Bank for complete projects and general materials are not reckoned on the basis of the prices set "in joint consultation", but at arbitrary prices set by the Chinese side alone, without consulting the Albanian side at all, as stipulated in the agreement. Therefore, the return by the Bank of the Albanian State to the China Bank of the invoices for the projects built in Albania is no "violation of agreements", as the Chinese note makes out.
Prices for integral projects and general materials, at which the invoices sent by China are reckoned, were not set in accordance with the provisions of the official agreements between the Government of the People's Republic of Albania and the Government of the People's Republic of China of June 8, 1965, and the stipulations of the correspondence of December 22, 1971 which clearly says that: "Prices for integral projects and general materials... will be fixed after joint consultation according to the principles of the setting of trade prices between China and Albania".
As far as military aid is concerned, the assessments of the Chinese side are utterly arbitrary, because in agreements of this category prior to 1967, all evaluations are made in Chinese currency, without consulting the Albanian side, whereas in later agreements which comprise most of the Chinese military aid to Albania, there is no definition of concrete values, either in Chinese or any other currency.
Therefore, those billions of yuans mentioned in the Chinese note do not represent the real sum of China's economic and military aid to Albania, but represent a claim made on the basis of arbitrary, one-sided and tendentious reckonings by the Chinese side. We affirm that, in order to further its sinister aims, the Chinese side precipitated matters when it set such figures. Complete reckonings will be made according to the agreements, protocols and criteria established by both sides. Reckonings will be made taking also account of the loss and damage the Chinese side has caused our economy by failing to meet contracted obligations on time, leaving an important part of the projects incompleted, etc.
The Chinese side has not been correct in the implementation of official agreements and protocols and jointly established criteria, either. The overwhelming majority of the economic projects built in Albania on Chinese credits have always been carried out with delays, which fluctuate from 1 to 6 years. There are also projects, such as the Ferro-chrome Factory which was due to be built on Chinese credits in Albania on the basis of an agreement concluded in 1965, which for the fault of the Chinese side has not been completed to this day. Likewise, the construction of the Metallurgical Complex began with delay and to this day, also, for the fault of the Chinese side, investment in its construction has been realized only to a measure of 67 per cent as against the volume of the total value of the Complex, and China has delivered only 74 per cent of the equipment.
These flagrant violations of official agreements by the Chinese side have caused grave damage to the Albanian economy, and the Chinese Government bears full material and moral responsibility for this. When all this is calculated according to official documentation and concrete facts, then it will be seen who owes who and how much.
In the Chinese note China's aid to Albania is presented as the decisive factor in our country's development. But it has never been, nor could it ever be, such a factor. The decisive factor, which nobody can deny, has been the resolute, persistent and heroic work and struggle of the Albanian people, under the leadership of the Party of Labour of Albania, for the construction of socialism according to the Leninist principle of self-reliance. The brilliant successes attained by Albania in the construction of socialism and the defence of the country are the deed of the Party of Labour of Albania, of the Albanian state of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of the Albanian people, and not the result of external aid.
The aid received from China has been only an auxiliary factor. The total value of the Chinese credits utilized by Albania up to the end of 1977 amounted to a very small percentage of our national income. This is the reality, and not its false presentation by the Chinese side which tries to create the impression as if it is China that has kept the Albanian people alive.
The chauvinistic concepts of the great state have clouded the minds of the Chinese leadership and have made it speak in the language of feudal landlords. The Chinese note boasts that China has delivered 1.8 million tons of wheat, etc., to Albania. It almost stops short of saying that Albania "has kept body and soul together thanks to China's bread"! This is an offensive stand towards the Albanian people. The truth is that Albania has imported grain from China during the period of 1956-1975. Not only does this figure not correspond to reality, but it should also be said that Albania has received only 436,000 tons of bread grain on credit from China over all this period, whereas it has received the rest in the commercial way, paying for it on a clearing basis. As the Chinese note has rounded into one figure both the bread grain imported by Albania on credit and the bread grain imported by it on a clearing basis, why does the Chinese side fail to mention what it has taken from Albania, what Albania has exported to China on a clearing basis during the period 1954-1977? Albania has delivered to China over 1.7 million tons of oil, over 1.3 million tons of bitumen, about 2.7 million tons of chromium ore and chromium concentrate, etc.
By mentioning its military aid in its note and making this note public, the Chinese Government has deliberately made public the military secret of the defence of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania. By so doing, the Chinese Government has gravely impaired the defence of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania and helped its external enemies, in particular the forces of the North-Atlantic Treaty Organization and US imperialism and the forces of the Warsaw Treaty and Soviet social-imperialism. This is an act of perfidy, and the Chinese Government bears responsibility for it.
A special place in the note of the Chinese Government is occupied by attempts to accuse the Albanian working people of allegedly failing to respect and being unwilling to collaborate with the Chinese experts who had come to Albania. These, are inventions through and through, and we will not take the trouble to refute them. We are convinced that, in his conscience, no Chinese expert who has lived and worked among our people will approve of these accusations. During all this time, the Albanian workers, specialists and managers have collaborated with the Chinese experts in a fraternal and friendly spirit, assessed their work correctly, respected their knowledge and experience.
Furthering definite ends, the Chinese note says that within 24 years 6,000 Chinese experts have been sent to Albania. This global figure is dished out in order to back up the claim that the credit for constructions, industry, agriculture and everything that has been made in Albania allegedly goes to these 6,000 specialists. But the construction of new Albania is the deed of the Albanian people themselves. Tens of thousands of Albanian specialists, engineers and technicians have worked everyday and continuously in the construction of various projects, without mentioning here the hundreds of thousands of technicians of medium training and the skilled workers. Without their work and knowledge no project could have been built.
As well as that, the Chinese note does not say that the experts sent by China have been paid handsomely by the Albanian people. This is not mentioned, but the note does not fail to remind us that China has allegedly spent 100 million yuans to experiment with Albanian iron! And this at the time when the Chinese experts, on orders from above, upon leaving Albania, left no blueprints to the Albanian specialists; they either burnt or took along with them all blueprints in their possession of the projects which were being built in Albania with Chinese aid.
It is natural that problems should arise between two partners, between two states about concrete economic questions for the solution of which discussions are necessary, even indispensable. The Chinese leadership, however, felt no need to conduct normal discussions, because it wanted to impose its opinions on Albania. Not only today, but for a long period of time before, the Chinese side, in various forms and manners, has brought pressure to bear on Albania over economic questions. During the talks about the signing of agreements of China's granting economic aid in credits to Albania, and then on observance of these agreements, many debates have taken place, in which the Albanian side has successfully opposed the views of the Chinese leadership which sought to impose a one-sided economic development on Albania, to inhibit its rapid and steady development.
In the lengthy debates, the pressure of the Chinese leadership reached such a degree that it threatened to have work on the designing of the hydro-power plants of Vau i Dejes and Fierza suspended, so that we should not build at all these very important industrial projects. The Chinese leadership thought that, as in their opinion, Albania had no technical cadres to design such large and complicated hydro-power plants with its own forces, it would consequently give up work on construction of these projects. But in the end, seeing that the Albanian side was undertaking to design these hydro-power plants itself, it was compelled to accord the credit. And actually these hydro-power plants were designed and built by the Albanian specialists, whereas the Chinese experts played the role of consultants instead of designers.
Many facts and documents indicate that, at given moments, whenever the Chinese policy made great turns, to which the Albanian Party and Government did not agree, the Chinese Government resorted to pressure and various coercive economic measures. These stands are a flat denial of the clamorous and repeated statements by the Chinese Government according to which "in granting aid to other countries, the Chinese Government strictly respects the sovereignty of the recipient country and never makes it conditional on, or asks, any privilege in return".
The Chinese note says: "... The Albanian side out of its own needs in domestic and foreign policies..., has wantonly maligned China's aid to Albania...". This lays bare the spirit of intrigue of the Chinese leadership and its desire to see Albania politically, ideologically and economically enslaved by Soviet social-imperialism or American imperialism and the reactionary bourgeoisie. The Chinese leadership speaks so because it thinks that Albania is isolated, that it could breathe and live only through China, and that now it has remained on the streets and will fall into the trap laid by the imperialists or the social-imperialists. This is what Khrushchev and Mikoyan thought when they once said that Albania would sell itself out "for thirty pieces of silver", that "without Soviet aid it would die of starvation, within fifteen days"!
But life showed that Albania did not sell itself out, nor did it die of starvation. It forged ahead with great success in the construction of socialism. And this was done not with Chinese aid, but with the heroic work and glorious struggle of the Albanian people.
In the future, too, under the leadership of the Party of Labour of Albania, the Albanian people, relying on their own forces, will always advance triumphantly on the road of socialism, and with their own example they will demonstrate to their friends and the peoples the unconquerable strength and vitality of Marxism-Leninism, the vigour of socialism, the vigour of the people.
In our struggle for the construction of socialism and the defence of the Homeland, in our efforts to face up to and overcome with success the difficulties raised to our country by the hostile act of the Chinese Government, we have and will continue to have more internationalist aid from the genuine revolutionaries, the freedom-loving and progressive people all over the world. Albania has never been isolated, it can never be isolated.
The plans for Albania's development, as laid out by the Party, will be carried out with success in all directions, through the selfless work and resolve of our people, relying on their own forces, also on the projects which China left incomplete, as well as on more new projects which will be added to them.
II
The unilateral breach of the agreements on economic and military cooperation with Albania by the Chinese Government, the arbitrary violation on its part of the contracts officially concluded between the two countries, the suspension of work on many projects important to our socialist economy, the ordering back of its experts, and so on, reflect a definite political and ideological line of the Chinese leadership. They are the outcome of the departure of the Chinese leadership from Marxism-Leninism and the principles of proletarian internationalism, of its rapprochement to and collaboration with American imperialism, the international bourgeoisie and reaction, of its renunciation of aid to and support for the revolutionary and liberation forces in the international arena, of China's intentions to become an imperialist superpower.
This course of the Chinese leadership, which went through a zigzag process, has come up against the constant opposition of the Party of Labour of Albania which cherishes the cause of socialism, the revolution and the liberation of the peoples above everything else. This accounts for the emergence of serious ideological and political contradictions which have been gradually growing between the Party of Labour of Albania and the Communist Party of China. Precisely because our Party and the Albanian people did not accept and did not submit to the Chinese line and views of a great power, the leadership of the Communist Party of China and the Chinese Government went to such lengths as to cut all aid to socialist Albania, and extended ideological disagreements to interstate relations.
All along, the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania has tried to settle these differences on a Marxist-Leninist road, through mutual consultations and comradely explanations, never making them public.
On this question, our Party has proceeded from the principle, that differences and misunderstandings may arise among various parties and states, even when they have relations of close friendship. No matter which side is to blame, the clearing of differences and misunderstandings calls for negotiations. The more so, this principle should be implemented between two socialist countries and communist parties. Such norms, as mutual consultations and comradely explanations, are absolutely necessary, because these Marxist-Leninist norms defend pure friendship, and not hypocritical and evil-intentioned friendship, they defend the purity of our scientific theory, Marxism-Leninism, strengthen the revolution and the struggle of the peoples.
Among the Marxist-Leninist norms which regulate relations among communist parties there exists also that of the correct and reciprocal, principled and constructive, criticism of mistakes which are observed in the line and the activity of this or that party. Such a comradely criticism cannot be called polemics, as the Chinese leadership interprets this norm. Polemics, as the word itself indicates, means a state of ideological and political struggle, it is a state in which non-antagonistic contradictions are transformed into antagonistic contradictions.
In its relations with the Communist Party of China, the Party of Labour of Albania has rigorously abided, by these Marxist-Leninist principles and norms which are implemented among genuine communist parties. Whenever it has seen that the Communist Party of China adopted stands and took actions in opposition to Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism, in opposition to the interests of socialism and the revolution, it has pointed out the mistakes to, and criticized it in a comradely manner. This is borne out by written documents of our Party and State, which are in your possession. And what has the attitude of the Chinese leadership been? While it welcomed and highly praised the Party of Labour of Albania and the Albanian Government for their support for, and defence of, People's China, the Chinese side never welcomed the correct and principled remarks of our Party. The leadership of the Communist Party of China has never wanted the Leninist norms and methods to be implemented in relations among parties. Reasoning and acting according to the concepts and logic of a great power, of a great party and a great state, which considers itself an infallible genius, it has demonstrated that it knows no other way apart from dictate and imposition of its views on the others, especially on the smaller parties and states.
Despite the existing divergencies, the Party of Labour and the Government of Albania have publicly supported China and the cause of socialism in China, especially, at the most difficult, internal and external political junctures it has gone through, at the moments when China was isolated and made the target of attacks from all quarters, even by its present friends. Our Party and Government have done this with an open heart, convinced that by so doing they were defending the fate of the revolution in China, which was under serious threat, defending the lofty interests of proletarian internationalism, the friendship between Albania and China. In their support for China against the enemies of socialism, and their defence of its stands and actions which were taken on the right road, the Albanian communists and people fought for the strengthening of the positions of Marxism-Leninism and socialism in China.
In order to better understand the political and ideological causes which led the Chinese leadership to its arrogant act of ceasing aid to Albania, in order to understand its chauvinistic attitudes of a great power in its relations with the Party of Labour of Albania, as well as to demonstrate the sincere, fraternal and correct stand adopted by the Albanian Party, Government and people towards China and the Chinese people it is necessary to review the development of Albanian-Chinese relations.
1. Contacts between our two parties and countries were established after the triumph of the revolution in China, after the founding of the People's Republic of China. They became closer and stronger especially after 1960, when the open struggle against Khrushchevite revisionism began. The struggle against imperialism and modern revisionism brought our parties together, but with China's departure from this struggle their roads parted.
The struggle of the Party of Labour of Albania against modern revisionism had begun even prior to the condemnation of Titoism by the Informbureau. It continued more fiercely after Stalin's death, when the Khrushchevite variant of revisionism began to show up. Our Party extended and intensified this struggle more and more, rising in opposition against the anti-Marxist attitudes and actions of Khrushchev and his gang, both in their foreign policy and in their relations with the communist parties, with our Party in particular.
The Khrushchevite deviation represented the revision of the Marxist-Leninist theory in all fields and on all questions. The Khrushchevite strategy was aimed at undermining the dictatorship of the proletariat and restoring capitalism in the Soviet Union, transforming this country into an imperialist superpower, for the division and domination of the world together with American imperialism. In order to realize this strategy, Khrushchev attacked Stalin and bolshevism, he advocated extinction of class struggle both within the Soviet Union and outside it. On the pretext that the ratio of forces in the world today had changed, that US imperialism and the international reactionary bourgeoisie had become reasonable, he justified his abandonment of the key thesis of Marxism-Leninism on the violent revolution and spread illusions about the so-called peaceful road. In their relations with the communist and workers' parties, the Khrushchevites acted according to their concept of the "mother party" and "conductor's batons". They wanted the other parties to submit to their dictate and adopt their views, to transform them into tools of their foreign policy. On this road, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and others reconciled themselves to the Yugoslav revisionists and made common cause with them in the struggle against Marxism-Leninism and the revolution.
To this traitorous and counter-revolutionary line of Khrushchevism the Party of Labour of Albania responded with its determined and unyielding fight. In particular, it opposed and denounced the ideological rehabilitation of Titoism by Khrushchev, who with this act of his was clearly showing that he had completely sunk in the quagmire of opportunism and betrayal. Documents prove that, despite its waverings in its stand towards Yugoslav revisionism, at the beginning of 1960, the Communist Party of China, also, influenced by nobody, condemned the rehabilitation of Tito and his group by Khrushchev.
In June 1960, as is known, the Bucharest Meeting was held. There, the counter-revolutionary line of Khrushchev and the Khrushchevites was still better confirmed. They not only attacked Marxism-Leninism in all directions, but also attacked the Communist Party of China directly. At that meeting, the Party of Labour of Albania openly went to the aid of the Communist Party of China and defended it to the end, thus drawing upon itself the fire of the anger and the weight of the pressures of all the Khrushchevite revisionists. Our Party made this principled defence in pure communist conscience, thinking and convinced that by so doing it was defending Marxism-Leninism and People's China.
The Bucharest Meeting and, later, the Conference of the 81 Communist and Workers' Parties in Moscow marked the final split between the Marxist-Leninists and Khrushchevite revisionists, and the beginning of the open polemics between them. Whereas our Party initiated and carried on the fight against Khrushchevite revisionism with consistency and resolve, the Chinese leadership wavered and failed to adopt clear-cut anti- Khrushchevite stands. In the initial stage of the fierce polemics between the Party of Labour of Albania and the Khrushchevite revisionists, China Was in agreement with Albania, but this only on the surface, because, in reality, as was proved later, it was seeking a reconciliation with the Soviets and the extinction of polemics with them. This was evident also in Chou En-lai's speech at the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, where in fact, he did not defend our Party, but demanded that polemics should cease instead. The Chinese leadership called this colourless stand assistance to Albania, but the demand to cease polemics was neither to the interest of socialist Albania, nor to the interest of China itself. It benefited Khrushchev and his fight against socialism and Marxism-Leninism.
2. The wavering stand of the Communist Party of China in the struggle against revisionism became clearly manifest in June 1962. At that time the Party of Labour of Albania sent a delegation to Peking to conduct talks with the leadership of the Communist Party of China on important questions which had to do with the tactics and strategy of the common struggle of our two parties in the international arena. On this occasion, the delegation of our Party came up against the very wrong views of the Chinese leadership.
Liu Shao-chi, who next to Mao Tsetung was the principal leader of the Communist Party of China at that time, and who led the talks for the Chinese side, as well as Teng Hsiao-ping, who was then the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, stubbornly insisted on the viewpoint of the Chinese leadership according to which the anti-imperialist front should necessarily include the Soviet Union as well, which at that time was led by Nikita Khrushchev's revisionist clique.
The delegation of our Party upheld the line of the Party of Labour of Albania, which was based on Lenin's teachings according, to which no successful struggle could be waged against imperialism without simultaneously combating revisionism, Our delegation insisted on the view of the Party of Labour of Albania that not only should the anti-imperialist front not include the Soviet revisionists, but, at the same time, it should spearhead its struggle both against imperialism in general, and US imperialism in particular, as well as against Soviet revisionism.
The Chinese leadership argued its line of reconciliation with the Soviet revisionists with the need to unite "with everybody" against US imperialism, which, in its words, was the main enemy. Apart from other things, this opportunist thesis also expressed the illusions entertained by the Chinese leadership about the Soviet revisionist leaders. During the Peking talks, Teng Hsiao-ping declared to the delegation of the Central Committee of our Party: "It is impossible for Khrushchev to change and become like Tito... As a socialist country, the Soviet Union will never change" (From minutes of talks, June 11, 1962).
The Party of Labour of Albania accepted neither these viewpoints nor the Chinese thesis on a common anti-imperialist front, in which the Khrushchevite revisionists, also, should be included, whereas the Chinese leadership held on to its opportunist positions.
The development of later events, the stepping up of the struggle of the Marxist-Leninist forces against Khrushchevite revisionism, the deepening of Khrushchev's disruptive activity and especially the signing of the Anglo-American-Soviet Treaty of August 1963 on the banning of nuclear tests in the atmosphere, which reflected the uniting of the efforts of the two superpowers for the establishment of their domination over the world, forced the Chinese leadership to start open polemics with Khrushchev. In this manner, when the reconciliation and agreement with the Soviet revisionists, so ardently sought by the Chinese leadership, did not materialize, only then the Communist Party of China effectively entered the road of anti-Khrushchevism and agreed to the determined, consistent and principled struggle of the Party of Labour of Albania. This could not fail to rejoice the Party of Labour of Albania and the Albanian people who, single-handed, were for almost three years then facing up to the open frenzied attacks of Khrushchev and entire modern revisionism. The bonds and cooperation between our two parties in the struggle against imperialism and revisionism were strengthened even more.
Our Party made all the efforts for this struggle to be broadened and deepened, because it served the mobilization of the anti-imperialist and anti-revisionist forces for the defence of the cause of socialism and the liberation of the peoples. But the Chinese leadership, as we will see below, did not prove to be consistent and principled in this struggle.
3. In Summer 1964 Chinese propaganda took up the Sino-Soviet border problem. Referring to a talk of Mao Tsetung with a group of Japanese socialist parliamentarians, it claimed that China had been dispossessed by the Russian Czars of vast territories of hundreds of thousands of square kilometres, that in Europe, too, the Soviet Union had territorial problems which had emerged as a result of the Second World War.
The Party of Labour of Albania did not approve of Mao Tsetung's raising the problem of rectification of borders. According to the view of our Party, the Chinese leadership was making two gross mistakes. In the first place, the raising of the border problem at that moment did not assist the ideological struggle against Khrushchevism. On the contrary, it provided the Soviet leadership with a powerful weapon against China and the Marxist-Leninists in order to neutralize the effect of the ideological struggle they were waging to expose the Khrushchevite betrayal and to present our struggle as a border dispute or territorial claims. On the other hand, by calling into question the rectification of the borders of the Soviet Union with some European countries following the Second World War, J. V. Stalin was unjustly attacked, and the accusation levelled by international reaction against him for creating "spheres of influence" was backed up. The Chinese leadership agreed with Tito, who, when it came to redress the injustices Yugoslavia had suffered in the past at the hands of the victorious powers, upheld this thesis and raised his voice to the skies, while he kept completely silent about the injustices done to another people, if they were in Yugoslavia's favour.
The Chinese thesis on the rectification of borders was not as simple as that. It expressed the chauvinistic spirit of the great state and bourgeois nationalism, it was an instigation of war in Europe.
In keeping with Leninist norms, in the spirit of complete correctness and in a comradely manner, the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania informed the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and Chairman Mao Tsetung personally of its opinions on these questions in a letter addressed to them on September 10, 1964.
The letter reads in part:
"We think that raising territorial problems with the Soviet Union now would gravely harm our struggle. If we were to do this, we would be giving the enemy a powerful weapon to fight us, and this would paralyse our march forward.
"Under the pressure of Khrushchev's revisionist propaganda, under the influence of Khrushchev's slanders and calumnies, and for many other reasons, the masses of the Soviet people will not understand why People's China is now putting forth territorial claims to the Soviet Union, they will not accept this, and Soviet propaganda is working to make them revolt against you. But we think that even true Soviet communists will not understand it, nor will they accept it. This would be a colossal loss for our struggle.
"... we think that we must not open old wounds, if any, we must not start a controversy and polemics over whether or not the Soviet Union has appropriated other countries' land,' but our only concentrated struggle should be spearheaded against the great ulcer, against the great betrayal represented by imperialism and modern revisionism, the traitor groups of Khrushchev, Tito and all their henchmen."
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China did not reply to the principled and correct letter of our Party. The Chinese leadership never gave our Party any explanation on this question of so great importance. Mao Tsetung limited himself to a verbal statement to the effect that we will not reply to your letter because we do not want to stir up polemics. In your view, which is in keeping with Leninist norms, the exchange of opinions, comradely criticism and each other's enlightenment are normal things between two communist parties. They can by no means be considered polemics.
Despite this incorrect stand of the Chinese leadership, our Party did not make this disagreement public. It continued its revolutionary struggle against imperialism and revisionism together with China.
4. In October 1964 N. Khrushchev was overthrown. This event again revealed the wavering stand of the Chinese leaders towards the Soviet revisionists. The hopes for a reconciliation with, and rapprochement to, them were revived.
On October 29, 1964, on behalf of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council of the People's Republic of China, in the presence of the ambassadors of Vietnam. Korea, Rumania and Cuba, Chou En-lai requested the Albanian ambassador to Peking to transmit to the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania the Chinese proposal that our parties send delegations to Moscow to back up the new leadership of the Soviet Union with Brezhnev at the head, and to unite with it "in the struggle against the common enemy, imperialism". He added that he had suggested to the Soviet side that an invitation should be extended to Albania, also, to attend the November 7 celebrations.
Expounding the view of the Chinese leadership at that meeting, Chou En-lai said: "Changes have taken place in the Soviet Union. Their influence and importance is not circumscribed within the Soviet Union, alone, but extends to the socialist parties and countries and the entire international communist movement, even to our common enemies and their agents. In a word, this is a good thing, a change has been made.
"... For these reasons we sent a message of greetings to the new leadership of the Party and Government of the Soviet Union, informing them that we support and welcome this change.
"... Now, in Peking, from October 16 we have adopted a truce in our press.
"... This we do in order to unite on the basis of v Marxism-Leninism against our common enemy, although many major problems may not be solved for the time being".
Although Chou En-lai knew that there were no diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Albania, which were brutally broken off on the initiative of the Krushchevites, he insisted that Albania should send a delegation to Moscow, and told our ambassador, "We think that the Albanian comrades must study our proposal, because this is a good opportunity to stretch a hand to, and unite with them in the struggle against the enemy".
The Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania could not accept this proposal, which sought the cessation of the struggle against revisionism and ideological reconciliation with it. If this line of reconciliation with the Soviet revisionists were accepted, it would spell disaster to the Marxist-Leninist movement, it would be a destructive blow at it. Therefore, our Party categorically refused the request of the Chinese leadership and turned it down flatly.
In its letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on November 5, 1964, the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania explained patiently and with Marxist-Leninist correctness that the assessment made by the Chinese leadership of the changes that took place in the Soviet Union was wrong and their proposal to go to Moscow was unacceptable.
This letter reads in part:
"This event though important and susceptible of serious consequences, has not yet led, at least until now, to the complete defeat of revisionism, has not yet marked the final victory of Marxism-Leninism over revisionism, but has only put off the decay of revisionism, has pushed revisionism closer to its grave, while Khrushchev's successors are trying to prevent revisionism from falling into this grave, by implementing the policy of Khrushchevism without Khrushchev.
"... Although N. Khrushchev's exit from the political scene is an important victory of Marxism-Leninism, the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania holds that it must not be overrated, that the vigilance of the Marxist-Leninists must not be relaxed nor should their principled struggle to smash Khrushchevite modern revisionism cease.
"... We are of the opinion that the open and principled polemics for the ceaseless exposure of modern revisionism must be kept up today and carried through to the end until revisionism is buried as an ideology... Our retreat from these positions won with struggle, would be a loss for us and a gain for the revisionists.
"... In these conditions, when the Soviet Government has unilaterally broken off diplomatic relations and committed dreadful anti-Marxist acts against us, we are of the opinion that it is neither permissible for us as Marxists nor is it worthy of us as a sovereign state, to ignore these things, only because of the fact that the person of N. Khrushchev has been deposed.
"For these reasons we have to express our opposition to the proposal of comrade Chou En-lai to the effect that an Albanian delegation should be invited by the Soviet Party and Government to attend the November 7 celebrations".
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China adopted a disparaging stand towards this confidential letter of our Party. The Chinese leadership never replied to this letter and did not take into consideration its reasonable and comradely remarks.
On November 7,1964, Chou En-lai went to Moscow at the head of a delegation of the Chinese Party and Government, to hail Brezhnev's advent to power. But, as facts were to prove, he had no success in his mission to bring about a reconciliation and agreement with the new Soviet leadership and no sooner had he returned to China than the Chinese leadership was compelled to resume polemics with the Soviet Union.
Thus, our Party's stand and its assessment of the events with regard to Khrushchev's downfall proved correct, Marxist-Leninist. Whereas the position of the Chinese leadership was conciliatory, opportunist and utterly wrong both in its assessment of, and stand to, the new revisionist leadership of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, although the Chinese leadership did not behave correctly and made no self-criticism, although the ideological differences deepened further, our Party went on with its struggle for the strengthening of the friendship and cooperation with the Communist Party of China, hoping that this would help the Chinese leadership to sound positions in the common struggle against revisionism and imperialism.
5. Regardless of the contradictions which had arisen between us, taking account of the difficult situations China was going through, and sincerely wishing to assist the Communist Party of China to overcome them, the Party of Labour of Albania continued to support China resolutely, especially in those political and ideological questions over which we held common views.
Our Party supported the Cultural Revolution at the personal request of Mao Tsetung, who declared to our Party that China was facing a colossal danger, and that no one knew who would win in China, the socialist forces or the revisionists (From minutes of the talk with the delegation of the Albanian Party and Government, May 1966). The Party of Labour of Albania assisted China at a very critical moment, when it was going through great upheavals and was being savagely attacked by the united imperialist-revisionist front. It supported the general line of the Cultural Revolution for the liquidation of the capitalist and revisionist elements who had usurped key positions in the Party and state power, though it did not agree over many questions of principle and methods which guided this revolution and were used in it. By supporting the Cultural Revolution, our Party nurtured the hope that it would find the road of true revolutionary struggle, led by the working class and its vanguard, the Communist Party. The entire period of the great Cultural Revolution was a very difficult period for socialism in China, it created a complicated and chaotic situation. This situation was the logical outcome of the factional and unprincipled struggle which took place within the ranks of the Communist Party of China during the time of the struggle for the carrying out of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and after 1949, around the road which China would follow for the further development of the revolution.
The great ideas of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the Marxist-Leninist ideology were not properly made the example for, the pillar and the compass of, the Communist Party of China in the concrete conditions of its country. This accounts for the fact that the Marxist-Leninist nucleus of the Party slipped into dangerous eclecticism, which gave rise to a chaos of unbridled struggle for power between factions, persons and groups holding various non-Marxist-Leninist views, something which seriously hampered the laying of the foundations of socialism in China. This political-ideological and organizational chaos in the Communist Party of China and the Chinese state enabled capitalist and revisionist elements to seize key positions in the Party, in the state power and in the army. In these conditions, the Cultural Revolution, inspired and led by Mao Tsetung personally, broke out.
The Party of Labour of Albania supported the general strategy of the Cultural Revolution. But we want to stress that our Party supported the strategy of this revolution and not all its tactics, it defended with determination the cause of socialism in China, defended the fraternal Chinese people, the Communist Party of China and the revolution, it did not defend at all the factionalist struggle of the anti-Marxist groups, whoever clashed and wrangled with each other, resorting even to arms, overtly or covertly, in order to retake state power.
The Cultural Revolution, more often than not, preserved the spirit and actions of an unprincipled struggle, which was not led by a genuine party of the working class which should strive for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Thus, these clashes among factionalist groups ended in the establishment in China of a state power dominated by bourgeois and revisionist elements.
The present Chinese leadership wanted and wants the Party of Labour of Albania to denounce the Cultural Revolution according to the will and the reasons of the Chinese leadership. The Party of Labour of Albania will never accept such a dictate. Together with all the world revolutionaries it is expecting the Communist Party of China to make the true analysis of this Cultural Revolution, to have the courage to state the truth on the ideas which guided this revolution, the groups and people who carried out and led it, on those against whom this revolution was directed, and to assume clear-cut stands on these questions. To this day, the leadership of the Communist Party of China has not done such a thing, because it is afraid of facts, events and their true Marxist-Leninist interpretation.
6. The Party of Labour of Albania has made all-round, powerful and open efforts to defend China in the international arena, though on many issues it held opposite views on principle. Such is the protracted and persevering diplomatic struggle of socialist Albania for the restoration of the lawful rights of the People's Republic of China to the United Nations, denied to it by US imperialism and its allies.
China pursued a close-door policy in its relations with other countries of the world. The leadership of our Party had expressed, on special occasions and in a comradely way, its desire to the Chinese leaders that People's China should be more active in its foreign policy, extend its political, economic, cultural and other contacts and relations with various countries, particularly with its neighbouring countries. According to our view, this would be to the advantage of China itself and the cause of socialism and the revolution in the world. But your leadership found this wish of Albania's unreasonable and preferred its own isolation, excusing itself with various pretexts before all the states which expressed their wish to establish relations with it.
7. In 1968, a Party and Government delegation of Albania went to China, headed by the former member of the Political Bureau and former vice- chairman of the Council of Ministers and minister of people's defence, Beqir Balluku. This delegation was also charged with the task of presenting to the Chinese leadership our requests for aid to strengthen the defence potential of Albania.
On that occasion, Chou En-lai openly put forth to Beqir Balluku the view of your leadership, according to which, Albania, as a small country, had no need of heavy armament and that it was not at all in a position to defend itself alone from foreign aggression, particularly from Soviet social-imperialism and US imperialism, no matter how much military aid it would receive from China. Therefore, according to Chou En-lai, the only road for Albania to cope with foreign aggression was that of applying the tactics of partisan warfare in the country and concluding a military alliance with Yugoslavia and with Rumania.
When our delegation came home, Beqir Balluku informed the Political Bureau of Chou En- lai's proposal. The Political Bureau of the Central Committee of our Party unanimously condemned and rejected Chou En-lai's anti-Albanian and counter-revolutionary proposal. Beqir Balluku, who formally adhered to the decision of the Political Bureau, added that he had allegedly opposed Chou En-lai's proposal. But later facts proved that Beqir Balluku had in reality been in full agreement with the proposal of the Chinese leadership and worked in secret to carry out this hostile strategic plan against the People's Socialist Republic of Albania.
Chou En-lai repeated this same thesis to the Albanian Government delegation which had gone to Peking in July 1975, to conclude an agreement on China's economic aid to Albania for the 6th Five-year Plan 1976-1980. This thesis was turned down again by our delegation in a clear-cut and categorical manner.
The leadership of our Party considered Chou En-lai's proposal about the military alliance he was seeking to impose on us an attempt of a reactionary character on the part of the Chinese leadership to drive socialist Albania into the trap of warmongering plots through military alliances, with the final aim of turning the Balxan area into a powder keg, as the Soviet social-imperialists and the US imperialists are seeking to do.
We do not know if Yugoslavia and Rumania were informed of these plans of the Chinese leadership; But even at present we are witnessing that the Chinese leadership is displaying unusual zeal to interfere in the affairs of the Balkans, to mix up the cards and to kindle the fire of war in this very sensitive area of Europe. But we are confident that the Balkan peoples will never accept to be set at loggerheads with each other, they will never accept to become tools either of US imperialism, Russian social-imperialism, or Chinese hegemonism.
These acts of the Chinese leadership and the opposition of our Party to these reactionary acts had, later, very serious consequences in the relations between our two countries. Our Party has never meddled with the internal affairs of China. But the Chinese leadership, at certain moments, has criminally interfered in the internal affairs of Albania. We will make these facts public at an appropriate time. If these condemnable acts undertaken by the Chinese leadership in collusion with the Albanian traitors were realized, the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, its independence and sovereignty would have been liquidated.
8. While our Party was working to strengthen fraternal cooperation with China, while it wanted to correctly wage and intensify the struggle against imperialism, modern revisionism and reaction on a joint front also with all the Marxist- Leninist parties and forces, China saw everything only from its own angle, it wanted to dominate others, so that the latter would follow its strategy and tactics.
The events that were taking place revealed ever more clearly that the political and ideological struggle of the Communist Party of China against the Khrushchevites did not proceed from a sound basis, in reality, its aim was not to defend Marxism-Leninism, the revolution and the liberation of peoples. It was waged simply for pragmatic ends and selfish interests. This became evident in the radical change of the Chinese strategy, to which Nixon's visit to Peking officially set the seal.
In the summer of 1971, Albania, considered the closest ally of China, learned from foreign news agencies the report spread all over the world that Kissinger had paid a secret visit to Peking. Negotiations, which marked a radical change in the Chinese policy, had been held with Kissinger. As in other cases, this time too, though the question was about a major political turn, a change in the strategic line, the Communist Party and the Government of the People's Republic of China did not deem it necessary to hold preliminary talks with the Party of Labour and the Government of Albania, too, to see what their opinion was. The Chinese leadership put others before an accomplished fact, thinking they had to obey it without a word.
It was clear to our Party that Nixon's visit to Peking was not an upgrading of the talks that were going on till then in Warsaw between the Chinese and US ambassadors, that it was not made to promote "people's diplomacy" and to pave the road to contacts with the American people, as the Chinese leaders claimed. Nixon's visit to Peking was laying the foundations of a new policy on the part of China.
With Nixon's visit, China joined the dance of imperialist alliances and rivalries for the redivision Of the world, where China, too, would have its own share. This visit paved the road to its rapprochement and collaboration with US imperialism and its allies. At the same time, the inauguration of the alliance with the United States of America also marked the abandoning on the part of the Chinese leadership of the genuine socialist countries, the Marxist-Leninist movement, the revolution and the national-liberation struggle of the peoples.
This alliance and meeting in Peking, between the Chinese leadership and the American President Nixon, were taking place at a time when the US was waging its predatory imperialist war in heroic Vietnam, when it was using all its most up-to-date means of war, except for the A-bomb, to kill the fraternal heroic Vietnamese people and to reduce Vietnam to ashes. This monstrous alliance and the Sino-US contacts were condemnable acts of disastrous consequences for the peoples.
Therefore, in view of this dangerous turn in the foreign policy of China, on August 6, 1971, the Central Committe of the Party of Labour of Albania sent a long letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, stressing in no uncertain terms that it was against this turn of China, which ran counter to the interests of People's China itself, the revolution and socialism.
The letter reads in part:
"... We regard your decision to welcome Nixon in Peking as incorrect and undesirable, we do not approve of, nor do we support, it. We also hold the view that Nixon's announced visit to China will be inconceivable to, and will not be approved by, the peoples, the revolutionaries and the communists of various countries.
"... Welcoming Nixon to China, who is known as a frenzied anti-communist, an aggressor and assassin of the peoples, as a representative of blackest US reaction, has many drawbacks and will have negative consequences for the revolutionary movement and our cause.
Nixon's going to China and his talks there cannot fail to arouse harmful illusions among the rank-and-file, the peoples and the revolutionaries, about US imperialism, its strategy and policy.
"... Talks with Nixon provide the revisionists with weapons to negate the entire great struggle and polemics of the Communist Party of China to expose the Soviet renegades as allies and collaborators of US imperialism, and to put on a par China's stand towards US imperialism and the treacherous line of collusion pursued by the Soviet revisionists towards it. This enables the Khrushchevite revisionists to flaunt their banner of false anti-imperialism even more ostentatiously and to step up their demagogical and deceitful propaganda in order to bring the anti-imperialist forces round to themselves.
".. .The visit of the US President to China will give rise to doubts and misunderstandings among the rank-and-file who may suspect that China is changing its stand towards US imperialism and involving itself in the game of the superpowers.
"... Our strategy calls for close alliance with the peoples fighting all over the world, with all the revolutionaries, on a joint front against imperialism and social-imperialism, and never for an alliance with Soviet social-imperialism allegedly against US imperialism, never for an alliance with US imperialism allegedly against Soviet social-imperialism".
In conclusion, the letter points out that "the line and attitudes of the Party of Labour of Albania will always remain principled, consistent, unchanging. We will combat US imperialism and Soviet revisionism uncompromisingly and consistently". The letter expressed the hope that the remarks the Party of Labour of Albania made to a sister party "would be taken up in a comradely spirit and understood correctly".
The Chinese leadership adopted its usual stand also towards this letter. It did not deign to give any answer. By so doing, it betrayed not only big state megalomania but also its fear to face the correct and principled Marxist-Leninist arguments of our Party. It is a fact that two months alter our letter, the 6th Congress of the Party of Labour of Albania was held. That was a good occasion to exchange views with the Chinese delegation invited to the Congress and to clarify each other's positions. But in this case, too, the Chinese leadership, consistent on its road of refusing consultations and the settling of disagreements through talks, adopted a stand in contravention of all practice and internationalist relations between sister parties. It concocted some absurd excuses for its failure to send a delegation to the Congress of our Party. Practically, the Communist Party of China has ever since reduced contacts with our Party, turning relations between the two parties into a purely formal relationship.
The change of China's strategy has come about as a result of an internal struggle within its Communist Party where deep contradictions existed, "a hundred flowers blossomed and a hundred schools contended", where there were pro-Khrushchevites, pro-Americans, opportunists and revolutionaries in the leadership. This accounts for the successive changes in the political line of the Communist Party of China, its vacillating, opportunist, and contradictory attitudes towards US imperialism, modern revisionism and international reaction. The axis of the Chinese policy has changed three times over ten years, from 1982 to 1972. First, the Communist Party of China abided by the strategic formula of a "united front with the Soviet and other revisionists against US imperialism and its allies". Later on, the Communist Party of China came forward with the slogan of a "very broad united front of the proletariat and the revolutionary peoples of all countries against US imperialism, Soviet revisionism and reaction of various countries". After Nixon's visit to China, the Chinese strategy again speaks of a "broad united front", but this time it includes "all those who can be united", incorporating in it even the United States of America against Soviet social-imperialism.
9. After its rapprochement with US imperialism and overtures to the United States of America and its allies, the leadership of the Communist Party of China proclaimed the anti-Marxist and counter-revolutionary theory of the "three worlds", which it presented as a strategy of the revolution, and made efforts to impose it on the Marxist-Leninist communist movement and all the peoples of the world as the general line of their struggle.
When they were fighting together against modern revisionism, and Khrushchevite revisionism, in particular, the Party of Labour of Albania as well as the Communist Party of China adhered to the principle, and stressed, that there was no "mother party" or "daughter party", that any party enjoyed the right to hold its own views on all problems, that a party was truly communist and revolutionary, when it looked at this problem from the angle of Marxism-Leninism. The Communist Party of China has violated these principles and norms in all directions. It is seeking to impose China's counter-revolutionary turn of unity with US imperialism and world reaction on all Marxist-Leninists, to have the entire revolutionary and liberation movement accept its anti-Leninist concepts and analyses of imperialism, the present-day world situation, alliances, and so on, as an absolute and incontrovertible truth.
Practice shows that in most cases, the Communist Party and Government of China have not viewed international issues from the angle of Marxism-Leninism, the interests of the revolution and the liberation struggles of the peoples. Chinese policy is a pragmatic policy, and it cannot be otherwise, in as much as its strategy and tactics are such. Therefore the world has witnessed and will witness about-faces in the Chinese strategy and politics in the future, too. These turns are passed off as Marxist-Leninist, but in reality they are anti-Marxist, they are turns catering to the interests of the big China state in its search of alliances with US imperialism, Soviet social-imperialism and world capital to create and build China into an imperialist superpower.
At present, the Chinese plan to become a superpower has found its concentrated expression in the infamous theory of "three worlds". The theory of "three worlds" seeks to replace Marxism-Leninism with an eclectic amalgamation of opportunist, revisionist and anarchic-syndicalist ideas and theses, it seeks to dampen the revolutionary spirit of the proletariat and its class struggle, advocating an alliance with the bourgeoisie and imperialism. Alleging that time is not ripe for revolution, the theory of "three worlds" seeks to preserve the status quo, the present situation of capitalist, colonialist and neo-colonialist oppression and exploitation.
Under the hoax of defence of national independence from Soviet social-imperialism which it regards as the only danger and threat today, China requires the peoples to give up their struggle for national, economic, and social liberation, to submit to US imperialism and the other capitalist powers of the West, the former colonialists. It presses for the strengthening of the Common Market and the European Union, organisms set up to keep the proletariat of Europe in capitalist bondage and to oppress and exploit the peoples of other countries. By fanning up the armaments race of the superpowers and relying on such instruments of war of US imperialism as NATO and other military blocs, the theory of "three worlds" instigates imperialist world war.
The theory of "three worlds" is a smokescreen to hide China's ambition for hegemony over what it calls the "third world". It is no accident that it has included itself in the "third world" and presents itself as its leader in the international arena. It is no accident either that the Chinese leadership is flirting with the "non-aligned" and seeking to take them under its wing.
The Chinese leadership is not the first to display its "affection" and "care" for the so-called "third world". The imperialists, the social-imperialists and the other neo-colonialists have worked out various theories on the "third world" long ago before it, in order to dominate and subjugate the countries and peoples of this "world". Therefore, it is a futile effort on the part of the Chinese leadership to claim that it is the first, as early as 1974, to have produced this theory on the basis of an allegedly objective analysis of the international situations made by Mao Tsetung. It is common knowledge that the theory of "three worlds" has been concocted by world reaction. The Party of Labour of Albania and the Albanian Government exposed and combated the theoretical and practical speculations in regard to the "third world" in the international arena as far back as 1960, and even before, as bourgeois-capitalist, neo-colonialist and racist manoeuvres and conspiracies to suppress the peoples who were fighting for freedom and independence.
The "contribution" of the Chinese leaders to the theory of "three worlds" consists only in its "substantiation" of the need for reconciliation of the "third world" with imperialism; they have discovered nothing; they concocted the alliance of the "third world" with US imperialism and the other imperialists to solicit their aid and to make China an imperialist superpower.
Therefore, it is not the Party of Labour of Albania which attacks the Chinese inventor or champions of this theory; it is precisely the latter who were the first to attack the Party of Labour of Albania and the struggle it has waged against this theory of world reaction, the struggle it has conducted in support of the freedom and independence of the peoples of Africa, Asia, Latin America, etc.
The implementation of the theory of "three worlds" led the Chinese leadership to unite even with the "devil", to unite with the US imperialists and the monopolists of Europe, with fascists and racists, kings and feudal lords, most rabid militarists and warmongers. Pinochet and Franco, former nazi generals of the German Wehrmacht and the Japanese imperial army, dyed-in- the-wool criminals like Mobutu and bloodthirsty kings, American bosses and presidents of multinational companies, became its allies.
This anti-Marxist line led China's leadership to unite with Tito, Carillo and other revisionists. At one time, it was against Tito, whereas now it has united with him. This testifies to its lack of Marxist-Leninist principles, to inconsistencies in its line. But our Party wants to tell the Chinese leadership: your uniting with Tito now and the suspicious alliances you are trying to piece together in the Balkans, pose a great danger to the peoples of this peninsula, to the Yugoslav, Albanian, Greek, Turkish and other peoples. Albania is well aware of the plans and ambitions of the Chinese leadership towards the Balkans. Therefore, the peoples of the world must be vigilant towards the Chinese intrigues in this region.
10. The Party of Labour of Albania has made every effort to solve the differences arisen between the two Parties and which were becoming pronounced with the passage of time, on the Marxist-Leninist road.
Proceeding from this desire, seeing that the Chinese leadership systematically failed to answer its letters and refused to send official delegations to Albania, seeing that ideological differences with the Chinese leadership were assuming broad proportions, the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania did not stay aloof, but made other efforts to engage in comradely talks with it.
Thus, in January 1974, the Central Committee of our Party proposed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China that a top level delegation of our Party and Government go to China for talks and that this visit be made, possibly, within the first six months of the year 1974. Though formally agreeing to the proposal of our Party, in point of fact, the Chinese leadership did not agree to our delegation going to Peking. In the beginning, the Chinese leadership told us that the delegation should arrive in the Second six months of the year 1974, later it postponed its visit to the first six months of the year 1975. And, finally, it kept silent about this issue, thus barring the way to talks, at a time when kings and princes, reactionaries and fascists were welcomed with great pomp in Peking. It was clear that the Chinese leadership was persistently treading its anti-Marxist road, that in relations with our Party and country, it was guided by the concepts of great power chauvinism, that it was trying to have its line and dictate accepted unconditionally and indisputably.
In these conditions, when the Chinese leadership refused any contacts, when it avoided any discussion and consultation, when it was working arrogantly and overbearingly to impose the theory of the «three worlds* on the Marxist-Leninist movement, what had the Party of Labour of Albania to do? To connive at the anti-Marxist line of the Communist Party of China and deny itself? To give up the struggle against imperialism and modern revisionism and join the enemies of the revolution, socialism, the freedom and independence of the peoples? To break away from the Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries and unite with the opportunists and the reactionary bourgeoisie? To fail to support the national liberation struggle of the peoples against the superpowers and their agents in the ranks of these peoples?
The Party of Labour of Albania stood loyal to Marxism-Leninism and the correct and revolutionary line it has always followed resolutely, unwaveringly and consistently. It also presented this Marxist-Leninist line at its 7th Congress, where it put forward its views and stand with regard to the main international problems today, the revolution and the liberation struggle of the peoples. Just as at all its other congresses, at the 7th Congress, too, our Party expressed its views also on problems which have to do with the Marxist-Leninist movement in the spirit of proletarian internationalism. The line of the 7th Congress, which was unanimously approved by the entire Party, lies at the foundation of all the home and foreign policy of our country.
This Marxist-Leninist line of our Party, the independent policy of socialist Albania, the principled and resolute stand of the Albanian people, which have always run counter to the anti-Marxist big power line and policy of the Chinese leadership, are the main and real cause of the anti-Albanian attitudes and acts of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the Chinese Government, which led to the arbitrary cessation of civil and military aid to Albania.
This was evident especially after the 7th Congress of the Party of Labour of Albania, when the Chinese leadership, breaking every norm of relations between sister parties, hurried to attack the 7th Congress of our Party, under the pretense that it had allegedly attacked China, the Communist Party of China and Mao Tsetung.
The accusation of the Chinese leadership is groundless. For this suffice it to read the documents of the 7th Congress, which are all made public. It is not difficult for anyone to see that it contains no attacks either against China, or against the Communist Party of China or Mao Tsetung. The Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania has asked the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China through a letter dated December 24, 1976, to indicate when and where our Party has attacked the Communist Party of China and Mao Tsetung. To this day the Chinese leadership, as usually, has given no reply.
But the question does not consist in "attacks" which do not exist. The anger and arrogance of the Chinese leadership towards the 7th Congress draw their source from the fact that our Party did not adopt the Chinese anti-Marxist theses and views, its counter-revolutionary theory of the "three worlds". The Party of Labour of Albania, as a genuine Marxist-Leninist Party, agrees to discuss problems, but it has never accepted orders and directives from anyone on what it must put forward and how it must put forward its view at its own congresses. Therefore, it has never allowed any Party, whether small or big, including the Communist Party of China, to interfere in its. internal affairs and dictate what it should do and how it should act.
11. Continuous changes have taken place in the leadership of the Communist Party of China as to its line, strategy and composition. The Party of Labour of Albania never defended this or that group of individuals that were removed from the leadership of the Communist Party of China. We have had and still have our opinion on everything and on every person or group of the leadership acting in China. This is natural.
The present Chinese leadership wanted the Party of Labour of Albania to support its acts with regard to the changes made at the head of the Communist Party of China. As we did not do it, it comes to the conclusion that we are partisans of Lin Piao and "the gang of four". It is wrong in both aspects, and this is one of the unavowed major political, ideological reasons which have urged the Chinese leadership to cease aid to Albania. The present Chinese leadership has wanted our Party to support its illegal and non-Marxist-Leninist activity to seize state
power in China. Our Party has not fulfilled and will never fulfil this desire of the Chinese leadership. The Party of Labour of Albania never tramples on the Marxist-Leninist principles, and has never been, nor will it ever be anybody's tool.
In the ideological and political differences and contradictions with the Party of Labour of Albania, in the failure of the attempts of the Chinese leadership to impose its views and line on the Party of Labour of Albania lies the real reason of the Chinese decision to cease aid to Albania. Having failed to subdue socialist Albania, the Chinese leadership is now seeking to avenge itself and harm the construction of socialism in Albania. In so doing, it is revealing its anti-Marxist and counter-revolutionary countenance even more clearly.
* * *
The cessation of credits and aid to socialist Albania on the part of the Chinese leadership is not only an episode, however grave, in the relations between China and Albania. This act assumes great international importance, it proves that China has come out against Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism, that it has adopted and is applying a big power chauvinistic policy and dictate, that it is implementing hegemonic practices and it is perpetrating arbitrary and brutal acts of a superpower.
For its selfish aims, to make China a central world power, the Chinese leadership is publicizing itself as a "defender of small and middle-sized countries", that it is fighting against "the unfair division of the world economy", that it is against "economic discrimination against the developing countries by the imperialist powers", that it stands for the "development of their national economy", for "the strengthening of their independence and sovereignty", that it is fighting "against bullying of the small by the big", etc. But when the Chinese leadership behaves like an enemy towards Albania, when it ceases aid and credits because the Party of Labour of Albania does not submit to its conductor's baton, all the falsity of the Chinese line is seen through, the not in the least good-intentioned aims and lies that the Chinese leadership wants to peddle to the peoples of the "third world" in order to suppress and enslave them, to impose its will and that of the old and new colonialists on them, are also clearly understood.
By cutting short aid to socialist Albania, at a time when China receives substantial aid and credits from US imperialism and world capitalism and accords aid and credits to their agents like Mobutu and his ilk, the Chinese leadership openly shows world public opinion that it does not agree ideologically with a truly socialist country, but it agrees and is in alliance with the enemies of socialism and the reactionaries, that it is against the socialist order, against the countries and peoples who demand liberation precisely from imperialism and social-imperialism, from oppression and dictate by big state chauvinism.
We want to say to the Chinese leaders: You extended the ideological differences and disagreements also to the field of state relations with our country. With this you dealt a heavy blow at the Albanian-Chinese friendship for which the Albanian people and the Chinese people have fought so hard. You made public the disagreements and differences and began open polemics. We accept this challenge and are not afraid of polemics. But you are fully responsible for all your hostile, anti-Marxist and anti-Albanian acts before the Chinese people and the Albanian people, before all world public opinion.
In order to provide the Albanian people and the Chinese people, and all world public opinion with the possibility of becoming acquainted with, and pass judgement on, the views of your Party and Government and the Albanian Party and Government with regard to the cessation of credits and aid on the part of China to Albania, we will publish this letter as well as the note of the Chinese Government in our newspaper "Zeri i popullit". We hope that you will publish our letter in your newspaper "Renmin Ribao". This is a norm which China has supported in the past.
The Party of Labour of Albania, the Albanian Government and people will fight to preserve the Albanian-Chinese friendship, which is a friendship between peoples. For their part, they will make every possible effort to maintain normal state relations between Albania and China. They are sure that the Chinese people will make a correct assessment of the Albanian stand and will know how to judge the anti-Albanian acts of the Chinese leadership.
The Chinese leadership ceased economic and military aid to Albania in the belief that Albania would have either to capitulate and submit to it or to stretch its hand out to others and be discredited. But the Chinese leadership has not reckoned with the Party of Labour of Albania and the Albanian people, their determination, the strength of their unity.
The People's Socialist Republic of Albania and the Albanian people, under the consistent leadership of the Party of Labour of Albania, with Comrade Enver Hoxha at the head, will thoroughly and honourably fulfil their historic mission for the construction of socialism by relying on their own forces, further proving to the proletariat and all the peoples of the world the inexhaustible and indomitable vitality of the Marxist-Leninist ideology, which enables even a small country, encircled by imperialism and revisionism, as Albania is, to build socialism successfully, to defend and carry it always ahead.
Albania will never submit to anybody, it will stand to the end loyal to Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism. It will march nonstop on the road of socialism and communism illuminated by the immortal teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. The Albanian people, with the Party of Labour at the head, will resolutely and consistently support the revolutionary and liberation struggles of the peoples, their efforts for freedom, independence and social progress. They will fight uncompromisingly through to the very end against US imperialism, Soviet social-imperialism, modern revisionism and world reaction. Albania has never bowed its back or its head, either in the past or today, nor will it ever do so in the future.
The Chinese leadership will fail both in its sermons and in its intrigues. The reactionary act it committed against Albania is revolting to the conscience of every honest man and woman in the world. Though encircled, socialist Albania is not isolated because it enjoys the respect and love of the world proletariat, the freedom-loving peoples and the honest men and women throughout the world. This respect and love will grow even more in the future. Our cause is just! Socialist Albania will triumph!
THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE PARTY OF LABOUR OF ALBANIA
THE COUNCIL OF MINISTERS OF THE PEOPLE'S SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF ALBANIA
Tirana, July 29, 1978.
Reprinted from the edition published by "8 Nentori" Publishing House, Tirana, 1978.
Sung to the tune of "The Thaelmann Column" in Songs of the Spanish Civil War, Vol. 1. (Folkways Records)
Written to denounce the hostile act of the Chinese revisionists when they openly joined the imperialist- revisionist encirclement of the heroic People's Socialist Republic of Albania. The content is based on the NEC Statement in The Workers' Advocate, Vol. 8 #7. The song was written by the New York Metro Branch of COUSML.
Though encircled by NATO and Warsaw
Trying hard to bring her to her knees,
Still Albania upholds the revolution --
Steers the path to final victory.
CHORUS:
Our beacon is the land
Where socialism stands;
Albania, we pledge you our lives!
ENVER!
The three world-ists who have power in China
Have embraced Albania's enemies.
They capitulate to all reaction
While they aim to gain hegemony.
CHORUS
In defiance of the opportunists,
'Gainst their blackmail and their cunning plots,
Stand the workers and peasants of Albania --
Self-reliant, solid as a rock!
CHORUS
The Albanian people stand determined
To uphold the Marxist-Leninist way.
The three world-ists, the Titos and the Khrushchovs
Find they choke when they bite the PLA !
CHORUS
Comrade workers! Heed your sacred duty!
Comrade workers! Advance and take your place!
All defend to death the Land of Eagles!
All defend our proletarian base!
CHORUS
(Note: last verse and chorus should be sung very militantly, shouting "Comrade workers!" each time.)
(Reprinted from Red Patriot, Newspaper of the Communist Party of Ireland (Marxist-Leninist), May 21, 1978.)
Recently a Central Committee delegation of the Communist Party of Ireland (Marxist-Leninist) returned from a visit to the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, where it was hosted by the Central Committee of the Party of Labor of Albania.
The delegation saw at first hand the great achievements of the Albanian people under the leadership of the great Party of Labor of Albania led by Comrade Enver Hoxha. The Party of Labor of Albania has distinguished itself by its persistent adherence to principle and its refusal to capitulate to any form of revisionism. It opposed the revisionism of Tito right from the outset. It opposed the revisionism of the Khrushchov clique and the Soviet revisionists as soon as it appeared. Today, the Party of Labor of Albania has taken a resolute stand against the new revisionists pushing the reactionary theory of three worlds. The Party of Labor of Albania has played an outstanding role in the struggle against revisionism of all kinds and has won the deepest respect of all genuine Marxist-Leninists and progressive people throughout the world.
The Albanian people achieved liberation in 1944 after five years of armed struggle against the Italian and later the German fascists. The Communist Party led from the beginning by Comrade Enver Hoxha rallied the people for tile armed struggle, hi the armed struggle hundreds of communists gave their lives as they constantly stood in the forefront of the struggle. In Albania it was a matter of pride that no patriot died from a bullet in the back, but always from a bullet in the chest.
Everywhere the delegation of the Communist Party of Ireland (Marxist-Leninist) went we saw places where martyrs had stood and fought and died. Everywhere we heard of the great bravery with which the people fought. The delegation learned of the decisive role of the Communist Party, now called the Party of Labor of Albania, and its constant example of leadership, which combined advanced and heroic stands with systematic and thorough work to unite the people on every level for struggle against the enemies of their country. The women of Albania played an outstanding role in the struggle, and this point was repeatedly explained and shown in concrete form.
During the entire period of national liberation no other political party in Albania fought the foreign invaders apart front the Communist Party. When it became clear that it was only a matter of time before the German fascists would face the same fate as the Italian fascists, the major imperialist powers, and most significantly the British imperialists, began to conspire and interfere in the internal affairs of Albania. These reactionary forces wanted to ensure that political power was given to the bourgeoisie and tried in every way to foist traitors onto the people. But the Albanian people, led by the Communist Party of Albania, resolutely resisted these activities and led the people in establishing complete independence. All outside interference by the imperialists was blocked right from the beginning. The Albanian people began in 1944 a new glorious period in their history, the period of building socialism.
During the period of building Socialism the Albanian people have constantly had to resist attempts by reactionary forces to interfere. First of all Yugoslavia, backed by the imperialist powers attempted to dismember their country and turn it into a province of Yugoslavia. Second the social-imperialists of the Soviet Union, who seized power after the death of Stalin, attempted to force Albania to become a capitalist country dependent on the Soviet Union. But both these attacks on the people have been defeated under the leadership of the Party of Labor of Albania.
Albania is now the socialist camp in the world today, Albania is the only country in the world in which the dictatorship of the proletariat is in existence. It is a country in which the bourgeoisie has been destroyed. Socialist Albania is the firm and reliable ally of the working and oppressed people of the entire world in the struggle against imperialism, feudalism and all reaction. The socialist camp allied with the working and oppressed people of the world are one camp in the world. This camp is united in struggle against the only other major camp in the world, the camp of the imperialists and reactionaries of every country. Everywhere the delegation of the Communist Party of Ireland (Marxist-Leninist) went, the Albanian people expressed their resolute determination to support and assist the working and oppressed people of the entire world. Albania has never kow-towed to the reactionaries of the world. Albania has never put so-called "trade" and "diplomatic" interests before the interests of world revolution. The delegation learned from the Albanian Party of Labor about the struggle that it has waged to uphold this principled Leninist stand against every attempt by internal and external reactionaries to divert them.
Under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat Albania has been transformed. Albania is the only country in the world where the working people enjoy complete freedom and democracy. The entire process of government of the country combines the advanced leadership of the proletariat through its Party, the Party of Labor of Albania with the most complete democracy. All the policies and programs of the government are decided after the full consultation with the people and have the complete support of the people. The delegation learned of the manner in which the dictatorship of the proletariat operated in many aspects of the society such as the factories, the agricultural cooperatives and on the question of national defense, the question of the administration of the communities and many other aspects.
Since independence the direct and indirect income of the people has risen constantly as the production of the society has increased. No prices have risen and many prices have come down.
In Albania, the wealth produced by the people is used to advance the general well-being of the people and not to fatten a class of rich parasites as in the capitalist countries. Because the basis of production is to supply the needs of the people and not to make maximum profit, there is no unemployment in Albania, there is no housing shortage, everybody is able to buy the food and clothing and other essentials that they need.
Albania has a medical service, which in terms of basic facilities, numbers of doctors, numbers of midwives, and the real concern for the people, far exceeds anything that exists in any capitalist country. And this service is provided free of charge to all the people.
Before liberation 85% of the people were illiterate. Now there is no illiteracy. Albania now has an advanced comprehensive education system. It has a national university based in Tirana, which each year produces six times more graduates than existed in the entire country before liberation.
Albania has made great advances in the struggle against the oppression of women. This is a question which the Party of Labor of Albania has shown great concern for throughout its entire history. In the national liberation war every effort was made to involve women and to oppose feudal attitudes. Before liberation there were only about 100 women with advanced education in the country, whereas today, nearly half the graduates from the university are women. The legal and political position of women is exactly equal to that of men. Every facility is provided to ensure that women are not discriminated against because of child bearing or any special roles that they have in the family. For instance, a complete system of kindergartens exists throughout the country which look after the young children according to whatever needs exist. A mother who is breast feeding her child is given time from work with pay to look after the child every four hours or whenever is necessary. If a child is ill, a mother, or father, if this is appropriate, is able to look after the child, or visit the child in the hospital without any loss of pay or loss of position at work. The Albanian women play an important role in every aspect of the life of the society and everywhere the delegation of the Party went we met and talked to women who had leading positions in factories, state farms, departments of the University and so on. The liberation of women in Albania has liberated a tremendous force for socialism.
The delegation visited many parts of the country and went to see every sort of institution. This included schools, kindergartens, factories, agricultural cooperatives of the higher and lower types, the University in Tirana, the Institute of Hygiene, the Agricultural Institute, many museums and places of historic interest, a music festival and many other places. Everywhere the delegation went we were greeted with great enthusiasm by everyone. Everywhere we went people expressed their support for the Irish people and for the struggle of our people against British imperialism. The people showed a great interest in Ireland and the struggle of the Irish people against British imperialism.
The delegation was deeply impressed by the happiness and enthusiasm of the people to build socialism and carry out their internationalist responsibilities. Albania is now self-sufficient in grain, and self-sufficient in most other basic commodities and raw materials. The entire country is supplied with electricity. All these things exist because of Marxism- Leninism and because of the leadership of the Party of Labor of Albania which has been consistently faithful to Marxism-Leninism.
During the visit the delegation of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ireland (Marxist-Leninist) expressed firm support for the great People's Socialist Republic of Albania and praised the tremendous work of the Party of Labor of Albania. The delegation, on behalf of the entire working and oppressed people of Ireland, extended the warmest friendship to the heroic people of Albania. The representatives of the Central Committee of the Party of Labor of Albania, expressed the firmest friendship for the Irish people and their support for the Irish revolution.
The visit of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ireland (Marxist-Leninist) has been a historic visit which has cemented the ties between the Communist Party of Ireland (Marxist-Leninist) and the Party of Labor of Albania, and between the Irish people and the Albanian people. End.
-- Statement of the National Committee of the Party --
(The following article is reprinted from Albanian Telegraphic Agency, June 17, 1978.)
The newspaper People's Voice, organ of the Communist Party of New Zealand, published in its issue of May 22, 1978, the statement of the National Committee of the Communist Party of New Zealand, entitled: "Communist Party Reaffirms Basic Line and Policy". The statement, which is reprinted today by the Albanian newspapers, reads:
The Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of New Zealand once again affirms its view that the basic contradiction in New Zealand, a developed capitalist country, is that between the working class and the capitalist class headed by the monopoly capitalist section. Consequently the working class faces a directly socialist revolution.
Any attempt to try to insert an intermediate stage between capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat is opportunism and revisionism. The adoption of a line of an intermediate stage of national democratic, people's democratic or anti-imperialist revolution, however correct for many countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, is nothing but class collaboration in regard to developed New Zealand. It means collaborating with one's "own" capitalist class, uniting with this class -- which is thoroughly pro-imperialist -- and sowing the illusion among the working class and the masses that their exploiters and class enemies are really their friends and allies, willing to fight under the leadership of the working class and its party for liberation from imperialism! And this when New Zealand history shows that the national capitalists back imperialism to the hilt! Such a line in relation to New Zealand is reactionary bourgeois nationalism, pure and simple. It is a thoroughgoing betrayal of the basic interests of the working class.
Such in fact is the revisionist line which E. F. Hill and the other opportunist leaders of the Communist Party of Australia (M-L) are trying to impose on the Party and the working class of New Zealand through crude Khrushchov-type interference in its internal affairs and by means of intriguing and conspiring with a tiny gang of local anti-Party conspirators. These are being exposed at the present time.
The Communist Party of New Zealand follows a consistent line of revolutionary class struggle in New Zealand for the aim of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Internationally it unites with the working class of the developed capitalist countries in the revolutionary struggle for socialism and against imperialism and capitalism, particularly, against the two imperialist superpowers, the biggest world exploiters, U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism. It fights both in theory and in practice to unite the working class of New Zealand with the struggle of the oppressed people for liberation from imperialism and their internal reactionaries. It fights also for the widest unity between all peoples against superpower domination and drive to world war.
The Communist Party of New Zealand develops its line in conformity with proletarian internationalism and its own practice in revolutionary class struggle. It wages consistent struggle for strict adherence to the basic principles of Marxism and the correct relations between fraternal parties which includes noninterference in the internal affairs of other parties. We hold that the solutions to the problems of the revolution in each country have to be solved by the revolutionary workers of that country.
In the present developing crisis of capitalism in New Zealand and abroad, the imperialist bourgeoisie is seeking to smash the Communist Party of New Zealand because it is in the forefront of the struggle in defense of the basic interests of the working class and the masses of the people. The imperialists are being aided by a small gang of petty-bourgeois elements within the Party.
However, the rank and file of the Communist Party of New Zealand, together with non-Party supporters, have stood firm to defend the Party. In doing so they are defending basic Marxist-Leninist principles. It is this firm stand on principle that will ensure both the defeat of the revisionist conspiracies against the Communist Party of New Zealand and the further strengthening of the Party ideologically, politically and organizationally. End.
Important Marxist-Leninist Document of the CP of New Zealand
The following is the text of an article published on June 18, 1978, in Zeri i Popullit, organ of the Central Committee of the Party of Labor of Albania.
The statement of the National Committee of the Communist Party of New Zealand of May 22, 1978, which was published in our press yesterday and which reaffirms its basic line and policy, constitutes an important Marxist-Leninist document in a moment of responsibility in the life of the revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat of New Zealand.
In conformity with the teachings of Marxism-Leninism, applied in the concrete conditions of New Zealand, the statement affirms that the working class of New Zealand faces today a directly socialist revolution and that the Communist Party of New Zealand follows a consistent line of revolutionary class struggle for the aim of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, rejecting the preachings about an intermediate stage between capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, which, in the conditions of New Zealand, a developed capitalist country, aim at giving up the revolution and advocating class collaboration with local bourgeoisie, an ally of imperialism, the National Committee of the Communist Party of New Zealand, fiercely condemns these preachings in in its statement as opportunism, revisionism, reactionary bourgeois nationalism, pure and simple, and a thoroughgoing betrayal of the basic interests of the working class.
Internationally, the statement of the National Committee of the Communist Party of New Zealand also reaffirms a clear Marxist-Leninist and internationalist line -- the line of solidarity and unity with the revolutionary struggle of the working class of the capitalist countries for socialism against the exploiting bourgeois order of imperialism, with the struggle of the oppressed people for liberation from imperialism and their internal reactionary regimes, with the struggle of the revolutionary forces and freedom- loving peoples against the biggest exploiters -- U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism, against their aims for world domination and their preparations for a new world war.
The statement is a clear evidence that the Communist Party of New Zealand strictly adheres to the correct, internationalist relations between fraternal parties, on the basis of the unflinching loyalty to Marxism-Leninism, the equality and non-interference in the internal affairs of one another, of the right of each party to solve the problems of the revolution in each country without foreign interferences and pressures, according to the universal teachings of Marxism-Leninism, its own revolutionary experience and the concrete conditions of the country.
The Party of Labor of Albania, the Albanian communists fully support these correct revolutionary Marxist-Leninist positions of the sister Communist Party of New Zealand and powerfully back up its resolute struggle against the revisionist conspiracies, which aim at diverting the Communist Party of New Zealand from the revolutionary road, at its degeneration and destruction. The Party of Labor of Albania expresses the firm conviction that such plots against the sister CP of New Zealand, just as in the past, will fail with shame and wishes to it successes in its revolutionary struggle and work for the strengthening of the Party ideologically, politically and organizationally. End.
The tentative agreement of July 21 between the government and the top labor bureaucrats of the postal workers' unions is a big betrayal of the postal workers' struggle.
The key issues in the present contract struggle are the efforts of the capitalist state to increase the exploitation of the postal workers by cutting their real wages and imposing increased productivity on them through the rationalization of the Postal Service, attacking their job security through automation and increasing their workloads.
Following the fascist logic of the capitalists and their "Democratic" Carter Administration, which blames the workers' wage increases for the inflation caused solely by the rich and their government, the capitalist press has widely hailed the new postal pact as a victory for Carter's "fight against inflation". At the same time, the press tried to console the workers by assuring them that the pact protected their wages by keeping a cost-of-living allowance and that it defended their jobs by maintaining the no-layoff clause. All these claims are big lies to cover up the fact that the tentative contract betrays outright the struggle of the postal workers for higher wages, job security and a lightening of the workload.
The pact has the following provisions:
Wages: The Postal unions demanded a wage raise of eight per cent in the first year of the contract plus an increased cost-of-living escalator which would add six per cent more to the raise at the present high rate of inflation, a total of 14 per cent per year, COLA included. Such a raise, at the bare minimum, is absolutely necessary due to the falling real wages of the workers, who have lost at least, 1.5 per cent in real wages, according to the government's minimized figures, over the period since the last contract was signed in 1975. But the new agreement promises only a piddling 19.5 per cent at most over three years, a measly two per cent the first year, three the second and five the third, plus a strictly limited COLA. This averages out to a mere 6.5 per cent per year, only one per cent above Carter's "anti-inflation" guideline and almost five per cent below the annual rate of inflation. Thus, under the tentative agreement, the postal workers' wages would fall still further behind inflation; the real wages of the workers would decline at an accelerated rate.
The fraud of the claim of the bourgeoisie that the postal workers' wages are the cause of the rise in the price of first-class postage stamps is evident from the history of these prices and wages. Between the mid-forties and mid-fifties wages rose by about 80 per cent, from $2700 at top grade in 1945 to $4875 in 1958, while the price of a first-class stamp only rose by 33 per cent from 3 cents to 4 cents, and that only in 1957. (Apparently in those days wage raises did not push up the price of stamps!) But from the mid-fifties to the present, the price of first-class stamps multiplied five times, from 3 cents to the present 15 cents, while wages rose only 225 per cent, or multiplied two and one-quarter times, during the same period. (And this wage increase has only been the result of the postal workers' militant struggle, as most of it occurred right after the vigorous wildcat strike the postal workers waged in 1970.) Thus it is obvious that the postal workers' struggle for increased wages is not the cause of high postal rates. Instead, it is a just struggle aimed at retarding the decline in their real wages in the face of inflation.
Length of contract: While the workers demanded a two-year contract to replace the former, three-year contract to give them a freer hand to fight the attacks of the capitalists, the labor traitors capitulated on this demand and agreed to a three-year contract, meaning the workers' wages will fall behind inflation while the workers will be tied to a miserable wage scale for three long years. The key issues in the present contract struggle are the efforts of the capitalist state to increase the exploitation of the postal workers by cutting their real wages and imposing increased productivity on them through the rationalization of the Postal Service, attacking their job security through automation and increasing their workloads.
Productivity and rationalization: The new pact also betrays the postal workers in the face of the capitalists' productivity drive to rationalize the postal service.
Over the past two and one-half years, in order to eliminate workers unneeded to man the new, automated mailing process, the government has reduced the workforce by 59,000 workers through attrition and by harassing workers. Not satisfied with this massive elimination of jobs, carried out even with a no-layoff clause in the contracts, the Postal Service proposed to eliminate it altogether. The Postal Service also announced that it wants to extend the probation period of new employees from the current 90 days to 180 days, thus doubling the length of time during which a worker can, under the contracts, be arbitrarily fired on the slightest pretext. The postal workers demanded that the no-layoff clause remain in the contract. Now the government and labor traitors are hailing the maintenance of the no-layoff clause in the contract as a "great victory", but it is this clause under which 59,000 workers have already lost their jobs! While the Postal Service is positively drooling to find new ways to eliminate workers, the maintenance of the no-layoff clause marks no advance at all for the workers.
Further, also as a result of the rationalization drive of the Postal Service, the burden of work on the workers has increased greatly. Forced overtime work has also been increased. As a result, the productivity (and with it the exploitation) of the workers has increased rapidly.)
Another means which the government has been using to increase productivity has been the introduction of a large number of "part-time flexible" workers and "casual" workers. The "part-time flexible" workers work irregular schedules of less than 40 hours a week. The Postal Service refuses to upgrade many of these workers, so as to maintain a "flexible" pool of slaves available for labor at any time and under the worst conditions. This is still more true of the policy of employment of "casual" workers, some of whom have remained in this category as long as five years without being upgraded, while they are subject to every whim of the employers. These categories of workers are used to reduce the number of regular postal workers to a bare minimum while permitting still greater workloads to be imposed.
To combat the productivity drive of the state, the postal workers have demanded maintenance of the no-layoff section of the contracts, that all postal installations be manned by full-time workers, that the classification of "part-time flexibles" be eliminated,and that the amount of required overtime be reduced. But the capitalist press reports that management prerogatives such as mandatory overtime and others, under which jobs are eliminated and workloads are increased, remain in effect in the new pacts despite the workers' demands to eliminate them. Hence the new agreement gives the postal workers no new protection against the disastrous rate of job elimination and increasing workloads that have been in effect under the old contracts.
In addition, the press reports that in the new contracts the Postal Service imposed unspecified limitations on life and health insurance payments and benefits.
Thus the new tentative contract agreement is a capitulation to the Carter Administration's anti-working class program of "voluntary" wage controls and increased productivity and provides the postal workers with no new protection on the questions of job security and increasing workloads. It is a betrayal of the just struggle of the postal workers. End.
Part IV
(Reprinted below is the table of contents and the fourth and final installment of the COUSML pamphlet "Why Did the 'RCP-USA' Split?" The pamphlet is available from the COUSML, P.O. Box 11942, Chicago Illinois, 60611, for 50¢.)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: WHY DID THE "RCP,USA" SPLIT? (Reprinted in the April 1, 1977 issue of The Workers' Advocate.)
SPEECH ON THE "RCP, USA"
I. In Practice the "RCP" Ends Up Giving the Same Political Line As the OL Social-Chauvinists: Iran,
"Zaire", Ethiopia, Fascist Anti-Busing Movement
II. How the "RCP" Lays the Ideological Basis for OL Social-Chauvinism
"The first point which should be taken very seriously is that the RCP is against the struggle against opportunism, even in theory as well as in practice."
"The second point is that the RCP's line essentially is that you should count missiles to see if the super-powers are equal."
"The third point is that Rep denies the basic Marxist-Leninist teachings on war, namely, that war is the continuation of politics by other, i.e. violent, means."
"The fourth point is that the RCP is doing a tremendous amount of ideological work on the theme that we are not presently in a revolutionary situation."
"The fifth point is that the RCP claims that we are living in a classical bourgeois democracy and denies the question of fascization."
"The sixth point is the RCP's support of the 'theory of three worlds'."
"The seventh point is the RCP has actually come out to directly cover for OL's lines and to deny that OL gives various social-chauvinist positions."
"The eighth point is RCP's method in giving ideological grounds for social-chauvinism. Their method is to use the line that 'everything is so complex, wow' and anyone who clarifies something must be a 'dogmatist'."
"The ninth point is that the RCP is opposed to revolutionary authority."
APPENDIX: ACTION GROUPS AND SIDE-LINE PAMPHLETEERS (Excerpts from a speech on organizational questions)
PART IV
The fifth point is that the RCP claims that we are living in a classical bourgeois democracy and denies the question of fascization. The RCP actually polemicized allegedly "against" the October League on the grounds that the OL once said that there was fascism or a "fascist tide", while the RCP prettifies growing fascism as "bourgeois democracy" or "sham democracy". What a militant struggle against social-chauvinism! The RCP denies the general fascization under imperialism, the Leninist teachings that "Political reaction all along the line is a characteristic feature of imperialism" and that "The difference between the democratic-republican and the reactionary-monarchist bourgeoisie is obliterated precisely because they are both rotting alive..." (Collected Works, Vol. 23, "Imperialism and the Split in Socialism", p. 106) And naturally at the same time the RCP closes its eyes to the actual situation in the U.S. and embellishes U.S. imperialism with its fairy-tales of democracy embellished with dogmatic, scholastic "Marxist" lectures about "bourgeois democracy". The RCP closes its eyes to the huge bureaucratic-military machine of the U.S. state, to the monstrous military and police forces, the unprecedented growth of the system of prisons, jails, courts and lawyers, the numerous secret police and espionage agencies, including FBI, CIA, DIA, Secret Service, etc., and the over-bloated bureaucracy that pushes its tentacles into every aspect of U.S. society. The RCP does not note that today the capitalists are on a fascist offensive against the workers, that one fascist law after another is being prepared and implemented. One glaring example of this is the way the RCP denies that the U.S. state is behind the open racist and fascist terrorist groups. In an article on the Ku Klux Klan and the nazis, the RCP denied the state-organized character of the open fascist groups and even denied that the monopoly capitalist class organizes them. (See Revolution, August, 1977, "Angry Actions Rip Fascist Grouplets", front page.) According to the RCP, "So while" the ruling class is probably not funding them (although wealthy reactionaries here and there whip their checkbooks out) nor do they need to at this time, groups like the Klan and Nazis provide a valuable service to the bourgeoisie. With the help of capitalist publicity, 'after all, they are news', these scum do raise up the banner of extreme reaction, of vicious racism and national chauvinism.
"In the short run, too, these reactionary grouplets are useful to capital, such as in Chicago's Marquette Park... All this has made united struggle by Marquette Park and neighboring Englewood, a Black community, against the real enemy much more difficult.
"In publicizing the Nazis and Klan, the media have been very careful to steer clear of any open endorsements of their political line. "
So these groups are not organized by the state, they are not organized by the ruling class, only maybe occasionally some rich capitalist may give some money. But you really wouldn't say they are based on the monopoly capitalist class, they just provide an unsolicited "valuable service to the bourgeoisie". And these newsmen who are publicizing them, they are just after a little bit of sensational news, have a few too many bourgeois democratic illusions about "freedom of speech" and almost unwittingly are also providing a service for the bourgeoisie. This is an example of RCP's flimsy attitude towards the state. RCP is giving the ordinary revisionist line of an "ultra-right fringe". And this attitude to the state is extremely useful to the social-chauvinists. The social-chauvinists give the line that the Soviet Union is a Hitlerite fascist state, and the Soviet Union is indeed fascist, but they deny the growing Hitlerite fascism in the U.S. and say that U.S. imperialism is just a "bourgeois democracy". The implication is that the threatened third world war will be an antifascist war, in which the world's people should support "democratic" U.S. imperialism against the Soviet social-imperialists.
The sixth point is the RCP's support of the "theory of three worlds". In the July 1977 issue of Revolution, the RCP came out in support of the theory of "three worlds". The RCP's timing is very interesting. At the time of RCP's article, the struggle between the OL social-chauvinists and ourselves on the question of "three worlds" had become very hot, and in fact it still is. The RCP did not speak on this question until the struggle really heated up and OL was taking very heavy blows. Then the RCP comes up to pull OL's chestnuts from the fire for them. One very significant thing is that the RCP is not only a "three worlder", but they are the primeval "three worlders", the original "three worlders". They were "three worlders" from before the time that this anti-Leninist line was being spread in the international Marxist-Leninist communist movement. Right from their formation, right back to 1968, they were "three worlders" to the extent that they held that the main contradiction inside the U.S. was the contradiction between the oppressed nations inside the U.S. and U.S. imperialism, and not the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. It took them till around 1974, I think, to start to reconsider this line. Around 1974 or 1975 they were finally able to figure out that the main contradiction in the U.S. was between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
Let us consider certain aspects of RCP's defense of the theory of "three worlds". The first thing to note is that they descend into the same gutter politics as the OL, the same political blackmail, and they always hasten to state that this line is the line of the Communist Party of China. The implication is that if you oppose the theory of "three worlds", you are opposing the Communist Party of China. Of course, in their article in the August 1977 issue of Revolution on "Two Superpowers: Equally Enemies of World's People", they refer to Comrade Enver Hoxha. So the implication is that if you oppose them on any front you are some type of a revisionist who is opposing China and opposing Albania.
The way the RCP supports the theory of "three worlds" and tries to cleanse it of the more blatant social-chauvinism is by using the most revolutionary- sounding phrases that cost them nothing -- and at the end of all these revolutionary phrases they end up with the same line as the OL. If you examine their article in the July Revolution you will find a lot of phrases like "in the final analysis", which they put in bold italics, or "although the fundamental conflict characterizing our era is the conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie", and this and that...but for the mean time, right now, you have something else. With this method the RCP says various things about how in the final analysis the neo-colonial lackeys are exploiters, etc., etc. But in the mean time the RCP praises these neo-colonialists under the most extravagant phrases. For example, they give the line that the more reactionary a government is, the greater the contradiction it has with imperialism. Here it is: "But even governments of the Third World which are completely reactionary in relation to their own people and which are dependent on imperialism also have contradictions to one degree or another with imperialism, exactly because they are dependent. " (Revolution, July 1977, p. 18, column 2) So the fact that a bloodstained lackey is dependent on imperialism is the proof that he has a contradiction with imperialism. The more of a traitor some lackey is, presumably the more contradiction he has with imperialism and the more he should be supported. The RCP constantly describe the comprador bourgeoisie and the feudalists in glowing terms -- terms which sometimes apply to certain actions of the national bourgeoisie but which, when used to describe the imperialist lackeys, cannot be called anything but glowing terms and extravagant praise. For example, the RCP says: "Conflicts between bourgeois Third World governments (the feudalists have disappeared, just like with the OL --ed.) and the imperialists, though significant, do not change the fact that these governments cannot and will not fight for complete independence from imperialism, and that the backbone of the struggle for national independence is the workers and peasants of these countries. " (Ibid.) Very nice, until you realize that the RCP is talking about the Shah of Iran and Mobutu, who will not fight for the complete independence of their countries but who have thus been described in glowing, liberation colors as people who will allegedly fight for some independence for their countries. This praise of neo-colonial lackeys is coupled with something which is rather common among the opportunists today and shows where certain so-called Marxist-Leninists are heading -- and that is the most extravagant praise for Chiang Kai-shek, the hangman of the Chinese people. The political blackmailers, the self-proclaimed great supporters of China, are coming out in defense of Chiang Kai-shek. The RCP babbles about "...when Chiang Kai-shek, a lackey of U.S. imperialism, was at least partly fighting Japanese imperialism, which was the Chinese people's main oppressor for a certain stage in the struggle. " Chairman Mao's assessment of Chiang Kai-shek's role is quite different. He wrote in August 1945:
"What about the Kuomintang? Look at its past, and you can tell its present; look at its past and present, and you can tell its future. In the past, this party carried on a counter-revolutionary civil war for ten whole years. During the War of Resistance it launched three large-scale anti-Communist campaigns, in 1940, 1941 and 1943, each time attempting to develop the attack into a country-wide civil war. It was only because of the correct policy adopted by our Party and the cooperation of the people of the whole country that its attempts failed. As everyone knows, Chiang Kai-shek, the political representative of China's big landlords and big bourgeoisie, is a most brutal and treacherous fellow. His policy has been to look on with folded arms, wait for victory, conserve his forces and prepare for civil war." He added: "As for Chiang Kai-shek, he was passive in resisting Japan but active in anti-communism. He was a stumbling-block in the People's War of Resistance." (Selected Works, Vol. IV, "The Situation and Our Policy After the Victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan.", pp. 11 and 12) The only reason that Chiang Kai-shek could be restrained from destroying the united front was the extremely wise, far-sighted policy of the Communist Party of China, which also happened to have an army to back up this policy and also the sympathy of the masses. It had nothing to do with any desire on the part of Chiang Kai-shek, who in fact wanted to plunge China into all-out civil war right in the face of Japanese aggression. Chairman Mao pointed out in 1946 that when Chiang Kai-shek left the united front and became one of the full-fledged enemies of the revolution, that this was not narrowing the united front but broadening the united front. "On the surface our revolutionary national, united front appears to have narrowed in the present period as compared with the period of the War of Resistance. As a matter of fact, it is precisely in the present period, after Chiang Kai-shek sold out the nation's interests to U.S. imperialism and launched the country-wide civil war against the people and after the crimes of U.S. imperialism and the reactionary Chiang Kai-shek clique were completely exposed before the Chinese people, that our national united front has really broadened." (Selected Works, Vol. IV, "The Present Situation and Our Tasks", Section VII, pp. 169-170. A few sentences further on, Chairman Mao denounces the "so-called third road".) This whole campaign in support of Chiang Kai-shek is extremely sinister. It is the opportunist version of what is called the "China Lobby" in Congress, a campaign of lobbying in support of Chiang Kai-shek.
When everything is said and done, the RCP's only difference with the OL on the question of "three worlds" is the following: the OL says that the theory of "three worlds" is the "great strategic concept" of world revolution, while the RCP asserts that "This three worlds analysis gives, in our view, a correct appraisal of the general role that countries, or groupings of countries, are playing today on the world scale. As such it is one important part of the more general world-wide united front line. " (emphasis as in the original, Revolution, July 1977, p. 5) So one says it is the whole strategy, while the other asserts that it is an important part of the whole strategy. That is the difference. The RCP does this by detaching the question of the struggle of countries or states from anything else in the world, they try to demagogically separate the international struggle from the struggle inside each country. Thus they give a schizophrenic line that, applied to Iran, goes as follows: since the Shah of Iran is struggling as part of the "third world" against imperialism, since as a country Iran is struggling against imperialism, you must support that struggle of the Shah of Iran, presumably on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. But internally, inside the country, you must base yourself on the workers and peasants and overthrow the Shah of Iran, presumably on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. On Sunday you may be allowed a day of rest from this glaring contradiction. RCP's line is: you overthrow the Shah of Iran and you support the Shah of Iran simultaneously. Furthermore even this distinction breaks down because the RCP asserts that you have to wage domestic struggle, against the Shah of Iran, and in the context of the international struggle, in favor of the Shah of Iran. The RCP asserts things such as that "...the Marxist-Leninists in each country" must "correctly combine their tasks in the broad world context with what is overall their main task -- waging the revolutionary struggle in their own country..." (Revolution, July 1977, p. 19, column 3). So even this whole distinction that the proletariat and peasantry inside the country is allowed to fight at least part of the time against the neo-colonial lackeys is destroyed by the rest of the argument. Now it was pointed out by a former speaker, and he was absolutely correct, that no government will say that you are supporting them in the international struggle if you are engaged in overthrowing them. No government in the world will take that view, whether it is a socialist government or a capitalist government or any government. Every government has a certain view, and quite correctly, that when you overthrow them you are weakening them. This exposes the eclecticism of simultaneous overthrowing and supporting the neo-colonial lackeys.
The seventh point is that the RCP has actually come out to directly cover for OL's lines and to deny that OL gives various social-chauvinist positions. Consider the article "Two Superpowers: Equally Enemies of World's People" in the August 1977 issue of Revolution. The RCP actually says that The Call's shameful editorial of July 11 "leaves unclear whether the CP (ML) in fact opposes the building of the B-l or favors it as a way to delay the onslaught of war. " According to the RCP, the OL's editorial was "schizophrenic". But in fact the OL's position was crystal-clear. Everyone who wanted to, understood what the OL was saying. The OL quite clearly said that by not building the B-l bomber, war was hastened, and this was bad. And The Call said that the revisionists are opposed to the B-l bomber. Now if you know the way OL "fights" revisionism, you know that when OL points out that the revisionists oppose the B-l bomber, that means that the OL is in favor of the B-l bomber.
So there was nothing "schizophrenic" about OL's editorial, it was very consistent. If anything, it is RCP's position that is schizophrenic, in that it is trying to reconcile social-chauvinism with the appearance of leading a fight against social-chauvinism. The RCP is actually covering up for OL's social-chauvinism. The RCP does the same thing with OL's "appeasement" slogan. The RCP discusses World War II and the real appeasement of the fascists in the late 1930's. Then the RCP states that "The CP(ML) does not make clear what they think the parallel with the present situation is." Thus the RCP denies what everyone knows, that the CP(M-L) is calling for an alliance with U.S. imperialism against Soviet social- imperialism, for joining U.S. imperialism's "anti- Soviet social-imperialist front". This is not clear to the RCP, which claims that "... even the CP(ML) does not have the nerve to try and 'fight appeasement' in the name of protecting China". But Klonsky has been giving the line of fighting "appeasement" for a long time. Thus the RCP is constantly covering up for the October League.
The eighth point is RCP's method in giving the ideological grounds for social-chauvinism. Their method is to use the line that "everything is so complex, wow" and anyone who clarifies something must be a "dogmatist". Of course, RCP holds that Marxism-Leninism applies "in the final analysis", but "wow, it's much too much". Let us take an example of the RCP's intellectualism. It is this type of example that gave rise to an RCP supporter saying in a forum that RCP has made the most contributions to Marxist-Leninist theory of any group in the movement, and someone else retorting "measured in pounds or measured in inches?" For this example, I wish I had a blackboard, because it is a little confusing. It is RCP describing the present situation, and this is again from "Counter-revolutionary Work in a Revolutionary Situation". So here goes: "or to break it down more, between the kind of situation that we have now (non-revolutionary situation) and the kind where you can naturally do the dog (revolutionary situation) is a qualitative leap". (Revolution, July, p. 3, column 2) What they really mean of course is that between the revolutionary upsurge and liquidating the revolutionary movement, which they are trying to do, is a qualitative leap. At any rate, here you have the qualitative leap between two stages of development. The article continues: "Viewed from the overall sense of the kind of things we're talking about, this is the big change from quantity to quality. But within that and leading up to that are a series of quantitative changes." OK ? So the RCP is saying that in order to do their counter-revolutionary work, liquidate the movement and have the big qualitative change, they have to do a large amount of quantitative work and it keeps quantifying until it reaches a qualitative change. So this almost sounds reasonable. But then the next sentence. "And within that series of quantitative changes there are also qualitative changes." Now you have qualitative changes in the quantitative changes leading to the qualitative changes. And this is just totally incomprehensible. Why does the RCP have to talk about qualitative changes in the quantitative changes leading to the qualitative changes ? The whole point of this is to support RCP's action group mentality, that was referred to earlier in a previous talk. The whole point for this discussion of quality and quantity, and they go on and on with this, the whole point of this great "dialectics", is to prove that "the battle of the bi-centennial" was a qualitative change, that "the July 4th demonstration was a qualitative change". Of course, the RCP warns that "Philadelphia, 1976, was not the same as Russia, 1905, and we must be careful not to exaggerate its importance -- while taking note of and building off the real advances it did represent. " (Revolution, July, p, 25, column 3) So all this "dialectics" is to prove that Philadelphia was a qualitative advance. Now why are they so interested in saying Philadelphia was. a qualitative advance ? As the comrade who spoke about the action group mentality in SDS and RCP pointed out: first you have your action, and then you go into deep depression until the next action. And this is exactly what RCP describes as happening to their cadre. The article states: "There isn't going to be a July 4th demonstration every week or every month or even every year. There was a certain sentiment, not only among our own ranks, but among the workers, kind of like 'well, Jesus, what do we do now? That was a great thing, I wish we could have another one of those things. Now I've got to confront the problem, in my shop where 98% of the people didn't go and 75% aren't that interested in what happened there, or 50% or whatever it is.' " (Revolution, July, p. 22, column 1) The whole issue is that the RCP itself describes how the RCP cadre got demoralized after the event. So, to prop their own cadre back up, to convince them that the action group mentality is right, the RCP says that this: action was a qualitative advance. Of course, they can't say it is a qualitative jump between non-revolution and revolution, or between monopoly capitalism and socialism, so it's only a qualitative advance in a quantitative advance towards the qualitative advance. And I assure you, you may think that we are very tired, having gone without much sleep and it's hard to understand the RCP's "dialectics", but you can read these passages from this RCP speech at any other time and you still can't make any sense of it. Everything is made so complex that no one can figure anything out.
The ninth point is that the RCP is opposed to revolutionary authority. And the RCP, which is part of the political blackmailers, which keeps implying that you are against the Communist Party of China if you oppose their line, has always been among the worst anti-communists. The line the RCP circulates now, not openly in the paper, is that China is a little bit rightist and Albania is a little bit dogmatist, so of course RCP is the golden mean, the independent Marxist-Leninists. This shows that the RCP has complete contempt for the entire international Marxist- Leninist communist movement. The RCP goes out of its way to attack the great Marxist-Leninist, Comrade Stalin. They attack him in certain articles for no reason at all, except to attack him and through him Marxism-Leninism. I have already mentioned that the RCP couldn't oppose OL on the question of the "main blow" without dragging in an attack on Comrade Stalin. Let us take another example. Right in the middle of the RCP's discourse on "dialectics", on quality and quantity, the RCP says: "Also summing up from the role of Stalin, we can see an erroneous tendency of sometimes being undialectical about the relationship between the objective and the subjective, in terms of making them absolutes and not seeing them interpenetrate, as if there's the objective and there's the subjective and it's not like they react upon each other and that the one can change the other -- sometimes this view comes through in Stalin, for example. " (Revolution, July, p. 3, column 3) The RCP adds the last phrase just in case you missed it before. Now if you read the rest of the article, you will see that there's nothing else whatsoever about Stalin, there's no other reference to Stalin. So the RCP has gone out of its way to attack Comrade Stalin. This is serious. There's a definite line in the left, and it is the same line that was used to split the international communist movement, which is against Comrade Stalin. A comrade speaking earlier pointed out that OL gives the Titoite revisionist line, and Tito's line is in fact against Stalin. There are those opportunists who are trying to convert Chairman Mao into a Titoite, who are outrageously slandering Chairman Mao, and trying to prove that he opposed Stalin. This whole opportunist, anti-communist wave is coming up, and the RCP is taking an active part in this slander campaign.
So those are some points about how RCP is preparing the ideological basis for social-chauvinism. Its role is to wage mock struggle against social- chauvinism in order to keep the revolutionary activists under the influence of social-chauvinism. Lenin pointed out during World War I how the bourgeoisie in Germany actually came out in articles and wrote that it would be a mistake, it would be a bad thing for the bourgeoisie, for the social-chauvinist parties to go more to the right and give more rightist slogans, because if the social-chauvinist parties did that the masses would desert those parties and create a truly independent party, a true Marxist-Leninist Party to overthrow the bourgeoisie. Lenin wrote: "In its issue of April 1915, Preussische Jahrbucher, a conservative German journal, published an article by a Social-Democrat, a member of the Social-Democratic Party....The Social- Democratic Party's behavior, Monitor says to (and in essence in the name of) the bourgeoisie, is 'irreproachable' in the present war (i.e., it is irreproachably serving the bourgeoisie against the proletariat). 'The process of the transformation' of the Social-Democratic Party into a national liberal-labor party is proceeding excellently. It would, however, be dangerous to the bourgeoisie, Monitor adds, if the party were to turn to the right; 'it must retain the character of a workers' party with socialist ideals. On the day it gives that up, a new party will arise to take up the rejected program, giving it a still more radical formulation!...
"These words openly express that which the bourgeoisie has always and everywhere done covertly. 'Radical' words are needed for the masses to believe in. The opportunists are prepared to reiterate them hypocritically." (Collected Works, Vol. 21, "Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International", pp. 444-445, emphasis as in the original). And this is the same service which the RCP plays for the bourgeoisie. The RCP tries to have some slogans which sound a little more to the left than the OL slogan in order to keep the masses from deserting the social-chauvinist groups by having one which sounds a little bit more to the left. But all these tricks will be in vain, because the struggle against social-chauvinism is invincible. By vigorously advancing the struggle against social-chauvinism on an objective basis, the Marxist-Leninists will force the sham groups to find themselves sitting on the sharp edge of a razor blade. By vigorously pushing forward the decisive tasks for the American revolution, we will definitely unite the Marxist-Leninists in opposition to the social-chauvinists, and push forward the anti-fascist proletarian socialist revolution.
APPENDIX: ACTION GROUPS AND SIDE-LINE PAMPHLETEERS (Excerpt from a speech on organizational questions.)
The types of basic organization of the opportunists essentially come down to action groups and side-line pamphleteers. While they do not have anything new on this front they have a few new slogans on the question. But they have nothing new from the 1960's. And in fact this point is fairly relevant in the sense that the opportunists are now busily engaged in floating a multitude of new SDS's, only some of the new ones are in the working class. So the basic organization of the opportunists consists of the action groups and the sideline pamphleteers. These sideline pamphleteers, basically they have an easy life, in the sense all they have to do is be isolated in the sidelines, give analysis in the abstract and don't engage in struggle. The action groups under the guise of a frenzy of activity are just as irrelevant to the masses in any place in the world as are the sideline pamphleteers. What they take up is the practical action without analysis, that is what the practice is, action without analysis. This is not a criticism of practical activity, we are in favor of practical activity, but practical activity should be guided by something, by Marxism-Leninism. We say practical activity should not be detached from the needs of the masses, that is to say, from the political line. You have to actually take up the political line and deal with the actual situation in order to advance from one stage of revolution to the next. And the action groups do not do this. They take up various activities detached from what is the situation, detached from what is the stage of revolution, detached from anything you can think of. As to the basic life of an action group, comrades who have been in SDS, who have been in other New Left or student groups, subsequent to SDS have experience with this. What the life is like, is you come up with an action. In the student movement in the '60's, it was usually of the caliber of you were going to throw blood on the Dow recruiter. That was going to be the action. Or it could be something much more glorious looking than that but by and large it was pretty much stuff like that. So for a week you would have a week of frenzied activity of preparation, of excitement in the air. And on Friday the Dow recruiter would come to the campus, twenty of you would burst into the recruiting office, douse him with a gallon of beef blood, run around the campus and proclaim what you have done and then settle into three weeks of utter depression. You were so depressed you could hardly even hold meetings. Somebody would always quit the next Monday and then come back about three weeks later. In our group it was the guy in charge of the literature table. Sc for the next three weeks after ah action we never had a literature table. After about three weeks you would slowly bit by bit recover, the comrade in charge of the literature table would come back, you would have a literature table again and you would start holding meetings again and start planning what would be the next action. And this was the life of the action group. The basic point here is that no matter how frenzied it is whether the action is once a month or once a week, whether in appearance it takes place in total isolation or with the support of an entire section of the masses, it is utterly rotten and will never lead to anything. If the opportunists could recruit a million backward workers into this type of organization, which they cannot and will not, it would collapse because this is its basis and it is utterly rotten and nothing will ever come of it. End.
"Self-reliant protracted people's war is the only way to victory"
(The following article is reprinted from Eritrea in Struggle, newsletter of Association of Eritrean Students in North America, August 1978.)
Seventeen glorious years have elapsed since the Eritrean people embarked upon the road of armed struggle to realize their age old aspirations -- national independence and liberation. Seventeen years ago, on September 1, 1961, a dozen Eritrean patriots reverberated gun blasts in the western lowlands of the country heralding the beginning of the armed national liberation struggle. The beginning of the armed struggle as a natural development and dialectical outcome of the struggle of the preceding years signified a qualitatively new stage in the Eritrean people's centuries old struggle against foreign aggression. It was an expression of the Eritrean people's deep sentiment for freedom and social justice and their determination to drive out the Ethiopian aggressors from Eritrean soil. Thus, September 1, 1961, the date of the birth of the armed struggle that has brought the Eritrean people nearer to their complete victory "is not", as the EPLF on the occasion of the 16th anniversary of the armed struggle said, "an ordinary day", but the day on which "a great historical cornerstone of our protracted popular struggle" was laid down.
It is through the persistence on the road of protracted people's war that the Eritrean people have scored many victories, that the unprecedented military, political, economic and social achievements have been registered. In the past seventeen years, the Eritrean people's, armed struggle has traversed an arduous and tortuous road of many twists and turns. It has, in particular since the formation of the EPLF in 1970, shattered the numerous obstacles placed in front of it by its enemies and has today developed into a full fledged people's war engulfing the entire people except for a few traitors. The armed struggle has reached a high stage, a stage where almost the entire country is liberated and the Ethiopian occupation forces are besieged in a few cities awaiting their complete annihilation.
The past year, the 17th year of the armed struggle, saw the further intensification of the Eritrean armed national liberation struggle. In the wake of the liberation of the important cities of Keren and Dekemhare in early July 1977, the Eritrean People's Liberation Army, continuing its advance on the cities, liberated a number of towns, brought the strategic highways of Asmara-Senafe and Asmara-Massawa under its full control and tightened its siege of the few cities still under enemy control. The enemy was on the other hand in complete disarray. Although the enemy made several attempts to recapture the strategic roads and attack the liberated areas, it miserably failed and took very heavy material and human losses. Throwing their all out support behind the fascist junta, the Soviet Union and Cuba also made concerted efforts to liquidate the Eritrean revolution. There was nothing the Soviet Union and Cuba did not do to turn our country into a depot of their sophisticated weapons and a camp of thousands of their troops. In spite of the overwhelming odds, the Eritrean struggle maintained its initiative and inflicted heavy losses on the enemy.
The 17th year of the Eritrean armed struggle also witnessed intense mass activity. On the one hand, the masses were fully drawn into the battlefields against the enemy and, on the other hand, they engaged themselves in intensive work building their popular power and reconstructing their liberated areas. The organization, politicization and arming of the masses was tremendously accelerated. With the convening of the first Congress of the General Association of Eritrean Peasants and the Association of Eritrean Students in March and May respectively the struggle to organize the masses marked a new stage. It was a busy year of great mass demonstrations and rallies, a year in which the Eritrean people fully asserted their popular democratic power in the villages, towns and cities. The liberated areas were greatly strengthened and consolidated with their economic reconstruction on the basis of the correct principle of self-reliance. Another big achievement of the year was the important steps taken towards the realization of national unity. Thus, the 17th year of the Eritrean struggle was a year of great accomplishments in all aspects of the struggle.
The Eritrean struggle is the longest ongoing armed national liberation struggle in Africa and one of the highly developed armed struggles in the world today. As, indeed, the other people's armed struggle of the past and present, it has confirmed the universally valid truth that the colonized and oppressed peoples can free themselves from oppression only by rising up in arms. The Eritrean people began the armed struggle in 1961 having learned from bitter experience that the counter-revolutionary violence unleashed by their colonialist oppressors can only be countered by waging armed struggle. Before resorting to armed struggle, the Eritrean people resisted in peaceful ways. They bitterly opposed their country's forcible annexation by Ethiopia which the imperialists instigated in 1950 but their expressed will for independence was ignored and thrown aside. During the 1950's the expansionist feudal regime of Haile Selassie responded to the people's peaceful demonstrations and strikes with ferocious violence. Thousands of workers, students, peasants and other patriots were brutally killed, imprisoned and maimed. Under Ethiopian colonial occupation, the Eritrean people have known nothing but counter-revolutionary warfare, oppression, humiliation and degradation. It was out of this concrete lesson that the Eritrean people came to realize the futility of resisting an armed enemy empty- handed. From their bitter experience, the Eritrean people were able to grasp Chairman Mao's profound teaching that "there is only one way to eliminate it (war -Ed.) and that is to oppose war by war, to oppose counter-revolutionary war with revolutionary war." Hence, the armed struggle was begun as the only road to defeating the Ethiopian occupationists and their imperialist masters and liberating the homeland.
In the course of the armed struggle, the Eritrean people have learned even more valuable lessons about the correctness of the road they have chosen. It was not long before the armed struggle was started that the Haile Selassie regime, with the full military and political support of the U.S. imperialists and Israeli Zionists, intensified its war of genocide to crush the armed resistance of the Eritrean people. Vowing "to punish the bandits", it pursued a "scorched earth" policy employing Hitlerite methods of destruction and terror to kill the determined fighting spirit of the masses. In 1967 alone hundreds of villages were destroyed by aerial bombardment and, consequently, tens of thousands of people were made refugees in the neighboring countries. Despite the enemy's savage crimes and the ELF's failure to lead the struggle as well as the obstacles it created, the Eritrean people defiantly continued their struggle. When the liberation movement gave birth to the EPLF in 1970, a new chapter was opened. Under the EPLF's correct leadership the struggle has since developed tremendously. The armed struggle gained momentum. It was the telling blows of the Eritrean revolutionary war together with the Ethiopian people's struggle that brought the feudal regime of Haile Selassie down.
The fascist Dergue's coming to power in 1974 did not change matters. The fascists holding power in Ethiopia today have consistently followed their predecessor's policy of genocide in Eritrea. As a matter of fact, they have escalated the war to the highest scale. As soon as the fascist junta seized power the first major statement it made was a war declaration against the Eritrean revolution. In early 1975, it conducted a large scale war to "once and for all crush" the Eritrean liberation struggle. Although it brought incalculable damage to the lives and property of the Eritrean people and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, the junta's aggressive adventure was successfully shattered by the heroic Eritrean liberation forces. The junta has since undertaken numerous dangerous adventures to drown the Eritrean struggle in blood and attain its aim of exterminating the people and is today in the midst of conducting the most diabolic war exercises. At the same time, the fascist junta has pretended to appear as a peace seeker but this has always been to cover up its true fascistic and war mongering nature. The experience is that whenever the fascist junta prepares for a large scale offensive it has come up with high sounding phrases about peace but only to dupe the Ethiopian masses, confuse world public opinion and take the Eritrean struggle by surprise. This confirms Lenin's statement that the oppressing classes "pay lip-service to peace and justice but in fact wage annexationist and predatory wars".
The Eritrean people have never failed to take the Dergue for what it is -- a fascist predator. In the past four years they have intensified their armed struggle against the Ethiopian occupationists and their imperialist sustainers in both depth and speed. The aggressor troops have been cleared from the entire countryside and from big cities and towns such as Keren, Dekemhare, Nacfa, Afabet, Ghinda, Dongolo, Mai Atal, Segeneiti, Ela Bered, Digsa, Nefasit and Karora. The heavy battles now center in and around the big cities and mainly around Eritrea's capital city, Asmara, The Eritrean struggle has maintained its superiority over the Ethiopian aggressors. Holding the initiative, it is suffocating the aggressors. In the liberated areas, the new democratic order has struck deep roots. With the Eritrean masses organized, politicized and armed, most of Eritrea has been transformed into an impregnable bastion of revolution.
By waging a self-reliant protracted people's war the Eritrean masses led by EPLF have scored victory after victory and are convinced that only by persevering on this road can they achieve complete victory. The lesson drawn from the experience of the Eritrean struggle is that the Ethiopian aggressors will insist on their counter-revolutionary violence and will never give up their occupation of Eritrea voluntarily. Hence, only the continuation of the armed struggle can guarantee that the colonial occupation of our country will be smashed. That is why the historic First Congress of the EPLF resolved "after sufficiently studying the past military experience of the front in general and the strategy of liberating the land step-by-step in particular, the congress confirmed the correctness of this strategy and resolved that its continuation is necessary for the victory of the people's war."
Today, the Ethiopian fascist aggressors with the all out support of the Soviet Union and Cuba are conducting their largest military offensive to liquidate the Eritrean revolution. Despite their repeated failures to reverse the situation in their favor, they still hope to remain in Eritrea and for this they are prepared to pay whatever price.
Knowing fully well the nature of the enemy the Eritrean people have long ago charted the correct strategy of "self-reliant protracted people's war is the only way to victory" to take them to complete victory. From the rich experience they have acquired during the past glorious 17 years, the Eritrean people have learnt very well the deep meaning of waging a revolutionary armed struggle. The past 17 years have amply demonstrated to the Eritrean people that protracted people's war is the only weapon to bring the Ethiopian aggressors to their knees.
This weapon has indeed proven correct. Colonialist Ethiopia, despite its superiority of weapons and number of troops, has been brought to its knees by the mighty Eritrean revolution. But the road ahead is still difficult. There are more sacrifices to be made. On their part, the Eritrean people are well prepared to pay any price for their just cause. Over 60,000 martyrs have paid for the noble cause of freedom and independence in the past 17 years. The spirit in Eritrea today among every man, woman and child is to fight to the last man.
Nothing can prevent the Eritrean people from achieving their objectives of independence and liberation for there is no force on this earth that can defeat a determined people fighting for a just cause. Chairman Mao has said it all: "The people of a small nation can certainly defeat aggression by by a big country, if only they dare to rise in struggle, dare to take up arms and grasp in their own hands the destiny of their own country." As we enter the 18th anniversary of our people's heroic armed struggle we are absolutely confident that our valiant masses by holding high the banner of protracted people's war will deal the Ethiopian fascist aggressors final blows and crown with full victory.
HAIL THE 17th ANNIVERSARY OF THE ERITREAN PEOPLE'S ARMED NATIONAL LIBERATION STRUGGLE!
LONG LIVE THE ERITREAN PEOPLE'S ARMED NATIONAL LIBERATION STRUGGLE! End.
(Song written by N. Y. Metro Branch of COUSML hailing the 17th anniversary of the armed struggle in Eritrea)
Sung to the tune of "Inevitable Struggle Has Broken Out" in New Literature and Ideology No. 22, p. 74.
For nearly one century they've suffered
Under the colonial yoke;
But they never bowed down to oppression
Never a word of yielding spoke.
CHORUS: *
The Eritrean people will surely win --
With their guns in their hands they can't fail!
Led by their fighting vanguard, EPLF,
The people's mighty forces will prevail!
To arms they went in 1961
And took the death-defying stand.
They've mourned their martyrs these 17 years
By driving the fascists from their land.
And then amidst the burning flames of war
Their vanguard EPLF arose.
And soon protracted people's war was born
And soon their ranks began to close.
CHORUS *
Destroy the enemy with his own guns;
Follow the self-reliant path!
Politicize and organize the masses:
Imperialists and lackeys face our wrath!
The Eritrean people are not alone;
The international proletariat's here.
United with oppressed peoples everywhere
We see our bright red future is near!
CHORUS *
*Note: chorus is sung twice, as in "Inevitable Struggle..." End.
During the second week of August, the Iranian people launched another series of demonstrations and uprisings against the fascist Shah Pahlavi and his U.S. imperialist masters. These latest uprisings have taken place in three towns -- Shareza, Najafadad, Homayunshahr -- and one major city, Isfahan.
In the city of Isfahan, population 680,000; located 257 miles from Tehran, more than 1,000 people marched in the streets shouting anti-Shah slogans, burning banks, and attacking the fascist police forces. Using rocks, explosive charges, and gunfire, the masses dealt stunning blows to the reactionary forces loyal to the Shah -- more than 47 security and specially trained riot police were seriously injured. During the intense fighting, which lasted more than two days, five masses heroically layed down their lives in the anti-fascist, anti-feudal struggle.
In an attempt to crush the most recent wave of the uprisings, the Shah Pahlavi has declared martial law and curfew for 30 days for the city of Isfahan and sent government troops with tanks to occupy the city. These latest attempts at suppression of the Iranian people's struggle by the Shah show his absolute panic and weakness in the face of the anti-fascist, anti-feudal struggle. The last nine months of heroic struggle with hundreds of thousands of Iranians rising up against the Shah have shown that no amount of reactionary violence by the Shah's troops and police will be able to suppress the people's just struggle. In fact, each new attempt at suppression of the struggle has inspired the masses to fight on harder than ever.
In an attempt to marshal public opinion against the continuing uprisings; the fascist Shah recently called a news conference, summoning the imperialist news media to his summer palace to hear him boast that he is "not just another dictator" but that he is a "hereditary monarch". Using the Big Lie Technique, the fascist Pahlavi claimed that all the rebellions were caused by backward masses opposed to his "liberalization" and "land reform" programs. No amount of fascist demagogy by the Shah or his U.S. imperialist masters will be able to turn truth on its head -- the Shah is a reactionary feudal monarch, a puppet and and lackey in service of U.S. imperialism. The results of the Shah's great "land reform" program or the "white revolution" as he calls it are only one example of the Shah's "progressive role". Today, after 12 years of this "white revolution" Iran is forced to import more than 70% of all its foodstuffs and more than 15% of the peasants have been forced off their land. In the Middle East, the Shah's role is that of a firefighter for U.S. imperialism. During the 1973 Arab- Israeli War, the Shah put all of his U.S. Phantom jets at the disposal of the Israeli Zionists and attempted to break the back of the Arab oil boycott by providing Israel with free oil.
The chief prop behind the regime of the Shah Pahlavi is U.S. imperialism. In 1952 Pahlavi was brought to power by a U.S. imperialist, CIA-financed and organized coup. Since that time the Iranian reactionaries led by the Shah have sold out and are selling out the country to the U.S. and other imperialists. U.S. imperialism maintains more than 30,000 military advisors in Iran, which control and direct the 400,000 man Iranian army as a weapon against their superpower rivals, Soviet social-imperialism, and as an instrument to suppress the liberation struggles of the peoples of the Persian Gulf region. Today, Iran under the rule of the fascist puppet Shah Pahlavi is nothing but an outpost for U.S. imperialism.
The Iranian people are waging a heroic struggle under the most difficult conditions. Fearing no sacrifice, fighting on in nine months of continuous uprisings, the Iranian people are determined to overthrow the feudal fascist Shah Pahlavi. Under the leadership of their Marxist-Leninist Party, the Workers' and Peasants' Communist Party of Iran, the Iranian people's aspirations for a democratic independent Iran free from feudal reaction and imperialist domination cannot be far off. End.