First Published: The Call, Vol. 6, No. 37, September 26, 1977.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Gus Hall recently claimed an impressive list of supporters for his line on “peaceful revolution.” “No communist leader, with the exception of Mao, has ever closed the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism,” he stated in a speech in New York on August 30.
Never before has Chairman Mao received a compliment from the general secretary of the revisionist Communist Party USA. Mao led the Chinese people to victory with his principled position, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
As for the rest of the Marxist-Leninist leaders, Hall’s words are nothing but slander. A quick comparison of the views of Marx and Lenin with Hall’s statement exposes his counter-revolutionary lies.
Marx was proud of his stand: “The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” (Communist Manifesto, p, 76).
Lenin was just as firm: “The replacement of the bourgeois by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution. ” (“State and Revolution,” Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 400.)
But Mister Hall will protest: “I never said they always advocated peaceful transition. Just that they admitted the possibility of it.”
Get on the bus, Gus. This is your revisionism in a nutshell. Based on what concrete conditions did Marx and Lenin admit this possibility?
Hall maintains that Marx “kept the door of peaceful transition specifically for countries like the United States.” But Marx spoke of the United States and England as “exceptional” only because at that time they had no highly developed state bureaucracy or military clique.
As Lenin pointed out, “it is precisely these institutions that were non-existent precisely in England and in America in the 1879s, when Marx made his observations (they do exist in England and in America now)!” (“The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky,” CW, Vol. 28, p. 238.)
The military and bureaucracy, Lenin explains, develop as imperialism develops. Instead of the relative peace and freedom of pre-monopoly capitalism, imperialism is marked by “minimal fondness for peace and freedom, and by a maximum and universal development of militarism.” (Ibid.)
Lenin concludes: “To ’fail to notice’ this in discussing the extent to which a peaceful or violent revolution is typical or probable is to stoop to the position of a most ordinary lackey of the bourgeoisie.” (Ibid, p. 239.)
Hall and his revisionist clique are worse than lackeys. They are social-fascists, ready themselves to use violence against the workers or genuine Marxist-Leninists, but deliberately disarming the masses in the face of violence from the bourgeoisie.
The revisionists promote the strategy of “peaceful transition to socialism,” based on the assumption that the ruling class can be made to give up their wealth and power without a fight.
But in fact this “peaceful road” is impossible. Not to prepare the masses for the inevitability of bourgeois violence is to set them up for slaughter. Witness Chile, for example, where the revisionist party’s reliance on the electoral road to change led to the massacre of thousands of Chileans by the fascist junta and their imperialist backers.
In the words of Chairman Mao, “We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.”
It is also necessary to rid the working class movement of Hall and his revisionist illusions.