First Published: Line of March Vol. 1, No. 2, July-August 1980.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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In recent months, the question of war has assumed a particular importance for the revolutionary movement.
This question has now come to the fore as the result of the deepening crisis of the imperialist system and the sense of desperation which increasingly characterizes the strategic thinking of its political guardians.
The stand of Marxism-Leninism towards war is not one of moral absolutism. War grows out of the intensification of contradictions which, one way or another, reflect the irreconcilable antagonisms between social classes or the antagonistic rivalries within a particular class. More particularly, war is, in Lenin’s phrase, “the continuation of policy.”
The communist movement’s stand toward war, then, rests in the first place on an analysis of the class forces involved and the policies which they are pursuing. What is the source of the present war danger and what stand shall the communists take toward it? To answer this question we must go beyond general abhorrence to war as a means of resolving disputes or the essentially bourgeois view that “war is irrational.” We can also not be satisfied that we already know the general nature of the principal contradictions in the world and that the present developments will be explained thereby–although clearly our starting point must be certain already developed assumptions on these matters.
But each new development in the class struggle brings to the fore new questions and new elements which may modify, affirm, or contradict the basic assumptions. It is necessary, therefore, with each new development to employ the basic tool of the materialist world view, the concrete analysis of concrete events.
In addition, each new development poses particular tasks for the communist movement within the context of an already developed line. Further, with each new twist and turn in the international class struggle, the contending lines in the communist movement are further tested.
This article then sets out to make this concrete analysis of recent events, particularly the clear and explicit shift in U.S. policy which has been most evident since the beginning of this year. In light of that analysis, we pose certain broad political tasks before the Marxist-Leninist forces and also evaluate the principal contending lines within the communist movement. Finally, we pay particular attention to some significant differences in stand and method which have emerged within the anti-revisionist, anti-“left” opportunist trend.
To a certain extent, U.S. Marxist-Leninists may have been lulled into a sense of complacency around the danger of war since it has been apparent that the military options available to the U.S. over the past few years have been constricted by the residues of Vietnam and Watergate. In addition, the two opportunist trends which today dominate the communist movement–modern revisionism and “left” opportunism– have so thoroughly distorted the nature of the war danger that there may even have developed a tendency on the part of some to avoid the issue of war altogether.
But the war danger is real. It grows with each passing day as the bourgeois politicians, unable to stem the hemorrhaging of the imperialist system, have become increasingly reckless. It is now apparent that a conscious decision has been made at the highest policy-making levels of the ruling class that the “Vietnam syndrome1’ must be brought to an end and that the U.S. must reclaim those military options it has been obliged to forswear over the past several years.
This policy decision was made not in January, 1980 when the “Carter Doctrine” was unveiled, but a year earlier. The U.S. response to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan at the end of January was the culmination rather than the consequence of the policy turn.
Of all the setbacks suffered by U.S. imperialism in the last decade, Afghanistan was the least significant. The country was never in the U.S. orbit and not a single serious political analyst expected that the Soviet Union would permit another one thousand miles of its southern border to be controlled by a hostile government. Yet Washington’s response to the Afghanistan intervention has been more extreme than it was either to the “loss” of Iran or the “loss” of Nicaragua, just to mention two of the most significant places where U.S. imperialism has been weakened in the past two years. The reason for this is fairly evident. The new aggressive foreign policy envisioned by imperialism’s chieftains for the 1980s requires, as it always has, the use of armed force. But military action in support of repressive regimes or in naked defense of the overseas interests of finance capital can no longer command an ideological consensus at home or internationally. That was the great political lesson of Vietnam where the U.S. fought a dirty neocolonial war completely on its own (the token contingents from Australia, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand merely underscored U.S. isolation) and left a profound memory on the consciousness of its own citizenry. It is only by linking the internal contradictions of the empire to a Soviet “master plan for conquest”[1] that Washington can hope to neutralize and isolate opposition to the actions it envisions taking in the years ahead.
As the noted ruling class strategist George F. Kennan remarked shortly after the Carter Administration’s hysterical response to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan: “Never since World War II has there been so far-reaching a militarization of thought and discourse in the American capital. An unsuspecting stranger, plunged into its midst, could only conclude that the last hope of peaceful, nonmilitary solutions had been exhausted–that from now on only weapons, however used, could count.” (New York Times, Feb. 1, 1980.)
Since that time the moves to put the U.S. (and its allies) on a war footing have proceeded with a grim inexorability.
Policies which only two years ago were deemed unthinkable are now being implemented with a zeal unmatched since the days when Lyndon Johnson promised to nail the Vietnamese coonskin to the wall. Military conscription is in the process of being reinstituted. The CIA has once again been unleashed–although the restraints placed on the counterrevolutionary agencies of the U.S. state after Vietnam were never more than token. The honorable representatives of the people in Congress vie with each other as to whose name will be attached to the next military appropriations measure. The Rapid Deployment Force–that longstanding dream of the Pentagon for the prompt dispatch of specially trained military forces to imperialism’s trouble spots in order to nip revolutionary upheavals in the bud–is off the drawing boards and a reality.
Building on the atmosphere of fear promoted around Afghanistan, the U.S. has begun to transform the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf into American seas. A billion dollar plan for the improvement of the U.S. naval and air bases on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia is now being prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Agreements have been reached with the pro-U.S. regimes in Kenya, Oman and Somalia for establishing a ring of military bases in the area. Egypt, supplied by the U.S., is moving to take on many of the military responsibilities previously assigned to the Shah of Iran.
In the course of a few short months, notes the New York Times (April 6, 1980), the U.S. has made ”a substantial move toward establishing a permanent U.S. presence, largely founded on naval power, in the Persian Gulf region.”
While some die-hards still detect “appeasement” in the Carter Administration’s policies, it is abundantly clear that a U.S. political counter-offensive–backed by a beefed-up military stance–is now underway, although only a neanderthal reactionary like William Randolph Hearst, Jr. would have the temerity to describe it as “No more Mr. Nice Guy!” (San Francisco Examiner, May 18, 1980.)
The Wall Street Journal, barely suppressing its elation with Jimmy Carter’s series of military actions early in the year and their accompanying anti-Soviet demagogy, concludes that the President “has really turned a corner on foreign policy,” a development it finds “considerably hopeful.” (Jan. 25, 1980.)
Even that hard-to-please critic of previous U.S. policy, Deng Xiaoping, appears to be satisfied that the U.S. is at last moving in the right direction. At least, we are so notified by that invariably well-informed messenger of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC), the Communist Party (ML) of the U.S., which notes that “the Chinese favor the main thrust of the Carter Doctrine.” (The Call, May 19, 1980.)
And if there were any doubt that the U.S. government is intent on letting the world know of its more aggressive turn, these should have been put to rest with the otherwise hare-brained “rescue” mission which came to grief on the desert sands of Iran. The significance of this scheme was not in its failure, embarrassing though that was for the U.S. Rather it was in the conception and U.S. willingness to attempt it. For there was virtually no possibility that this mission could have been pulled off without substantial accompanying military action. Subsequently, it was revealed that the plan called for U.S. fighter-bombers stationed in aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf to attack military facilities around Teheran in the event that the Iranian armed forces attempted to interfere with the “rescue”–and one can hardly imagine that they wouldn’t. Likewise, the scheme clearly depended on a sizeable Iranian fifth column within Teheran–undoubtedly CIA agents of Iranian nationality as well as (if the distinction can be made) operatives of the Shah’s regime still active in the country.
In short, the word is out. Uncle Sam is on the move again and the rest of the world had better watch its step.
Does all this sound alarmist? There is reason for alarm. Not because Carter is necessarily preparing some insane venture to solve all the outstanding problems of the imperialist system with one desperate throw of the nuclear dice; but because the estimate has been made by those who guide the destinies of the U.S. imperialist system that the time has come to hang tough and be ready, if necessary, once again to pursue the system’s political objectives by military force.
While the principal objective of the new aggressive policy is counterrevolution in defense of neocolonialism, the danger that this greater willingness to employ armed force will lead to war with the Soviet Union should not be underestimated. For an essential component of this strategy is the capacity to intimidate the Soviet Union militarily in order to dissuade it from giving aid to anti-imperialist movements which directly impact the vital interests of the U.S.
Of course, the danger of war is not a new feature of imperialism. Ever since the turn of the century when the consolidation of the world imperialist system was, of necessity, accompanied by the phenomenal growth of a militaristic state bureaucracy in all the leading capitalist countries, the various imperialist states have conducted their respective foreign policies from behind fixed bayonets. This much is the inevitable condition for any imperial foreign policy, although it is a matter of no small consequence that the bayonets have given way to intercontinental missiles, high-speed bombers and arsenals of nuclear weapons with a capacity for destruction that can probably be only dimly imagined.
One speaks of the inevitability of this condition under capitalism because the underlying economic compulsions of this system produce a constant striving for the division and redivision of the planet’s wealth and resources that can only be resolved in accordance with the respective strength of the contending imperialist forces. In this sense, war is the ever-present attendant of monopoly capitalism.
But in the period since the end of World War II, imperialism’s preoccupation with war has assumed another aspect. Rivalry between the imperialist powers still remains a potential source of a future world war, as witness the intensification of economic rivalry between the U.S. and other major capitalist powers, particularly Japan and West Germany. However, so long as the U.S. retains the present balance of military power vis-a-vis its imperialist rivals, the contention is not likely to flare up into another armed conflict. Meanwhile, the entire world imperialist system has been placed on the defensive by the struggle against imperialism itself, particularly by the struggles initiated by peoples and nations exploited and oppressed by imperialism over the past 30 years. This development is actually the maturation of the most glaring contradiction inherent to the imperialist system itself.
As a result, the wars actually fought in the world since 1945 have been, virtually without exception, wars of revolution and counter-revolution flowing out of the just struggles of oppressed peoples for national liberation and socialism and the attempts by the imperialist powers to maintain the old exploitative relations even where it becomes necessary to do so in new political forms.
In the past, these dirty colonial wars were pretty much one-sided affairs. For the most part, the imperialist countries were capable of snuffing out revolutionary risings in their colonies long before they could ripen into mass insurrection. And where, on occasion, struggles did get out of hand, the superior arms and technology of the colonial powers invariably prevailed, although the racist ideology with which imperialism envelops its foulest deeds has drawn a mask over the ferociously genocidal character of those wars conducted by “civilized” nations.
The Second World War, however, qualitatively weakened the imperialist system as a whole–even though one capitalist power, the U.S., rose to an unprecedented position of economic and military hegemony within that system. But the other imperialist countries, drastically weakened by the conflict, were unable to defend their colonial rule against a newly invigorated revolutionary tide which had grown up and become steeled in the war. In short, precisely because World War II was both a war of inter-imperialist rivalry and at the same time an antifascist war in defense of democracy and socialism, revolutionary forces in the colonies (and in Europe as well) frequently played a role which put them in a position to mount a challenge for power in the postwar world.
This struggle appeared in its most advanced form in Asia. It took the form of civil war between the communist-led masses and a U.S. puppet in China, a communist-led anti-colonial struggle against the French in Indochina, and a communist-led struggle against Japanese colonialism and subsequently U.S. imperialism in Korea.
As the anti-colonial tide became irresistible, the imperialist powers increasingly turned to those forms of independence for the former colonies in which the interests of imperialism were guaranteed. In time, this new political expression of imperialism came to be known as neocolonialism.
The major wars of the 30-year period from 1950 to today were fought when and where the imperialist powers were either unwilling to permit the transition to independence (Algeria, Mozambique, Angola, etc.) or saw themselves as unable to control the transition to independence of the colonies in such a way as to maintain imperialism’s economic interests. (There are complex particularities, such as in the wars engendered by Israel and South Africa; but these, too, are expressions of the same contradiction between imperialism and oppressed peoples and nations, even though imperialism in those conflicts operates in part through racist settler regimes.)
In the final analysis, these wars have been expressions of the fundamental contradiction of our epoch–between the dying capitalist mode of production and the rising communist mode of production. For in the long run the only alternative to neocolonialism is socialism, even though a country insisting on genuine liberation may only be able to take the first political steps towards the ultimate development of a socialist system.
It is in this sense–and only in this sense–that the attempt by the chieftains of U.S. imperialism to target the Soviet Union as the prime source of their current desperation has an element of truth in it. Basically, however, the “sea of troubles” enveloping the imperialist system which Jimmy Carter has now vowed to take up arms against does not emanate from Moscow. It flows from the unfinished business of oppressed peoples and nations trying to rid themselves–in some cases (as in Iran) in a thoroughly unscientific manner–of every vestige of exploitation by the U.S.-dominated imperialist system.
The U.S. chose to fight in Vietnam not because it opposed Vietnamese “independence.” Nominally, it had accepted the forma) political verdict of the earlier French defeat in Vietnam. Rather it fought in Vietnam because imperialism has never knowingly agreed to the peaceful “loss” of a single territory from its economic domain. (To this day, the U.S. feels it was “tricked” in Cuba because it lost the opportunity to suppress the Cuban revolution in its earliest stages. Nevertheless, the 20-year policy of military and economic harassment of Cuba bears stark testimony to the fact that the U.S. is still not reconciled to the “loss” of Cuba.)
It has, then, been a matter of great frustration to Washington that its military defeat in Vietnam ushered in a period in which severe restraints were placed on the military options available to the defense of the imperialist system.
Those frustrations are a matter of record. They began in April, 1975 when the U.S. military was forced to stand by helplessly and watch its 20-year effort at counter-revolution unravel in a welter of frantic helicopter flights from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. They were heightened by the inability of the U.S. to subvert the triumph of the MPLA in Angola, largely as a result of the twin traumas of Indochina and Watergate. They were aggravated by Soviet and Cuban support to the post-Haile Selassie regime in Ethiopia,[2] the unviability of the neocolonialist puppet regime in Zimbabwe, the relative independence of OPEC and the oil-producing nations, exploding anti-U.S. sentiment in Latin America, and the growing strength of other Soviet and/or Cuban supported liberation movements from the PLO to Polisario. Imperialism’s frustrations were further exacerbated when U.S.-inspired schemes for drawing Afghanistan into a South Asian anticommunist orbit via the Shah of Iran backfired and resulted in the popular uprising in Kabul led by the People’s Democratic Party in April, 1978. In addition–and perhaps this was the most significant of all–the system’s mentors could see that their perceived vulnerability had vastly encouraged revolutionary forces in Latin America, Southern Africa and the Middle East to advance their own struggles with renewed vigor.
After the fall of the Shah of Iran, the Wall Street Journal voiced these frustrations, declaring that “the world order [is] coming unglued” and, speaking on behalf of a growing consensus within the U.S. ruling class, that “the spiral into disorder can be averted only if the U.S. starts to assert itself once again” (Feb. 21, 1979).
But the Wall Street Journal was hardly a voice crying in the wilderness. To a certain extent, the U.S. had been asserting itself again ever since Angola, particularly with Carter’s demagogic “human rights” crusade. But the turn to a more strident stand became a matter of considerably heightened urgency to U.S. imperialism with the rapidly deteriorating position of the Shah of Iran during 1978. By year’s end it was clear that the Shah, a linchpin of U.S. policy for controlling the Middle East for a decade, could not survive politically. Even in the unlikely event that the developing Iranian upheaval were derailed, the Shah’s usefulness to U.S. imperialism had pretty much come to an end.
It was Iran, which is strategic to U.S. interests, rather than Afghanistan, which is not, that provoked the need for a new policy. That new policy was actually agreed upon in late November or early December of 1978 and unfolded rapidly over the next two months. It was launched with the playing of “the China card,” signified by the resumption of diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China in mid-December. This event, despite disclaimers to the contrary, was a clear signal that confrontation rather than detente would henceforth constitute the main content of Washington’s relations with Moscow. Any hesitation in the U.S. policy-making establishment concerning the need for a policy change quickly evaporated with the unceremonious and hasty departure of the Shah from Teheran on January 16, 1979–for now the contagion of popular revolution which had erupted in Iran could we” sweep the rest of the Moslem world and there would be no Shah to fulfill the appointed task of suppressing it.
No sooner had the Shah left Teheran than Deng Xiaoping showed up in Washington sympathizing with the woes of the U.S. empire and noting that just as the U.S. had good cause for concern over the Cuban troops in Angola, so China was equally perturbed with “the Cubans of Asia,” the Vietnamese, for their actions in Kampuchea. The effervescent Deng quickly endeared himself to the hearts of the U.S. military establishment by endorsing a plea by 170 retired U.S. generals and admirals, including the cream of the rightwing and neofascist sector of the officer corps of the armed forces, for a crash program to meet the Soviet military “threat.” (Asked if he had read an open letter by these military figures which had appeared as a full-page ad in the New York Times and other papers, Deng responded, “I have read it myself and very much approve of that letter.”)
Before leaving for home, Deng huddled with Carter and other administration officials. His immediate practical purpose, it would appear, was to line up tacit U.S. support for the forthcoming Chinese invasion of Vietnam and get an assurance from Carter that an appropriate warning to the Soviet Union not to attack China as a result of the Vietnam invasion would be forthcoming. He was not disappointed in this endeavor.
Then, with all the pieces in place, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown was dispatched on an emergency mission to the Middle East in mid-February bearing the message, according to the Wall Street Journal (Feb. 16, 1979), “that after nearly a decade of retreat induced by the Vietnam war, the U.S. plans to be more aggressive in defending its economic and security interests in the Middle East and elsewhere.” (Emphasis is added.)
While Brown was delivering this message to Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt and Jordan, China launched what rightwing columnist William Buckley could not help but impishly call its “educational exercise in Vietnam.” Three days later, the President notified the world of the new policy in a highly publicized speech at Georgia Tech University. His principal focus was Iran which, he said, “continues to be of deep concern to us and our friends and allies,” both because of that country’s immediate proximity to the Soviet Union and because Iran is “a major oil producer that also sits beside the principal artery for most of the world’s trade in oil.”
But Carter underscored the fact that his message was global by coming through with the warning to the Soviet Union concerning Vietnam that Deng had sought and concluding with the following: “Let me repeat: In the Middle East, in Southeast Asia and elsewhere in the world, we will stand by our friends–we will honor our commitments [the very phrase used by Lyndon Johnson in announcing the dispatch of U.S. troops to Vietnam in 1965]–and we will protect the vita) interests of the United States.”
The next evidence of the policy turn came, as it frequently does, in reports of a realignment of influence in the foreign policy establishment–in particular, a shift in the relative standing of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Carter administration. Brzezinski, long noted for his aggressive brand of anticommunism, was on the rise; Vance, saddled with the task of guiding U.S. policy in the days of its limited options, was on the wane.
Summing up this shift in a dispatch which was not only perceptive but may have been prescient on future developments in Afghanistan, the Manchester Guardian’s highly esteemed Washington correspondent, Jonathan Steele, wrote (April 8, 1979):
In recent weeks the non-interventionists have begun to lose some ground .... Dr. Brzezinski is a compulsive optimist who believes the West can and should go on the ideological offensive. He is also a barely restrained intervener, who tried to reinsert the CIA into Angola, who has been linked with plans to get the Chinese to undercut the Patriotic Front in Rhodesia, and who, if the U.S. were to be found to be involved in the current rebel movements in Afghanistan, would presumably have approved it.
Meanwhile, the Carter administration’s stand towards the SALT-2 agreement with the Soviet Union was undergoing a subtle but significant shift. Under the pretext of having to make concessions to the military in order to get the Pentagon’s endorsement of the SALT agreement, Carter moved to increase military spending substantially over previous years. Unwilling to abandon SALT directly, the Carter administration in effect put the pact in pawn to the vagaries of the U.S. Senate and strongly indicated that it was not going to go down the line in an all-out effort for ratification.
The Pentagon did its part in the charade. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee July 11, 1979, Gen. David Jones, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared: “We consider it absolutely essential that, if the nation accepts the SALT-2 agreement, it does so with a full understanding that we will be required to undertake a series of important strategic modernization programs in order to maintain strategic parity” with the Soviet Union.
Perhaps the most provocative step of all, however, was a recommendation in October, 1979 by a top policy body of NATO for the deployment of 572 new U.S. nuclear systems in western Europe. These would include ground-launched cruise missiles at U.S. bases in West Germany, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands as well as new, longer-range Pershing rockets in Germany. The U.S. was dearly behind the recommendation and has since announced that the deployment will proceed even if all the NATO countries do not agree.
The Soviet response was to offer the withdrawal of a significant number of ground troops and 1,000 tanks from East Germany (the recommendation was justified by the claim that the Warsaw Treaty countries enjoyed a manpower and tank numerical superiority over NATO) and to negotiate on the withdrawal of Soviet tactical missiles– if the western deployment were held up. The U.S. airily dismissed the Soviet response as a “trick” and declared that it was going ahead with the plan to increase substantially the nuclear threat to the USSR. This move, following on the growing alliance between the U.S. and China may well have convinced the Soviet leadership that the overthrow of a friendly regime in Afghanistan when combined with these other developments was completely intolerable strictly from a military security point of view.
Afghanistan then became the fig-leaf for U.S. intentions to consolidate a domestic and international consensus for the policy turn. The intersection of anticommunism with Afghanistan’s proximity to Iran was deemed sufficient to reap the benefits of a year’s work in the ideological vineyards. In a matter of days, Carter broke through a whole series of barriers that had restricted U.S. foreign policy choices for half a decade. Draft registration was proposed along with the lifting of certain legal curbs on the CIA; new military programs were announced despite widespread agitation around inflation and calls for budget-cutting. The reactionary military dictatorship in Pakistan was brought back into the pale of “free” nations and–just to make sure that no one could possibly miss the point–Brzezinski strolled up to the Afghanistan border in Pakistan and pompously aimed a rifle in the direction of Kabul.
An essential component of the shift in U.S. policy was a propaganda offensive aimed at changing the ideological climate both in the U.S. and the world at large. This process was begun with Carter’s “human rights” crusade launched in the first year of his administration in an effort to shift world attention away from U.S. imperialism’s crimes in Vietnam and to lay the foundation for once again putting communism rather than imperialism on trial. With the policy turn adopted in early 1979, the ideological war was stepped up. Its particular targets were Vietnam, Cuba and the Soviet Union. The ideological assault on each had a particular political goal in mind.
The principal purpose of the ideological attack on Vietnam was to discredit the Vietnamese revolution in order to neutralize the effects of the mass antiwar movement and to provide the bourgeoisie with a weapon to discredit a similar movement the next time around. And for U.S. imperialism’s purposes at this juncture, it makes little difference if the discrediting can be achieved by the actions of pacifists, liberals or pseudo-(revolutionary) “communists”, for cynicism and ideological fatigue are also weapons that the bourgeoisie can use.
A revealing indication of this process was offered by Time magazine (April 14, 1980) in an article profiling a former antiwar activist, SDS leader and defendant in one of the many “conspiracy” trials of the 1960s, “Chip” Marshall. After noting the ironies implicit in the tale of the “radical-turned-businessman,” Time concludes the article with a question to Marshall on the Vietnamese “boat people,” eliciting the following response: “Sometimes I feel really terrible. Maybe we were completely wrong on Vietnam.”
There is also an element of account-settling in the ideological assault on Cuba. The Vietnamese, after all, confronted the U.S. in their own country. But the Cubans, in an act of almost unprecedented international solidarity, sent their troops to another continent at a time when the U.S. was unable to do the same in order to inflict a defeat on U.S. imperialist policy objectives in Angola. The insult to U.S. imperialism’s credibility was as serious as the injury to its geo-political concerns in Southern Africa.
But the current attack on Cuba also represents U.S. concern with the ripening revolutionary conditions in the Caribbean and Central America. The strong anti-imperialist turn in Nicaragua, Panama, El Salvador, Grenada, and Jamaica is the harbinger of the future in this area and the source of considerable concern to U.S. imperialism. This same contradiction is deepening in Guatemala. It was hardly an accident, therefore, that the State Department “discovered” a hitherto undetected Soviet combat brigade in Cuba within weeks of the overthrow of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua. Cuban aid to Nicaragua and Grenada has already been described as “Soviet penetration” of the Caribbean.
Imperialism’s threat to Cuba should not be underestimated. The Cuban government has already called attention to the possibility that the diseases which hit the Cuban sugar and tobacco crops last year and which played a major role in the country’s current economic difficulties may not have been natural disasters but the handiwork of the CIA. This accusation cannot be lightly dismissed if for no other reason than that precisely such plots were hatched and admitted to by the CIA in earlier years. There is also a growing body of evidence to demonstrate that the sudden moves on the part of a number of Cubans to seek sanctuary in the Peruvian and Venezuelan embassies–the actions which triggered off the present exodus of counter-revolutionary and antisocial elements from Cuba–was hardly spontaneous but the result of deliberate provocations by the CIA working through its Latin American agents.
The ideological assault on the Soviet Union has focused on the need “to stop Soviet expansionism before it is too late.” In this connection, it is a telling commentary on the counter-revolutionary complicity of the Chinese Communist Party in this undertaking that it should make the following comment (Peking Review May 12, 1980): “Cuba is also a Soviet base for infiltrating Latin America. This has led to unrest in several countries there today.” (Emphasis added.) Coming from a party which not long ago was proclaiming the revolutionary virtues of “great disorder” in the world today, the statement not only shows how far the CPC has degenerated, it underscores the actual content of the charge that the present danger of war emanates primarily from “Soviet social imperialism.” For on this point, Washington and Peking are in complete agreement, namely that the struggle against U.S. imperialism is a Soviet plot.
The Carter administration doesn’t miss a chance to describe the struggle against imperialism as “Soviet expansionism,” because there is little evidence available to substantiate the charge otherwise. This point is underscored by the emphasis various commentators have placed on the fact that Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan was the first time since World War II that Soviet (and Warsaw Pact) troops had stepped beyond the borders of the USSR and eastern Europe–while U.S. and NATO country troops are stationed on every continent and in countries thousands of miles from home.
The propaganda war over Afghanistan has been equally mendacious and an insult to the intelligence. Even a casual reading of U.S. press reports supposedly out of the region leads to the inescapable conclusion that the bulk of it is based on the inspired imaginings of Afghan counterrevolutionaries, U.S. agents and editorial writers trained in the classical school of sensationalist journalism. Hardly a day passes, for instance, without a report of Soviet use of “poison gas” in Afghanistan. This charge has been repeated so widely and so often that it has been implanted in the consciousness of large numbers of people. And yet an Associated Press report of April 18, 1980, carried apparently in only a handful of newspapers included the following:
American diplomats in Pakistan have been scrambling for information to confirm the suggestions in Washington [emphasis added] that the Russians are using lethal nerve gas. ’Frankly speaking, the evidence has been minimal,’ said one western diplomat in Islamabad. . . . Dr. Zahir Shah, the deputy superintendent of the Khyber Hospital in Peshwar, which treats some of the worst battle casualties, said no respiratory ailments that could be linked to poison gas have been detected.
The evidence is there. It is unmistakable and overwhelming. In the 1980s, not only will U.S. imperialism stand and fight; it is going on the offensive. This is neither a casual decision nor a conspiracy on the part of one sector of the ruling class. In fact, the most ominous sign of all may well be the relative degree of consensus in the highest echelons of monopoly capital in support of the shift in U.S. foreign policy as evidenced by the fact that not a single significant presidential contender (including Edward Kennedy and John Anderson) has made foreign policy a major issue in the 1980 elections thus far.
It is clear then that the new imperialist counter-offensive will play a decisive role in determining the tasks of the communist movement in the 1980s. Those tasks involve both the struggle for peace and the struggle against all attempts at counter-revolution. They embrace such issues as opposition to the draft and the military budget, as well as mobilization of the masses in order to prevent U.S. intervention in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and the Middle East. They also include struggle against aid to counter-revolutionary forces in Afghanistan and Southeast Asia, and exposure of plots against Cuba. We can certainly expect that the turn to a more aggressive U.S. international policy will also create the objective conditions for a “flow” period once again in the spontaneous movements of the masses, placing before us the questions of what kind of political and organizational leadership the communists will offer these movements.
There is a particularly important set of tasks in the ideological realm. As the sixties demonstrated, the struggle against war must include defense of the revolutionary movements in the world. Herein rests the political significance of the struggle for clarity within our own ranks on such questions as Vietnam and Afghanistan.
The connections between “foreign policy” and the class struggle at home are inescapable. They exist not only in the readily obvious manifestations of protest against the revival of the draft, but also in the fact that a decade in which the U.S. economy has been racked by inflation and recession (with another recession now taking over) will make it impossible for the bourgeois state to maintain the “guns and butter” policy of the Vietnam war period. Economic considerations, among others, are also leading to an upsurge of racism and a re-invigoration of neo-fascist ideology and organization. Many people have already noted that the recent ghetto insurrection in Miami had, among its causes, resentment by Blacks at the favored treatment given Cuban “refugees”–most of them “white”–at the expense of much more desperate black Haitians.
In light of these circumstances, the communist movement must have a correct understanding of the turn in U.S. imperialism’s foreign policy if communists are to take on the political tasks of the coming period.
In examining the analysis and stand of the different sectors of the U.S. communist movement on these questions, then, we are in effect struggling for the leading line for the coming period.
As undoubtedly could have been anticipated, the voice of modern revisionism in the U.S., the CPUSA is appalled at the turn in U.S. foreign policy which it sees resulting from a “conspiracy” by Carter, Brzezinski, Rockefeller and the Pentagon to destroy detente and return to the days of the cold war. The party’s analysis of the significance of the shift is that “The reckless, irresponsible policies of the war-hawks are today again blocking the way to rational relations based on equality and mutual advantage between nations.” (Daily World, May 14, 1980.)
But the real significance of the turn in U.S. policy is to mount a more effective defense of the empire by freeing up the policy-makers once again to employ the force of armed counter-revolution. Far from being a “conspiracy” or the product of some sudden streak of irrationality in the ranks of monopoly capital, it is the response most likely to be expected from any ruling class when it sees its grip on power slipping away.
This inverted view of the world is typical of modern revisionism. What the CPUSA fails to see is the fact that U.S. foreign policy is invariably the reflection of the tactical needs of monopoly capitalism at any given moment. A change is not caused by the ascendancy of the military sector. The ascendancy of the military sector is brought about by the need for a change.
The significance of this “slight” difference is underscored in the illusions promoted by the CPUSA. “Anti-detente policy splits big business,” proclaims the Daily World (May 13,1980). The evidence– Armco Steel Co. was insisting that it be allowed to complete a deal for the sale of oil-drilling equipment to the Soviet Union. Another revisionist analyst, Conrad Komorowski (Daily World, May 17, 1980) claims that “powerful sections of the U.S. Establishment have turned thumbs down on the policies which led to the Carter-Brzezinski adventuristic military gambles.”
Now it is undoubtedly possible to find an occasional capitalist who will be somewhat fearful of the turn towards war. And it is also true that the Iranian “rescue” expedition, especially in light of its failure, has come in for criticism from within the ranks of monopoly capita)–as exemplified by Vance’s resignation. But to deny the consensus in the highest reaches of finance capital in favor of the shift in U.S. policy is to promote grave illusions among the masses as to what is required if war is to be averted.
The CPUSA stand, of course, is completely consistent with the revisionist views of the CPSU which see U.S. imperialism cooperating in its own demise through the efforts of a “more rational” sector of monopoly capita) who will come to understand the futility of trying to maintain U.S. hegemony in the world.
The struggle for peace cannot be led by a party which can assert: “The danger in Carter’s policies is that they are anti-detente, pro-cold war, confrontational and based on the use of military force as an instrument of policy–contrary to the UN Charter” (Daily World, May 17, 1980). How can the CPUSA believe that monopoly capital’s state apparatus can be induced to shun the use of force and abide by the UN Charter?
Such fetishizing of bourgeois legality is promoted by another revisionist analyst, Tim Wheeler (Daily World, May 13, 1980) who castigates Carter as “a devious schemer who would resort to a cheap deception to exclude his own Secretary of State from a meeting to approve an operation with enormous risks to world peace.” With a devotion to the niceties of bourgeois statute more suitable to the Harvard Law School than to the rigors of Marxist theory, Wheeler goes on to note indignantly: “In the face of Carter’s refusal to consult his own Secretary of State it is no surprise that he would violate the War Powers Act and the Hughes-Ryan Amendment which require him to consult with Congress before sending troops or covert agents into a situation that could lead to hostilities.” For shame!
Such a stand is, of course, obligatory from a party which desperately clings to the illusion that an anti-monopoly government will be permitted to come to power and to dismantle the imperialist system peacefully and gradually.
It hardly comes as a surprise, therefore, to note the focus of the CPUSA’s militant call to action in response to the U.S. policy turn. “Brzezinski must go!” demands the Daily World (May 14, 1980) in an editorial which declares that “the wrong man resigned” when Vance left office. “The ouster of Brzezinski,” the Daily World solemnly declares, “would be a blow at the international bankers’ and other transnational corporations’ manipulation of U.S. foreign policy for their own profit-seeking aims.”
That such nonsense could be palmed off–and even accepted in some circles–as resembling a Marxist analysis of recent events speaks not only to the ideological bankruptcy of the CPUSA but to the theoretical poverty of the communist legacy in the U.S.
It does not seem to have occurred to these revisionist thinkers that by seeing the present policy of U.S. imperialism as a “conspiracy,” they completely drop out of the whole process its underlying class contradiction. Instead of elevating the significance of the struggle against the danger of war, the “conspiracy” charge reduces the struggle from that of one class against another to that of one set of imperialist servants against another–as though either set has a base of support independently of the actual needs of the imperialist system.
Yes, Brzezinski is up and Vance is down. But this merely indicates that at the present juncture, a ruling class consensus is developing behind the policies associated with Brzezinski and away from the policies historically associated with Vance. Only those who see the bourgeois state apparatus as some “neutral” legal entity over which monopoly capital happens presently to exercise undue influence–rather than as the legal expression and armed representation of the monopoly capitalist class– could wind up in such a political muddle.
The line of the CPUSA is incapable of achieving its objectives– detente, peaceful coexistence, peace. Imperialism’s drive to war will not be hampered, let alone stopped, by appeals to and support for those “in the U.S. ruling class who have not quite taken leave of their senses,” the CPUSA’s characterization of the supporters of detente among the capitalists.
The point is that the struggle for peace is inseparably bound up with the struggle against imperialism. Promoting illusions about a more rational wing of monopoly capita) not only subordinates the struggle against imperialism to the struggle for a highly illusory “peace,” it actually liquidates the struggle for peace itself.
The revisionist line is not, of course, alone in misleading the working class on this issue. The “left” opportunist trend in the U.S., rapidly losing all basis for being charged with any form of leftism (even ultra-leftism), is distinguished on the question of U.S. foreign policy by its unity with the turn to a more aggressive stance by imperialism. The idea of including the U.S. in its long-sought-after anti-Soviet alliance is now unashamedly affirmed by the chief sects. One grouplet advises us to see ”our own ruling class as an unreliable ally in the fight against social-imperialism” (New Voice, March 31, 1980). Another notes that since the beginning of 1979, Carter has had “a positive foreign policy which has been somewhat reluctantly pursued over the past year with relatively good results” (People’s Independent Coalition of New Jersey).
In short, as U.S. imperialism undertakes to shift its strategy in order once again to become the reliable base of active counter-revolution in the world, it not only enjoys the support of these “left” opportunist groupings, it is constantly being urged on to even stronger measures by them.
A particular odious task which the “left” opportunist sects have taken on with a rare enthusiasm has been to buttress the ideological assault on the Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions from the “left,” although a casual reading of their attacks on these two socialist countries is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from right-wing propaganda on the same subject. Every calumny ever advanced by U.S. imperialism against Cuba and Vietnam is repeated in the “left” opportunist press.
One group, the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS), declares with a straight face: “While Cuba was exploited before by the U.S., nothing compares to the degree of their exploitation by the Soviet Union now.” The LRS calls Cuban counter-revolutionary Huber Matos, who was just released from prison after 20 years, “an inspiration to all Cuban freedom fighters,” and can undoubtedly be counted upon to demand U.S. support (as if such a demand were not redundant) for the next military expedition mounted against Cuba by the CIA provided the agency doesn’t forget to include Matos in the landing party.
It is not hard to imagine the kind of leadership the left” opportunist trend will offer the mass movements aimed at opposing the next U.S. exercise in counter-revolution–or with what little enthusiasm these groups will take up the struggle to oppose U.S. war preparations.
The degeneration of what was once the New Communist Movement into this cesspool of class collaboration has bound up within it the elements of both tragedy and farce. But the point is that the principal force which up until now has dominated the critique of modern revisionism has itself outstripped the revisionists in consorting with the class enemy.
It is the sober recognition of this political reality which has been the principal basis for the developing anti-revisionist, anti-“left” opportunist trend to insist upon a firm and absolute line of demarcation with “left” opportunism. In so distinguishing itself from this retrograde trend–and in further deepening its own critique of modern revisionism–the Marxist-Leninists have set out to advance a genuine communist line.
Our trend is being forged in the process of taking up the principal questions posed by the class struggle as it unfolds. Our trend’s demarcation with the retrograde trends has developed as part of an international phenomenon based on contending international lines. As a result, while there will continue to be different views within our trend on a whole host of questions, we should be able to achieve a unified international line because, in general, the anti-revisionist, anti-“left” opportunist trend has taken a correct stand on the question of U.S. imperialism and the war danger.
Unlike the revisionists, our trend does not see the problem as one of personalities reflecting different ruling class perspectives, but instead recognizes that imperialism as a system develops its own set of political compulsions to which the bourgeois state apparatus must respond. It sees the central importance of the struggle against imperialism and does not see every Soviet policy objective and initiative an expression of selfless socialist wisdom. This developing Marxist-Leninist trend is based on a critique of modern revisionism’s penchant for conciliation and surrender to imperialism and holds up the banner of proletarian internationalism as its principal world view.
In so far as most forces in our trend are concerned, the principal shortcoming on this issue is a tendency not sufficiently to appreciate the fact that the growing war danger and alterations in U.S. policy pose obligatory political tasks for the communist movement. In genera), this weakness in our trend is a reflection of its immaturity. There is still a strong current which sees the tasks of communists in this period either in terms of narrow base-building in the working class, or which confines the tasks of communists to those deemed to correspond to our movement’s present capacities rather than to those placed before us by the realities of the class struggle.
But another current is also emerging in our trend which, if left unchallenged, will seriously compromise the central principle of proletarian internationalism on which our trend bases itself. This current is a developing centrist line on the international question which is presently making negative concession to “left” opportunism. The most vocal representative of this centrist line in our trend is the Guardian, principally as reflected in its stands around Vietnam and Afghanistan, but which also comes through in a certain absolutizing of “non-alignment” as a criterion for evaluating the roles played by different countries in the world.
We are taking up this critique of the Guardian’s, line at some length and with a measure of sharpness precisely because it is operating within the anti-revisionist, anti-“left” opportunist trend. In our view, the tasks of the present period are bound up with the ultimate transformation of our trend as a whole into a Marxist-Leninist party. This transformation will require an intense struggle both for line and a proletarian ideological orientation. In this sense, the struggle within our trend will often appear to be even sharper than the struggle which sums up our demarcation with opportunist trends. The reason for this is that it is far more difficult to forge a party than to demarcate from an opportunist trend, and to accomplish this task we must pursue the ideological struggle within our own ranks with the rigor attendant upon the historic dimension of the political task involved.
We single out the Guardian’s centrism for two reasons. First, the upcoming struggle against U.S. imperialism’s drive to war and counterrevolution will be seriously weakened if communists make negative concessions to the bourgeoisie’s “left” opportunist allies. These concessions constitute a form of ideological surrender to “left” opportunism. In the case of Afghanistan in particular, the Guardian maintains the “two superpowers” view of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, thus opening the door to at least an ideological united front against the Soviet Union that would clearly serve the interests of U.S. imperialism.
Second, as a force in our trend, the Guardian’s centrism offers a fairly developed world view which, in effect, substitutes the classless concept of “non-alignment” for proletarian class stand and socialism as the ultimate criterion for determining the position of communists. Our trend will never become an advanced Marxist-Leninist trend capable of transforming itself into a revolutionary vanguard party on such a basis.
We will not review here our critique of the Guardian’s line on Vietnam. For a full elaboration of that critique, see the pamphlet, The War in Indochina, by Irwin Silber. For the moment, we will simply point out that subsequent events and additional information which have since come to light have made it overwhelmingly evident that the initial judgment of Marxist-Leninists, that the Vietnamese intervention in Kampuchea was justified on the grounds of self-defense and proletarian internationalism, was completely correct. The worst fears of the communist movement that the Pol Pot regime was a monstrous parody of communism responsible for mass extermination of the populace and devastation of Kampuchea’s economic life have been confirmed by many who remain opposed to the Vietnamese action. Even the editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal, Robert Keatley, admits in the context of a vicious attack on Vietnam that “the former Pol Pot regime–that murderous clique which made genocide a state policy–foolishly goaded Vietnam into the invasion which brought about its own downfall.” (Wall Street Journal, Jan. 3, 1980.)
But the full unfolding of China’s international line of collaboration with the U. S. in the forging of an anti-Soviet front has settled the question of the political context for the events in Indochina once and for all. Politically speaking, hasn’t it become necessary to support Vietnam and make whatever contribution is possible to the consolidation of a genuinely revolutionary government in Kampuchea?
Unfortunately, the Guardian has not seen fit to reexamine its initial and somewhat hasty analysis of the struggle in Indochina. Not only does it continue to defend its “all sides are wrong” line, but the incorrect line has seriously compromised the Guardian’s ability to supply its readers with reliable information on the continuing contradictions in Indochina.
For instance, in a report on the problem of “famine” in Kampuchea, the Guardian writes (Sept. 5, 1979): “What is the cause of the famine? It is principally the massive disruption of rice planting, the result of the Vietnamese invasion .... Prior to the massive Vietnamese invasion, despite the many reported ultra-’left’ excesses of the Pol Pot government, there were no reports of starvation.”
Here the Guardian’s empiricism is employed to justify a stand that prettifies the Pol Pot regime. Aside from the dubious quality of the “facts” in the Guardian’s report, there is not even an attempt to locate the present contradictions politically. And while the Guardian does not hesitate to echo the assertions made by U.S., Thai and Chinese propaganda concerning the situation inside Kampuchea today, it has not once carried a report from the Heng Samrin government itself or from any number of left and bourgeois journalists who have been to Kampuchea and whose reports run contrary to the genera) anti-Vietnam line advanced by U.S. propaganda.
In an editorial titled Kampuchea: One Year Later (Jan. 23, 1980) the Guardian asserts: “We remain convinced that the Khmer people, given more time, would have corrected these mistakes [of Pol Pot] through political or other forms of struggle, as have other socialist countries in the past.” Apparently the Guardian is not aware of the fact that to “remain convinced” of a proposition in the absence of any tangible evidence to back up that conviction, while a touching tribute to the resources of spontaneity, is a somewhat less than convincing communist argument.
The underlying idealist error is made clear in the Guardian’s response to a reader (Jan. 16, 1980) who criticized the paper’s stand: “We disagree on the key question,” says the Guardian. “It isn’t, in our view, how the Vietnamese-installed government develops in the future– though this is an important question. The key question is that a socialist country invaded another socialist country to install a government of its choice, thus preventing the people of Kampuchea from determining the future of their own revolution . . . .Vietnam had no right to limit the sovereignty of Kampuchea.”
This departure from materialism on the Guardian’s part is of serious political and ideological consequence. This fidelity to process over political results is the hallmark of all petit bourgeois prejudice–whether of the social democratic right or the anarchist left. And to view the struggle of the people of any country as simply “their own revolution” is a fundamental denial of the essence of proletarian internationalism. It is absurd to argue, as the Guardian has, that it does not take an absolutist position on the question of national sovereignty while holding to the views expressed above.
The full logic of this negative concession to bourgeois nationalism was actually drawn out by a prominent “left” opportunist group, the Proletarian Unity League (PUL), which argues that it is better for a country to be led down a reactionary path than for its “national sovereignty” to be “violated” by revolutionary forces. (For a fuller elaboration of this point, taken to its logical conclusion, see the PUL’s pamphlet, Kampuchea, Self-Determination and the ’Boat People’, which holds that it was wrong for the Soviet army to “impose” socialism by establishing communist governments in eastern Europe after World War II, thus uniting with the policy then advanced by U.S. imperialism to roll back the “Iron Curtain” which, it said, had fallen over that portion of the world.
The Guardian stand on Soviet intervention in Afghanistan suffers from the same small-mindedness and empiricism that characterized its stand on Vietnam. If anything, its centrism is even more nakedly demonstrated in the way it approached the Afghanistan question.
“The USSR cannot justify limiting the sovereignty of socialist Afghanistan, regardless of pretext,” writes the Guardian (Jan. 16, 1980). The phrase “socialist Afghanistan” here is completely gratuitous. Not even the various revolutionary governments in Kabul have asserted as much. The real reason for its appearance in the article is that it enables the Guardian to base itself on its own “principle” that “socialist countries should not invade socialist countries” (subsequently amended to cover states that “describe themselves as socialist”) and thus avoids taking responsibility for the actual course of the Afghan revolution.
The Guardian goes on: “The principal motivation for the adventure was big power hegemonism carried out in contention with U.S. imperialism.” Here the Guardian is gored on the horns of its centrist dilemma, trying to maintain a distance from “left” opportunism while uniting with its anti-Sovietism. Unfortunately, “hegemonism” in the abstract explains nothing and can hardly be deemed the cause of anything. The result is a political stand which places an imperialist country and a socialist country in the same category and judges their actions by the same set of criteria, a stand one would expect of anarchism or social democracy but which has nothing in common with Marxism-Leninism. (The “left” opportunists are more knowledgeable in their Marxism, which is why they are careful to designate the Soviet Union a capitalist country.)
It is unnecessary to draw out all of the detailed points in the Guardian’s thesis. Suffice it to say that it mixes bourgeois categories with proletarian categories, confuses moralism with Marxism, as with Vietnam, removes Afghanistan from its international context. The result is to reinforce U.S. imperialism ideologically while surrendering responsibility for the tasks facing the communist movement.
It is hardly surprising then that the “left” opportunists, alert to the fact that the Guardian’s centrism has provided them with a political opening, should address the following invitation to the Guardian: “Let’s not let difference over questions like which superpower is the main danger in the world roadblock us from uniting to carry out our basic duty. And that is to oppose every instance of invasion and aggression concretely–even if such invasions are carried out by people who wave the red flag and call their murder ’socialist’.” (David Kline, Opinion, Guardian, February 20, 1980)
(Although the Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committee [PWOC] also took an incorrect stand on the question of Vietnam/Kampuchea, we do not regard them as part of the centrist current. It is unfortunate the PWOC has not reevaluated its line in the light of subsequent events and information and so continues to uphold an erroneous position on the question. But it is also clear that their stand, while an error, is not the expression of a consistent world view which represents a departure from the generally correct proletarian line that they have upheld on most international questions.)
The Guardian’s line does not consist simply in an incorrect stand on certain key political questions such as Vietnam and Afghanistan. Rather, the problem stems from the fact that the Guardian has not been able to make a thorough break with the ideological underpinnings of the “left” opportunist line and with some of the anticommunist prejudices characteristic of the New Left.
The anti-revisionist, anti-“left” opportunist trend was indelibly shaped by its origins in the New Communist Movement and the historical critique of revisionism. But that movement and its critique of revisionism early came under the influence of a “left” opportunist line which ultimately came to define and dominate it.
The split within that movement came principally around the question of Angola. While the question of what stand to take on Angola implied fundamental ideological differences, its concrete manifestation was political. As a result, there were some who supported the MPLA but still held on to the thesis of capitalist restoration in the USSR, or to the view that the call for a “united front against the two superpowers” was still the correct strategy for the international movement.
Most forces in the developing Marxist-Leninist trend were able to shed the ideological baggage they brought with them from the period of the New Communist Movement. This resulted from the full flowering of the “left” opportunist line which has revealed its underlying class collaboration in undisguised fashion as well as from the important theoretical work that has been done–particularly in refuting the capitalist restoration thesis and the Theory of the Three Worlds–since the time of Angola.
The Guardian, unfortunately, has not been able to complete this process. While it has somewhat quietly dropped the use of the term “Soviet social imperialism,” it continues to cling to some of the key formulations and concepts of the “left” opportunist line. In fact, even the CPC has been using the term “social imperialism” less and less often these days, substituting for it the term “hegemonism.” (This change in terminology may reflect preparation on the part of the CPC for dropping the capitalist restoration thesis without in any way abandoning its present international line.)
But for the Guardian to continue to use such non-Marxist categories as “hegemonism” and “superpower” to describe the Soviet Union is not only unsound theoretically, it is irresponsible politically in view of the fact that this terminology is fundamental to the “left” opportunist line. In essence, the Guardian still holds to the thesis of the “united front against the two superpowers,” even though within that formulation they place the principal emphasis on the struggle against the U.S. superpower.
It is such a stand that makes it possible for the “left” opportunists to seek a united front with the Guardian. At a time when the majority of forces in the anti-revisionist, anti-“left” opportunist trend have rid themselves not just of the politics but the ideological and theoretical underpinnings of this “left” opportunist line, the Guardian’s centrism stands as a roadblock to the consolidation of an international line by our trend that is firmly based on proletarian internationalism.
Clearly the political tasks of the communist movement in the period ahead are complicated by the fact that the struggle to transform the present anti-revisionist, anti-“left” opportunist trend into a Marxist-Leninist party must command the center of our attention. It would be the height of useless posturing to pretend that this trend will be able to give effective guidance to the mass movements until and unless it can unify around a leading line and, on that basis, re-establish a genuine vanguard party of the U.S. working class.
But that fact should in no way lead to the conclusion that the communists have no role to play in the struggle to counter U.S. imperialism’s plans for war and counter-revolution, or that the communists should not develop their own analysis of the current situation and advance it in contention with incorrect lines that prevail on the left.
If anything, the objective limitations placed on the political effectiveness of the communists in the present circumstances should serve to underscore the urgency of settling the fundamental line questions before our movement so that a qualitative advance can be registered in the effort to unify our trend and transform it into a proletarian party, capable of meeting the challenge posed by U.S. imperialism’s heightened war preparations.
[1] While such terminology can frequently be found in the rhetoric of the most extreme rightwing ideologists, this particular quotation is taken from the pages of The Call (Jan. 28, 1980), newspaper of the Communist Party (M-L), the foremost “left” opportunist formation in the U.S. communist movement, thus demonstrating not only the linkage between this retrograde trend and the far right but the actual political service rendered U.S. imperialism by this band of pseudo-revolutionaries.
[2] Whatever the merits of the present Ethiopian regime, its stand towards the Eritrean people’s legitimate demand for self-determination is incorrect. Political and military support to the Ethiopian government on this issue by the Soviet Union and Cuba is a totally negative concession to narrow petit-bourgeois nationalism in the Ethiopian regime. There is some evidence, however, to indicate that Cuba has made efforts to effect a shift in Ethiopian policy and to try to mediate the contradiction in a principled fashion.