On a world scale, modern revisionism was checked objectively by the realities of the class struggle and challenged theoretically within the ranks of the communist movement. Objectively, the CPSU’s revisionist world view was challenged by the rising tide of revolution in the colonial and neo-colonial world. The flashpoints of that tide are now etched in history: Cuba, Algeria, Vietnam, the Middle East, southern Africa, Chile, Iran, Nicaragua, and many others. In each of these cases, the revisionist line of the CPSU and its loyalist parties was put to the test.
In Cuba, the pro-Soviet CP at first dismissed the national revolutionary struggle led by Fidel Castro as “adventurist”, gradually making its peace with the Castro forces as the struggle unfolded, but standing somewhat askance of the process until after the triumph of the revolution. In Algeria, the French Communist Party malingered in its support for the anti-colonial struggle and even gave objective support to the colonial government. In Indochina, the Soviet Union vacillated in its support for the struggle against US imperialism, but when the Vietnamese continued undaunted, Soviet political and military support increased. In Chile, where the revisionist line was put to its most direct test, the consequences were tragic. In Iran, the revisionist Tudeh party retreated from the struggle against the Shah and proved itself incapable of maintaining initiative and leadership in the midst of a revolutionary situation. In Cambodia, the USSR maintained its recognition of the puppet Lon Nol regime until the end of the war. On the other hand, in Angola, the Soviets went to the aid of the MPLA, supported the Cuban troops who safeguarded the liberation struggle and helped defeat attempts by the US and South Africa to steal the Angolan people’s revolution from them. In Afghanistan, Soviet intervention was crucial in resisting US-backed counter-revolution.
The thread that runs consistently throughout Soviet foreign policy is that the line of the CPSU is based first and foremost on what is seen to be in the immediate interests of the Soviet state, taking into account its efforts to reassure US imperialism of its commitment to detente. Where those interests coincide with the needs of a revolutionary struggle, the results are beneficial. When they are in contradiction, not only does the Soviet government fail to support just struggles, in some cases (as in the Philippines) it even opposes them.
Nevertheless, the very realities of the Soviet Union’s position in the world, the fact that in the long run its own security as a socialist country is bound up with the successes of revolutionary movements, and the maturation of the international class struggle in general, served as effective barriers to the full implementation of the CPSU’s revisionist theses. No amount of detente can obliterate international class struggle which goes on independently of the pronouncements of various parties and states. And what the CPSU could not see on its own, US imperialism was only too anxious to demonstrate for it–as witness the wars in Indochina, the assault and blockade of Cuba, the machinations in southern Africa and the Middle East, etc., etc.
These objective developments which could not be controlled by the CPSU checked the process whereby the opportunist underpinnings of revisionism could be fully transformed into all-sided class collaboration-ism and surrender to imperialism. This was most clearly revealed when the CPSU joined in support of revolutionary struggles on the two most decisive international battlefronts of the past two decades–southeast Asia and southern Africa.
At the same time, revisionism was being challenged by a political struggle internal to the international communist movement. While the Chinese and Albanian parties were the most prominent in this struggle, they were not the only parties to express concern over the CPSU’s revisionist turn. A number of other Asian parties–from Vietnam, Korea, Japan and Indonesia–to one degree or another opposed the revisionist deviation.
It is also becoming increasingly clear, however, that the anti-revisionist stand taken by the Chinese and Albanian parties was marred, even in the early stages, by both ultra-left and nationalist deviations. Perhaps the clearest reflection of the ultra-leftism was the failure to develop any serious strategy for uniting with those parties in the international movement who were resisting revisionism but who did not share complete ideological and political unity with the CPC and the Party of Labor of Albania (PLA).
Was the critique of revisionism exaggerated, as some have claimed? Not at all. In the realm of theory and ideology, the views advanced (particularly by the CPC) in the period leading up to China’s famous “Proposal Concerning the General Line of the International Communist Movement” in 1963 must command the respect and support of all Marxist-Leninists. The 1963 polemic certainly could have provided a firm foundation to reunite the communist movement on a principled basis.
But the CPC and the PLA determined that the struggle could no longer be conducted within the councils of the international movement. The organizational split in the international movement was a negative development. The intensifying anti-imperialist struggles of the period were providing increasingly favorable conditions for deepening the theoretical struggle against the major formulations of modern revisionism. US intervention in Indochina was clearly on the rise. The fiasco in Indonesia demonstrated the bankruptcy of “peaceful transition” very dramatically. Armed struggle had been launched in Angola. The Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis had alerted communists to the still-rapacious character of US imperialism. However, by permitting themselves to be provoked into an organizational split at that time, the CPC and the PLA forestalled the possibility of sustaining the tit-for-tat ideological polemic against modern revisionism and, in fact, abandoned it; for it was shortly thereafter that the theory of capitalist restoration was advanced, fundamentally changing the nature of the debate within the communist movement.
Undoubtedly the arrogance of Khrushchev and the CPSU toward the CPC and the PLA aggravated the situation within the communist movement and was designed to drive the CPC and PLA out of the movement. But provocations cannot justify an ultra-left response. It is the responsibility of Marxist-Leninists to consider the long-term interests of the whole and not to lose their bearings even under extreme provocation.
In effect, the CPC and PLA abandoned the effort to establish a Marxist-Leninist headquarters in the international movement precisely at a time when the contradictions of the imperialist system were ripening and offering the anti-revisionists an opportunity to make gains in the critique of revisionism. Further, they permitted the split to take place primarily over issues of ideological principle rather than a backward political line that manifested itself all-sidedly in the class struggle. They even celebrated it as a good thing.
Why is this last point important?
Politics is the ultimate objective test of all ideological questions. No matter how we may sum up the ideological essence of a world view and note what it will lead to politically, until those political expressions of the world view are manifested in the actual class struggle we cannot conclude that the ideological deviation has been fully consolidated or even necessarily that it means what we have concluded it to mean. This is the standpoint of materialism, which ultimately judges all parties not by what they say but by what they do.
Unless those defending Marxism-Leninism root themselves in the real world of political practice, they will fall into idealism and consequently will be organizing new parties and new movements at the drop of an opinion. Furthermore, they will isolate themselves from all those who may not yet be convinced of their arguments so long as they remain in the realm of theory and can only be won over as the theory manifests itself in actual social practice.
Seen in this light, the fact that the CPSU, for all its vacillations, ultimately stood with Vietnam in the struggle against US imperialism during a period when Vietnam was the key front in the international class struggle, is of overwhelming significance.
The actual role played by the Soviet Union in support of Vietnam is not nearly as selfless or unflinching as subsequent revisionist propaganda claims. There is significant evidence to demonstrate that political pressures on Vietnam to negotiate with the US prematurely were advanced by Soviet leaders. (There is also evidence that Chinese support was not nearly as consistent and unstinting as it might have been.) Nevertheless, the stand of the CPSU was principally correct. On this issue, at least, the CPSU’s revisionist words were contradicted by its proletarian internationalist practice.
In no way did the political stand of the CPSU on Vietnam mean that the ideological struggle against modern revisionism should be abandoned. Quite the contrary. Modern revisionism was then and still is the most serious ideological deviation within the international communist movement, spreading illusions, fostering vacillation and class collaboration. But in political practice, it has not yet crossed the barricades to collaborate all-sidedly with imperialism.
The ultra-left response by the CPC and PLA obscured this political reality. In essence, these parties thoroughly mishandled the struggle against modern revisionism, actually side-tracked it and themselves fell into opportunism. Ultimately, this “left” deviation developed a number of theoretical propositions and political theses which laid the foundation for transforming the anti-revisionist movement into an opportunist trend. These propositons were:
1. No united action with revisionism. This slogan, which was first advanced publicly in the course of the Vietnam war, has had a long and inglorious history. When, in 1965, the new post-Khrushchev leadership of the Soviet Union agreed to a proposal by the Vietnamese and Korean parties for an “anti-imperialist common front” against US aggression in Vietnam, the PLA vigorously condemned it as “a trick” and, after some hesitation, the CPC likewise rejected it, invoking the “principle” of “no united action with revisionism.”
The tawdry history of this ultra-left formulation has characterized it ever since. Coming from a critique of revisionism leading a party in state power as objectively equivalent to imperialism, the formulation itself winds up serving the interests of the bourgeoisie. Posturing as a more militant critique of revisionism than that being made by others, the formulation actually abandons the struggle against revisionism.
It was the earliest and one of the most ominous signs of the “left” deviation’s potential to mature into active class collaboration.
2. Capitalism has been fully restored in the Soviet Union. The USSR is a “social imperialist” superpower v hose underlying economic system, however much disguised by the outer appearance of socialism, is fundamentally no different from that of the US and the other advanced capitalist countries and subjects Soviet policy to the exact same iron laws of capitalist development uncovered by Marx and Lenin.
The capitalist restoration thesis is the principal theoretical underpinning of the “left” deviation in the international communist movement. Amazingly enough, considering the enormous political implications which flow from it, the thesis has been advanced in a most irresponsible fashion–a fact which by itself should provoke some suspicion as to its merits. For all that the USSR has been labeled “capitalist”, neither the CPC nor the PLA has to date produced a single theoretical work laying out this thesis. Rather, this task has been left for followers of this line in the west–Martin Nicolaus, Charles Bettleheim, et al–and with most inauspicious documentation and argumentation.
The Chinese press has been filled with heated denunciations of “Soviet social-imperialism” and scorching “exposures” of some malfunction or inequity in the Soviet economy. But insofar as anything that could remotely be said to resemble a scientific analysis of the Soviet economy, the theoretical vacuum has been obvious to the point of embarrassment. The “best” of the theoretical work–that of Bettleheim–doesn’t even bother to analyze the Soviet economy. It rests its case on the view that a revisionist line in the party is by itself the “proof of capitalist restoration. After that it becomes a simple matter to assert that the various actions of the Soviet government must be based on the same compulsions that underlie US policy, since it is also capitalist and, as everyone knows, Lenin said that imperialism is a system and not a policy.
The shoddiness of the argumentation defies belief. (The thesis is becoming even more tenuous as China, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping and Hua Guofeng, has been rapidly adopting the very same economic policies which were cited as evidence of capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union 15 years ago. Following rapidly on the miraculous “restoration of socialism” in Yugoslavia conveniently discovered by the CPC two years ago, the entire process reeks of theoretical opportunism.)
For the moment, let us simply note that while the theoretical underpinning (such as it is) for the capitalist restoration thesis is ultra-left, its political consequences have been decidedly rightist. The “left” content of the thesis is bound up with classical anarchist tendencies to collapse the distinction between socialism and communism and insist on implementing policies in economic and political life for which the appropriate material foundation does not yet exist. This, in turn, gives rise to another “left” error–the ideas of “revolutionaries” principal over a scientific understanding of the actual material conditions of social development.
But this “left” error manifested itself in a rightist political line when it achieved its full programmatic expression with the slogan of “The United Front Against the Two Superpowers.”
3. The correct strategy for the struggle against imperialism is the United Front Against the Two Superpowers. In retrospect, it seems clear that this concept was, for the CPC, the necessary transition from its earlier call for a united front against US imperialism to its present Three Worlds Theory and the call for a united front against the Soviet Union. The PLA did not carry the argument this far, but its line objectively serves the same political purpose, obscuring the struggle against US imperialism.
To label both the US and the Soviet Union “superpowers” and lump them together in the way in which the formulation does is to equate the social systems of the two countries and to imply that their respective roles in world affairs are fundamentally the same. Marxism-Leninism holds that the mode of production is the decisive factor in categorization of countries and social system. It becomes theoretically untenable, therefore, to hold that the US is a capitalist country, the Soviet Union is not, but that the correct strategy for the international communist movement is the united front against the two superpowers. One’s opinion on capitalist restoration is the linchpin to the whole line struggle.
The US is the principal prop of the world imperialist system, the chief back-up of every bourgeois government in both hemispheres and the prime architect of the imperialist strategy of neo-colonialism. Further, as the “arsenal” of imperialism, the US represents the foremost military force which all movements of class struggle and national liberation will inevitably encounter–whether directly or indirectly–on the path of revolution.
The point is that there are no circumstances, now and in the foreseeable future, in which the interests of US imperialism and the interests of the revolutionary forces in the world can coincide especially in the struggle against revisionism and the concrete expressions of national chauvinism and hegemonism which flow from the nationalist deviation of the CPSU.
But the same cannot be said of the Soviet revisionists. Insofar as the state interests of the Soviet Union coincide with the needs and interests of the international proletariat and the anti-imperialist struggles of oppressed peoples, then it is important for Marxist-Leninists to stand with the USSR. However, the strategy of the “united front against the two superpowers” makes it impossible for revolutionary forces to respond correctly to this phenomenon.
This must be emphasized since there are some forces in the anti-revisionist, anti-“left” opportunist trend who oppose the capitalist restoration thesis and target US imperialism as the main enemy of the world’s peoples but attempt to uphold the slogan of the “united front against the two superpowers”. Such a position is flawed methodologically and represents a completely unwarranted negative concession both to imperialism and to “left” opportunism. Objectively, it obscures directing the main blow at US imperialism.
To hold that US imperialism is the main enemy of the world’s peoples and still uphold the strategy of the two superpowers is a contradiction in terms. The formulation and, more importantly, the strategic concept underlying it, is completely bound up with the capitalist restoration thesis. As the Theory of the Three Worlds shows, trying to put the strategy into practice with any degree of consistency will inevitably lead to class collaboration.
By 1969, these three propositions had become the hallmark of the CPC’s politics. However, while publicly advancing the strategy of the “united front against the two superpowers”, the CPC embarked on the long road toward rapprochement and ultimate alliance with US imperialism. The invitation to Nixon to visit Peking over the protests of the Vietnamese signified the process which finally was expressed in its most developed form in the Theory of the Three Worlds, announced in a speech by the then-restored Deng Xiaoping at the United Nations in 1974.
The events since that time read like a litany of betrayals. Making common cause with the most reactionary figures in the world–the Shah of Iran, Chile’s Pinochet, Germany’s Strauss, Britain’s Thatcher, and China’s most-favored US president, Richard Nixon–China’s international line has degenerated to the point where it consistently lines up with the interests of US imperialism on an ever-growing number of questions, from southern Africa to southeast Asia, from the Middle East to western Europe.
Rarely has the traditional Marxist view of ultra-leftism–“left in form, right in essence”–been more applicable. By the mid-seventies, what had once been a slight “left” deviation that some may charitably have described as an excess of zeal in the struggle against revisionism had matured into a full-blown opportunist trend increasingly in league with imperialism. Ironically, this “left” opportunist trend advanced a more all-sided class collaborationist politics than did the right opportunist trend which it came into being opposing.
The anti-revisionist origins of the “left” opportunist trend gave it some measure of legitimacy among Marxist-Leninists for a much longer period than it would otherwise have been able to achieve. But ultimately, the line of demarcation with “left” opportunism had to be drawn. The fact that “left” opportunism is actively calling for collaboration with US imperialism makes this demarcation all the more urgent.
How far the line of the CPC has degenerated from defending Marxism-Leninism to its present opportunism can best be underscored by recalling the following comment from the “Proposal Concerning the General Line of the International Communist Movement in 1963”. “To entrust the fate of the people and of mankind to collaboration with US imperialism,” said the CPC at that time, “is to lead people astray.” Were we religiously inclined, we should append an “amen!”
What is the ideological source of this “left” opportunist line? We believe that there are two principal sources for the deviation: nationalism within the leaderships of the CPC and PLA and anarchism in many sectors of the international communist movement (particularly among the “Maoist” forces in the advanced capitalist countries).
In the case of Albania, it appears that the Soviet rapprochement with Tito, particularly in light of Yugoslav designs on Albanian national sovereignty, played an inordinately significant role in propelling the PLA in an ultra-left direction. In the case of China, it appears that the specific Soviet stand toward the People’s Republic–a stand which undoubtedly was characterized by national chauvinism–led the CPC to make certain unwarranted generalizations about the Soviet role in the world as a whole.
The nationalist tendency was not clearly manifest in the early period of the dispute, since it was merged with a generally correct Marxist-Leninist critique of Soviet revisionism. In this sense, we can say that the state interests of China and Albania in the period 1957-1963 by and large coincided with the defense of Marxism-Leninism. Let us use just one illustration.
While the Soviet Union was advocating peaceful co-existence between the USSR and the US in 1956 as the cornerstone of the general line of the international communist movement, the actual situation of the People’s Republic of China was such that this stand did not correspond to the genuine national security interests of China. US imperialism was still committed to the overthrow of the communist regime and gave no indication that it was prepared to abandon Chiang Kai-shek on Taiwan. As late as 1960, both US presidential candidates–Kennedy and Nixon–actively vied with each other as to the extent of the military commitments each would make to the “defense” of two off-shore Chinese islands, Quemoy and Matsu, islands which were a considerable distance from Taiwan and within a few miles of the mainland.
In addition, China had fought the US in Korea and was watching with great concern the US build-up in Vietnam. In short, “peaceful co-existence” seemed to the CPC a rather slender reed on which to stake China’s national security at a time when US military forces were building up on its borders and US policy remained staunchly anti-Chinese. Clearly, the success of other revolutions, particularly in Asia, seemed a much more reliable guarantor of China’s state security than an agreement with US imperialism.
The best the Soviet leaders could suggest in return was that Moscow’s atomic umbrella would provide Peking the protection it needed. This alternative was unacceptable to the CPC on two counts. First, it was unreliable, given the general trend of Soviet politics. Second, it placed China in a dependency relationship with the Soviet Union.
For these reasons, there was an identity of views within the CPC between those whose concerns were principally nationalist and those who proceeded from the standpoint of Marxism-Leninism. Indeed, since the two at that time were not really distinguishable, it is fair speculation in hindsight to suppose that these were not two distinct and separate groups of individuals.
Gradually, the nationalist deviation came to dominate the CPC more and more. Kept in check by the realities of the Vietnam war, the nationalist tendency asserted itself ever more strongly after 1968–the year in which the Tet offensive and US domestic political developments made it clear that the US had lost the war to Vietnam. It was also, not so coincidentally, the year of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which the CPC took as a clear signal that Moscow was fully prepared to take action to change the internal political realities in China.
From then on, the nationalist aspect of the Sino-Soviet dispute came increasingly to the fore. (As early as 1964, China’s erstwhile ally, Enver Hoxha, had noted that the introduction of “territorial claims” in the struggle against the CPSU served to compromise the struggle against revisionism. “The ideological and political struggle against Khrushchev must not be diverted into delicate questions of territorial claims,” wrote Hoxha. “The claims of the Chinese have been built on a dangerous platform and from a nationalist position, to the point that they themselves have pretensions to Outer Mongolia.”)
Today, China calls for the strengthening of NATO, supports the European Common Market, applauds French and Belgian counterrevolutionary intervention in Zaire, attempts to subvert the Vietnamese revolution and destabilize its social system, criticizes the US for permitting the Shah of Iran to fall, warns against the revolutionary unrest in the Caribbean and supplies arms and military training to reactionary counter-revolutionaries in Afghanistan.
While this process has grimly unfolded, the theoretical pretext for it has almost vanished. Indeed, it would be foolhardy for the CPC to try to justify its present stand in the name of the struggle against revisionism, for the very heart of the criticism of the Soviet line was that it promoted collaboration with and reliance upon US imperialism; and there is not a single socialist country anywhere in the world today more actively collaborating with and promoting reliance on US imperialism than the People’s Republic of China.
Similarly, whatever “political economy” arguments the CPC employed to justify its capitalist restoration thesis can hardly be maintained by a party which has now rehabilitated the man who was not long ago designated “the biggest capitalist-roader” in all of China. Declaring that the attack on Liu Shaoqi, former chairman of the People’s Republic of China, as the “biggest frame-up our party has ever known,” the CPC has now surrendered every theoretical justification for designating the Soviet Union as capitalist unless it wants to say the same about China. In fact, many Soviet-type policies are being implemented in China in attempts to repair the economic and political chaos associated with the Cultural Revolution.
In essence, the main point for which the CPC criticized the Soviet Union was collaboration with US imperialism. Today, the most active collaborator with US imperialism is the CPC. The CPC also criticized the CPSU for its “revisionist” economic policies. Today the CPC is implementing these same policies. All that remains, then, as the cornerstone of the CPC’s general line, is narrow nationalism.
While nationalism was the principal source of the deviation at the headquarters of the “left” opportunist trend, anarchism was the most conspicuous feature of the “Maoist” formations which took up the line of the CPC internationally. (There was also a significant anarchist influence within the CPC, which was given clear voice in the Cultural Revolution.)
The rise of anarchism internationally, particularly among the student youth in the major imperialist countries, can be tied directly to the intensifying crisis of imperialism and the political vacuum created by the degeneration of the revisionist parties. The “New Left” in the US and its variants in France, Germany, Italy and Holland, for instance, gained legitimacy as the result of their militancy in opposing imperialism at a time when the revisionist parties were being discredited by their blatant reformism and subservience to the Soviet Union. In the US, the “New Left” threw itself into the struggle against racism and the US war in Vietnam with a vigor and thoroughness that served to underscore the cowardly tailism of the CPUSA.
This movement reached a crescendo in 1968 when student militancy linked up with worker dissatisfaction in western Europe and when the mass anti-war and anti-racist movements in the US had become the sharpest expressions of class struggle.
By and large, the “New Left” was student-based and of petty bourgeois class origin. In itself, however, this was not the problem. Historically there have been many political movements of similar origins which have been won to and guided by Marxism, and at its peak the “New Left” did make some important contributions to the class struggle. But the ingrained class values of the “New Left” did become a major problem and ultimately the source of its “left” political deviation in the absence of a leading Marxist-Leninist line and a genuine vanguard party. For without such a line and party, the inevitable gravitation of these forces toward Marxism resulted in the grab bag of superficially-digested Marxist theory and anarchist prejudice which came to characterize that section of the “New Left” which linked up with the communist movement. Herein rests one of the major betrayals of revisionism; that its surrender of the revolutionary essence of Marxism left a whole generation of revolutionaries leaderless and opened the doors of the international communist movement to a substantial reintroduction of anarchist tendencies.
Compounding the problem was the ascendancy of an anarchist line in China which, expressing itself through the pronounced egalitarianism of the Cultural Revolution, gave a “Marxist-Leninist” cover to the ultra-democracy and “left” adventurism characteristic of the “New Left.” The seemingly anti-imperialist militance of the CPC stood in sharp contrast to the stand of the CPSU and reinforced the contempt of militant youth for the vacillations of the revisionist parties. For many in the imperialist countries, the CPC critique of the USSR also had the advantage of justifying a long-standing and deep-rooted anti-communist prejudice against the Soviet Union.
This marriage of a nationalist deviation in the CPC to a pronounced anarchist current in the imperialist countries produced a new international trend calling itself communist but with extremely dubious Marxist foundations. This trend had almost no links to the tradition of the Third International and, compared to the revisionist parties, an extremely narrow social base. About the only thing it took over from its predecessors was the legacy of flunkeyism in relation to a leading party, merely shifting the site of worship from Moscow to Peking.
The tragedy of this development is that it was not foreordained. The spontaneous militancy of the mass movements which rose in the sixties was, in itself, a reflection of the revolutionary unrest then stirring in the imperialist countries. Those who marched, met, protested and demonstrated against the mind-deadening conformity of monopoly capitalism and its inhuman aggressions internationally comprise a part of that human material which Marxism-Leninism has always drawn upon in the development of its revolutionary core. Such a trend, under proper leadership, could have been trained and transformed into a conscious revolutionary force with the class stand of the proletariat and the methodology of Marxism-Leninism.
But the revisionist headquarters clearly could not undertake such a task, and the anti-revisionist headquarters abdicated its responsibility in this regard. Instead, the CPC turned inward, especially during the Cultural Revolution, taking no responsibility for the international movement.
Contrast this stand with that of the Bolsheviks under Lenin in the twenties, when the initial break with the Second International produced a similar ultra-left phenomenon and a principled ideological struggle was able to check the emergence of “left wing communism” and guide most of its proponents back into the mainstream of the revolutionary movement.
But in hindsight it seems clear that the principal anti-revisionist headquarters was not up to such a task ideologically, even if it had attempted to provide such leadership. Its own ideological moorings were too shaky, and ultimately it could only oppose the right deviation with one from the “left”, giving rise to a trend which today has become thoroughly discredited in the eyes of all revolutionary forces.
The consolidation of opportunist general lines in the two most powerful and influential communist parties in the world is the principal source of the present crisis in the international movement. Given that this development takes place in the context of the deepening crisis of imperialism, its negative consequences are pronounced. While revisionist parties aspire to positions in bourgeois governments and actively promote class collaboration through policies of reformism, surrendering the task of training the working class in revolution, the CPC and its followers actively promote class collaboration in the guise of building the international united front against hegemonism–merely the more elaborate description of the anti-Soviet alliance.
One of the most graphic illustrations of the opportunism currently rampant in the international movement is the fact that both the CPSU and CPC tend to judge other parties by the extent to which they line up, not so much with themselves, but with their chief adversaries. Parties which clearly do not support or base themselves on the principal revisionist theses–such as the Angolan, Cuban and Vietnamese parties –are nevertheless designated “revisionist” and worse by the CPC because of their ties with the CPSU. The CPSU, for its part, takes a similar view of parties with close ideological ties to the CPC, even when such parties may be the leading revolutionary forces in their respective countries. The clearest example is the CPSU’s antagonism to the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).
Instead of the actual class struggle with the bourgeoisie in each country providing the principal criterion for assessing the nature of various parties–and conducting ideological struggle with them–both the CPSU and CPC play narrow factional politics with revolutionary movements throughout the world.
These narrow nationalist prejudices have infected the entire international movement, which now tends to designate parties as “pro-Soviet” or “pro-China” as though these were their principal points of definition. Marxism-Leninism must break with this shoddy caricature of two-line struggle.
We are fully aware that this position has been and will be labelled “centrist” by many. We reject such categorization. Centrism represents the attempt to conciliate opportunism by blurring the distinction between Marxism-Leninism and a principal deviation from it. But the international communist movement today is faced with two deviations-revisionism and “left” opportunism. Defense of Marxism-Leninism requires a demarcation with both of these erroneous tendencies and a struggle to win all communists to a correct revolutionary line and orientation. The two-line struggle today is Marxism-Leninism on the one hand, and modern revisionism and “left” opportunism on the other–two sides of one opportunist coin.
Ideologically, the defense of Marxism-Leninism requires the reaffirmation of those universal principles of scientific socialism which both modern revisionism and “left” opportunism have surrendered to the bourgeoisie. It means resurrection of the class stand of the proletariat as the guiding ideology of the international movement and the revitalization of Marxist-Leninist methodology in the movement’s theoretical practice.
Politically the defense of Marxism-Leninism means a break with the reformist lines of peaceful transition and pacifism and a break with the blatant class-collaboration of the anti-Soviet alliances.
Organizationally, Marxist-Leninists will have to determine the proper path to follow in each country. In some countries, the Marxist-Leninists will form headquarters and conduct their struggles for a correct line and orientation from within existing parties. In others, the rectification of the parties’ ideological and political lines will take place outside existing organizations and express itself in the reestablishment of genuine parties. This is the precise situation of the US communist movement.